ABSTRACT
Born only two years apart, William James (1842-1910) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) are remarkably parallel figures in the history of philosophy. Negatively speaking, both reject the empiricist view that knowledge consists in the mental reconstruction of an independent reality, the neo-Kantian transcendentalism that grounds cognition and values beyond the natural world and the scientific materialism that acts as just one more dogmatic metaphysics among others. Positively speaking, each supplants such traditional programmes with a vision of philosophy as a new kind of practical discipline that includes and enlarges upon the sciences without exempting them from critique. In doing so, both centre philosophy on the individual, construed not as passive mechanism or supernatural agent, but as multivalent, self-fashioning organism. Nietzsche therefore provides an excellent point of comparison for further examining an ethics of self-transformation in the context of a modern scientific worldview. Such a comparison is the task of the present chapter, which examines James’s and Nietzsche’s respective ideals of ethical character in terms of their reactions to the evolutionary theories of their time. Both posit a kind of inner fuel for self-transformation – energy and will – and in doing so they offer similar critiques of externalist evolutionary logics. However, they draw upon different physiological models in outlining the individual’s relationship to itself and to its environing world, and they promote contrasting images of the ideal individual or society. If James embeds self-transformation in a socially shared cooperative project, Nietzsche’s ideal is an elite individual that negates humanity’s metaphysical needs through ascetic self-overcoming. This reflects James’s location of significance in the purposive mediation of ascending levels of individual and social structure for the purpose of creating a maximally inclusive world, as opposed to Nietzsche’s prizing of the ennobled supra-historical individual. The two thinkers thus present starkly different options for the reconstruction of purpose and value in the wake of Darwin’s deconstruction of teleology or Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’.
