Henry James, Moral Philosophers, Moralism

The theorizing mind tends always to the oversimplification of its materials.

—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Henry James wrote no book The Varieties of Moral Experience, but he was a great observer and painter of that variety, and philosophers, who often miss the variety, can learn much from him. In this essay I am concerned with the variousness of moral disagreement and with the place of moralism in these forms of disagreement.

Philosophers tend to see ethics in terms of a background idea of the primary importance of judgment. Moral thinking is a type of evaluative thinking, and in evaluative thought one has in mind something or other—act, person, character trait—and considers the application to it of some evaluative term. The picture supports a philosophical conception of moral disagreement: moral disagreement will be disagreement whether a term of moral evaluation applies to such-and-such. We may also recognize a further possible kind of disagreement, over the acceptance or rejection of an evaluative concept (blasphemous, say, or chaste) or a set of such concepts.

For Henry James, the characterization of the distances there may be between human beings in their moral life and understanding proceeds altogether differently; judgment has not got the central position it has for philosophers. The immense difference between James and philosophers in approach to the description of moral life is tied to a difference in which concepts are salient. For philosophers: right and wrong, good and bad, duties, rights and obligations, notions of virtue and of particular virtues. These hardly drop out of the picture for James: consider, for example, his interest in the very particular kind of courage shown by his cousin Minny Temple, and how he turns and returns to the representation of forms of courage like Minny’s. James, though, isn’t interested in the judgment that someone or some action is courageous but in the exhibition and appreciation of this or that particular striking form. Among the concepts salient for James are some to which philosophers pay relatively little attention. Thus, for example, the opening of The Tragic Muse, displays before us forms of philistinism, moralism, and aestheticism. We are indeed also warned that responsibility will count for something in this story, but we are warned too that what is to be understood as responsibility will itself not be separable from the very different lives we are just at that stage glimpsing. I focus on moralism as a notion that has or can have an interesting and deeply suggestive role in moral thought, too little reflected on by philosophers (Nietzsche being the most important exception), in large part because responsiveness to moralism isn’t so much a matter of judgment as of appreciation and of what we make the appreciation count for. I shall interweave discussion of what moralism is for James with discussion of some philosophical views of it.

Whatever the ambiguities and complexities of Henry James’s relation to his father, one thing they share is an interest in moralism. In the case of Henry James, Sr., the interest is entirely hostile; moralism, for him, is the spiritual evil. What he means by moralism is a kind of pride in the possession of moral goodness, but not only that. Moralism involves giving to the sphere of the moral a fundamental human importance which it lacks; it involves also a kind of fear of natural instincts and desires: “Leading me as it does to regard my inward self as corrupt, to distrust my heart’s affections as the deadliest enmity to God, it logically prompts the crucifixion of those affections as especially well pleasing to Him . . .” (James, Sr., 160). His son wasn’t given to theorizing about spiritual evil, and moralism as he saw it was not an unmitigated evil: it had its varieties, some of them even admirable. Although he doesn’t theorize about moralism, James does think about it: characters and forms of living which one could describe as moralistic have, throughout his life, a conspicuous role in his fiction. Further, in his understanding of art—his own and its contrasts and similarities with that...