Pragmatism [is] a mediator and reconciler. . . . She “unstiffens” our theories. She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence. It follows that in the religious field she is at a great advantage both over positivistic empiricism, with its anti-theological bias, and over religious rationalism, with its exclusive interest in the remote, the noble, the simple, and the abstract in the way of conception. In short, she widens the field of search for God. Rationalism sticks to logic and the empyrean. Empiricism sticks to the external senses. Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the senses, and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. . . .
Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience’s demands, nothing being omitted.
William James, Pragmatism
IN THIS CHAPTER I construct a critical counter-narrative of the pragmatist tradition that understands pragmatism developed by James as emerging out of a context of cultural contestation over the meaning of gender, race, and class and the relationship between philosophy, science, and religion. First, I offer preliminary considerations on pragmatism, rhetoric, and gender. Then I examine some previous work on pragmatism and gender, as well as James’s own views on women and gender, particularly as they are developed in his 1869 review of two famous works on the women’s movement. I next look closely at the late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century cultural context in which James produces his conception of pragmatism in order to provide background for the critical analysis of James’s rhetorical presentation of pragmatism as a female-gendered mediator between science and religion. Finally, I discuss James’s conception of temperament and its relationship to gender and religion, looking more broadly at James’s writings to better contextualize his presentation of pragmatism as what I term a “rhetoric of mediation.”
One of the most familiar critiques of pragmatism, which has been especially directed at James, is that as a mode of philosophy it has not been systematic and logical enough in its formulations. Partly in response to these critiques Peirce attempted to clarify his own “pragmaticism” by differentiating it from James’s pragmatism, and Dewey attempted to develop his instrumentalist version of pragmatism as a “precise logical theory” of the “general forms of conception and reasoning.”1 But these efforts were not successful enough to occasion much change in the dominant opinion of pragmatism, and by the mid-twentieth century, philosophy students in the United States increasingly began to reject pragmatism in favor of analytic philosophy. According to West, “Logical positivism seized the imagination of the most talented young philosophers in the country,” who viewed pragmatism as “vague and muddleheaded.”2 Or as Seigfried puts it, in the context of a Western philosophical tradition that has often exhibited strong polarization in gendered terms, pragmatism came to seem “far more feminine” than what replaced it. “When separation, generalization, sharp boundaries, and the drive to reduce the multiplicity of experience are categorized as masculine, then inclusiveness, concreteness, vagueness, tolerance of ambiguities, and pluralism are seen as feminine.”3
Into the category of “the feminine” as well can be placed religion as it has been conceptualized in much of the Western philosophical tradition. And perhaps not surprisingly, pragmatism as developed by James and Dewey also has much to do with religion. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has connected the marginalization of gender with that of rhetoric and religion in dominant Western discourses. Describing the “negative ‘feminine’ gendering of both rhetoric and religion in the anti-rhetorical discourses of philosophy and science,” she observes:
Like wo/men, religion and rhetoric figure as the excluded or idealized “other” in modern western discourses. Like wo/men, both religion and rhetoric are reduced by the modern rationalist tradition to emotion and passion, to style devoid of substance. They are identified with custom, fiction, or colorful ornament, likened to opium and pie in the sky, or associated with trickery and treachery. In the last three centuries wo/men have had to struggle to overcome their actual exclusion from public speaking and academic institutions at the same time that the “feminine” has become a rhetorical figure of exclusion and subordination, which functions to contain religious and rhetorical discourses and their unruly sociopolitical possibilities.4
Pragmatism, at least in the writings of James and to a lesser degree, Dewey, can be seen as an exception to this rule insofar as it seeks to include and revaluate positively both rhetoric and religion. However, the question of how we may think about religion, rhetoric, and gender as an aligned problematic in the pragmatist tradition very much remains an open one.
If we take feminist critiques of Western philosophy’s marginalization and exclusion of rhetoric seriously, we must be suspicious of any claims regarding the irrelevance of images and metaphors in a philosophical text. Moreover, if we accept Seigfried’s counter-narrative of pragmatism, we also have good reason to pay attention to the presence of gendered language in pragmatist texts and to gendered critiques of pragmatism that characterize it as “vague,” “fuzzy-minded,” and “muddle-headed.” The theme of gender in James’s writings can and should be examined in the context of a critical rhetorical analysis of pragmatism.
In Pragmatism and Feminism, Seigfried outlines her own critical strategy for reading James’s writings. She observes that performing a critical feminist reading of a text is difficult for several reasons, one of which is the prevailing view that, as Nancy Tuana puts it, “a philosopher’s gender biases are irrelevant to his philosophical system.”5 Such a view can be reinforced by the fact that most male philosophers, and James is only one example, treat women and gender only indirectly; or, if directly, these references are often limited and widely scattered.6 For Seigfried initially, the things to be admired in James’s thought, such as his pluralism, anti-imperialism, sympathy for disadvantaged groups, and focus on experience, had seemed to outweigh his “occasionally disparaging remarks about women” and in her view “shielded him from the more harmful forms of sexism.”7 It was only when she began to focus specifically and critically on conceptions of women and gender in his writings that his sexism came to seem in her view not only obvious but pervasive.8
Seigfried finds that James’s statements about women and gender are related to his project of undermining “masculine” scientific positivism through a revaluation of “feminine” mysticism, and in her view, he fails to be truly critical with respect to both. James’s project, she thinks, is promising: he wants to critique scientific positivism through advocating the “feminine-mystical perspective” as a legitimate source of knowledge and insight, one that opens up new horizons of consciousness to which science in a strictly positivistic sense can have no access. However, in doing so, he maintains the interpretive authority of the scientific sphere over the mystical, creating what Seigfried calls an “ambivalence” between “masculine” science/rationality and “feminine” symbolism/mysticism, so in her view he fails to seriously challenge the gendered hierarchy of science and mysticism.9 Moreover, through her investigation of James’s writings for gendered presuppositions and attitudes, she finds that he disregards the experiences of women, fails to consider them as philosophical subjects in their own right and not as the “Other” of men, and makes essentialist claims about aspects of women’s “nature.”10
Despite what she takes to be James’s reinscription of masculine power and authority and his Victorian sensibilities regarding romantic love and women’s virtue, elements that mark his writing as among the “least feminist” of the classical pragmatists (Dewey presumably being the most feminist), Seigfried finds an abundance of “conventionally feminine” elements to be present also, such as an emphasis on feeling, intuition, and the permeability and fluidity of boundaries, concepts, and selves. She quotes in support of her position Morris Grossman’s statement that
the “feminine” in James—the chthonic, the liquid, the vague, the inconstant, the chaotic—almost destroy him. . . . The “embrace” of the feminine—the acceptance of the vague, the inchoate, the irresolute, the liquid, the emotive—saves him. . . . William also accomplishes a feminine embrace of chaos in favor of nature, abundance, inventiveness, fecundity and superfluidity.11
Seigfried surmises that it may be “the very prominence of this feminine side of himself” that causes James to “emphasize manliness, the Promethean self, and the Goethe-like resolution to strive against overwhelming odds.” The existence of both masculine and feminine elements in James’s thought suggests for her “an unresolved, creative tension between feminine and masculine desires and values,” a tension that may be profitably explored through a critical feminist analysis.12
Seigfried also finds James to be, along with Dewey (and excepting Peirce), an exemplar of what she calls pragmatism’s “recognizably feminine style”:
On a scale of traits, assumptions, and positions that range from stereotypically masculine to stereotypically feminine, pragmatism . . . appears far more feminine than masculine. Among the various aspects contributing to this feeling are a penchant for indirect, metaphorical discourse rather than a deductive and reductively symbolic one and the concreteness of pragmatist methodology. Such concreteness stresses the experiential basis of theory and problematic situations over traditional textbook puzzles and abstract conceptual distinctions. The pragmatist goal of philosophical discourse, which is shared understanding and communal problem solving rather than rationally forced conclusions, is more feminine than masculine, as is its valuing of inclusiveness and community over exaggerated claims of autonomy and detachment. The same can be said for its developmental rather than rule-governed ethics.13
Seigfried’s understanding of feminine versus masculine traits is a curious one. On the one hand, she acknowledges that these are stereotypical, varied, culturally and historically based, rooted in power interests, and determined by the intersection of gender with race and class, and further, that a “feminine” perspective is not identical to a “feminist” one. Yet she then muses that pragmatism’s “feminine rather than masculine style” helps explain why she and other women have been “drawn to” pragmatism and have found it “emotionally sustaining as well as intellectually attractive.” She finds in particular James’s “metaphorical and suggestive style” to be more in line with her own thinking than an “analytic and explicit” one yet wants to claim that this preference is “the expression of a feminine style without implying that all women think this way or that no men do.” Seigfried also quotes with approval Mary Mahowald’s argument that the feminine characteristics in pragmatism “may have been due to direct feminist influence.”14 Thus, in her investigation of pragmatism’s affinities with feminism, she sometimes elides feminism with “the feminine” while also not historicizing pragmatism’s usage of gendered rhetoric.
Gerald Myers offers an almost exactly opposite reading of James’s views on women and feminism, noting that while James “was hardly a committed activist,” he nevertheless took an interest in the women’s movement and held “active suffragettes” such as Jane Addams in high esteem:
James was prepared to follow the recommendations made by intelligent women for changes in women’s roles, although he was not of a temperament to pretend to head their cause. He had no problem in deferring to women’s judgments and assumed that he could depend upon women to define their own best interests.15
For Myers, James’s attitude toward women’s issues was characterized by “neutrality” and a willingness to withhold judgment on whether or not the reforms advocated would be beneficial or detrimental to society as a whole. Following the pragmatist maxim, he was willing to leave considerations of the value of these reforms to their future practical effects. However, according to Myers, James was convinced that “nothing was more unjust than a policy that would stunt a person’s capacity for moral growth,” and he opposed restrictions on women’s access to education and politics for this reason. In addition, his commitments to justice and democracy enabled him to recognize that “the status quo deserved to be changed” and that the women’s movement was further proof of the ongoing progress of democratic ideals in the United States and Europe.16
In an effort to sort out some of the issues raised by these conflicting views on James’s understanding of women, gender, and the women’s movement, I turn now to James’s review of Horace Bushnell’s Women’s Suffrage and John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women. It was written in 1869, when he was twenty-seven years old, almost a decade before his marriage to Alice Howe Gibbens in 1878, and published in the North American Review, one of the leading literary magazines of the day. This is the only one of his writings that deals in a direct and sustained manner with the subject of women, gender, or the women’s movement. The early date of this review in comparison to those of the other texts by James discussed in this book should be underscored: it predates the Berkeley address, for example, by almost thirty years. Therefore, it is difficult and potentially problematic to read the views expressed in this essay as representative of those of the James of Pragmatism and the later writings discussed. However, I find that a careful consideration of this essay provides important background for my analysis. Both critics, like Seigfried, and defenders, like Myers, of James’s views on women and gender look to this particular essay for evidence in support of their positions. And the crux of the disagreement between them lies in how one interprets James’s discussion of what he terms the “sentimental ideal” of marriage: Does he mean by it simply to demarcate and describe a currently widespread and dominant cultural viewpoint with which he does not necessarily agree, or is he advocating the continued hegemony of this ideal? Myers takes the first position; Seigfried, the second.
In the review essay, James ridicules the contradictory views of conservatives like Bushnell who argue against women’s suffrage with “first, a vociferous proclamation of the utter and radical peculiarity of the womanly nature; then a nervous terror of its being altered from its foundations by a few outward changes” (ECR, 249–250). Bushnell’s defense of women’s subordination in terms of the moral superiority of their “‘subject nature’” is, for James, just a restatement of the “good old Catholic doctrine” that “suffering is a higher vocation than action.” With respect to this doctrine, James observes, “there has probably not been an unjust usage in Christendom which has not at some time sought shelter under its wings.” Because the issue of women’s status in modern society is fundamentally related to questions of justice, “any defence of woman’s position on ascetic principles,” like the one Bushnell attempts, “will fall with little weight on the public ear.” James is critical of Bushnell’s assertion that women should not be granted access to any kind of institutional authority or power, writing that “the strongest of all ‘women’s-rights’ arguments is, that women are frivolous because they are irresponsible” (ECR, 248, 250). James seems to implicitly support both suffrage and equal educational opportunities for women. Such statements also seem to contradict Seigfried’s assessment that James espouses the Victorian ideal of separate spheres and its attendant ideology of women’s “fixed” nature.
For James, “the woman question” is both a practical and sentimental issue. By this he means that the reforms envisioned by advocates of the women’s movement will usher in sweeping changes in the prevailing “sentimental ideal” of the “personal intercourse of man and wife.” James betrays an ignorance of legal abuses and domestic violence in marriage, believing that in contrast to the situation in Mill’s England these abuses hardly ever occur in the United States and further concluding, in a somewhat puzzling statement, that “the mere animal potency of sex” causes every man to “always shrink from appearing personally like a brute in [a woman’s] presence” (ECR, 251, 255).
James’s focus, instead, is on the effect that changes in women’s social and political status will inevitably have on the traditional American marriage ideal. He criticizes Mill for advocating a view of marriage that is, in James’s view, indistinguishable from friendship, so that “according to this, the most important requisite in an astronomer’s wife is, that she should have a passion for astronomy.” Mill’s own ideal of marriage, “each party being able to subsist alone, and seeking a mate, not to supply an essential need, but to be enjoyed as a mere ally, or great moral luxury,” is, for James, opposed to “the ideal of the representative American,” who views (heterosexual) marriage as primarily a relationship of dependence. He describes the “American ideal” of marriage in this way:
However he might shrink from expressing it in naked words, the wife his heart more or less subtly craves is at bottom a dependent being. In the outer world he can only hold good his position by dint of reconquering it afresh every day: life is a struggle where success is only relative, and all sanctity is torn off of him; where failure and humiliation, the exposure of weaknesses, and the unmasking of pretence, are assured incidents; and he accordingly longs for one tranquil spot where he shall be valid absolutely and once for all; where, having been accepted, he is secure from further criticism, and where his good aspirations may be respected no less than if they were accomplished realities. In a word, the elements of security and repose are essential to his ideal; and the question is, Are they easily attainable without some feeling of dependence on the woman’s side, without her relying on him to be her mediator with the external world, without his activity overlapping hers and surrounding it on almost every side, so that he makes as it were the atmosphere in which she lives? (ECR, 254, 253)
As indicated earlier, James’s own views regarding this sentimental American ideal of marriage are somewhat difficult to pin down. According to Seigfried, James in the previous quote “reiterates the theme of female subjection in marriage,” and “his sentimentalizing of the patriarchal status quo uncritically espouses the very argument from custom that Mill so clearly demolishes.”17 Thus, she reads him as simply uncritically replicating the patriarchal Victorian ideal. She concludes based on this passage that James holds to a
belief in separate spheres for women and men [that] reflects the patriarchal ideology that only men are fully human, that is, fully rational, and reflects as well the Victorian sentimentalizing of this ideology, which holds that women are more emotional than men and thus the proper bearers of a morality based on care.18
But the text itself does not support this conclusion. It is not at all clear from a close reading of this particular essay in its entirety that James accepts the ideology of separate spheres and its attendant conclusions about women’s nature.
On the other hand, Myers would read it that James “was not hiding behind the references to the representative American” in this passage and “separated himself from the typical American” marriage ideal. According to Myers, James is foreshadowing his later argument in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” that “conventional morality is the most recent result of the human race’s moral experiments, and that we must proceed cautiously before replacing it.”19 Myers’s interpretation is supported by the fact that James does not give a definite answer to the question he poses at the end of the quote. He writes, “Many men will answer No, peremptorily” to this question but then dismisses this answer as too conservative and “dogmatic.” Leaving the question unresolved concerning whether it is the common interests and equality that Mill advocates or the traditional ideal of male egotism and female self sacrifice that account for the enduring popularity of the institution of marriage, and what practical effects a revolutionary change such as the one Mill proposes will bring about in society, James concludes his review by stating that “in this matter, sentimental and practical considerations must go hand in hand” (ECR, 255). He urges Mill to publish further on the ramifications of his position for interpersonal relations, the “conventional morality” of the marriage ideal, and the issue of divorce and its effects on children.
The central issue in how one understands this essay is bound up with James’s references to the sentimental ideal of marriage: Is it a descriptor, or does he present it as his own ideal? In her influential study of Victorian culture, Ann Douglas writes that “sentimentalism is a complex phenomenon. It asserts that the values a society’s activity denies are precisely the ones it cherishes; it attempts to deal with the phenomenon of cultural bifurcation by the manipulation of nostalgia.”20 Such an understanding of sentimentalism is clearly present in Bushnell’s text and in the ideal of the “representative American” that James constructs. Yet again it is not clear whether by articulating this ideal James means to “protest a power to which [he] has already in part capitulated” or to underscore its lingering staying power in a society that was rapidly moving forward on other fronts with the “democratic flood” of modern civilization.21
While the conservative tendencies of James’s position on morality and sentiment are evident from the essay, it’s important to appreciate how his position differs from conventional Victorian views. Rather than espouse an “uncritical sentimentalizing of the status quo” as Seigfried concludes, the overall tenor of the essay is actually quite sharply critical of Bushnell’s views, which are themselves a good illustration of the Victorian cult of femininity discussed by Douglas.22 James expresses caution about Mill’s proposed alternative ideal of marriage in terms of how it will accord with the views of the “representative American” and how it will practically operate, yet he ends by postulating that Mill may well be “more far-seeing than the majority” and that his book will come to be seen as “epoch-making” in its advocacy of “absolute equality, justice, and personal independence” (ECR, 255–256).23 “Epoch-making” is the same designation James will apply to the book and philosophy he dedicated to Mill, Pragmatism, almost forty years later, in 1907.
On my reading, in this essay James is willing to consider social reforms and the corresponding changes in cultural ideals that will surely result from them, and he demonstrates an at least preliminary understanding of the women’s movement in terms of justice and morality. While he does not wholeheartedly endorse all of Mill’s premises, he certainly finds his views more compelling than Bushnell’s, which he characterizes as a not “very serious contribution” to the subject. He states that Mill’s text “ought to be read by every one who cares in the least degree for social questions,” for it contains glimpses of “the ultimate tendencies of the democratic flood which is sweeping us along” (ECR, 250, 255). Seigfried is correct that James does not directly critique the patriarchal, Victorian sentimental ideal of marriage that he understands to be the dominant American one. However, he implicitly calls it into question in his critiques of Bushnell’s arguments in support of this ideal and in leaving open the questions of whether Mill is correct in his proposals and whether the reforms Mill advocates will be beneficial to women and society as a whole.
A third view on this essay is provided by James Livingston in Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy. Livingston supports Myers’s reading over Seigfried’s to argue that James sought to create a “middle ground” position between Bushnell and Mill, “articulating a position that criticized Mill’s premises but endorsed his purposes.”24 According to Livingston, James is critical of both Bushnell and Mill for relying on essentialist conceptions of women’s nature, and in this sense each can be said to have a “personal ideal” underlying his argument. While Bushnell believes in the essential inferiority of women, Mill’s position that “what is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing” implies, according to Livingston, “a reduction of female to male.” For Livingston this is a “strikingly modern locution because it does not treat ‘man’ as the standard of subjectivity as such, and because it postpones the either/or choice between difference and equality which Mill offers his readers.”25 Livingston wants to suggest that in his critique of Mill James is actually prefiguring later feminist critiques of liberal feminism and simultaneously leaving space for the articulation of female desire and subjectivity.
Although I think this is a bit of a stretch, Livingston is right to see James attempting to occupy a kind of middle position between Victorian sentimentalist conservatism and the liberal feminism of John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill. This middle position, along with the questions it raises about whether women’s nature and gender more generally are fixed or culturally/experientially determined, prefigures the middle position that James sketches out for pragmatism. By saying that this essay prefigures James’s later development of pragmatism, I do not mean, as Livingston does, that it “opens up a discursive space for the figure of the female” who then reappears in the form of pragmatism as “the woman who ‘unstiffens all our theories.’”26 Rather, I mean that in this essay we can see James attempting to carve out a mediating position in which he occupies territory between Victorian and Progressive culture using the rhetorical motif of gender, just as we will see him do later in his presentation of pragmatism.
The tension in James’s 1869 review between a Victorian-inspired social and moral conservatism and a recognition of the rising tide of justice, democracy, and moral development in which the women’s movement was developing at the time is a good early illustration of the complexity of his views on gender. The same kind of tension is evident in James’s writings on the gendered nature of pragmatism. These tensions are perhaps ultimately unresolvable, but some attention to the context of James’s writing will help situate his own views on gender historically and culturally while also clarifying these views by distinguishing them from others prevalent at the time. Using the analysis of Gail Bederman and other cultural historians, one can situate James’s writings within a context of cultural changes taking place in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.
According to Beryl Satter, the period encompassing the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was characterized by “a broad cultural debate over precisely which qualities constituted ideal manhood and womanhood, or the ideal gendered self.” A number of diverse groups and individuals
were united by their shared engagement in a pervasive but now-forgotten late-nineteenth-century contest over whether the key to progress, civilization, and race perfection was (Anglo-Saxon) male desire or female virtue. Was the nation in need of male rationality or female spirituality? Who offered the more complex paradigm of human mind or selfhood—the desirous, competitive, and rational white man, or the desireless, spiritual, and altruistic white woman? Did man represent the rational mind that must dominate feminine “matter” and physicality? Or did woman represent the moral spirit that must dominate unruly, masculine man?
Satter explains further that this debate was part of an ongoing “broader cultural battle for authority between proponents of white middle-class manhood and those of white middle-class womanhood,” all of whom “discussed and ambiguously reworked the meanings of gendered definitions of mind, matter, spirit, selfhood, and desire.”27
In Manliness and Civilization Bederman explores the changing notions of manhood and masculinity in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She defines manhood as “the cultural process whereby concrete individuals are constituted as members of a preexisting social category—as men.”28 That is, manhood is neither an unchanging essence associated with all bodies sexed as male nor an easily defined, coherent set of various culturally prescribed characteristics, beliefs, and values. Instead, it is a “historical, ideological process” productive of a certain set of social truths that generates individual meaning while restricting individual behavior. Such a view of gender as a process, Bederman emphasizes, does not rule out human agency but instead highlights the historical and cultural flux of gender ideologies as individuals continually challenge, renegotiate, and adapt their identities.
Bederman argues that the Victorian ideal of “manliness” had its roots in the rise of the middle class in the early nineteenth century. As the middle class increased in size and visibility between 1820 and 1860, it began to distance itself from other classes through an emphasis on gentility and respectability. This new identity depended very much on gender definitions and roles, particularly a view of “true” middle-class women as guardians of the family and paragons of piety and virtue. The complementary ideal of manhood for middle-class men involved a strong emphasis on the building up of manly character through disciplined self-control. The ability of men to control their own passions and impulses through sheer force of will served as a justification for male authority over women, children, and employees.29 The middle-class ideal of manliness, centered on this notion of male self-control and its attendant virtues of honor, strength, duty, and elevated moral sensibilities, began to be questioned in the late nineteenth century. As Bederman argues, the close connection between manliness, self-control, and economic success was losing credibility in the face of new social and economic conditions. This process was accelerated by challenges to white middle-class male authority from white middle-class women and working-class and immigrant men.
The changing social, economic, and political conditions of this period were accompanied by the development of new strategies and ideals for defining middle-class manhood. Chief among these was the gradual replacement of the ideal of manliness with that of masculinity. The new masculine ideal involved, according to Bederman, “a glorification of all things male,” including the athletic male body, old-fashioned notions of manliness, and organizations devoted to “making boys into men” such as the YMCA and the Boy Scouts.30 Other strategies included a rejection of “excessive femininity” in the form of opposition to women’s suffrage and co-education; the development, diagnosis, and treatment of the cultural “disease” called neurasthenia; recruiting drives for male teachers to counter too much “feminine” influence in the education of young boys; and a critique of Victorian society as too soft and “effeminate.”31 The adoption of a working-class ideal of masculinity, which had been formulated earlier in the century in opposition to middle-class manliness, was also among the strategies adopted by the middle class at this time.
Bederman’s analysis shows that the terms “masculinity” and “manliness,” although today used interchangeably, must be carefully distinguished in any discussion of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. During the Victorian period, the term “manliness” connoted “all the worthy, moral attributes which the Victorian middle class admired in a man,” such as self-control, a strong will, and good character.32 The adjective “masculine,” on the other hand, concerned “any characteristics, good or bad, that all men had,” regardless of race or class. The series of social, political, and economic changes occurring in the late nineteenth century challenged the Victorian notion of manliness and rendered it untenable, leaving many middle-class men casting about for new ideals and values of manhood. The term “masculine,” because of its vagueness, seemed a good candidate for the job. Whereas the noun “masculinity” was almost never used in the early and middle nineteenth century, in the 1890s, it began the slow process of taking on some now-familiar connotations, including “ideals like aggressiveness, physical force, and male sexuality.”33 The period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, therefore, witnessed a series of gradual changes in middle-class male identity and self-definition, in which the contrasting ideals of manliness and masculinity, with their attendant implications for class, race, and gender, played a central role.34 These ideals of masculinity and manliness also implied particular ideals of femininity and womanhood. In particular the Victorian notion of manliness implied a corresponding conception of femininity, also known as the Cult of True Womanhood.
To what extent can the changing ideals of masculinity and manliness and their feminine antipodes be said to play a role in the development of pragmatism? Through a critical analysis of James’s rhetoric, one can, I think, identify in his writings a participation in the broad cultural debate over ideals of manhood and womanhood that Satter identifies, as well as an attempt to theorize the “ideal gendered self” through a mediation between competing cultural-religious ideals of manhood. This mediation is very much related to his treatment of women, motherhood, gender, and femininity but ultimately signifies a discussion about what it means to be a male subject in a context of widespread social change and contestation over the meaning of gender and the future of American civilization. I argue that in James’s narrative of pragmatism one can read a negotiating process of remaking white manhood through his own philosophical project, a process that not only invoked the competing ideals of Victorian notions of manliness and working-class conceptions of masculinity but also challenged these prevailing gender ideologies in significant though limited ways.
The broadly conceived tension between empiricism and rationalism in the quotation cited at the beginning of this chapter, wherein “rationalism sticks to logic and the empyrean. Empiricism sticks to the external senses. [But] Pragmatism is willing to take anything,” is evident in many of James’s writings. For James, the antagonism that exists between these two perspectives has its roots in his own historical and intellectual context. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were characterized by a spirit of widespread scientific optimism in North America and Europe, so much so that, as James notes, “our children . . . are almost born scientific” (PM, 44, 14). Yet the religious attitude was also very much still present, extending to a “devout” faith in the progress of science.35 The simultaneous existence of both of these attitudes produced a situation in which no one existing philosophical system could be adequate to the needs of individuals who embraced both empiricism and religious faith. James sums up this type of individual in the following way: “He wants facts; he wants science; but he also wants a religion” (PM, 15). The challenge for James was to develop a philosophical system that could satisfy both needs, respecting the facts while also leaving room for religion. He offered pragmatism as just this kind of philosophy, a flexible mediator between rationalism and empiricism, and religion and science.
As discussed in the previous chapter, James’s formulation of pragmatism specifically refers to it as a method for solving entrenched philosophical problems by attending to the practical results of each position and the differences, if any, that would result for either position being true. Often seemingly unresolvable arguments can be quickly disposed of by recognizing that there exists no practical difference between the two viewpoints. James explains further:
The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. . . . The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right. (PM, 28)
In both his 1898 lecture and in Pragmatism, James is mainly preoccupied with employing pragmatism as a means of settling religious arguments, such as the nature of God and pluralism versus monism. Arguing that disputes concerning religion, like most philosophical debates throughout history, are mainly due to differing temperaments among the disputants, he positions pragmatism as the means of reconciling such debates and temperaments. However, to accomplish this, James presents pragmatism as a specifically feminine character:
Pragmatism [is] a mediator and reconciler. . . . She “unstiffens” our theories. She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence. . . .
. . . You see already how democratic she is. Her manners are as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature. (PM, 43–44)
Here James explicitly constructs pragmatism as a neutral, female-gendered “mediatrix” between opposing philosophical forces that he finds present in his own context. Because of pragmatism’s mediating, reconciling, flexible, friendly, natural, and democratic sensibilities, she is able to unstiffen our theories and act as a “happy harmonizer” of empiricism and religion (PM, 39).
The gendered rhetorical presentation of pragmatism as mediator deserves our attention not because it is yet another example of how reading for gender in the works of male philosophers reveals inevitable biases but more importantly because it seems to be one of the most enduring images of pragmatism. However, rarely if ever is the gendered nature of the mediation acknowledged, let alone critically analyzed. Seigfried finds other passages in Pragmatism to contain a “submerged rape metaphor” in the form of the “philosopher as a predatory male” who forces truth upon the world, but curiously she does not deal with this provocative passage at all.36 West has observed that “the mediating role of pragmatism” imparts a “power to subsume aspects of other contending positions [and] permits pragmatism to domesticate and dilute for its own purposes.”37 His use of the “domestication” metaphor is apt, yet he does not take up the question of the gendered nature of the subsuming power he has identified.
Livingston calls this passage a “primal scene of pragmatist metaphor” and, as I mentioned earlier, reads James’s 1869 review as “open[ing] up a discursive space for the figure of the female—or rather for female desire” that is then presented in the form of pragmatism, as “the woman who ‘unstiffens all our theories.’”38 However, in calling attention to the female gender of pragmatism, Livingston seeks not to critique but to celebrate this mediating quality of pragmatism in negotiating socioeconomic change in the United States. He then extends the metaphor to feminism, arguing that pragmatism initiates the change that is then completed by feminism. Thus, one of his central claims is that there is “an intellectual continuum that begins with pragmatism and ends (for the time being) with feminism,” so that “feminism incorporates what pragmatism initiates, but also . . . pragmatism itself is unlikely if not inconceivable in the absence of feminism.” Both pragmatism and feminism, for Livingston, “mediate between the disintegrating past and the impending future, between previous truths and novel facts.”39
Livingston argues that for James, pragmatism is a configuration of the “New Woman” who
invented modern feminism by extricating herself from an exclusive preoccupation with domesticity, entering market society as an individual—not necessarily as a bearer of domestic roles such as mother, daughter, or wife—and redrawing the boundary between private and public enterprise, between the personal and the political.40
This New Woman of pragmatism is constructed in opposition to the Victorian Cult of True Womanhood, which Livingston argues is also personified in James’s narrative in the figure of “chaste” and empyrean rationalism, while pragmatism “refuses to remain in that separate sphere: she wants to be less virtuous, more worldly, more commercial.”41 Although I find his approach to be problematic—because it insists on reading pragmatism in embodied terms as a woman rather than a gendered rhetorical construction, it does not look more broadly at how James employs gender fluidly in his writings, and it tends to reify gender stereotypes rather than critically analyze their rhetorical functions—I do think Livingston is right to see pragmatism as a kind of transitional figuration between the Victorian cult of femininity and the modern era. Already within the formative period of pragmatism, then, gender plays a crucial role in how pragmatism is rhetorically constructed and defined.
James also employs gendered terminology in A Pluralistic Universe and The Varieties of Religious Experience to describe various temperaments and the religions and philosophies to which they give rise. We can understand James’s use of gendered terms to characterize extremes of religious and philosophical temperaments as both reproducing and challenging and redefining Victorian notions of gender. I demonstrate that although James’s writings were very much influenced by Victorian and post-Victorian notions of masculinity, femininity, manliness, and womanliness prevalent at the time, they also evidence a process of attempting to negotiate between them in order to construct a kind of paradigm of the ideal gendered self.
In James’s work one can discern an attempt to reconcile some of the gendered hierarchical oppositions present in his cultural and intellectual context, such as those between rationalism and empiricism, logic and sensible experience, facts and intuition, and science and religion. His method for accomplishing this involves a devaluation of the masculine component of the opposition and a revaluation of the feminine aspect. Moreover, because James’s project takes place within a cultural context in which the notion of manhood was itself being redefined, in revalorizing “feminine” empiricism, sympathies, and religion, James also tries to redefine these as alternative masculine ideals. Pragmatism, in his view, because it plays a mediating role in these gendered oppositions, can serve as a philosophy of reconciliation, one that seeks to uphold both the “scientific loyalty to facts,” gendered as masculine, and the importance of religion and mysticism, gendered feminine. Gender becomes the rhetorical device for positioning pragmatism as a new kind of mediating philosophy, representing a new understanding of the gendered self that is neither traditionally masculine nor feminine but encompasses a range of possibilities between these extremes.
When looking at James’s use of gender in any depth, it quickly becomes obvious that gender in his writings is not fixed but is fluid and unstable. At some points a particular philosophical or religious worldview is characterized as feminine, only to be rendered masculine at another point. For this reason, I think it is best to read James’s gendering of opposing terms loosely and contextually as a rhetoric that he finds useful in characterizing extremes in temperament and thinking, as well as for overcoming these oppositions. In a context of ongoing and widespread cultural contestation over gender and gender ideals, James can be read as engaged in this wider conversation through the manipulation of gender in his texts. What is consistent, however, is the gendering of pragmatism as female as it works to mediate and moderate between extremes.
In Pragmatism, James emphasizes the subjective element in philosophy, the notion that one’s temperament is largely determinative of one’s philosophical outlook. “Temperaments with their cravings and refusals do determine men in their philosophies,” he says, “and always will” (PM, 24). But while it is clear for James that “the history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments,” he notes that, regardless of temperament, philosophers generally attempt to mask or suppress this important feature of their thought, giving only “impersonal reasons” in support of their arguments. The reason is that temperament, like rhetoric, religion, and gender, is dismissed as irrelevant to a philosopher’s conclusions, relegated to the realm of mere opinion and prejudice. James argues, however, that temperament is actually the strongest determination for holding a particular belief. One’s temperament “loads the evidence” in favor of certain beliefs rather than others, determines one’s worldview more than any “strictly objective premises” would, and regards those who do not share it as somehow “out of key with the world’s character,” philosophically incompetent (PM, 11).
By understanding the central role James gives to temperament in philosophy, his attention to spelling out different types of temperament and their relationship to various philosophical systems becomes a bit clearer. James’s individualism made him loath to generalize about personalities, noting that “individuality outruns all classification”; nevertheless, for rhetorical purposes he found it useful to describe and categorize two general “types of mental make-up,” thus setting up his own approach as constituting a mediating alternative. In keeping with James’s view that “a philosophy is the expression of a man’s intimate character,” he sees temperament as extending to other realms of human life, such as politics, literature, art, and etiquette (PU, 7, 14). A philosophy is “our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pull of the cosmos” (PM, 9). This implies that philosophical temperament is inseparable from the other aspects of human personality, and philosophy is not the only discipline with a subjective element—two points with the dual effect of democratizing the enterprise of philosophy.
James was fond of quoting the saying of an “unlettered workman” who, making repairs to James’s house, once remarked, “There is very little difference between one man and another, when you go to the bottom of it. But what little there is, is very important” (TT, 122). This statement, which James called “one of the most philosophical remarks I ever heard,” can be applied to his understanding of temperament. He views temperament as a mixture of characteristics and traits that together form a composite identity of individuals as well as “races” and civilizations. For example, in discussing the will in terms of a basic difference between impulsion and inhibition, he writes,
The different races of men show different temperaments in this regard. The Southern races are commonly accounted the more impulsive and precipitate; the English race, especially our New England branch of it, is supposed to be all sicklied over with repressive forms of self-consciousness, and condemned to express itself through a jungle of scruples and checks. (TT, 106)
Yet James acknowledges fluidity and mixture as well, commenting several pages later that “there are plenty of bottled-lightning temperaments in other countries, and plenty of phlegmatic temperaments here” (TT, 122). While he often finds it illustratively and rhetorically useful to demarcate two general, opposing sorts of temperament, it is clear that James sees most temperaments, including his own, as a combination of traits, not all of which are necessarily consistent with each other. In the “tough-minded” versus “tender-minded” distinction introduced in Pragmatism, for instance, it is clear that James embodies traits from both columns, and it is clear from his argument that he thinks this also applies to the majority of individuals. He invokes the “extremer cases,” rare though they be, because they serve a rhetorical purpose: By their extremeness they come to represent a kind of truth and authenticity in the minds of his audience. This is not to say that the extremer cases are simply illustrative, however; although they are rare, real individuals do embody these extremes: for example, the saints James discusses in the Varieties, of whom James says “we are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme” and “we are glad they existed to show us that way, but we are glad there are also other ways of seeing and taking life,” ways that are “nearer to the middle line of human effort.” This “middle line” is characterized by a balance of “equally strong” faculties to produce a “stronger all-round character” (VRE, 272).
Two general categories of personality traits are discussed in Pragmatism, A Pluralistic Universe, and The Varieties of Religious Experience. They map onto each other in some respects, but each text presents the categorization in a slightly different form. In Pragmatism, James makes a general distinction between rationalism and empiricism and then refines this distinction further into a difference between the tender-minded and tough-minded temperaments. The result is the following categorization:
THE TENDER-MINDED |
THE TOUGH-MINDED |
Rationalistic (going by “principles”), |
Empiricist (going by “facts”), |
Intellectualistic, |
Sensationalistic, |
Idealistic, |
Materialistic, |
Optimistic, |
Pessimistic, |
Religious, |
Irreligious, |
Free-willist, |
Fatalistic, |
Monistic, |
Pluralistic, |
Dogmatical. |
Sceptical. |
James acknowledges that most individuals do not fall neatly into one or the other category; “most of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line” (PM, 14). The distinction is meant to function rhetorically, and for James, the few individuals who embody the extremes, and the vivid examples they evoke in the minds of his audience, serve his argument well.
Possession of the tough-minded temper results in the adoption of a materialistic philosophy, which either rejects the notion of a supernatural God out of hand or banishes religious belief from the domains of history and science, restricting it to a private subjectivism. According to James, this scientific perspective implies the “enlargement of the material universe and the diminution of man’s importance,” providing a “naturalistic or positivistic feeling” of the absolute helplessness of human beings before the harsh, unchanging power of nature. In such a worldview, “the romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing,” and “only the tough-minded find themselves congenially at home” here (PM, 15). These comments certainly tell us much about James’s own philosophical temperament, although the dissatisfaction he feels with the philosophy of tough-mindedness is meant to apply to a general human need for metaphysical and religious optimism.
On the other side, the philosophies that result from the tender-minded temperament (James calls these “religious philosophies”) are also found wanting. He describes two main types of tender-minded philosophy: “radical and aggressive” transcendental idealism; and “eclectic” theism, which descends, “fighting a slow retreat,” from traditional scholastic theism and seeks a compromise with Darwinian science. James’s problem with both branches of tender-minded thought is the same. They are too abstract and “sterile,” too removed from the concrete particulars of daily life to be of any consequence or relevance. The “trail of the serpent” of rationalism and intellectualism lies over all religious philosophy (PM, 16).
In A Pluralistic Universe, James draws a slightly different distinction between the sympathetic and cynical temperaments in terms of the competing “philosophic visions” these produce. The cynical temper leads to a materialistic philosophy in which the world is defined “so as to leave man’s soul upon it as a sort of outside passenger or alien,” while a sympathetic outlook prefers a spiritualistic philosophy, one that “insists that the intimate and human must surround and underlie the brutal” (PU, 16). The temperament distinction here is not only slightly different but significantly more limited than was the case in Pragmatism. It is in accordance with James’s focus in A Pluralistic Universe on an individual’s relationship with the wider social reality of the universe as a whole, conceived in terms of the criteria of intimacy and foreignness.
James divides the sympathetic, spiritualistic temper into monistic pantheism or idealism and dualistic theism or scholasticism. He employs the criteria of intimacy and foreignness introduced in the sympathetic/cynical distinction to describe monism as producing a greater degree of intimacy between humans and the world than does dualism. Monism itself is further subdivided into more monistic and more pluralistic varieties, which he terms, respectively, the philosophy of the absolute and radical empiricism. While both absolutism and radical empiricism “bring the philosopher inside and make man intimate,” the philosophy of the absolute creates a discrepancy between the finite and infinite ways of taking the world. In other words, the distinction between the absolute’s infinite knowledge of itself and the individual’s finite perspective creates a barrier to intimacy so that the relationship between the human and the divine becomes one of foreignness. Radical empiricism, on the other hand, because it views reality distributively by “holding to the each-form” of which the divine is one example, creates a greater degree of intimacy between humans and the divine (PU, 21, 26).
The criterion of intimacy deserves further exploration here because of its central importance in James’s thought. Intimacy and foreignness are distinguished in this way:
From a pragmatic point of view the difference between living against a background of foreignness and one of intimacy means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust. One might call it a social difference, for after all, the common socius of us all is the great universe whose children we are. If materialistic, we must be suspicious of this socius, cautious, tense, on guard. If spiritualistic, we may give way, embrace, and keep no ultimate fear. (PU, 19)
Such a definition of intimacy in terms of one’s general habit or attitude toward the world recalls James’s understanding of the pragmatic theory of meaning, in which “the effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence, in our future practical experience” (PM, 259).42 The practical effect of a spiritualistic philosophy of intimacy is an attitude of trust, while materialistic foreignness produces cautiousness and wariness. Elsewhere James describes the universe in social terms, as that wider “social self” that is the “innermost of [our] empirical selves” (PP, 1:300–301). Intimacy refers here to a social ideal of reciprocal, dynamic relations, which may potentially lead us to a further attitude of openness and trust in our “common socius.”43
James believes the sympathetic attitude to be more prevalent among individuals and more “normal”:44
The majority of men are sympathetic. Comparatively few are cynics because they like cynicism, and most of our existing materialists are such because they think the evidence of facts impels them, or because they find the idealists they are in contact with too private and tender-minded; so, rather than join their company, they fly to the opposite extreme. (PU, 20)
James’s preference for a sympathetic philosophy, then, is not simply a matter of personal taste but is also, he believes, more in accordance with the needs and desires of most individuals. His project in A Pluralistic Universe is to show “the majority of men” how they can be sympathetic without being “too private and tender-minded” or “fly[ing] to the opposite extreme.” Radical empiricism can provide intimacy without tender-mindedness and, at the same time, because of its attention both to the facts and the religious needs of individuals, can serve as an answer to the dilemma of empiricism versus rationalism.
Perhaps the most famous temperament distinction in the writings of James is made in The Varieties of Religious Experience. There he distinguishes between the healthy-minded individual and the sick soul and the types of religion that each prefers. Just as one’s temperament determines the philosophic worldview that one finds most appealing, so also religions are more or less preferred by individuals based on particular tempers. Both the sick soul and the healthy-minded individual are examples of James’s focus in the Varieties on “the extremer cases” (VRE, 40).
The “constitutionally sanguine” religious believer, also called the “once-born,” possesses a “congenital” sense of happiness and experiences religion with “enthusiasm and freedom” (VRE, 72–73). James describes different types of this healthy-minded outlook, extending from a rather simplistic feeling of general contentedness and peace (what he calls “animal happiness”), to the more complex mind-cure movement and its refusal to acknowledge the existence of evil. Whereas the religion of healthy-mindedness is characterized by an attitude of “deliberately minimizing evil,” the sick soul holds a radically opposite view, “a way of maximizing evil, based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world’s meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart” (VRE, 112). Like healthy-mindedness, the religion of the sick soul admits of degrees. At one extreme are those who see evil as “only a mal-adjustment with things, a wrong correspondence of one’s life with the environment.” This conception of evil allows for its being curable in principle, provided one’s life or environment can be adjusted. But at the other extreme are those for whom evil is far more “radical and general, a wrongness or vice in [one’s] essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy.” The attitude of such a radically “world-sick” individual expresses for James “the real core of the religious problem: Help! Help!” (VRE, 114, 135).
Having cataloged the many varieties of sick-souled and healthy-minded experiences, James is left with the question of which his own philosophy should prefer and why. He concludes that “morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience,” overlapping healthy-mindedness, which cannot stand long in the face of sorrow and depression. Because healthy-mindedness does not acknowledge the reality of evil, it is dismissed by James as “inadequate as a philosophical doctrine” (VRE, 136). That is, the religion of healthy-mindedness does not serve the empiricist criterion of loyalty to the facts, nor does it accord with the majority of individual experiences.
With this treatment of the issue of temperament and its relationship to religion in James’s writings as background, I turn now to a consideration of the ways in which a rhetorical analysis attentive to gender as a trope can enrich our understanding of these issues. The temperament distinctions just highlighted are gendered such that the sensibilities James associates with the tough-minded, cynical, and sick-souled or constitutionally somber temperaments are usually manly or masculine, while those of tender-minded, sympathetic, and healthy-minded or constitutionally sanguine tempers are feminine. However, the situation is more complex than this statement allows, for James himself often reverses these gendered characterizations to effect his own goal of bridging empiricism/science and rationalism/religion.
Some examples illustrate my argument. In describing the healthy-minded individual, James writes:
It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this sky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden. (VRE, 73)
Femininity is explicitly associated here with youth, innocence, and healthy-mindedness. The emphasis on youth and innocence is important, for as we saw earlier, while James admires healthy-minded individuals for their unfailing optimism and spiritual vigor, he finds the healthy-minded attitude itself to be inadequate to the full range of human experiences. Describing the “antagonism” between sanguine and somber attitudes in gendered terms, he writes that while sick souls view healthy-mindedness as “unspeakably blind and shallow,” those of a healthy-minded temper in turn regard sick souls as “unmanly and diseased.” In this passage, James may be associating “morbid-mindedness” with the debilitating Victorian “wasting illnesses” that afflicted many women of the era.45 Because of their association with women and hysteria, sick souls may be regarded as unhealthy and unmanly. Nevertheless, James himself sides with the sick-souled temperament, which he takes to include more of the whole of life, saying of the healthy-minded attitude that it “breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes” (VRE, 136). Here, in a reversal of gender hierarchies, he undermines the association of femininity with morbid-mindedness and signifies healthy-mindedness as an unmanly and impotent attitude.
According to James, the feminine affinities of the religion of healthy-mindedness are to be found in both individuals and entire peoples. In his discussion of the ancient Greeks, James associates the development of feminine sensibilities with a higher stage of cultural development and complexity. Once again his use of gender defies easy classification. Femininity, previously related to the inexperience and youth of healthy-mindedness as described earlier, is in this case tied to the evolution of higher cultural sensibilities. However, it is useful to keep Bederman’s distinction between manliness and masculinity in mind here, for James often seems to distinguish between them as well. For example, while not denying that there are moments of joy in the writings of Homer, James argues that on the whole, the Greeks were “unmitigated pessimists,” too “masculine” to appreciate the value of the tragic mood as a more elevated sensibility. He contrasts the pessimistic attitudes of Greek and modern thought:
The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that the pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility. Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on in their classic literature. . . . The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, was reserved for races more complex, and (so to speak) more feminine than the Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period. But all the same was the outlook of those Hellenes blackly pessimistic. (VRE, 120–121n9)
For James, femininity and masculinity are matters of degree in both individuals and cultures. In this passage, higher degrees of complexity and femininity are associated with the development of tragedy as a cultural ideal, meaning that for James, an excess of masculinity is at least as undesirable as excess femininity was to the post-Victorian middle class of his day.
The “religious gladness” associated with healthy-mindedness, for James, is related to the extraordinary feeling of well-being and contentment in the face of extreme suffering that is a hallmark of saintliness. The attributes of the saintly life, according to James, are asceticism, purity, charity, and “strength of soul,” defined as “the sense of enlargement of life.” Later in the text James gives a slightly different list of saintly attributes, replacing strength of soul with “devout love of God,” which can easily, he says, degenerate into fanaticism (VRE, 221, 273). On the whole, James seems to regard saintliness as more characteristic of feminine sensibilities than masculine ones, which would seem to logically imply that the developed virtues of saintliness appear more often in women than in men. In his essay “The Energies of Men,” James writes:
The most genuinely saintly person I have ever known is a friend of mine now suffering from cancer of the breast. . . . Her ideas have kept her a practically well woman for months after she should have given up and gone to bed. They have annulled all pain and weakness and given her a cheerful active life, unusually beneficent to others to whom she has afforded help. (ERM, 143)
Saintliness is associated here with the mind-cure movement popularized by Mary Baker Eddy and others and with the power of ideas to effect extraordinary changes in one’s physical well-being. The female saint he describes is also praised for her selfless service to others, a cheerful beneficence undertaken despite great pain and suffering.
In a letter to his wife, Alice, James invokes similar notions of women’s saintly purity, selflessness, self-sacrifice, and courage in the face of overwhelming pain and suffering by signifying “Woman” in a universal sense as blessed Mother. He associates Alice and his own (deceased) mother with the elderly, poverty-stricken peasant women he encounters in his European travels and remarks rapturously and “with tears running down my face” that what he loves in his wife is the same quality that exists in all women—saintly motherhood. “They are the venerable ones whom we should reverence,” he writes. “All the mystery of womanhood seems incarnated in their ugly being—the Mothers! the Mothers! Ye are all one!”46 A similar veneration and idealization of motherhood is found in his discussion of instinct in The Principles of Psychology. Here he describes parental love as “an instinct stronger in woman than in man” and comments further that “the passionate devotion of a mother—ill herself, perhaps—to a sick or dying child is perhaps the most simply beautiful moral spectacle that human life affords” (PP, 2:1055–1056).47
However, a closer reading of James’s discussion of saintliness in Varieties reveals that while generally speaking, saintly virtues are more feminine than masculine, men actually best embody the saintly ideal. The reason is that excess in the saintly attributes is associated with women, who often are cursed with “a relative deficiency of intellect” that limits their saintly development. His treatment of fanaticism as the “unbalanced” vice of religious devotion employs only female saints as examples of what he terms a “theopathic condition.” The “sweet excess of devotion” that characterizes this condition is prevalent in “gentle characters, where devoutness is intense and the intellect feeble,” and where “a mind too narrow” can abide only one great affection. Theopaths, according to James, “have an imaginative absorption in the love of God to the exclusion of all practical interests, which, though innocent enough, is too one-sided to be admirable.” Margaret Mary Alacoque is characterized as “so feeble of intellectual outlook” as to inspire only our pity. Teresa of Ávila is “superficial” and a “typical shrew,” possessed of an extremely energetic, although “unfeeling” nature (VRE, 275–278).48
The well-developed saint is well balanced, possessed of a “stronger all-round character” that combines strong affections with an equally strong will, intellect, and sympathy, balancing masculine and feminine (VRE, 272). James’s emphasis on the necessity of the will for controlling one’s emotions, together with his discussion of habit in Principles, recalls the Victorian ideal of manliness discussed by Bederman, in which the virtues of self-denial and self-mastery are essential for the legitimation of male superiority and authority.49 For James, feminine sensibilities may be more highly developed than masculine ones, but left alone, “unbalanced” and “excessive,” they can degenerate quickly into vices. Manly self-control is needed, in the life of the saint at least, to produce a truly well-developed and well-rounded individual.
In many of the tropes and metaphors surrounding his discussion of saintliness in the Varieties, James appears to be using gender to discuss not differences between men and women but rather competing notions of manhood. This is the focus of his discussion of Nietzsche’s critique of the saint as the sophisticated invalid who endangers the entire human race. For James, Nietzsche may be wrong about his assessment of the saint, but he “expresses well the clash between two ideals,” the “carnivorous-minded ‘strong man,’ the adult male and cannibal,” on the one hand, and the “herbivorous” saint, “tame and harmless barn-yard poultry,” on the other (VRE, 296–297). The saint, James tells us, appeals “to a different faculty” in human beings and serves as a complementary ideal to the strong man. To illustrate this point, James likens the distinction between the saint and the strong man to a complementarity model of male-female relationship:
The woman loves the man the more admiringly the stormier he shows himself, and the world deifies its rulers the more for being willful and unaccountable. But the woman in turn subjugates the man by the mystery of gentleness in beauty, and the saint has always charmed the world by something similar. Mankind is susceptible and suggestible in opposite directions, and the rivalry of influences is unsleeping. (VRE, 296)50
Just like masculinity and femininity, James tells us, saints and strong men can happily coexist. In this passage, he seems to be advocating complementary spheres for men and women, who balance one another through stormy masculine strength and mysterious feminine beauty. He reproduces conventional Victorian notions of gender in the stereotypes of feminine charm and submission as a complement to and check on male authority and power.
James says that, “in discussing saintliness, we ask if it be an ideal type of manhood.” He wants to say that it can be, and in order to prove this, he attempts to undermine Nietzsche’s valorization of the strong man ideal by arguing that “all ideals are matters of relation.” Instead of there being only “one intrinsically ideal type of human character,” James considers the existence of competing and complementary ideals as an essential feature of a pluralistic world. We must acknowledge the existence of many points of view in determining the degree and value of an individual’s conduct, adaptation, and success; and a test of saintliness in terms of “economical considerations” (that is, in terms of its “utility of function”) reveals it to be “indispensable to the world’s welfare.” James leaves it up to each individual to decide what religion and what degree of saintliness are best, concluding that “there are no successes to be guaranteed and no set orders to be given to individuals, so long as we follow the methods of empirical philosophy” (VRE, 298–300).
James’s conclusions regarding saintliness can be read as mediating between the traditionally conceived masculine ideal of the strong man and the weaker, more feminine saintly ideal. Nietzsche’s masculine strong man, in James’s contestable reading, is a brute, devoid of moral sensibilities or gentlemanly behavior, and altogether too “tough” for James’s taste. The strong man, with his “robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking Heaven that it hasn’t a single morbid fibre in its composition,” does not correspond to the full range of individual experience (VRE, 29). The saint, in contrast, is full of dignity and self-control, features of the Victorian ideal of manliness, but also is charming, gentle, mysterious, and spiritual, elements more in keeping with the Victorian ideal woman. In his discussion of saints, James attempts to negotiate these gender stereotypes by showing masculine, manly, and feminine attributes to exist in both male and female saints. Men can be gentle and charming, and women, in those rare cases where gifted with manly balance and a strong, well-rounded character, can be self-disciplined and successful.
On the issue of whether or not the saint is an ideal type of manhood, James tells us that there is no single “intrinsically ideal type of human character” abstracted from “the utility of his function.” In abstract terms the saint may represent a “higher type of man,” because he is “adapted to the highest society conceivable, whether that society ever be concretely possible or not,” but in reality there is “no absoluteness” in the saintly ideal, because all adaptation is a matter of degree and varies based on the actual situation. Again balance seems to be what James is advocating. The examples of Jesus, Oliver Cromwell, and Stonewall Jackson demonstrate that “Christians can be strong men also” (VRE, 297–299).
Although each ideal serves its own important purposes in the world and can produce both beneficial and harmful results, James is willing to say that the world itself would be further improved with each measure of saintliness. Whenever a saint by example serves as “a leaven of righteousness in the world, and draws it in the direction of more prevalent habits of saintliness, he is a success, no matter what his immediate bad fortune may be” (VRE, 299). The type of saintliness that James advocates, however, is not the weak intellect or unfeeling energy of (in his view) a Teresa of Ávila but is characterized by self-discipline and “strong, all-round” balance. The balance and self-control characteristic of the manly, well-developed saint, contra Nietzsche, can provide a notion of the saint as one among many ideal types of manhood.
The new notion of manhood that James advocates in the ideal of the saint can be seen also in the development of his notion of a finite god in A Pluralistic Universe. As discussed earlier, James believes that most individuals are of the sympathetic temper and want a relationship of intimacy with the world. Those who are cynics are so only because they shy away from tender-mindedness and too much privacy or because they feel compelled by the facts. James’s project, accordingly, is to demonstrate that intimacy is not incompatible with the facts and that one can be of a sympathetic temper without being too tender-minded. In a letter to Thomas Davidson that hints of his later discussion in A Pluralistic Universe, James writes:
In saying “God exists” all I imply is that my purposes are cared for by a mind so powerful as on the whole to control the drift of the Universe. . . . The only difficulties of theism are the moral difficulties and meannesses; and they have always seemed to me to flow from the gratuitous dogma of God being the All-exclusive reality. Once think possible a primordial pluralism of which he may be one member and which may have no single subjective synthesis, and piety forthwith ceases to be incompatible with manliness and religious “Faith” with intellectual rectitude. In short, the only theism I defend is that of simple unphilosophic mankind.51
As Perry points out, at the time James felt that he was defending empiricism and the notion of a finite god against Davidson’s rationalism and deification of man. For James, a “pluralistic universe,” with a finite god conceived as a moral ally for human beings, could satisfy the manliness and intellectual rectitude demanded by a strong scientific temper, while at the same time providing a place for religious faith and piety.52
Similarly, a reconciliation between tender-minded rationalism and tough-minded empiricism is the focus of James’s project in Pragmatism. James describes the majority of individuals as having a scientific allegiance to facts combined with a felt need for religion. These two commitments need not necessarily conflict; one must be able to develop a philosophy that will be flexible enough to encompass both of them:
You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific loyalty to facts and willingness to take account of them, the spirit of adaptation and accommodation, in short, but also the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type. And this is then your dilemma: you find the two parts of your quaesitum hopelessly separated. You find empiricism with inhumanism and irreligion; or else you find a rationalistic philosophy that indeed may call itself religious, but that keeps out of all definite touch with concrete facts and joys and sorrows.
. . . It is at this point that my own solution begins to appear. I offer the oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts. (PM, 17)
For James, pragmatism can serve as a means for overcoming the gendered hierarchical oppositions of rationalism and empiricism, science and religion, and logic and sensible experience. Unlike rationalism and empiricism, which remain tightly bound to their respective domains of logic and the senses, “pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the senses, and to count the humblest and most personal experiences” in its quest for truth. “In short,” James concludes, “she [pragmatism] widens the field of search for God” by mediating between gendered extremes in temperament and philosophical type (PM, 44).
Indeed, this points us toward a new understanding of the function of temperament types throughout James’s work. His statement that “we learn most about a thing when we view it under a microscope, as it were, or in its most exaggerated form” reminds us that, like temperaments, notions of gender themselves are rarely fixed or extreme but are constantly being challenged and renegotiated. “Few of us are tender-foot Bostonians pure and simple, and few are typical Rocky Mountain toughs, in philosophy” (PM, 14). That is, few men are either true Victorian manly gentlemen or examples of rough-and-tumble Teddy Roosevelt masculinity. James challenges both of these ideals of manhood by placing them as foils for his own philosophical and religious project and telling us that, like concepts, existing gender ideals are far too thin to encompass the whole of reality. As Townsend puts it in more personal terms, “The alternatives and the tension between these two understandings of the truth about the world constitute James’ temperament. He was himself the mediation.”53
The philosophy that James offers through his construction of pragmatism is designed to mediate between the gendered hierarchical oppositions of feminine religion and masculine empiricism. “Pragmatism can be called religious,” he says, if you grant that a religion can be pluralistic or melioristic. But James is willing to let his audience make up their own minds, based on their own particular temperaments, about which religion, philosophy, and gender ideal are right for them:
You will probably make your own ventures severally. If radically tough, the hurly-burly of the sensible facts of nature will be enough for you, and you will need no religion at all. If radically tender, you will take up with the more monistic form of religion: the pluralistic form, with its reliance on possibilities that are not necessities, will not seem to afford you security enough.
But if you are neither tough nor tender in an extreme and radical sense, but mixed as most of us are, it may seem to you that the type of pluralistic and moralistic religion that I have offered is as good a religious synthesis as you are likely to find. (PM, 144)
The pragmatic religious synthesis James proposes sides neither with the tough hurly-burly of empiricism nor with the tender security of rationalism but instead tries to navigate a middle way between these gendered extremes, toward a mixed pragmatism, a religious synthesis, a more balanced notion of manhood, and perhaps, toward a more pluralistic understanding of gender.
This chapter presented a narrative of pragmatism that emerges out of James’s understanding of pragmatism as a mediator between opposing extremes. His larger project is to provide a religious philosophy suited to the temperamental needs of individuals who are caught between their commitments to science and faith. Pragmatism can take account of the facts while still leaving room for faith and the moral optimism that James thinks so important. While he describes the oppositions between empiricism and rationalism and science and faith using gendered language, though not necessarily in a consistent manner, James proposes pragmatism, gendered female, as a “genial,” “flexible” solution that can resolve these oppositions by mediating between them. In doing so, he participates in a wider cultural debate about the ideal gendered self. By using gendered language, perhaps James means to appeal to the male members of his audience who feel as equally caught between competing ideals of manhood as they do between the competing claims of science and religion. Pragmatism mediates between these competing ideals and advocates a position that is “mixed, as most of us are.”
In the next chapter I show how the themes of gender and religion along with the gendered rhetoric of pragmatism as mediator appear again in a different way in Richard Rorty’s contemporary neopragmatist narrative.