ABSTRACT
The guiding metaphor of nineteenth-century German idealism was reality-asorganism.1 This metaphor challenges the mechanistic determinism of the Enlightenment by building a teleological principle of growth and maturation into history. For the idealist, development is not only real but is the optic through which everything must be viewed. Truth is in the whole, which is a self-realizing whole that expresses itself in history. Although the idealism of the early nineteenth century is not considered particularly scientific, it did challenge the same steady-state models of the world that were undermined by the scientific evolutionism that took hold by the century’s end. Idealism thus prepared the ground for later evolutionism by forcing many thinkers to take development seriously. In Nietzsche’s words, ‘the minds of Europe were preformed for the last great scientific movement, Darwinism – for without Hegel there could have been no Darwin’.2 Although idealism waned in Germany starting in the 1830s, it was the reigning philosophy in the anglophone world during the height of the Darwinian controversies at the century’s end. During William James’s time, anglophone idealists like T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley at Oxford, and Josiah Royce at Harvard were all portraying reality as a self-developing rational whole. The dominant anglophone philosophies of the early twentieth century – the analytic logicism of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore in England and the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey in the US – were both forged in reaction to the metaphysical excesses of such views. Unlike the seminal analytic philosophers, however, the pragmatists reacted against idealism by giving a central role to reconstructed historicist and evolutionary concepts in their philosophies. The pragmatists were salvaging something of the idealist vision, rather than pivoting from a philosophy of development to a philosophy of static logic. The present chapter traces William James’s particular reaction to idealistic monism and to the notion of truth or reality as an organic system. Reality for James can be likened to a developing individual. However, James denies that reality comprises a totalized system or that synoptic knowledge is possible even in principle. Reality may be an organism, but it is an organism in the same sense in which we are organisms: finite, growing and fringed by an inchoate ‘more’. At his most speculative, James posits an increasingly inclusive hierarchy of consciousnesses of which we are all a part. The highest consciousness here may
be equated with God, but it is a finite God that is constituted in history by myriad sentient beings. In undertaking this examination, this chapter situates the major concepts of James’s later philosophy – pragmatism, pluralism and radical empiricism – in relation to his conception of evolution and individuality. James’s conception of the individual, heretofore understood primarily as an individual human being, shows up in different ways at different levels of analysis. An examination of these levels allows James’s ethics of self-transformation to appear in its broadest logical and metaphysical terms.
