James ’ s Empirical Assumptions by Henry Jackman

William James is well known for his rejection of materialism and his lifelong defense of what he referred to as, among other things, the “religious hypothesis.”1 Part of this defense can be understood in terms of James’s frequent identification with the “sick souls” who are highly sensitive to the evils in our world, rather than the “healthy minded” who are more disposed to either ignore or downplay the significance of such features.2 The sick soul feels a deep need for assurance that lies beyond the material world, and so a dissatisfaction with materialism would be understandable. However, James often gives the impression that even the “healthy minded” should be dissatisfied with materialism, and that the problems with the view go beyond the emotional needs of the sick soul. This more general critique of materialism may seem to be in tension with the often naturalistic tenor of James’s writings, and those of us who are more sympathetic to the naturalistic side of James obviously hope that James’s critique of “philosophical materialism” can be separated from those elements of his thinking that are essential to his pragmatism. Such a separation is possible once we see that James’s critique of materialism grows out of his views about its incompatibility with the existence of objective values. Objective values (as James understands them) are incompatible, however, not with materialism in its most general form (according to which the natural world is the only one), but rather with a materialism that understood the “material world” in terms of the sciences of the late nineteen hundreds. In particular, one could not defend the potential objectivity of value in the way that James hoped if one endorsed the particular “pessimistic” cosmology characteristic of the sciences at the turn of the last century. Consequently, if one rejects certain “empirical assumptions” associated with the science of James’s day, the possibility of a type of “melioristic materialism” opens up, and this sort of materialist could still understand value in the way that James proposes. Given the state of the sciences of the time, it may have been reasonable for James to reject any sort of thoroughgoing materialism, but if James’s view that even the healthy minded should reject materialism stems partially from his empirical rather than from purely philosophical commitments (empirical commitments that a contemporary pragmatist need not share),3 then one should be able to endorse materialism while keeping James’s philosophical perspective intact. James’s philosophical dissatisfaction with materialism was connected to his understanding of value as ultimately resting on nothing more than our subjective practice of valuing. With this picture of value in place, James takes the existence of permanent and objective values to require our ultimate and eternally ongoing agreement about what to value. The real existence of objective values in the world thus requires the real endurance of a valuing community, and if all valuers disappear, the existence of objective value will have turned out to have been an illusion. This line of thought shows up the most explicitly in James’s discussion of ethical value in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” where ethical objectivity is understood as requiring an actual settlement about what competing preferences should be satisfied. As he puts it, “If one ideal judgment be objectively better than another, that betterness must be made flesh by being lodged concretely in someone’s actual perception.”4 A merely potential settlement clearly does not seem to be enough for James, so if our valuing practices die out before any settlement is made between competing preferences, then they can never be more than just that, competing preferences with no “objective” fact about which one should have been satisfied.5 This strand of thought runs through James’s writings on all normative issues. In particular, it can also be understood as affecting his views on the nature of truth and representation. Objective or “absolute” truth requires that we actually reach a stable consensus about various questions, and it is not enough for there to be one which we would have reached had we been able to investigate longer.6