Constructing on contingency: William James from biology to ethics and politics

Abstract

There is still a widespread tendency to consider pragmatism as a dubious translation of Darwinian biology on a philosophical level, confusing it with the so called “social Darwinism”—the sociological movement inaugurated at the beginning of last century by W.G. Summer, which actually was rather inspired by Spencer’s evolutionism. A reassessment of the reasons for these misunderstandings appears nowadays important when one considers how, in fact, many of the current socio-economic-political practices replicate precisely the criteria for an improper interpretation of the principle of natural selection involved in Darwinian biology. My paper will focus on some of the motives by which James provided a reading of Darwin’s theory that helps to deepen and integrate some of its most interesting features at a philosophical level, finally discarding any hasty reduction of human phenomena to an uncritical biologism. I will try to show how the ethical dimension and its political effects are the backbone of James’ approach to Darwinism, presenting the pluralistic, relativist and meliorist quality of the philosophical naturalism that he developed just on the basis of his dialectical relationship with Darwin’s biology. James appears today almost exclusively as “author of inspiration” in political or in training courses for managers or financiers. However there are a number of theoretical reasons suggesting the importance of his work for the current political-philosophical debate, including his insistence on the need to pay systematic attention to the consequences of epistemic principles with respect to the choices of values, as well as his plea for consolidating the pluralist, anti-dogmatic perspective suggested by Darwinian biology.