William James, Energy, and the Pluralist Ethic of Receptivity

Abstract

William James, Energy, and the Pluralist Ethic of Receptivity Loren Goldman (bio) William James's work is pervaded by the rhetoric of energy, language intended to convey the felt livedness of experience, the visceral sense of both the universe's teeming potential and our own active powers. Insofar as James aims to philosophize for the sake of life, moreover, this rhetoric captures the timbre of his theoretical concerns. "Human energizing," James writes in a version of his significantly titled 1906 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, "The Energies of Men," is "that sum-total of activities, some outer and some inner, some muscular, some emotional, some moral, some spiritual, of whose waxing and waning in himself he is at all times so well aware" (ERM 150).1 Elsewhere, he describes consciousness as "the habitual centre of [one's] personal energy," and states that the "real" self at any given moment is "the centre of [one's] energies" (VRE 161–162).2 Energy is also a moral concern, for it invigorates the "strenuous mood" of ethical exertion James famously exhorts; religious faith is beneficial, for example, because it sets free "[e]very sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils" (WTB 161). For James, the contrasting lassitude of "easy-going" life makes it not worth living, for meaningful existence requires the energy to pursue ends "pertinaciously enough" (WTB 84–85). James's commentators tend to reproduce his energetic language without remark. Cornel West writes that James's rhetoric aims to "energize people to become exceptional doers under adverse circumstances, to galvanize zestful fighters against excruciating odds."3 Colin Koopman describes James as the defender of "the creative energies that individuals inject into institutions."4 The late Sergio Franzese, in a study dedicated to what he terms James's "ethics of energy," describes the latter as "the normative condition of the praxis that realizes human values."5 Even more recently, Sarin Marchetti explains the crux of James's social thought as "the unleashing of our moral energies in conduct,"6 and Alexander Livingston writes that James's moral ideal exemplifies an "energetic character that combines the push of willful impulse with the constraint of habitual inhibition."7 In like fashion, Kennan Ferguson stresses the centrality of pluralism in James's work because of the energizing results of confrontation with radical difference.8 [End Page 706] For these commentators, faith invigorates action, and otherness mobilizes new energies within us.9 An energetic ethos clearly has its dangers. Any approach that views all existence as struggle—James wrote that life is worth living only if "combats may be carried to successful terminations and one's heel set on the tyrant's throat" (WTB 47)—can lead to the view that living itself as a zero-sum game. In an age where "low-energy" becomes a devastatingly unheroic epithet, it might even reinforce the notion that politics is about nothing more than winning.10 This concern is not limited to James scholars, but goes to the heart of the question of the appropriate mode of political comportment in democratic life. James often appears part of a Liberal tradition in which good citizens are active, bringing themselves to bear on the public, and revealingly dedicates Pragmatism to the memory of John Stuart Mill, the champion of non-conformist individuality, "whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive to-day [1909]" (P 3). Taken authoritatively, this stress on self-assertion may slide into the uninterrogated assumption that politics needs only politicians, excluding those who lack the privilege or capacity to speak for themselves. James's work can appear to make this tendency manifest: he sought by dint of higher education to save democracy from its lower tones, couched his ethical ideals in the terms of manly virility, and thought historical progress came from (male) genius imposing itself on the world.11 Despite James's reputation as "the first democrat in metaphysics,"12 as philosopher Horace Kallen called him in 1914, one may reasonably wonder how this energetic manliness harmonizes with the pluralism often celebrated in his work.13 Like Kallen, Ferguson and William Connolly have emphasized...