Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Goldman, Loren

Titel

William James, Energy, and the Pluralist Ethic of Receptivity

Ist Teil von

• Theory & event, 2020-07, Vol.23 (3), p.706-733

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• William James's work is pervaded by the rhetoric of energy, language intended to convey the felt livedness of experience, the visceral sense of both the universe's teeming potential and our own active powers. Insofar as James aims to philosophize for the sake of life, moreover, this rhetoric captures the timbre of his theoretical concerns. "Human energizing," James writes in a version of his significantly titled 1906 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, "The Energies of Men," is "that sum-total of activities, some outer and some inner, some muscular, some emotional, some moral, some spiritual, of whose waxing and waning in himself he is at all times so well aware" (ERM 150).1 Elsewhere, he describes consciousness as "the habitual centre of [one's] personal energy," and states that the "real" self at any given moment is "the centre of [one's] energies" (VRE 161–162).2 Energy is also a moral concern, for it invigorates the "strenuous mood" of ethical exertion James famously exhorts; religious faith is beneficial, for example, because it sets free "[e]very sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils" (WTB 161). For James, the contrasting lassitude of "easy-going" life makes it not worth living, for meaningful existence requires the energy to pursue ends "pertinaciously enough" (WTB 84–85).