WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES •
VOLUME 13 • NUMBER 1 • SPRING 2017 • PP. 27-48
“THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY”: WILLIAM
JAMES AND THE SENTIMENTAL TRADITION
SEAN EPSTEIN-CORBIN
This paper shows that William James borrowed a rhetorical
framework from sentimental prose – both narrative and
argumentative – which helped him grapple with novel problems in
modern philosophy. The new direction I take to Jamesian studies is
to place James into a context – sentimental culture – that can reveal
to scholars how sentimental discourse influenced his thought, and
how sentimental discourse might vibrate across pragmatism’s
genealogy. I pay special attention to the philosophical tradition of
moral sentimentalism and the literary tradition of sentimental
fiction. Taken together, my efforts should help scholars to look at
James anew – as a rhetorical innovator who borrowed narrative and
argumentative tropes from the discursive environment available to
him.
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raditional histories of pragmatism, such as H.S. Thayer’s
insightful
Meaning and Action: A Critical History of
Pragmatism
, tend to privilege conventional philosophical
genres over autobiography or literary fiction, leading to
readings of William James that discount the literary and rhetorical
features of his writing. Doing this not only minimizes the cultural
complexity of James’s thought, it also minimizes the influence of
literary and rhetorical traditions on his writing. This essay will trace
James’s connection to the sentimental tradition. My argument brings
together two strands of recent scholarship. The first includes those
scholars – like Cornel West, Erin McKenna, and Richard Rorty –
who address the literary and rhetorical features of James’s writing,
including his appreciation for irony, regard for the Romantic
tradition, use of prophetic modes of expression, and emphasis on
process narration (what McKenna characterizes as the “task of
utopia”).
1
The second includes scholars like Jerome McGann,
Shirley Samuels, and Dana Luciano, who have shown that the
sentimental tradition is a de facto philosophical tradition, one
governed by sophisticated rhetorical norms that transcend clear
discursive divisions between prose, poetry, literature, pulp,
philosophy, fiction, and nonfiction.
2
My modest contribution here is to argue that James’s
pragmatism inherited the rhetorical framework of sentimental prose
— both argumentative and narrative — and that he brought its
formidable resources to bear on novel problems in modern
philosophy. My aim isn’t so much to view the philosophical as
literary, but simply to place James into a specific literary and
rhetorical context — the sentimental tradition — to help scholars
analyze how sentimental discourse influenced his thought, and how
sentimental discourse might vibrate across pragmatism’s genealogy.
Since a full analysis of James’s writing is beyond the scope of this
essay, I will focus on those texts most significant to pragmatism’s
development:
Pragmatism
and its sequel,
The Meaning of Truth
.
I will show that many features that distinguish James’s style in
these texts can be traced back to influential texts in the sentimental
tradition. First, I will outline several key tropes in the writings of the
T
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eighteenth-century moral sentimentalists, Ashton Ashley-Cooper,
the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, and Adam Smith, arguing that they
constitute the rhetorical framework of
Pragmatism
. Next, I will
explore the common tropes and narrative techniques of sentimental
fiction to suggest that James is best understood as the “moderate
narrator” of his own philosophical writings. Instead of conflating
“William James,” the man, with “William James,” the narrator of
his philosophical texts, it is better to recognize the rhetorical skill of
William James, the author.
Influence is notoriously hard to establish, but we can be fairly
certain that James read the central writers of the sentimental
tradition. We know, for instance, that he taught Smith and most
likely was familiar with Shaftesbury. James had a copy of
Shaftesbury’s text in his library within Houghton Library.
3
Given
that he retired from Harvard in 1907, the year of the publication of
Pragmatism,
it is likely that he read Shaftesbury prior to its
composition. Further, Robert Richardson, in
William James: In the
Maelstrom of American Modernism,
writes, “Benjamin Rand, who
later did work on Shaftesbury...was James’s reader for Philosophy
2 [Logic and Psychology],” suggesting either that James guided
Rand to Shaftesbury, or that Rand made the connection himself in
relation to James’s instruction.
4
The case of Smith is easier. First, Smith’s
Theory of Moral
Sentiments
is listed as having been found, with James’s notes, in his
personal library.
5
Second, in an October 14, 1888 letter to his
brother, Henry James, he mentions “Adam Smith” as someone he is
reading in preparation for “a big class in ethics” he would be
offering.
6
Lastly, Smith mentions Shaftesbury’s theory of affections
in Part VII.II.52 of his
Theory of Moral Sentiments
. It is also clear
from James’s letters and known reading that the generic conventions
and common themes of sentimental writing would have pervaded a
large portion of his readerly universe.
TROPES FROM MORAL SENTIMENTALISM
Shaftesbury has gained increasing attention from scholars studying
the development of 18
th
and 19
th
-century moral sentimentalism.
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Elizabeth Eger has pointed out the importance of his writing to the
Bluestocking Circle, a constellation of mostly female authors who
exerted an enormous influence on the development of transatlantic
cultures of sensibility and sentiment.
7
Lawrence Klein has advanced
new analyses of Shaftesbury’s philosophical complexity, suggesting
that his “philosophy of politeness” crystallized a discourse that
would remain important in Anglophone writing for over a century,
including specific constructions of the terms taste, virtue,
adjustment, publicity, character, and politeness that usefully blur
boundaries between ethics and aesthetics.
8
In particular, Klein
suggests that Shaftesbury, like James, bemoaned the detachment of
philosophy from active life and desired “that philosophy should
make people effective participants in the world.”
9
Shaftesbury, attempting to side-step the issues of free will and
determinism, argues that virtue consists in arranging one’s passions
“so that they shall not clash with his environs.”
10
Fitting one’s
sentiments to externally-derived standards becomes the goal of
cultivation. Each of these terms rests, in turn, on the notion that
humans are social creatures and that the categories of good and evil
– but not the propensity to act in accordance with either – are to a
certain extent inborn properties of human nature. As Klein observes:
For Shaftesbury, the affections were only the
foundations of human morality. Human morality,
though it arose in the feelings, was a phenomenon of
consciousness and rationality as well. While humans
were naturally sociable and naturally capable of
virtue, they were not, to speak precisely, naturally
good or virtuous. Virtue required training and work,
for virtue was not merely an affective disposition, but
affection raised to a conscious principle in the
rational agent by reflection on affection and the sorts
of actions endorsed by affection.
11
A few features of Shaftesbury’s thought become important in
our consideration of James. The first is the figure of virtue he
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constructs. Shaftesbury’s trope of virtue is simultaneously public
and private. It proceeds – to use a metaphor – from the wellspring
of the affections to a terminus determined by public manners down
a stream of action. The fitness of one’s affections and the politeness
of one’s actions are subject to judgment, an evaluative instrument
determined both by public norms and in public performance. The
visibility, as it were, of one’s conduct provides for the adjustment of
that conduct, and the adjustment of conduct requires, in turn, the
cultivation of one’s affections. Or, to use Shaftesbury’s words:
There is no creature, according to what has been
already proved, who must not of necessity be ill in
some degree by having any affection or aversion in a
stronger degree than is suitable to his own private
good or that of the system to which he is joined. For
in either case the affection is ill and vicious.
12
Put differently, Shaftesbury makes a distinction between private
interest and public interest, but insists that the former is subordinate
to the latter, and that each requires the proportional adjustment of
affection to the particular context of one’s “actual life.”
13
Before considering the connection between Smith and James, it
is important to establish that Shaftesbury’s construction of the figure
of virtue persists in James’s writing. Doing so requires a brief
consideration of “Lecture IV: Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth”
in
Pragmatism
. There, James constructs true belief as virtuous belief
– what is true is good in the way of belief – and suggests that the
only determinant of truth is the “cash-value” of a belief, or its utility
to the one who believes it.
14
Digging a bit deeper, he writes:
“The true,” to put it very briefly, is only the expedient
in the way of our thinking, just as “the right” is only
the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient
in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run
and on the whole of course; for what meets
expediently all the experience in sight won’t
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necessarily meet all farther experiences equally
satisfactorily. Experience, as we know, has ways of
boiling over, and making us correct our present
formulas.
15
He later clarifies that by “farther experiences” he means the
future, and that the true is a purely “regulative postulate” meant to
guide the processes of action tied to belief.
16
James has taken the rhetorical structure of Shaftesbury’s trope
of virtue and transposed it onto his trope of truths (by which he
means “good beliefs”). “Verification” – not simply by the individual
but by the individual “in conversation” – takes the place of
Shaftesbury’s “environs.”
17
Action, adjustment, and cultivation
retain their meaning from Shaftesbury’s construction. The
“affections” become the “beliefs.”
18
So, in Shaftesbury’s moral
sentimentalism, the affections lead to action judged according to
outcomes in a context determined by public manners, and reason
adjusts the affections to fit actions to those manners. In James’s
pragmatism, beliefs lead to action judged according to outcomes in
a context determined by public values, and reason adjusts the beliefs
to fit actions to those values. Both suggest that private and public
interests pertain to the cultivation of affections/beliefs, and that
private interests are subordinate to – though distinct from – the
systems in which they are embedded. The purpose of philosophy in
each instance is to perfect the process of cultivation and help
individuals act effectively in the world.
Smith provides James two figures lacking in Shaftesbury’s
philosophy. The first is the figure of sentiment as a circuit linking
experience, sensibility, and reason, a figure without which the
explanation of “interior life” provided by James would be
incomplete. The second is the dialectical construction of the tropes
of duty and utility that allow James to construct his infamous
“pragmatic test” of truth: its “cash-value in experiential terms.”
19
Like Shaftesbury, Smith – as a moral philosopher and
rhetorician – has received renewed attention. Stephen J. McKenna,
in his
Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety,
connects Smith to the
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classical rhetorical tradition and to the earlier philosophizing of
Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume. McKenna writes that “Smith’s
deployment of propriety in rhetoric and ethics was fully in accord
with philosophical issues already well framed in the classical
rhetorical tradition.”
20
He goes on to argue, building on previous
notions circulated by Barbara Warnick, that “rhetorical propriety is
fundamental for sympathy,”
21
and that rhetorical propriety can be
defined as “a rhetorical consensus between moral agents, one of
whom is the principal or dative of sentiment, the other of whom is a
spectator.”
22
McKenna rightly interprets Smith’s theory of
sentiment and sympathy as itself a rhetorical frame, one governed
by the interaction between the spectator and the object of his
concern.
As will become evident in my section on sentimental literature,
James’s rhetorical purpose is different from Smith’s. Smith largely
refrains from epistemologizing (to borrow Rorty’s phrase), while
James re-frames epistemology as a rhetorical act, one that can only
be understood in a narrative context. Nonetheless, James shares with
Smith both a rich store of classical rhetorical education upon which
to draw and a preoccupation with the sentimental circuit governing
spectator and subject.
Following McKenna’s lead, what we must do, however, is
properly articulate the trope of the sentimental circuit that Smith
constructs. In my argument, this circuit is what in turn provides the
particular rhetorical features of duty and utility in
Theory of Moral
Sentiments
that allow James to develop his “pragmatist theory of
truth.” Interestingly, Smith presents the central piece of his theory
of sentiment through a brief narrative:
We see or think about a man being tortured on the
rack; we think of ourselves enduring all the same
torments, entering into his body (so to speak) and
becoming in a way the same person as he is. In this
manner we form some idea of his sensations, and
even feel something that somewhat resembles them,
though it is less intense. When his agonies are
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brought home to us in this way, when we have
adopted them and made them our own, they start to
affect us and we then tremble and shudder at the
thought of what he feels. Just as being in pain or
distress of any kind arouses the most excessive
sorrow, so conceiving or imagining being in pain or
distress arouses some degree of the same emotion,
the degree being large or small depending on how
lively or dull the conception is.
23
Here, Smith outlines the four steps that lead to the creation of a
sentiment. During an experience, an individual has immediate
reactions to sensory information, a process he refers to as
“sensibility.”
24
Sensibility leads one to imagine oneself in the place
of the feeling subject, a kind of mirroring process Smith refers to as
“sympathy.”
25
While engaged in sympathetic imagination, one then
engages in a moral evaluation of the other’s experience. Based on
one’s moral evaluation, one then develops a moral response, which
Smith sometimes refers to as an “affection,” elsewhere as an
“attitude.”
26
The outcome of this process – sensibility, sympathy,
evaluation, and attitude – is a sentiment, which itself becomes a
combination of a feeling, a belief, a commitment, and a moral
disposition. Once secured, sentiments can then be cultivated, both
by solidifying the sentiment through repeated engagement of it, and
by seeking out related sentiments. Or, as Smith puts it: “So my thesis
is that our fellow-feeling for the misery of others comes from our
imaginatively changing places with the sufferer, thereby coming to
conceive what he feels or even to feel what he feels.”
27
The concept
of sentiment, rightly understood, is perhaps Smith’s most important
contribution to sentimental literature and to James’s pragmatism. In
its sophisticated form, it provides the basis for an entire literary
aesthetic, social project, educational theory, and conception of
philosophy.
An important move Smith makes is to evaluate sentiments on
fundamentally consequentialist grounds. He writes that “The
sentiment or affection of the heart that leads to some action can be
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considered in two different relations: (1) in relation to the cause that
arouses it, or the motive that gives rise to it; (2) in relation to the end
that it proposes, or the effect that it tends to produce.”
28
Put
differently, he thinks that sentiments should be praised or criticized
based on either the cause or effect of the sentiment in question. He
means that a sentiment could be deemed defective if it were either
out of proportion with the experience that provoked it, as when one
criticizes someone for reacting too emotionally to a jingle, or if the
sentiment leads to harmful or merely inefficient outcomes, as when
a response to a charity advertisement leads someone to donate half
their rent money to a dubious cause. As Smith clarifies: “The
propriety or impropriety…of the consequent action consists in the
suitableness or unsuitableness, the proportion or disproportion, that
the affection seems to bear to the cause or object that arouses it. The
merit or demerit of the action, the qualities by which it is entitled to
reward or deserving of punishment, consists in the beneficial or
harmful nature of the effects that the affection aims at or tends to
produce.”
29
Of importance to our later discussion of James, Smith
frames the evaluation of sentiments not on some intrinsic property
of a sentiment, nor to what extent a sentiment “corresponds” to
reality, nor to how “coherent” a sentiment is with other sentiments,
but with regard to its appropriateness in adapting the individual to a
stream of experience.
For Smith, one of sentiment’s primary values is in reinforcing
ethical duty, but also in civilizing and perfecting duty, turning it
from a cold process of rational rule-following into a warm process
of fellow-feeling. The notion that there are different forms of
rationality, and that some integrate logic and feeling, is central to
James’s critique of Western philosophy, and to the ways in which
he appeals to his audiences. Smith suggests that “a person’s regard
for those general rules of conduct is his sense of duty, a driver of the
greatest importance in human life, and the only driver that most
people have to direct their actions.”
30
Far from thinking of this as an
adequate state of affairs, Smith rejoins:
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All the graceful and admired actions to which the
benevolent affections would prompt us ought to be
based as much on the passions themselves as on any
concern with general rules of conduct. A benefactor
will think he has been poorly repaid if the
beneficiary, in acknowledging the help he has been
given, is acting merely from a cold sense of duty,
with no affection toward the benefactor personally.
31
Here, Smith argues that part of moral evaluation of an act
depends on the balance of sentiments driving the act. That a
beneficiary should acknowledge the help of a benefactor is taken as
a clear duty, but duty alone would be inappropriate to the
beneficiary’s moral obligations. He or she is also obliged to feel in
proportion to their duty, proportion previously defined in relation to
the cause of the sentiment (what the benefactor did) and the outcome
of the sentiment (the reaction it would elicit from the benefactor).
The notion of “appropriateness” in relation to sentiments – as they
attach to duty – is perhaps Smith’s second most important
contribution to pragmatism.
The trope of utility, the third and final connection between
Smith’s theory of sentiments and James’s pragmatism that I will
consider, is also a fitting bridge between Smith and James in my
larger argument. Smith writes, “Everyone who has thought hard
about what constitutes the nature of beauty has seen that one of its
principal sources is utility...The fitness of any system or machine to
produce the end for which it was intended confers a certain rightness
and beauty on the whole thing, making it a pleasure to think about –
and this is so obvious that nobody has overlooked it.”
32
Here, utility
is garnered as an integral component of beauty; further, it is defined
primarily as the “fitting” of motives and consequences. Smith
doesn’t go quite so far as arguing that beauty is truth, and truth is
beauty. He does suggest, however, that the sentiments of beauty and
utility might bear a family resemblance. Smith continues:
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Why is utility so pleasing? This has been answered
by Hume. According to him, a thing’s utility pleases
its owner by continually suggesting to him the
pleasure or convenience that it is fitted to promote.
Every time he looks at it he is reminded of this
pleasure, so that the object in question becomes a
source of continual satisfaction and enjoyment. The
spectator’s sympathy leads him to have the
sentiments of the owner, making him view the object
in that same agreeable light.
33
Here, Smith introduces the idea that sentiments are contagious,
and that sympathetic imagination always already includes
sympathizing with another’s sentiments. To ape his famous
description of the person on the rack, we might say that when we
see a person admiring an object, we imagine what we might feel by
admiring that same object. We then cultivate sentiments toward that
object, or objects of that type. Once this occurs, we might then find
pleasure in considering an object fitted to its purpose even in the
absence of the owner or designer of the object in question. As Smith
writes, “An artifact’s being skillfully designed so as to be suitable
for some purpose is often valued more than is the purpose itself;
exact adjustment of the means for attaining some convenience or
pleasure is often valued more highly than the convenience or
pleasure itself, though they would seem to be the sole source of the
artifact’s merit.”
34
The utility of objects per se becomes compelling
to us even if we don’t ever intend to use an object for its purpose.
One might make an analogy here to James’s conception of beliefs
and the process of agreement, by which one exposed to a belief well-
fitted to its ends – having plentiful “cash-value” – might consider
the belief beautiful even without adopting it.
To connect my discussion of Smith back to my primary
argument, I would like to point out how Smith’s tropes of sentiment,
duty, action, and utility (some of which have overlap with
Shaftesbury’s) help James construct his “pragmatic theory of truth”
and persuade his reader to adopt positive attitudes toward it. In the
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opening paragraphs of “Lecture VI: Pragmatic Conception of
Truth,” from
Pragmatism
, James writes, “Let me begin by
reminding you of the fact that the possession of true thoughts means
everywhere the possession of invaluable instruments of action; and
that our duty to gain truth, so far from being a blank command from
out of the blue, or a ‘stunt’ self-imposed by our intellect, can account
for itself by excellent practical reasons.”
35
First, James defines “true
thoughts” as “instruments of action.” Second, he states that
individuals have a duty to gain truth, not as a vapid social norm, but
for reasons that matter in practice.
He continues, “The importance to human life of having true
beliefs about matters of fact is a thing too notorious. We live in a
world of realities that can be infinitely useful or infinitely harmful.
Ideas that tell us which of them to expect count as the true ideas in
all this primary sphere of verification, and the pursuit of such ideas
is a primary human duty. The possession of truth, so far from being
here an end in itself, is only a preliminary means towards other vital
satisfactions.”
36
Third, James creates an evaluative scheme for true
beliefs, differentiating between utility and harm. Fourth, truth is re-
positioned not as an end in itself, but as a cause of action, the
consequences of which might be useful or harmful. He continues,
“If I am lost in the woods and starved, and find what looks like a
cow-path, it is of the utmost importance that I should think of a
human habitation at the end of it, for if I do so and follow it, I save
myself. The true thought is useful here because the house which is
its object is useful.”
37
Through his anecdote, James reinforces the
four points I covered above: truths are to James like sentiments are
to Smith, and one should evaluate them based on how well they fit
motives to consequences.
James then extends the Smithian trope of truths-as-sentiments
to those truths that do not seem immediately useful: “The practical
value of true ideas is thus primarily derived from the practical
importance of their objects to us. Their objects are, indeed, not
important at all times. I may on another occasion have no use for the
house; and then my idea of it, however verifiable, will be practically
irrelevant, and had better remain latent.”
38
Truths, like sentiments,
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can be cultivated, and one has a duty to cultivate them. This duty is
not – as it is in Smith’s theory – created by social conditions, but by
the notion of “survival” borrowed from contemporary evolutionary
theories. A truth can also, like sentiments can for Smith, be deployed
in appropriate or inappropriate proportion, depending on the context
in which the truth becomes useful or “activated.” James continues
to one of his more frequently quoted lines: “You can say of it then
either that ‘it is useful because it is true’ or that ‘it is true because it
is useful.’ Both these phrases mean exactly the same thing, namely
that here is an idea that gets fulfilled and can be verified. True is the
name for whatever idea starts the verification-process, useful is the
name for its completed function in experience.”
39
Here, James
borrows the figuration of “truth-as-process” from Smith’s
“sentiment-as-process.” A sentiment, once held, initiates the
sentimental circuit, and it closes it. A true belief, once held, initiates
a practice, and the evaluation of that practice by the lights of the true
belief closes it.
James extends the analogy between his theory of truth and
Smith’s theory of sentiments: “But in this world, just as certain
foods are not only agreeable to our taste, but good for our teeth, our
stomach, and our tissues; so certain ideas are not only agreeable to
think about, or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond
of, but they are also helpful in life’s practical struggles.”
40
Our
sentiments toward truths function like our sentiments toward
objects, and for the same reasons. Our affections for certain ideas
are not of a radically different type from our affections for foods,
relationships, or works of art. Insofar as a belief is useful in at least
one context, then it will be appropriate in that context, one will have
a duty to store it up, and one will praised for activating it in proper
proportion (as was true in Shaftesbury).
TROPES FROM SENTIMENTAL LITERATURE
While James takes many of his rhetorical moves from moral
sentimentalism, his style relies more heavily on narration than do
the dense treatises of Shaftesbury and Smith. In particular, James
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makes frequent use of free indirect discourse
41
in his anecdotes, the
effect of which is what Wayne Booth calls the creation of “sympathy
through control of inside views.”
42
Unlike his figures of virtue and
truth-as-process, James’s narrative techniques more closely match
those found in sentimental novels. Through his narrative technique,
he constructs a motif of authentic feeling that in turn constructs his
own philosophical persona as “William James, the moderate
narrator.”
The first major trope James borrows from sentimental literature
is the motif of authentic feeling. As Aaron Ritzenberg has pointed
out, despite the attention sentimental literature gives feeling,
deciphering which feelings are genuine, and which false, is often
difficult.
43
Ultimately, however, part of the purpose of a sentimental
novel is to reveal to the reader which characters are authentic, and
which aren’t. For example, in Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women,
honesty – as in Laurie’s “honest eyes”
44
– is a virtue admired
independent of the feelings in question. While the Professor in
Alcott’s story has “warmth, intimacy, and a tender capacity for
expressing his affection—the feminine attributes Alcott admired
and hoped men could acquire in a rational, feminist world
,
” it is
noted that his beliefs, “while beautiful and true,” simply “wouldn’t
pay.”
45
Yet, Jo, in her disgust at being forced, for financial reasons,
to incorporate a superficial moralism into her children’s stories,
implies that such affections are irrelevant if they’re not honest work.
Such motifs are ubiquitous throughout sentimental writing. As
Bruce Burgett suggests, “the heart” is the “universal and pre-
political point of affective identification” troped as “authentic
feeling.”
46
Authentic feeling, in this sense, is to be contrasted with
the manipulations of rakes and the crass ideology of many suitors in
sentimental fiction. Indeed, as any reader of sentimental fiction
knows, determining which heart is good, and which bad, is the
primary thrust of every romantic plot, and a key to the moral
universe of each novel.
Throughout his philosophical writings, James makes use of the
motif of authentic feeling – with its related tropes of “heart,” “soul,”
“sickness,” “health,” “good,” and “bad” – including when he insists
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that only the “cash-value” of philosophical conceptions “for our
actual experience” should be counted for or against such
conceptions.
47
Eschewing entirely a purely speculative mode in
philosophy, he instead insists that motivations and virtues of those
engaged in philosophical discourse communities matter. Finding a
philosopher or philosophy to follow is, in this regard, much like
deciphering the virtues of a lover’s heart in sentimental fiction.
More importantly, James adapts the motif of authentic feeling into
the motif of authentic
belief,
thereby constructing one of
pragmatism’s most well-known tests: whether or not a believer does,
in fact, act on a belief is the final test of his having the belief in the
first place. In other words, those who say they believe something in
the hypothetical space of a philosophical discussion but then do not
act in accordance with that belief receive special derision in James,
who does not use the charge as a pure
tu quoque
objection, but
instead as a measure of which objections can be said to inhere in
practice and which only in conversation.
The second trope James picks up from sentimental fiction – and
perhaps his most effective form of persuasion – is the trope of the
moderate narrator. As Margaret Cohen points out, sentimental
narrators most often speak in “spare and understated fashion,”
signifying their good sense, propriety, and by extension, their
virtue.
48
A sample from the opening of Chapter 2 of
Sense and
Sensibility
should suffice to illustrate the point, in this instance
accentuated through Jane Austen’s characteristic use of free indirect
discourse:
Mrs. John Dashwood did not at all approve of what
her husband intended to do for his sisters. To take
three thousand pounds from the fortune of their dear
little boy would be impoverishing him to the most
dreadful degree. She begged him to think again on
the subject. How could he answer it to himself to rob
his child, and his only child too, of so large a sum?
And what possible claim could the Miss Dashwoods,
who were related to him only by half blood, which
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she considered as no relationship at all, have on his
generosity to so large an amount.
49
Here, the narrator’s tone is both what allows Austen to gain the
reader’s trust and what allows the narrator to function effectively as
a vehicle of morals and manners, guiding the neophyte (more to be
said on this below) into a proper love match.
Important points need to be made here. First is that moderation
is itself, of course, a virtue in sentimental fiction. It is not, as many
have pointed out, more important than authentic feeling or a fitting
degree of affection. Nonetheless, sentimental novels tend to punish
characters who are either too effusive or not effusive enough, as the
occasion dictates. Propriety, not a set level of enthusiasm, is what
governs the narrator’s discrimination of fine feeling. Yet, as
sometimes occurs in plots, overwhelming feeling is itself sometimes
appropriate: at the death of child, for instance, or the rescue of an
estranged young woman. Yet, immoderation is
never
proper for the
narrator, whose ethos depends entirely on being perceived by the
reader as a perfect arbiter of taste and decorum.
To be more direct: James leverages the generic convention of
the moderate narrator widely consumed by his own readers by
characterizing philosophical schools other than pragmatism as either
too enthusiastic or too morbid, too hard-headed or tender-minded,
too particular or too general.
Pragmatism
, by way of its master
narrator (James), promises the reader not so much truth in any given
matter, but appropriate belief. That is to say: belief fitted to the very
bourgeois discourse community for which he writes.
Nevertheless, James does not offer his reader his own position –
that of the Austenite narrator, secure in her station as elder and
guide; instead, he offers the reader the position of (pragmatist)
neophyte, the final trope he borrows from the sentimental tradition
that we have time to consider in this essay. Just as, for Jane
Tompkins, the sentimental novel insists that a young woman must
learn to “control her passions on her own”
51
if she is to enter
maturity, James dramatizes philosophizing as the process by which
the uninitiated “amateurs” to which he is speaking must learn to
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control the equally dangerous passions of distinguishing and
simplifying, lest they be led to ruin by either unrestrained empiricist
or rationalist dogmatisms.
52
As I stated to in the introductory section, the purpose of this
essay is to outline James’s borrowing of tropes from the sentimental
tradition, both from philosophers of moral sentimentalism and
authors of sentimental literature. One way to simplify my project is
to develop a genealogy of the phrase “the sentiment of rationality”
that appears in James’s
The Will to Believe
. While they are clearly
close-knit, I will now somewhat shift course and cap my discussion
by turning to the sentiment of rationality.
In “The Sentiment of Rationality,” James constructs
“philosophizing” as itself a narrative at the level of the individual
philosopher, characterizing it as the process of moving from a state
of confusion or uncertainty to a state of orderliness and fluidity. In
particular, the sentiment of rationality is how a philosopher knows
that he or she has, in Rorty’s phrasing, gotten things to hang together
in a sufficient way. The philosopher is then characterized as one who
is particularly sensitive to the sentiment of rationality, making him
or her analogous to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poet (whose superiority
of feeling grants special power)
53
or Lydia Sigourney’s sentimental
traveler (whose superiority of empathy grants special power).
54
But,
James tells his reader, the philosopher has so far been like Plato’s
winged stallions, improperly restrained in their intellectual passions.
An overdeveloped passion for distinguishing or simplifying has
driven most philosophy, and what is required is an appropriate
moderation of the passions.
In short, James casts the pragmatist – this time synonymous with
the moderate narrator himself – as the charioteer bridling each
passion toward a virtuous end. In this way, the pragmatist narrator
garners trust from the reader for the more abstract flights that
proceed. The particular journey the reader is to take: a tour of great
philosophies judged by aesthetic principles and all but one
(pragmatism) found lacking. As James puts it, “No system of
philosophy can hope to be universally accepted among men which
grossly violates either of the two great aesthetic needs of our logical
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nature, the need of unity or the need of clearness, or entirely
subordinates the one to the other.”
55
James recasts philosophical
judgment as the cultivation of the sentiment of rationality in relation
to a pragmatist standard of unity and clearness. The issue –
borrowing again from Shaftesbury – is one of the fitness of our taste
to public standards.
The phrase “the sentiment of rationality” now appears in a
proper genealogy. It emerges as an adaptation of two significant
threads of intellectual culture prior to the twentieth century: moral
sentimentalism from Shaftesbury and Smith and sentimental
literature from Austen to Alcott. Clearly, the philosophical purposes
to which James puts the trope of the sentiment of rationality add a
great deal to the sentimental tradition. Pragmatism, in many ways,
is the adaptation of sentimentalism to late modernity, a pluralistic
counter-point to the positivistic, idealistic, and materialistic
philosophies that regained prominence during the World Wars.
I have shown that James borrows the motif of authentic feeling
and the motif of the moderate narrator from sentimental fiction.
Further, I have shown that James borrows the tropes of virtue,
politeness, action, sentiment, duty, and utility from moral
philosophers like Shaftesbury and Smith. Together, the rhetorical
resources James draws on don’t just make his arguments
sophisticated and pleasurable; they also suggest how one might re-
visit scholarly efforts to understand 18
th
- and 19
th
-century culture
more broadly. The literary qualities of his philosophy help us
understand how generic divisions between analytical prose and
literary language often underwrite deep assumptions about
rationality, feeling, and argument. More importantly, perhaps, is the
insight that
how
James wrote tells us as much about his desire to root
false dichotomies between reason and feeling out of Western
discourse as
what
he wrote.
Merced College
sean.epstein-corbin@mccd.edu
WILLIAM JAMES AND THE SENTIMENTAL TRADITION
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VOL. 13 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2017
REFERENCES
Alcott, Louisa May.
Little Women
. London: Marston, Low, and
Searle, 1872.
Austen, Jane.
Sense and Sensibility
, ed. Edward Copeland.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Booth, Wayne.
The Rhetoric of Fiction.
Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1961.
Burgett, Bruce.
Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in
the Early Republic
. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Chisholm, Hugh.
Encyclopedia Britannica
, 11th ed., s.v.
“Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of.” Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1911.
Cohen, Margaret.
The Sentimental Education of the Novel.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Eger,
Elizabeth.
Bluestockings:
Women
of
Reason
from
Enlightenment
to
Romanticism
.
New
York:
Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010.
Elbert,
Sarah.
A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott’s Place in
American Culture
. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1987.
James, William.
The Letters of William James
. Vol. 1. ed. Henry
James. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920.
—.
The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism.”
London:
Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909.
—.
Pragmatism
. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1975.
—.
The Will to Believe: And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
.
New York: Dover, 1956.
Klein, Lawrence E.
Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness:
Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-
Century England
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994.
—.
Shaftesbury: Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times
.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Kowalski, Philip J.
Guide to William James’s Reading.
Published
2014. Accessed February 9, 2017,
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http://williamjamesstudies.org/guide-to-william-jamess-
reading
.
Luciano, Dana.
Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in
Nineteenth-Century America
. New York: New York University
Press, 2007.
McGann, Jerome.
The Poetics of Sensibility
. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996.
McKenna, Erin.
The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist
Perspective
. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
McKenna, Stephen J.
Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety
.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.
Richardson, Robert D.
William James: In the Maelstrom of
American Modernism: A Biography.
New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 2006.
Rorty, Richard.
Philosophy and Social Hope.
New York: Penguin,
1999.
Ritzenberg, Aaron.
The Sentimental Touch: The Language of
Feeling in the Age of Managerialism
. New York: Fordham
University Press, 2013.
Saad, Mariana. “Sentiment, Sensation, and Sensibility: Adam
Smith, Pierre Jean Gorges Cabanis, and Wilhelm von
Humboldt,”
History of European Ideas
(2015): 208-232.
Samuels, Shirley.
The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and
Sentimentality in Nineteenth Century America.
New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992.
Sanchez-Eppler, Karen.
Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism,
and the Politics of the Body
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Press, 1993.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe.
A Defence of Poetry
. Indianopolis: Bobs-
Merrill Company, 1904.
Sigourney, Lydia H.
Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands
.
London: Tilt and Bogue, 1843.
Smith, Adam.
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, ed. Knud
Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Tompkins, Jane.
Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of
American Fiction, 1790-1860
. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1985.
West, Cornel.
The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy
of Pragmatism.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
NOTES
1
West,
American Evasion of Philosophy
; Rorty,
Philosophy and
Social Hope;
McKenna,
The Task of Utopia
.
2
McGann,
Poetics of Sensibility
; Samuels,
The Culture of
Sentiment;
Luciano,
Arranging Grief
.
3
Kowalski,
Guide to William James’s Reading,
273.
4
Richardson,
William James
,
284-285.
5
Kowalski,
Guide to William James’s Reading
, 276.
6
James,
The Letters
, 283.
7
Eger
, Bluestockings, 4.
8
Klein,
Culture of Politeness
, 109.
9
Klein,
Characteristics
, viii.
10
Chisholm,
Encyclopdia Britannica
, 765.
11
Klein,
Culture of Politeness
, 56.
12
Klein,
Characteristics,
190.
13
James,
The Meaning of Truth,
v.
14
James,
Pragmatism
, 46.
15
James,
Meaning of Truth
, vii.
16
Ibid., 240.
17
Ibid., vii.
18
Ibid., 219.
19
Ibid., v.
20
McKenna,
Adam Smith
, 26.
21
Ibid., 102.
22
Ibid., 116
23
Smith,
Theory of Moral Sentiments
, 11.
24
Ibid., 30.
25
Ibid., 53.
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26
Ibid., 97.
27
Ibid., 12.
28
Ibid., 78.
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid., 86
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid., 218.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.
35
James,
Pragmatism
, 97.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid.
38
Ibid., 98.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid., 42.
41
An entry for Austen’s
Emma
appears in
A Guide to William
James’s Reading
, showing that James quoted from it in
The
Principles of Psychology
.
42
Booth,
The Rhetoric of Fiction
, 245.
43
Ritzenberg,
The Sentimental Touch
, 2-7.
44
Alcott,
Little Women
, 87.
45
Elbert,
A Hunger for Home
, 216.
46
Burgett,
Sentimental Bodies,
17.
47
James,
Pragmatism
, 46.
48
Cohen,
The Sentimental Education
, 64.
49
Austen,
Sense and Sensibility
, 9.
51
Tompkins,
Sensational Designs
, 165.
52
James,
Pragmatism
, 15.
53
Shelley,
A Defence of Poetry
, 90.
54
Sigourney,
Pleasant Memories
, 17.
55
James,
The Will to Believe,
66.