William James and the Tradition of American Public Philosophers

Cushing Strout

The role of public philosopher in America is conspicuously absent today, but it has been recurringly present in our past. William James’s colleague Josiah Royce pointed out that there have been three American philosophers who have been inventively original and also representative of "some stage in the spiritual life of our people": Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James. Edwards was not only original in the formulation of his Puritan theology but he also "gave voice to some of the central motives and interests of our colonial religious life" and was the recognized intellectual leader of the revival movement known as the Great Awakening in the 1730s.

In the early nineteenth century Emerson, having given up his pastorship at a Unitarian church, was making a new career for himself on the lecture circuit, speaking eloquently on behalf of the new world of America and addressing some of its cultural, religious, and social issues. When Emerson spoke in New York in 1842, one member of the audience was Henry James, Sr. His son William had been born only two months earlier, and his father invited Emerson to his house where the lecturer was taken upstairs to admire the first-born son. It was appropriate that William James should have been asked in 1903 to speak at Concord about Emerson at a centenary ceremony where James saluted him as an artist of "spiritual seeing and reporting" who had sounded "a bugle blast" on behalf of "the sovereignty of the living individual."

Royce pointed out that James as a philosopher had a more extended range of influence in Europe than either Edwards or Emerson, who were both known and respected across the Atlantic. Royce noted that James belonged to the second stage of evolutionary thought, widening and deepening it, rather than polemicizing about it; and he played a "commanding part" in the "psychological movement" of the late nineteenth century, one that in its wider sense was connected with "all the modern forms of nationalism, of internationalism, of socialism, and of individualism." James sought to link up his philosophical role with the problems of the American people in the post-Civil War era in which amidst economic growth, territorial expansion, and massive immigration America was "attempting to find itself anew, to redefine its ideals, to retain its moral integrity, and yet to become a world power."

He and his brother Henry, unlike his other two younger brothers, had not served in the Civil War. Their father had restrained them from enlisting, but in any case the older boys had been much more familiar with tourism in Europe, where their father had sought an informal education for them, than with the escalating political strife of America with which the younger sons were much more involved. One of the younger sons, Wilkinson, had been almost fatally wounded at the battle of Fort Wagner in South Carolina, where he had served with Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, head of a regiment of free black men, many of whom had died with their young leader. In 1897 William James, already much better known than his younger brothers, had been asked to speak to several thousand people in Boston’s Music Hall to celebrate the unveiling of the famous monument by St. Gaudens to honor the white officer who had led the doomed assault on Fort Wagner. Shaw’s regiment had done more than anyone else, nevertheless, to convince the public that Negro troops could fight bravely and well, thus paving the way for their broader participation in the war after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Rather than giving the usual praise of military heroes for their military actions, however, James instead saluted Shaw for his "civic courage’’ in taking the command, because in this new venture "loneliness was certain, ridicule inevitable, failure possible, and Shaw was only twenty-five. . . ."

In his lectures at Edinburgh in 1901—2 on "The Varieties of Religious Experience" James had about four hundred enthusiastic auditors, who were drawn by his extraordinary fusion of psychological and religious concerns, both of which were animated by his own personal experience as a young man of radical doubt, depression, and conflicting ambitions. James’s father had blended a tough-minded Calvinism with a mystically enthusiastic Swedenborgianism. His son was too much educated in medicine, natural history, and evolutionary biology to follow his father’s eccentric footsteps in this way, even though both had experienced severe crises about vocational choice. But he did follow his father’s advice to earn respect by having a scientific career, though his nervous troubles became evident as soon as he set out on it. While hospitalized with varioloid, a mild form of smallpox, when he was in Brazil as part of an exploring and collecting expedition led by Louis Agassiz in 1864, James had decided that he was "cut out for a speculative rather than an active life" and having recovered the use of his eyes, made a new resolution: "When I get home I’m going to study philosophy all my days." Instead he continued his medical studies, and became increasingly depressed and even suicidal. Once he was overwhelmed by a panic fear that but for the grace of God he might become like a passively withdrawn, idiotic, and epileptic patient whom he had seen in an asylum. The son needed to find some essential room for the idea and exercise of his freedom of the will. He had found help not only in the French philosopher Renouvier but also in Wordsworth’s poetry. It is not hard to see why the poet was pertinent to him. As Meyer Abrams has pointed out in Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971), Wordsworth’s most important poetry was a form of "creative autobiography" that "turns on a crisis which involves the question of the meaning of the author’s life and the purpose of his suffering" and "is resolved by the author’s discovery of his literary identity and vocation and the attendant need to give up worldly involvement for artistic detachment. . . ." (John Stuart Mill, to whom James would dedicate Pragmatism, also found help in recovering from his own depression by reading Wordsworth’s poetry.)

In his Edinburgh lectures the son wanted to pay tribute to his father’s blazing conviction that religion was real, while maintaining at the same time his own modern psychological and philosophical thinking. There was a Jamesian moment, as it were, because he was undogmatic, not a church member, not a promoter of any sect. He had impressive scientific credentials as the author of The Principles of Psychology, the first important American work in that field; and yet he was extraordinarily willing to pay close and respectful attention to those who had had religious experiences, however bizarre they might seem to nonbelievers. Audiences were charmed that he spoke and wrote with an artist’s feeling for concrete and vivid imagery and with an Irish wit. One of his colleagues at Harvard spoke vividly of James’s style as "wallowing," that is, moving through his material "as the whale does through the sea, twisting and turning at his pleasure, tossing up foam for mere sport, and plunging or rising as the fancy strikes. James always wallowed." He was well versed in addressing large audiences, having spent a week at Chautauqua with its thousands of good people, comprising, he said, a sort of "middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear." It made him long for the "big outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings."

In his lectures on religious experience, James drew on a democratically wide spectrum of material from saints, philosophers, artists, and ordinary people. The scope of his believers included Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, Christian Scientists, Transcendentalists, Quakers, Mormons, Mohammedans, Melanesian cannibals, drug-takers, atheists, and neurotics, including himself concealed in the guise of an anonymous Frenchman to whom (James later confessed) he had attributed his own experience of panic fear in the asylum.

Nothing could have been further from the inventory in his lectures of disturbing religious experiences than the Anglican religion, which he characterized in a letter to his friend Pauline Goldmark as "obese and round and comfortable and decent with this world’s decencies, without an acute note in its whole life or history, in spite of the shrill Jewish words on which its ears are fed, and the nitro-glycerine of the Gospels and Epistles which has been injected into its veins." In the end his conceptualizing of religion came down to the centrality of one type of experience very familiar to Americans, the conversion of the "twice-born sick soul" through a crisis into a new consciousness in which "surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused."

He also outlined by contrast another familiar form of American religion, "the religion of healthy mindedness," which cultivates the "sky-blue" optimistic gospel of the "once-born," whose development is "straight and natural, with no element of morbid compunction or crisis." Yet on his own evidence the religion of healthy mindedness, preached in his day by Christian Scientists and other "mind-curers," attracted the nervous and the sick, not the robust and the healthy; and in a footnote James acknowledged that in his case histories of the mind-cure form of healthy mindedness, there were "abundant examples of regenerative process." His concepts tended to conflate psychological genesis with doctrinal perspective.

What stands out in The Varieties of Religious Experience, nevertheless, is his sympathy for the point of view held by the classic examples of "twice-born" sick souls, those for whom the "evil facts" which the "healthy-minded" refuse to recognize are actually "a genuine portion of reality," James insists; "and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth." In a remarkable passage James observes that

the normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. . . .Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. So the completest religions, he concludes, "are those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed."

It was here that he most parted company with Emerson, who had said we should admire a soul "whose acts are regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses" and not turn against such an angel and say "Crump is a better man, with his grunting resistance to all his native devils." James replied in a wonderful footnote: "True enough. Yet Crump may be the better Crump for his inner discords and second birth," while the regal character may "fall far short of what he individually might be had he only some Crump-like capacity for compunction over his own peculiar diabolisms, graceful and pleasant and invariably gentlemanly as these may be." Sorrow and suffering are for James the soul’s "heroic resources," and he appealed to "the common instinct for reality" that holds the world "to be essentially a theater for heroism."

James’s father complained that Emerson lacked "a conviction of sin," as Calvinists called it, and William shared with his father a Puritan strain that connected them to Jonathan Edwards. William specifically cited Edwards’s Treatise on Religious Affections for its argument that "no appearances whatever are infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is the only sure evidence, even to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians." As a philosopher of pragmatism James was thoroughly at home with this emphasis on practice because for him beliefs are rules for action, so that "to develop a thought’s meaning we need therefore only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce." James was resolutely humanistic, however, as Edwards was not, and evaluated theologies by "the voice of human experience within us, judging and condemning all gods that stand athwart the pathway along which it feels itself to be advancing." From this point of view "the gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another."

He himself had no sense of living commerce with God, and his ultimate belief in the supernatural came down to his psychologist’s confidence that in faith and in prayer there is some "actual inflow of energy." Having spent so much time in his Edinburgh lectures on making this point credible, he found that he had too little time left to develop his philosophical views about it. All that he could suggest was that he had an "over-belief" that such states are connected to a larger realm of personality, a universe not defined by "the sectarian scientist’s attitude" in which "the world of sensations and scientific laws and objects may be all." But he was typically heretical in thinking that God need not be single or infinite, and as a pluralist he rejected the tendency to "consider the world as one unit of absolute fact." It was this monistic tendency that he found to be a major fault in his father’s theology, in Emerson’s transcendentalism, and in Josiah Royce’s version of Absolute Idealism in which the totality of everything is "present at once to the eternal divine consciousness as a single whole." There’s an amusing photograph of Royce and James in 1903 sitting on a New Hampshire wall. When James heard his daughter’s camera click, he cried, "Royce, you’re being photographed! Look out! I say Damn the Absolute!" For James a finite God had the advantage of fitting "the ordinary moralistic state of mind" that makes "the salvation of the world conditional upon the success with which each unit does its part."

James late in life wrote "A Suggestion about Mysticism," but what is remarkable about it is not its religious but its psychological content. It is a report on a disturbing dream that he had in which he seemed to belong to "three different dream systems at once," none of them connected to the other, or to his waking life. He felt desperately lost, and the dream gave him "a new pity towards persons passing into dementia." As the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson has suggested, the dream would seem to have uncovered not a supernatural realm but a reliving in fantasy of James’s youthful acute identity confusion, reappearing as he struggled with the conflict in old age (in Erikson’s terms) between "hopes for a higher integrity" and "terminal despair."

Actually, James’s most mystical experience had to do with his response to nature, which was always an important part of his life, especially camping, hiking, and climbing in the Adirondacks. In Keene Valley he was part owner of Putnam’s Camp, named for his friend James Jackson Putnam, a pioneer in American psychotherapy, who became a convert to Freudian psychoanalysis after he met Freud in 1909 at Clark University. James was in Panther Gorge when he was working on the Edinburgh lectures, and in the moonlight before a fire his experience became "a regular Walpurgis Nacht with the Gods of all the nature-mythologies" meeting in his breast with "the moral Gods of the inner life. . . ." These two kinds of Gods had nothing in common, he felt, and this idea made him feel that "the Edinburgh lectures made quite a hitch ahead."

For him this state of special alertness was full of "every sort of patriotic suggestiveness" and was connected to his wife, his friend the youthful Pauline Goldmark, his children, and his brother Henry–all fermenting within him, along with "the problem of the Edinburgh lectures." The experience seems to have been more aesthetic than religious, for he said it made him understand "what a poet is." As his friend John Jay Chapman remarked, in his speaking and writing James created a public "which came to see in him only the saint and the sage, which felt only the religious truth which James was in search of, yet could never quite grasp in his hand." Instead it "shone, as it were, straight through his waistcoat, and distributed itself to everyone in the drawing room or in the lecture hall where he sat."

James’s position on the religious scene in America was complex. He was sympathetic to the "utopian dreams of social justice" of his day insofar as they represented secular forms of saintly charity. But the social-gospel churches were more likely to be Episcopal than to be revivalist, and the liberal theologians did not have his Methodist-like feeling for twice-bornness. James saluted saintly forms of "non-resistance" as prophets of a better future, but he was also hard-headedly aware that "the whole history of constitutional government is a commentary on the excellence of resisting evil, and when one cheek is smitten, of smiting back and not turning the other cheek also." His balance has the risky charm of a circus performer holding a pole as he crosses a wire high up in the tent.

He was faced with the challenge of performing another balancing act (or what he called "beating and tacking") in his response to the ideal of "the strenuous life," preached by Theodore Roosevelt and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who often used it to justify war and imperialism. In one sense James was himself an advocate of the strenuous ideal because he was a believer in heroism as the moral significance of life. His famous essay on "The Moral Equivalent of War" was a warning to his fellow reformers that the martial virtues gave war a persistent and compelling place in the human imagination, and some surrogate for them would have to be found so as to "inflame the civic temper" as "past history has inflamed the military temper."

James was outraged by the imperialism of the Republicans in the Philippines and took to the newspapers to combat them, Governor Theodore Roosevelt in particular. The Governor, he wrote, was "in the Sturm und Drang period of early adolescence, treats human affairs when he makes speeches about them from the sole point of view of the organic excitement and difficulty they may bring, gushes over war. . .for the manly strenuousness it involves, and treats peace as a condition of blubberlike and swollen ignobility fit only for huckstering weaklings, dwelling in gray twilight and heedless of the higher life." You might think that James sounded that way himself in his essay on "The Moral Equivalent of War," but James pointed out the crucial difference. With Roosevelt there was "not a word of the cause, one foe is as good as another, for aught he tells us; not a word of the conditions of success." After all, James reminded him, the Southern secessionists when they chose battle rather than having Lincoln as President were leading the strenuous life just as much as the Union forces whom Roosevelt idealized and for whom Justice Holmes as a young man had fought and been wounded three times. Now the McKinley Administration, James charged, "was openly engaged in crushing out the sacredest thing in this great human world–the attempt of a people long enslaved to attain to the possession of itself, to organize its laws and government, to be free to follow its internal destinies according to its own ideals."

In attacking Herbert Spencer’s sociological determinism, in which individuals never counted for anything important, James emphasized the role of great men in history as a kind of Darwinian spontaneous variation, which the social environment "adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys, in short selects," and by doing so is modified by the great man’s influence in "an entirely original and peculiar way." The causes that changed communities from generation to generation, he argued, have been due to "the accumulated influences of individuals, of their examples, their initiatives, and their decisions." Yet James’s temper was thoroughly democratic, and it led him to find the exemplary virtues of courage, endurance, and fidelity in "the daily lives of the laboring classes," as lived on "freight-trains, the decks of vessels, in cattle-yards and mines, on lumber-rafts, among the firemen and the policemen." Even so, he understood the value of a leader with liberal ambitions who, when things get dammed up, could make a hole in the dam for "flowing water" to enlarge it, and an educated country would be able "to use such men for what they are worth, and to cast them off before they victimize it." Robert Penn Warren has said that in the shadow of All the King’s Men was the "benign figure of William James" as well as Huey Long and Mussolini. James would have been quick to see how Long’s populism, for all its genuine reforms, had become warped into a victimizing dictatorship, just as he would have been proud that many Italian philosophers of Pragmatism lost their lives opposing fascism.

Characteristically, James first formulated Pragmatism in popular lectures before they were published in 1907, when he resigned from Harvard with great relief, feeling free "after thirty-five years of being owned by others." Rereading Emerson’s works in preparation for celebrating Emerson at Concord in 1903, James had responded most to Emerson’s tonic example of a man who had kept on his own nonconforming path with faith in his individual mission. This precedent had encouraged James to have the confidence to present Pragmatism as his contribution to philosophy. His recognized identity as a public philosopher was made evident by the size of his university audience–more than a thousand people. It was, he acknowledged, "certainly the high tide" of his existence so far as "energizing, and being ‘recognized’ were concerned."

He hoped to impart to his audience some news of a "new dawn" in philosophy. There was a conflict between rationalists and empiricists in philosophy, which he symbolized by the difference between "tender-foot Bostonians" and "Rocky Mountain toughs." James located Pragmatism in the empiricist philosophical tradition (hence his dedication of the book to John Stuart Mill), but he presented it at first not as a metaphysics but as a method for turning theories into instruments for moving our inquiries forward. It had no dogmas or doctrines of its own. In this respect it was the method of modern experimental science, and the idea of truth that follows from it is functional: new truth "marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity."

He knew that rationalists of all kinds, seeking absolute principles and eternal truths, would find this sort of empiricism ignoble and coarse. To them he made a characteristically Jamesian response: "The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean." James’s claim that Pragmatism was only a method for clarifying the meaning of ideas turned out to be somewhat disingenuous for it is clear that he thought it should "turn its back on absolute monism, and follow pluralism’s more empirical path" in which things are partly joined and partly disjoined. Moreover, for "pluralistic pragmatism" truth is profoundly humanistic: "all ‘homes’ are in finite experience; finite experience as such is homeless. Nothing outside of the flux secures the issue of it. It can hope salvation only from its own intrinsic promises and potencies." This eloquent Jamesian respect for finitude is, I think, the most modern and radical aspect of his philosophizing, but he drew back, nevertheless, from the tough-minded in their "rejection of the whole notion of a world beyond our finite experience."

The lectures were only in part technically philosophical; they also returned to James’s own religious questionings and to the argument he had long ago had with his father’s monism in contrast to a more pluralistic moralism, a point of view that James had turned to when he was struggling as a young man to overcome his tendency to depression and despair. James recognized a conflict between religion as "self-surrender" and moralism as "self-sufficingness" (what Emerson would have called self-reliance); and he tended to identify religion with the "sick-minded" and moralism with the "healthy-minded." Of course, he conceded, as individuals we could sometimes be "healthy minds on one day and sick souls on the next"; but philosophers needed to be more consistent. James’s feeling for the central role of heroism made him confess that his own pragmatism recoiled from religious optimism about a world already saved in favor instead of a more chancy, dangerous, and unfinished world: "Doesn’t the very ‘seriousness’ that we attribute to life mean that ineluctable noes and losses form a part of it, that there are genuine sacrifices somewhere, and that something permanently drastic and bitter always remains at the bottom of its cup?"

This eloquent tough-mindedness in Pragmatism is often overlooked in James because at other moments he can express some limited sympathy in some contexts for utopian reformers and even for "the healthy minded once-born," sentiments which may seem more American to many of his commentators. Yet he had advertised Pragmatism in the beginning of his lectures as a mediator between "the tender-minded" and "the tough-minded," and so in the end he returned to the idea that "higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own." We might be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, being "merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken." It was a characteristically Jamesian compromise expressed with his characteristic flair for the homely metaphor.

James’s writing is so expressive of the man that it might seem as if it would be too idiosyncratic to have an influence, but in fact Pragmatism was a movement in philosophy that had its passionate proponents in England and Europe, so that James, as Ralph Barton Perry put it, was "the Ambassador of American Thought to Western Europe." He was, like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, a cosmopolitan American patriot who could speak to the world, and he has been credited by the historian H. Stuart Hughes with being "the revivifying force in European thought in the decade and a half preceding the outbreak of the First World War."

But the recent revival of Pragmatism, chiefly led by the philosopher Richard Rorty, has invoked John Dewey rather than James. Dewey linked himself to James in their common belief that the "chief business of philosophy" is to show how "desire and ideas, purpose and knowledge, emotion and science, can cooperate fruitfully in behalf of human good." Both men were Darwinian, but Dewey always set out from the context of the organism and its environment, truth and value being functions of a growing organism’s accommodating, adapting, or reconstructing its relationship to its environment through the exercise of what he called "the method of intelligence." His focus was on problem-solving truths in contrast to James’s profound interest in truths of orientation and in the confronting of issues that are posed for the will, rather than for technological control or scientific understanding.

Dewey was like James in having an admirable sense of public responsibility as a philosopher-citizen. As a trustee of Hull House in Chicago, he marched in a suffragettes’ parade in New York, shared platforms with labor leaders, and in 1937 courageously went to Mexico to investigate and expose the Soviet trumped-up charges against Leon Trotsky. Dewey’s most recent admirer, Alan Ryan, has rightly called him a "secular preacher and lay saint to the Republic" in his role as philosopher of a religion of democracy.

Dewey’s temper was markedly different from James. Seeking to harmonize every dualism into a unity, his positive thinking entirely lacked James’s sense of radical evil. "Before choice no evil presents itself as evil," Dewey wrote, as if it were only a competing good before it was rejected. "Only when the past ceases to trouble and anticipations of the future are not perturbing," Dewey asserted, "is a being wholly united with his environment and therefore fully alive." James might rightly have considered such a bland harmony as being true only of the corpse in the grave. Ryan, for all his admiration, concedes that Dewey "took for granted a malleability and predictability in institutional arrangements that all experience refutes." If in 1920 Dewey wanted the Baconian theme of knowledge as power to come to "a free and unhindered expression," by 1939 he was well aware that a science of human nature might only "multiply the agencies by which some human beings manipulate other human beings for their own advantage" and thus obscure the "fundamentally moral nature of the social problem."

Dewey had defended President Wilson’s intervention in the First World War and had been dismayed by its results. A burnt child who shunned the fire, he clung thereafter to an old-fashioned sense that an American "resort to military force is a first sure sign that we are giving up the struggle for the democratic way of life, and that the Old World has conquered morally as well as geographically–succeeding in imposing upon us its ideals and methods." Giving a speech when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Dewey remarkably proclaimed: "I have nothing, had nothing, and have nothing now to say directly about the war." It was a sign of the end of his role as an American public philosopher.

His utopian strain meant that, though he was not a member of the Socialist party, he always voted for Norman Thomas until Harry Truman’s victory in 1948. Dewey’s orientation was primarily towards the future rather than the past, but if he had had more of a historical sense, he might also have been more aware of the intractable, of unavoidably conflicting loyalties, and of the unintended, unforeseeable consequences of action. Ryan always reads Dewey as sympathetically as he possibly can, but he acknowledges that Dewey was vulnerable in a way that James was not to the charge that pragmatism had little to say about events like war that are "not easily explained as intelligent problem solving."

James had concluded from a tour of Italy’s ruins that they showed powerfully "how man’s life is based historically on sheer force and will and fight, and how the inner world only grows up inside and under the shelter of these brute tendencies." He always lamented that his philosophy was incomplete, like an "unfinished arch, built only on one side"; and a philosophy of history, which he never had, might have helped complete it. "I am finite once and for all," James wrote, "and all the categories of my sympathy are knit up with the finite world as such and with things that have a history." As Arthur O. Lovejoy pointed out, James was unusual among philosophers for having "a keen sense of the validity and the distinctiveness of the temporal point of view."

James died in 1910, and the next generation of philosophers was the first to be purely professional in the modern academic sense, as the historian Bruce Kuklick has noted; and with its specialization, philosophy lost its public. It is revealing that the man who reclaimed that public was not a philosopher but a theologian and preacher, Reinhold Niebuhr. "I stand in the William James tradition," Niebuhr wrote. "He was both an empiricist and a religious man." But Niebuhr recognized that he was different from James in emphasizing "collective destiny," rather than individualism, in social life and "the meaning of history," rather than mysticism, in the religious life. A circuit rider to colleges and liberal organizations in the 1940s and 1950s, Niebuhr yoked together the political ideals of modern liberalism with a conservative theological respect for the symbols and myths of Biblical Christianity, which he found expounded with intellectual power in the European existentialist-Christian theologies of Soren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, and Emil Brunner.

Niebuhr and Dewey were at contrary philosophical poles about religion and psychology, but they were often in the same political camp with a common reluctance to endorse the New Deal until it was virtually over and with a shared vigorous opposition to Stalinist communism as well as to reactionary and fanatical anti-communism. Niebuhr had been a radical pacifist, but he developed a realistic sense of history, and it induced him to become a leading critic of pacifism in order that free peoples could resist with force the imperialism of Hitler. As early as 1932 he had prophetically suggested, however, that nonviolent resistance would be the most effective method for the liberation of the Negro in America, as Martin Luther King, Jr. proved in practice twenty-five years later. Niebuhr’s favorite American example of a political hero was Abraham Lincoln for his political realism about slavery and his religious sense of America being under judgment for its crimes. "I might have been an historian," he once told an interviewer, but his daughter had reminded him that he was "not enough of an empiricist to be a good historian." In Niebuhr’s book The Irony of American History (1952) there is much dialectical theologizing of irony as his mode of cultural criticism, but his demythologizing of American exceptionalism and laissez-faire optimism in economic matters is tempered by his recognition of the political realism embedded in the theory of checks and balances, which the framers of the American Constitution had outlined in The Federalist Papers.

There is a current revival of pragmatism, which has already had academic conferences to celebrate it; but it is filtered through Richard Rorty’s strange blend of Dewey’s progressivism with the skepticism of Nietzsche and French deconstructionists. Rorty has the ambition to be a public philosopher as well as a specialized professional, but in either role he has not yet made the kind of difference that either James or Dewey made. Radically skeptical of all metaphysics and aggressively atheistic, Rorty has no room for Niebuhr and relegates James to the role of precursor to Dewey. Rorty is in sympathy with the literary postmodernists, but the great public literary critics in the past, like George Orwell, Edmund Wilson, and Lionel Trilling, have no counterparts on the contemporary scene. One of Rorty’s allies, Cornel West, writing in an anthology, Pragmatism: From Progressivism to Postmodernism, declares that "the loss of Paul de Man, his authorizing and legitimizing intellectual presence, intensified the crisis of vocation among humanistic intellectuals." The discovery of de Man’s youthful role as a propagandist for the fascist occupiers of his country was a literary scandal that attracted much publicity; but the notion that this arcane, obscure, and detached ironist, for whom all attempts to control meaning are self-undermining, was an icon for humanist intellectuals in general suggests that literary theorists in recent years have indulged themselves in delusions of grandeur. They have also contributed to the fragmented contemporary campus in which any ethnic group is assumed to be entitled to cultural nationalism and to be beyond criticism except by its own representatives.

James’s radical individualism, which went along with his strong sense of having an American identity, makes him seem entirely out of step with this climate of opinion. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz has pointed out that our sense of religion today connects it to the "communal sensibility of a religiously assertive social actor," rather than to private struggles with inner demons, as James did. Dewey left out the demons entirely, and both men also isolated religious experience not only from its institutional life in churches and sects, but also from its particular theological traditions. As Geertz argues, however, the movement of religion towards the center of social life, nevertheless, is "not a unitary phenomenon to be uniformly described." We must deal with "the personal inflections of religious engagement that reach far beyond the personal into the conflicts and dilemmas of our age." In that sense social religion is also a diverse individual matter; and for those stories, he concludes, we shall need analysts with Jamesian sympathies, analytic insight, and literary skill. They will need a measure of his genius to be able to speak to general audiences and to respond as incisively and eloquently as he did to public issues and to a wide range of individual experience.