Kantian
Transcendental Pessimism and Jamesian Empirical Meliorism
Sami Pihlström·
University of Helsinki, Finland
Abstract
Kant’s philosophy was an important background for the pragmatist
tradition, even though some of the major classical pragmatists, especially
William James, were unwilling to acknowledge their debt to Kant. This essay
considers the relation between Kant and James from the perspective of their
conceptions of the human condition. In particular, I examine their shared
pessimism, employing Vanden Auweele’s (2019) recent analysis of Kant’s
pessimism and arguing that this is required by James’s meliorism (which is put
forward as a middle-ground option between optimism and pessimism). A
comparative inquiry into Kant’s and James’s views on the relation between
ethics and religion is provided against this background of their shared
philosophical anthropology.
Keywords
James, Kant, meliorism,
pessimism, religion
Abstrakti
Kantin filosofia toimi
tärkeänä vaikuttimena pragmatistiselle traditiolle, vaikka moni klassinen
pragmatisti, William James erityisesti, ei ollut halukas tunnustamaan velkaansa
Kantille. Artikkelissa tarkastellaan Kantin ja Jamesin ajattelun
välistä suhdetta heidän ihmisyyttä koskevien käsitystensä kautta.
Tarkastelen erityisesti heidän pessimismiään soveltamalla Vanden Auweleen
(2019) tuoretta analyysiä Kantin pessimismistä, jota pidän välttämättömänä
Jamesin meliorismille (jonka esitän optimismin ja pessimismin välimuotona).
Vertailen tätä taustaa vasten Kantin ja Jamesin näkemyksiä etiikan ja
uskonnon välisestä suhteesta.
Asiasanat
James,
Kant, meliorismi, pessimismi, uskonto
Introduction: transcendental pragmatism
This paper
examines the controversial relation between Immanuel Kant and William James,
one of the founders of American pragmatism. While James famously, or
notoriously, claimed philosophy to have progressed not “through” but “round” Kant
from British empiricism to “the point where now we stand” (that is, presumably,
his own pragmatism), respecting the “English spirit” as intellectually,
practically, and morally “saner”, “sounder”, and “truer” than Kant’s (James
1978 [1898], pp. 138-139), a number of scholars have compellingly shown how
profoundly Kantian many of James’s own ideas were – and how deeply Kantian the
pragmatism he co-established thus more generally is.[1]
The details concerning the complex relationship between Kant and James remain
controversial for interpreters of both philosophers and for historians of
pragmatism, but at an abstract meta-level it is relatively easy to identify
important analogies between the two thinkers, despite James’s (at times
arguably somewhat exaggerated) hostility toward Kantian apriorism and the heavy
“German” style of philosophizing generally, which he seems to have considered a
clear manifestation of a kind of “intellectualism” foreign to practical human
life and its real concerns.
Let
me, in an introductory fashion, indicate some of Kant’s and James’s most
significant points of agreement. First, in theoretical philosophy, especially
epistemology and metaphysics, James shares what we may call Kant’s constructivism, at least in spirit if
not in every detail of letter: the empirical world experienceable and knowable
by human beings does not come to us as “ready-made” or “given”, equipped with
“its own” pre-categorized metaphysical structure, but is shaped by our
cognitive capacities – not, to be sure, by a fixed and unchanging set of twelve
categories of the understanding (according to James) but by our on-going and
constantly critically revised practices
of inquiry. That is, we cannot (and should not imagine that we can) know
“things as they are in themselves” (Dinge
an sich selbst) but only things
that have to a considerable degree been structured by us, albeit obviously not
created by us ex nihilo.[2]
Some of the best Jamesian pronouncements of this general (quasi-Kantian)
constructivism are Lectures II and VII of his Pragmatism (James 1975 [1907]), dealing with the pragmatic method
and the metaphysical dependence of “things” on our purposes and interests,
respectively.[3]
Secondly,
in practical philosophy (ethics) and the philosophy of religion, James, while
of course firmly rejecting Kantian strict rationalist deontology in favor of a
more experimental, non-apriorist, and non-foundationalist ethical approach,[4]
can be interpreted as having come up with a way of postulating God’s reality
(and possibly human immortality) in a way strikingly resembling Kant’s (1983
[1788]) famous “postulates of practical reason”. There is no way we could
metaphysically or theoretically speaking know
anything about God (or any other transcendent metaphysical and theological
matters, including things in themselves), but our ethical orientation to life
may nevertheless necessitate a theistic postulation, because otherwise we could
not be coherently committed to what the moral law requires us to commit
ourselves to, i.e., the highest good (summum
bonum), the eventual harmony of moral virtue and happiness. For Kant as
much as James, it may therefore be ethically
necessary to have faith in God[5]
– though it must also be kept in mind that James’s God is a finite God, not the
single over-arching absolute divinity of traditional theism.
In
terms of Kant’s three famous questions – “What can I know?”, “What ought I to
do?”, “What am I entitled to hope?”, presented toward the end of the first Critique (Kant 1990 [1781/1787],
A805/B833; see also, e.g., James 1977 [1911], chapter 2) – James is therefore a
semi-Kantian thinker at least with respect to knowledge (we can only know a
world that is to a great extent a result of our own structuring activity,
albeit a more pluralistic and malleable one than Kant had maintained) and hope
(we can legitimately hope that there is God, or that there are at least some
kind of superhuman forces concerned with the “salvation” of the world, and that
we might have an immortal life, though again there is much more plurality in
the ways in which these beliefs are construed from the Jamesian pragmatic point
of view in comparison to Kant’s). Moreover, even though the ethical question
concerning what we ought to do is the one where the two philosophers are
perhaps most obviously divided, the meta-level idea that religion and theology
should be based on ethics rather than vice versa is something they deeply
share. There is a sense in which ethics, for both Kant and James, comes first
and orients our entire philosophical investigation, no matter what we are
inquiring in philosophically, and therefore their profound agreement in ethics
cannot be located in the content of
ethical theory.[6] In
particular, metaphysics (including the metaphysics of theism, or religious
metaphysics generally) must be grounded in ethics, rather than the other way
round (cf. Pihlström 2009, 2013).[7]
Furthermore,
James’s ethics, despite his tendency (as a pragmatist) to assume some form of
consequentialism according to which the outcome of our actions is what
ethically matters, is “Kantian” in the sense that we must be fundamentally
committed to taking seriously other individuals’ perspectives, against a
“certain kind of blindness” to the inner worth of others and a deafness to the
“cries of the wounded” that we constantly hear around us.[8]
In fact, I will in the following suggest that this yields a key metaethical[9]
similarity between Kant and James.
It
may be proposed that whereas Kant’s philosophy is generally known as transcendental idealism, James’s version
of pragmatism – despite his rejection of Kant’s a priori transcendental method
and some of the scornful remarks he makes about the use of the
transcendentalist vocabulary – can be labeled transcendental pragmatism (see Pihlström 2003, 2009). This is above
all because human practices, driven by our natural needs, interests, and
purposes, provide a quasi-transcendental framework within which knowledge as
well as moral deliberation are so much as possible. James as much as Kant is
investigating the necessary conditions
for the possibility of things we take for granted; he just (unlike Kant)
locates such conditions in our constantly changing, historically transforming,
and always reinterpretable human practices rather than any permanent
ahistorical structures of our cognitive capacity. Another reason why this
practice-oriented view is not very far from Kant’s general position is that
according to Kant practical reason is ultimately “prior to” theoretical
philosophy: even in its theoretical use, human reason is guided by the
practical (moral) interest. James could not agree more profoundly about this
idea.
In
the present essay, I will argue for James’s fundamental Kantianism by moving
around these more familiar comparative discussions, however. It seems to me
that several earlier contributions to the interpretation of Kant and James
(among them possibly some of my own works) have already taken some steps toward
demonstrating how deeply Kantian James’s pragmatic constructivism and his
ethically grounded conception of religion are, insofar as a pluralistic
“softening” of the original Kantian transcendental framework is regarded as a serious
option (which, clearly, many Kantians would not do). I will, instead, move
right through the theme that in my view unites Kant and James at the most
fundamental level – that is, philosophical
anthropology.[10]
After all, Kant maintained that his three questions can be summarized as the
single question, “What is man?”, and it is precisely this question that James,
as a kind of “transcendental humanist”, is also trying to answer (cf. also
Carlson 1997). I will suggest that these two philosophers’ many similarities
are basically a corollary of their shared conception of humanity, which can,
perhaps contrary to some expectations, be regarded as pessimistic in an important sense.[11]
After having devoted the bulk of this paper for a comparison of Kant’s and
James’s (ethical and religious) pessimisms and meliorisms, I will add some
final remarks on their shared commitment to critical
philosophy.
Jamesian meliorism
Our reception of
both Kant and James has, I believe, suffered from overly optimistic readings
that may make them seem less sophisticated thinkers than they really were. Kant
is often portrayed as a rationalist Enlightenment optimist who despite his
faith in reason brings God back into his transcendental system through a
backdoor, while James may be seen as a “positive thinker” inspiring (famously)
not only the philosophy of life employed at Alcoholics Anonymous but
positivity- and happiness-focused self-help more generally, including the
theology of wealth and flourishing.[12]
This is in my view seriously wrong and needs correction.
I
have tried to argue on earlier occasions that James’s pragmatic method should
actually be characterized as a “negative” method in the sense that it primarily
focuses on the potential ethically problematic effects of our concepts and
conceptions that are to be pragmatically examined (see Pihlström 2013, 2014,
2020). I now wish to draw attention to some new scholarly work on Kant
emphasizing his negative and
pessimistic conception of the human being. For my comparison of James and Kant,
I will particularly use Dennis Vanden Auweele’s very interesting book, Pessimism in Kant’s Ethics and Rational
Religion (2019), because his interpretation is unique in its emphasis on
Kant’s pessimism.[13]
Not only Kant’s conception of the limits of human reason (on the side of
theoretical philosophy) but also, and more importantly, his rejection of
theodicies and his account of radical evil (on the practical philosophy side)
are key elements of what may be regarded as his pessimism – a humanistic version
of pessimism that deserves to be taken seriously also in a Jamesian pragmatist
context.
This
is a form of pessimism that need not, however, destroy our ability to be good –
either epistemically or ethically. Rather, it is a way of taking seriously our
true human predicament in its epistemic, ethical, and existential fragility. I
believe this is something that unites Kant and James at a fundamental level,
and therefore Kantian pessimism needs attention in this context.
Pessimism
here needs to be understood as a transcendental
ground for the very possibility of our being and doing good – of our striving
for a better world, again both epistemically and ethically – to the extent that
we can claim a kind of transcendental pessimism and empirical meliorism to be firmly
integrated in James (cf., e.g., Pihlström 2008). Kant’s pessimistic account of
the human being arguably plays a crucial role in any pragmatist development of
transcendental philosophy. At a meta-level, this interplay of pessimism and
meliorism should make us rethink the philosophical anthropology at the
background of both Kantian critical philosophy and Jamesian pragmatism. We
must, Kant and James seem to agree, start from a reflexively critical analysis of our human
situation, seeking to understand our finite and fragile condition as sharply
and honestly as possible; only against that background of criticism can we
pragmatically try to construct a better human world (epistemically and
ethically).
For
Kant, such a critical analysis shows that we are unable to know anything about
things as they are in themselves (including theological issues such as the
existence of God and human immortality) and that we are not by our nature good
but desperately need the moral law set by our autonomous reason in its practical
use.[14]
For James, an analogous critical analysis starts from the impossibility of
theodicies that would allegedly render suffering justified and from the framing
of the very pragmatic method by the problem of evil, the recognition that there
are real losses and real sorrows in human life, no matter how positively
meaningful and flourishing our life could at best be (cf. Kivistö and Pihlström
2016, chapter 5). Just as Kant’s Religionsschrift
(1983 [1793/1794]) begins with the well-known analysis of “radical evil” as
a natural human inclination, James’s Pragmatism
(1975 [1907]) begins and ends with a discussion of the problem of evil and
the rejection of theodicies.
It
seems to me that James indeed does not go “around Kant” but right through him
when it comes to a certain kind of pessimism about the human condition. This
might sound like an implausible reading of a philosopher who wrote essays such
as “The Energies of Men” and “Is Life Worth Living?” (both in James 1979
[1897]); however, the key idea is not that meliorism would be wrong but that it
is based on a deeper pessimism. Moreover, the specific word is not essential –
we definitely do not have to talk about “pessimism” at all – but the general
commitment to something like anti-optimism and the rejection of any naïve
“positive thinking” are what matters. Indeed, a kind of quasi-Jamesian moral
“heroism” is precisely what is needed for the Kantian moral subject to overcome
– even partially – the natural inclination to prioritize evil maxims instead of
moral ones. Vanden Auweele (2019) rightly emphasizes throughout his book that
from a Kantian point of view human nature has no inherent inclination to
goodness but needs reason (the moral law) as its guidance. James may be
slightly more optimistic about this specific matter, but he also argues that we
need to be educated out of our instinctive blindness and deafness. For James,
such education takes place through the employment of the pragmatic method
taking seriously the potential practical results of our ideas, a method framed
by an antitheodicist understanding of the problem of evil: neither Hegelian nor
Leibnizian attempts to render unnecessary suffering meaningful in a
transcendent sense are, for James, humanly acceptable, as they disregard the
concrete experience of the victims of evil and suffering (cf. James 1975
[1907], Lecture I).
We
should thus follow James (ibid., Lecture VIII) in viewing pragmatism as
proposing a form of meliorism reducible neither to naively optimistic views
according to which the good will ultimately inevitably prevail nor to dark and
cynical pessimism according to which everything will finally go down the road
of destruction.[15]
Pragmatism generally mediates between a number of implausible philosophical
extremes (including strong realism and idealism as well as the tough-minded and
tender-minded “temperaments”),[16]
and similarly Kant’s transcendental philosophy mediates between (again) realism
and idealism as well as, say, rationalism and empiricism and dogmatism and
skepticism. The mediating role played by meliorism is part and parcel of the
more general pragmatist-cum-Kantian picture of the human being. This is how
James characterizes pragmatism’s commitment to meliorism:
Now it would contradict the very spirit of life to say
that our minds must be indifferent and neutral in questions like that of the
world’s salvation. Anyone who pretends to be neutral writes himself down here
as a fool and a sham. […] Nevertheless there are unhappy men who think the
salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism.
Optimism in
turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world’s salvation inevitable.
Midway
between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism […].
Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it
as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more
numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.
It is clear
that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism. (Ibid., 137.)
Earlier
in the same volume, James contrasts meliorism with determinism, because the
latter claims that “necessity and impossibility between them rule the destinies
of the world”, while the former “holds up improvement as at least possible”
(ibid., 61). Pragmatism figures as a pluralistic philosophy of promise and
hope, refusing to take “salvation” for granted (like dogmatic religious
outlooks optimistically tend to do), nor claiming it to be impossible (as
materialist and determinist views hopelessly pessimistically do, with their
bleak picture of an ultimately inhuman universe), but the fact that such a
promise is needed in the first place follows from our highly insecure,
vulnerable, and both epistemically and ethically incomplete human condition.
In
particular, sincerely understanding this incompleteness is essential in our
ethical relations to other human beings around us. More specifically, James’s
(1983 [1899]) well-known examination of “a certain blindness in human beings”,
as an inclination or tendency to overlook the significance of otherness and
other human beings’ distinctive points of view that might make their lives meaningful in ways we cannot
easily understand, is analogous (or even James’s own version of) Kant’s
treatment of “radical evil”, which is also an inclination (Hang), i.e., the tendency rooted in us to choose maxims contrary to
the moral law – an inclination to evil (Hang
zum Böse). These notions reflect the two philosophers’ fundamental
agreement about transcendental pessimism. According to both, we need to be
educated out of these inclinations. This happens, in Kant, primarily by the
practical use of reason (which ultimately leads to religion, as we will note
below), and in James by an engagement in holistic practices more generally
(that is, not merely reason-use as such), religious practices included. Both
are versions of the idea that human beings need to be enculturated in order for them to be able to be moral – to adopt a
“strenuous mood”, as James memorably put it. Pessimism and meliorism work together
here, as it is only on the grounds of pessimism that the melioristic project of
making the world – especially human beings – better makes sense. This
ultimately amounts to a thoroughly pragmatic philosophical anthropology.
Without appreciating a basic vulnerability in the lives we share with
other human beings, no “cries of the wounded”[17] can be heard, and no
pragmatic method can get off the ground. Therefore, James’s physiological
metaphors of human finitude should be taken seriously as fundamental to his
pragmatism: he finds both deafness (to what he calls the
cries of the wounded) and blindness (to others’ experiences
in general) significant to his analysis of our responses – or, better, failing
responses – to vulnerability and suffering. In an opening comment to the 1899
“blindness” lecture, he notes: “Now the blindness in human beings, of which
this discourse will treat, is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in
regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.” (James
1983 [1899].) Similarly, the human being, according to Kant (1983 [1793/1794],
6:32), “is by nature evil”, and this fact about our condition manifests itself
in our disregard for moral duty when it comes to our natural pursuit of
happiness.
It
must be noted, however, that there are also important divergences between
Kant’s and James’s distinctive accounts of our inclinations to evil. For Kant,
radical evil is not merely the empirical tendency to prioritize one’s own
happiness, well-being, or personal needs and interests in contrast to the moral
law (though this is of course something we have a tendency to do, according to
Kant); it is, more strongly, our free
choice of maxims that prioritize happiness to moral law, that is, our
tendency to freely choose to follow maxims that conflict with the categorical
imperative. Our autonomous reason is self-divided here. It is crucially
important for Kant that we are responsible
for these choices and prioritizations and that we are therefore, indeed, “radically” evil (“at the root”,
recalling the Latin etymology of radix);
the unhappy choice arises from ourselves. Ultimately, our tendency to freely
choose to be evil in this sense is as inexplicable and incomprehensible as our
acting (when morally good) out of pure respect for the moral law as moral
subjects (see ibid., Book I).[18]
Kantian pessimism
It is, arguably,
precisely due to the “radical” character of evil (in the etymological sense of radix) that human beings are unable to
achieve by their own efforts what Kant in the second Critique (1783 [1788]) called the highest good (summum bonum); in this pursuit commanded
by the moral law itself (and thus by our practical reason), we seem to need, in
addition to our autonomous reason, something like divine grace, and we need to
be able to legitimately hope that we
might deserve such grace on the basis of our moral commitment. James (1979
[1909]) revisits an essentially similar idea when he advances pragmatism as a
pluralistic philosophy of hope, insisting that we need to do our best in the
effort of “moral salvation” while at the same time trusting that other
(superhuman) agents will do their best, too.[19]
We
should, however, now take a slightly closer look at the way in which pessimism
figures in Kant’s practical philosophy and philosophy of religion, in
particular. Here I will help myself to Vanden Auweele’s insightful reading. He
defines “Kantian pessimism” as a view emphasizing “the lack of any capacity for human nature to be or navigate toward
moral goodness”, entailing that “human
nature requires a radical revolution through means exceeding that nature”
(Vanden Auweele 2019, p. xvi; see also p. 65), and he strikingly suggests that
pessimism is not merely a part of Kant’s philosophy but is present “in the
whole of his philosophy” (ibid., p. xviii). In some more detail, he summarizes
Kantian pessimism as the conjunction of three theses. First, human nature (or
natural processes generally) “do by themselves not facilitate moral goodness”;
indeed, there is “something profoundly amiss with human nature”. Secondly,
therefore, our development toward goodness “must include a radical change”; in
terms of the radix etymology, again,
human nature needs to be “altered from the ground up”, not merely trained or
reformed. Thirdly, Kant espouses a skeptical view about our actually being able
to reach the highest good. (Ibid.) The human being simply does not have a “holy
will” that would not experience a conflict between moral duty and natural
inclination (ibid., pp. 44-45, 51). This seems to be a similar kind of
transcendental anthropological “fact” about us as, say, our not possessing the
faculty of “intellectual intuition” that would know its objects directly
without the mediating role of the senses (as analyzed in the Transcendental
Aesthetic of the first Critique).[20]
Note,
however, how close Kant’s pessimism comes to Jamesian meliorism. As Vanden
Auweele puts it, this pessimism “does not cancel out the possibility of a
better future, but warns against the belief that natural processes by themselves
navigate toward that end. Progress is hard and difficult, not inevitable.”
(Ibid., p. xx.) What is required is “moral education that cultivates and
augments [our] rational interest in moral behavior” (ibid., p. 20).
Accordingly, just as the Jamesian meliorist may still have confidence (however
meager) in the possibility of a better outcome, or “moral salvation” of the
world (for which the assistance of “higher powers” may be needed), the Kantian
pessimist does not claim human beings to be “necessarily corrupted” but only
“naturally corrupted” (ibid., p. 101; cf. pp. 109, 116): the Hang zum Böse rooted in us does not make
morality impossible for us but only very difficult. Otherwise the very pursuit
of moral goodness (a pursuit we have a duty to engage in) would become an
incoherent requirement. Moral virtue must still be a human possibility; our
nature cannot be so thoroughly (necessarily, unavoidably) corrupted by our
propensity to evil that we could not even aim
at being morally good – to even occasionally occupy what James called the
“strenuous mood”.[21]
The possibility of moral goodness in this sense only concerns human beings,
because neither angels (who would possess a “holy will”) nor mere animals would
be able to act virtuously due to a conflict between duty and inclination.
Another
potential comparison to James would also be highly natural here: perhaps our
way to goodness is something that only opens through a radical conversion (see the relevant sections on
conversion in James 1985 [1902], Lectures IX-X). At least in Kant’s view, no
minor adjustments are sufficient, but human nature needs to be “radically
sculpted” to “overhaul” its natural behavior (Vanden Auweele 2019, p. 65); what
is needed is a “dramatically changed second nature”. While this kind of radical
moral education is difficult, Kant is not a thoroughgoing or absolute pessimist
in the sense that he would deny its possibility. James’s position may also be
seen as cautious if not skeptical regarding our ability to achieve the highest
good – or “moral salvation”, as James calls it – as it is not easy for us to
overcome the blindness that comes naturally to us. Moreover, we may note that
just as radical evil and moral blindness are analogous notions in these two
thinkers, so are the ethico-religiously central concepts of the highest good
and the moral salvation of the world.[22]
While Kant urges us to be committed to moral duty despite its difficulty, James
offers us an uncertain universe with responsibility:
It is then perfectly possible to accept sincerely a
drastic kind of a universe from which the element of ‘seriousness’ is not to be
expelled. Whoso does is, it seems to me, a genuine pragmatist. He is willing to
live on a scheme of uncertified possibilities which he trusts; willing to pay
with his own person, if need be, for the realization of the ideals which he
frames. (James 1975 [1907], pp. 142-143.)
For
James, this “trust” may also be directed, religiously, at “superhuman forces”
that may assist us in advancing the moral ideal of salvation (ibid., p. 143).
In the Kantian context, a “conversion” to moral seriousness despite the
uncertainty of our condition is, however, primarily a rational and ethical one.
Because our human nature does not possess the tools to reach moral goodness, we
require “the intervention of reason that radically remodels nature” (Vanden
Auweele 2019, p. 5). This ultimately leads to religion (see also below), but we
cannot hope to just volitionally adopt a religious faith because of its
beneficial effects in our moral pursuits; as Vanden Auweele notes (ibid., p.
23), Kant rejects Pascal’s Wager as firmly as James (1979 [1897], chapter 1)
does.[23]
Yet, we do need actively embraced human faith in order to direct our behavior
from what we merely naturally are to what ethical duty – in our “strenuous
mood” – requires. Insofar as the key to Kant’s pessimism is our inability to be
naturally good (that is, our inclination to evil instead of moral virtue), for
James the fundamental problem seems to be that the very possibility of morality
is endangered by the fact that we appear to be living in a material world
devoid of any higher meaning and value, if the scientific account of the world
is on the right track. For both, we need to overcome our nature and become
fully human – and this is itself an irreducibly ethical quest.
While
Vanden Auweele does not explicitly speak about transcendental pessimism (or
meliorism, for that matter), his reading of Kant fits very well my attempt to
reconcile transcendental pessimism with empirical meliorism. He notes that “the
rationally justified hope for a future in which humanity is set right shines so
powerfully that one is blinded to the darkness it is supposed to cover up”
(Vanden Auweele 2019, p. 22). Rational hope does shine, but we can only notice
it against the pessimistic darkness around it. Again, the same holds for
James’s melioristic conviction that things can
be made better while success is never guaranteed.
There
is no need to here dwell on the way in which Kant (1983 [1791]) in his “Theodicy
Essay” firmly rejects all actual and possible (e.g., Leibnizian metaphysically
optimist) theodicies allegedly rendering evil and suffering (or
“counterpurposiveness”, Zweckwidrigkeit)
meaningful and (in some sense) purposeful.[24]
It suffices to observe here that antitheodicism
(as I like to call it) is an essential element of Kant’s pessimism. There is no
way in which we could by our limited rational resources justify the evil and
suffering we find around us in the world we live in; moreover, it can be
suggested that our moral duty to treat other human beings not merely as means
but also as ends (according to the second formulation of the categorical
imperative) would have to preclude the instrumentalizing tendencies of
theodicies, i.e., the temptation to see others’ suffering as a means to some
imagined higher end.
No
rationalist dogmatic faith in a harmonious divine plan rendering all
counterpurposiveness ultimately purposeful can thus be humanly accepted,
because it is in the end a form of the “blindness” James criticized, though not
exactly in the same sense. It is a form of blindness (and deafness) due to its
inability to appreciate the experience of utter meaninglessness in suffering.
In this antitheodicism, Kant and James stand united.[25]
Ethics and religion
As was already
remarked above, the Jamesian pragmatic postulation of God’s existence – based
on a “will to believe” leap (cf. James 1979 [1897]) – resembles the Kantian
rationally legitimate hope for God’s existence as a “postulate of practical
reason”. This leap, or hope, is necessary for us (given the kind of beings we
are, and given the pessimism sketched above), because otherwise we cannot be
fully committed to the requirements of morality. It is, thus, for melioristic
reasons that we need to take the “will to believe” step toward practically
postulating a Kantian divinity that (we may hope) can ultimately guarantee
justice as the harmony of virtue and happiness, though, given our pessimistic
condition, we can never know for sure anything about such an outcome.
On
the basis of the considerations of meliorism and pessimism, it is possible to
further deepen our comparison between Kant and James by noting how closely
similar their ways of subordinating religion to morality are. It is through religion
– to which our reason in its limited condition brings us – that our blindness
and our propensity to evil may be (partially, temporarily) overcome and the
moral pursuit strenuously advanced – to the extent that we may (again) follow
Vanden Auweele’s (2019, pp. 131, 173) suggestion according to which Kant’s
philosophy of religion is “an integral part of practical philosophy by making
religion into a tool for cultivating moral resolve”, and the functions of
religion are to be subordinated to the ethical one. They are also to be
subordinated to ethics according to James as well.
An
obvious question that arises here is how sincerely
a morally motivated religious believer can adopt religious faith, knowing
that it ultimately only plays an instrumental role for advancing ethical rather
than religious ends. This is a question that comes up as clearly in the Kantian
context (see ibid., chapter 6) as in the Jamesian one (see Pihlström 2008,
chapter 2; 2013, chapter 1). If religion is only, or even primarily, intended
to help us adopt the strenuous mood and pursue moral ends that ought to
motivate and bind us independently of religion, does it have any autonomous or
even any genuine role to play in our lives? If we were fully conscious of the
primarily (or exclusively) ethical function of religion, this would be “the end
of religion”; a truly Kantian form of Christianity would, rather, have to be
embraced without our being aware of its essentially serving our “moral courage”
(Vanden Auweele 2019, p. 191). This is how Vanden Auweele formulates the worry:
Religions can only achieve its [sic] function, that is, to cultivate moral resolve, if they are
taken to be true, not if they are adopted because it is prudent to adopt a
religion. One believes in Christianity because one thinks Christianity is true,
not because one thinks Christianity would be prudent to believe in (this would
make for a hypocritical believer). (Ibid., p. 192.)
In
other words, the morally instrumental function of religion is problematic for
the sincerity of religious faith. “Instrumental belief is not real belief”
(ibid., p. 193), and therefore our realizing the “practical usefulness” of
religious belief would destroy that belief qua
religious. As was already noted above, Kant just like James later rejected
Pascal’s Wager, which (at least according to a received view)[26]
proposes to infer the rationality of religious faith from the beneficial
outcome of that faith (and from the fact that its probability, however small,
is not zero).
This
“sincerity objection”, as we might call it, is arguably a worry that can be
raised with full force only in the context of the kind of Kantian-cum-Jamesian
pessimism-cum-meliorism that has been sketched above. We may be persuaded by
Kantian and Jamesian arguments that religion is necessarily, at least in the
sense of practical necessity, needed for us to be able to overcome our
instinctive blindness and/or our natural inclination to prioritize evil maxims.
It is only a short step from this insight to the conclusion that this is all religion is ever needed for. Could
religious faith, then, even turn into a kind of placebo therapy that we know “works” but not because there is a
“real” objective mechanism there but because such a motivating force tends to
be effective for beings like us with our cognitive and ethical condition,
including our limitations? At least it would seem that for a placebo effect to be real we cannot know
that the therapy involved really has no efficient power. Paradoxically, for our
being able to effectively “use” religion as a “tool” for our moral resolve, we
must not know, or perhaps not even be
able to know, that it is “merely” such a tool. We must, in some sense, be able
to be sincerely committed to religion without having climbed onto a reflective
meta-level affirming the moral value of such commitment – yet this sincerity
itself must arise from our ethical stance toward religion.
It
is, it seems to me, essentially the same kind of sincerity that Kant emphasizes
when he rejects theodicies in the Theodicy Essay and that he also praises in an
eloquent footnote toward the end of the Religionsschrift.
This is, indeed, what Kant finds the most striking feature in Job’s character
in contrast to Job’s “friends” (who seek to formulate theodicies, in
contemporary parlance).[27]
More precisely, Job’s key virtues, according to Kant, are his “sincerity of
heart” (Aufrichtigkeit des Herzens) and “honesty in openly admitting one’s
doubts” (die Redlichkeit, seine Zweifel
unverhohlen zu gestehen), which establishes “the preeminence of the honest
man over the religious flatterer [Schmeichler]
in the divine verdict” (Kant 1983 [1791], 8:267):
Job speaks as he thinks, and with the courage with
which he, as well as every human being in his position, can well afford; his
friends, on the contrary, speak as if they were being secretly listened to by
the mighty one, over whose cause they are passing judgment, and as if gaining
his favor through their judgment were closer to their heart than the truth.
Their malice in pretending to assert things into which they yet must admit they
have no insight, and in simulating a conviction which they in fact do not have,
contrasts with Job’s frankness [Freimütigkeit]
[…]. (Ibid., 8:265-266)
At
this point it might be suggested that the Kantian prospective believer actually
needs Jamesian meliorism to overcome the pessimism that now extends to our
ability to invoke religious considerations in any serious and sincere sense in
this context. Within the Kantian system itself, the sincerity of religion may
indeed be lost, as Vanden Auweele correctly worries. In brief, it may be
suggested that from a pragmatic point of view our sincere faith may itself
bring its own verification along with it – and this is something that seems to
be available to James but not (at least not fully) to Kant. This would be an
example of a case in which the employment of the Jamesian “will to believe”
strategy is pragmatically legitimate; after all, one of the types of cases that
James (1979 [1897]) considers in “The Will to Believe” is precisely the case
where strong belief is required for the belief itself to be able to be (made)
true.
However,
even here (at least when we are examining the religious case) it seems that we
do need to make sure the faith that is to be voluntarily embraced is sincere to begin with. It cannot be –
any more in the Kantian than in the Jamesian situation – adopted merely for instrumental reasons or on
purely practical and functional grounds due to results or benefits that would
be external to it. Its moral worth needs to be something that sincere faith
“internally” (inherently) carries with it, even if the contingent outcome were
not to be realized, after all. Only by adopting such a pragmatic faith in God’s reality can the potential pragmatic
Kantian be both genuinely religious and genuinely ethical.
From
the Jamesian pragmatist point of view, it could even be suggested that the
“truth” of religion pragmatically amounts to its ethical functionality in our
lives. That is to say, Vanden Auweele and many others who fail to approach the
Kantian issue of sincerity from the Jamesian pragmatist standpoint rely on an
essentially non-pragmatic dichotomy between the issues concerning the
theoretical truth (vs. falsity) of religion, on the one hand, and the practical
usefulness or functionality of religion, on the other hand. If we frame our
examination of the relation between religion and ethics in a thoroughly
pragmatist manner, this dichotomy must itself be overcome. The practical –
i.e., ethical – functionality of religion is constitutive of its pragmatic
truth, or in other words, the theoretical “metaphysical” truth of a religious
outlook is its pragmatic
functionality in the (would-be) believer’s system of belief, which is
ultimately their (form of) life in a holistic sense.[28]
Pragmatism, after all, is for James a “philosophy of hope”, but this notion of
hope must not be contrasted to Kant’s but rather be understood as fully
congruous with Kant’s treatment of religion in terms of legitimate rational
hope.
It
will inevitably remain an open issue here whether Jamesian pragmatism can
ultimately keep its promise of delivering a melioristic account of religion
that does not rely on a dichotomy between ethical or pragmatic and purely
theoretical truth but can, rather, resolve the question of sincerity that seems
to arise in the Kantian context which proposes to account for religion in terms
of practical reason. The main conclusion for us (for now) is that it is right
here that Kant and James are deeply engaged with essentially the same problem.
In my view, Kantian practical (moral) theism needs to be informed by Jamesian
pragmatist considerations in order for the sincerity issue to be adequately
dealt with. But in the context of the present inquiry this remains a mere hypothesis
to be further critically tested by means of both historical and systematic
investigation. It could, for instance, turn out that from Kant’s perspective
there is a sense in which a religious attitude “comes first”, after all, and
the critical account of the moral grounds of religion only gives a voice to
those who already have religious faith.[29]
It
is, at any rate, an essential element of Kantian-cum-Jamesian sincerity that
naïve optimism is rejected across the board, both in ethics and in religion. Therefore,
the sincerity needed in the formulation of a properly Kantian (and Jamesian)
religious faith is essentially the same sincerity that we need for the
rejection of theodicies, along the lines of Kant’s Theodicy Essay, and
therefore the kind of pessimism briefly analyzed above is a key element of such
sincerity. Only by taking others’ meaningless and non-instrumentalizable
suffering philosophically – ethically – seriously can we hope to formulate
anything like an adequate account of morality and religion; overcoming
theodicies is, indeed, part of overcoming the “blindness” James was (sincerely)
worried about.
Conclusion: humanism and critical philosophy
It is impossible
to defend the transcendentally pessimistic conception of humanity (as
articulated above) without a fundamental commitment to what Kant called critical philosophy. The chief task of
philosophical inquiry is always critical.[30]
Critical philosophy, broadly understood, integrates the Kantian pursuit of
reason and the Jamesian pursuit of the holistic and pluralistic development of
“the whole man in us”. It is (only) through critical philosophy that we can
establish methods of conversion that might (but also might not) lead to moral
goodness and progress.[31]
It is, moreover, (only) through critical philosophy that we become aware of the
kind of pessimism we need to be committed to in order to sincerely understand
our human condition, especially the Kantian inclination to evil and the
Jamesian instinctive blindness. For the uncritical (naïve) gaze, these
unwelcome features of our existence are not visible. In a more pragmatist
terminology, we need a genuine – again sincere – commitment to inquiry, also in ethical and theological
matters.
To
engage in critical philosophy – or pragmatic inquiry – in pursuit of the kind
of melioristic account based on the background of pessimism is, moreover, to be
committed to a Kantian-cum-Jamesian humanism,
in contrast to various currently popular transhumanist, posthumanist, or
antihumanist ways of thinking. The inquiring subject that critically turns
toward a reflection on their own capacities and limitations is a human being.
The question “What is man?” indeed integrates all the three Kantian questions.
James, we may conclude, essentially shares Kant’s humanistic conception of the
human being; to be a pessimist, or a meliorist, is to be a humanist seriously,
and often painfully, concerned with the human condition.[32]
References
Bird, G. (1986), William
James, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Campbell, J. (2017), Experiencing William James: Belief in a Pluralistic World,
Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press.
Carlson, T.L. (1997), “James in the Kantian
Tradition”, in R.A. Putnam (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to William James, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Dewey, J. (1986 [1929]), Experience and Nature, Chicago: Open Court.
Goodson, J.L. (ed.) (2018), William James, Moral Philosophy, and the Ethical Life, Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books.
James, W. (1979 [1897]), The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, eds.
F.H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and I.K. Skrupskelis, Cambridge, MA and London:
Harvard University Press.
James, W. (1985 [1902]), The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature,
eds. F.H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and I.K. Skrupskelis, Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard University Press.
James, W. (1975 [1907]), Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, eds. F.H.
Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and I.K. Skrupskelis, Cambridge, MA and London:
Harvard University Press.
James, W. (1979 [1909]), A Pluralistic Universe, eds. F.H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and
I.K. Skrupskelis, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
James, W. (1977 [1911]), Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to
Philosophy, eds. F.H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and I.K. Skrupskelis,
Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
James, W. (1978), Essays
in Philosophy, eds. F.H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and I.K. Skrupskelis,
Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
James, W. (1983), Talks
to Teachers on Psychology and Some of Life’s Ideals, eds. F.H. Burkhardt,
Fredson Bowers, and I.K. Skrupskelis, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard
University Press.
Kant, I. (1983 [1763]), “Der einzig mögliche
Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes”, in in W. Weischedel
(ed.), Immanuel Kant: Werke in zehn
Bänden, vol. 2, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Kant, I. (1990 [1781/1787]), Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. R.
Schmidt, Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
Kant, I. (1983 [1784]), “Idee
zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlichen Absicht”, in W. Weischedel
(ed.), Immanuel Kant: Werke in zehn
Bänden, vol. 9, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Kant, I. (1983 [1788]), Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, in W.
Weischedel (ed.), Immanuel Kant: Werke in
zehn Bänden, vol. 5, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Kant, I. (1983 [1791]), “Über
das Misslingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodicee”, in W.
Weischedel (ed.), Immanuel Kant: Werke in
zehn Bänden, vol. 9, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. (English translation, “On the Miscarriage of All
Philosophical Trials in Theodicy”, in Kant, Religion
and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. A.W. Wood and G. Di Giovanni,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.)
Kant, I. (1983 [1793/1794]), Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, in W.
Weischedel (ed.), Immanuel Kant: Werke in
zehn Bänden, vol. 7, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Kant, I. (1983 [1794]), “Das Ende aller Dinge”, in in
W. Weischedel (ed.), Immanuel Kant: Werke
in zehn Bänden, vol. 9, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Kivistö, S. and Pihlström, S. (2016), Kantian Antitheodicy: Philosophical and
Literary Varieties, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Koistinen, O. (2012), “The Critique of Pure Reason as Metaphysics”. In L. Haaparanta and
H.J. Koskinen (eds.), Categories of
Being: Essays on Metaphysics and Logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marchetti, S. (2015), Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Pihlström, S. (2003), Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View, Amherst, NY:
Humanity Books.
Pihlström, S. (2008), “The Trail of the Human Serpent Is over Everything”: Jamesian
Perspectives on Mind, World, and Religion, Lanham, MD: University Press of
America.
Pihlström, S. (2009), Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology,
London: Continuum.
Pihlström, S. (2010), “Kant and Pragmatism”, Pragmatism Today 2, http://www.pragmatismtoday.eu/winter2010/Pihlstrom-Kant_and_Pragmatism.pdf.
Pihlström, S. (2013), Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God, New York: Fordham
University Press.
Pihlström, S. (2014), Taking Evil Seriously, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pihlström, S. (2016), Death and Finitude: Toward a Pragmatic Transcendental Anthropology of
Human Limits and Finitude, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Pihlström, S. (2020), Pragmatic Realism, Religious Truth, and Antitheodicy: On Viewing the
World by Acknowledging the Other, Helsinki: Helsinki University Press.
Putnam, H. and Putnam, R.A. (2017), Pragmatism as a Way of Life, Cambridge,
MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Skowronski, K. and Pihlström, S. (eds.) (2019), Pragmatist Kant, Nordic Studies in
Pragmatism 4, Helsinki: Nordic Pragmatism Network, online: www.nordprag.org.
Vanden Auweele, D. (2019), Pessimism in Kant’s Ethics and Rational Religion, Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books.
