ABSTRACT
In their different but equally stimulating ways, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James help one appreciate that what unites the Romantics with Friedrich Nietzsche and the pragmatists is the idea that the human subject does not have to answer to the world; that is, it had better stop considering the idea of human answerability to something nonhuman. Instead of claiming that our rational beliefs and sentences ought to be world directed and ought to correspond to reality as it really is, we should understand the far-reaching implications of one of Nietzsche’s most dangerous suggestions: “Only we have created the world that concerns man” (The Gay Science). Nietzsche’s radical position is reflected in James’s “humanistic principle,” or what he also terms “the humanistic state of mind.” This chapter seeks to explain the significance of this principle for the Jamesian version of pragmatism, and moreover it shows that an understanding of the importance of this principle offers one the possibility of seeing James as part of the Romantic tradition.
