The Reach of Empathy: William James's Metaphysics and the Environmental Crisis

Any attempt to rise to the climate challenge will be fruitless unless it is understood as part of a much wider battle of worldviews, a process of rebuilding and reinventing the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect. Because what is overwhelming about the climate challenge is that it requires breaking so many rules at once.

—Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

Columnist and editor Naomi Klein calls our attention to the urgent need for a radical reenvisioning of entrenched worldviews or conceptions of reality in our time of direly threatening climate change and pending ecological disaster around the globe. We need, in other words, to question our most basic assumptions about our nature as humans and our place in the natural world. These assumptions both affect our practices and are reflected in our practices in many ways. How can we go about doing this critically important questioning? One way is to pay renewed attention to the resources for such a task provided by particular well-known philosophers, especially to their metaphysical visions or conceptions of reality, when available. We are not likely to change our practices in a radical way if the convictions underlying those practices remain unrecognized and unchallenged. Such metaphysical assumptions are often so deeply and subtly rooted as to go unnoticed, but they can still play a decisive role in our individual and collective actions and policies—for good or ill.

The philosopher whose metaphysical (and epistemological) vision I propose to investigate and defend in its relation to the climate crisis is William James. James was an ardent outdoorsman who relished hiking in the New England Adirondack Mountains. He was trained in physiology and medicine and wrote an early, much-referenced two-volume work called The Principles of Psychology. But he spent most of his life and career as a philosopher. He wrote widely about most of the traditional major problems of philosophy, such as epistemology, ethics, philosophy of religion, and metaphysics, and, most importantly, about the relations of these fields of thought with one another. He was more of a holistic thinker than a specialist in any one of these fields. His metaphysical ideas reflect this holistic orientation of his thought.

In what follows, I shall discuss the following aspects of James's philosophy with a focus throughout on his metaphysical view. These aspects can serve, I argue, as an instructive, even if only a suggestive, model for a kind of worldview that is desperately needed in our time of increasing ecological crisis. I do not contend that James's is the only or even necessarily the best model for this purpose, only that it contains much that is useful and important in this regard. I cannot hope to bring into perspective the whole of James's philosophy in a brief article, nor do I intend to involve this article in detailed investigations of scholarly literature and debates about his philosophy.¹

My selections of aspects of James's thought for my purposes here are just that: my selections and my interpretations. Other interpreters of James can make their own assessments of James's writings and of what I have to say here. My focus is not so much on possible disputes about the viability or accuracy of these interpretations—although I view my interpretations as being viable and accurate—but on applications of James's philosophy I believe to have significant bearings on our current ecological crisis.

Here is a list of the aspects I shall bring under discussion, each of them closely related to James's philosophy: the concept of pure experience as an antidote to mind-body dualism; the idea of nature as a concatenated unity, or universe-multiverse; the essential role of novelty both in nature and in human agency; and the cognitive significance of feelings. From these four aspects I shall derive a fifth critical concept of nature-encompassing human empathy that I believe to be essential to ecological awareness and responsibility—hence...