James, William

1842–1910

Philosopher, Educator, and Author

Through his research and his teaching, the philosopher William James sought to mediate between two concepts of middle-class manhood that developed in U.S. culture from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The first concept, rooted in antebellum intellectual, religious, and reform movements such as the Second Great Awakening, transcendentalism, and abolitionism, emphasized moral idealism and the authority of individual conscience. The second concept, which emerged after the Civil War, eschewed this antebellum idealism and defined true manliness in terms of duty, obligation, and a “strenuous life”—understood as a struggle toward masculine physical fitness. James sought to combine the ethical principles that informed antebellum reform movements with the new emphasis on the strenuous life to generate a manly, intellectual individualism.

James's vision of manliness had several sources. First, James drew on an Emersonian transcendentalist insistence that truth could never be received secondhand, but had to be discovered, tried, and tested firsthand. Second, James conceptualized manhood in terms of growth and individual autonomy—both of which were part of transcendentalist philosophy and Second Great Awakening theology. Third, James built upon new findings in experimental psychology that challenged the notion that all men possessed distinctive rational and emotive capabilities that could be shaped and reinforced in exact, uniform ways. For example, while James appreciated religious spirituality, he rejected simple solutions such as building moral behavior through physical exercise, as suggested by proponents of “muscular Christianity.” Finally, the experiences of Civil War soldiers, such as his brother Wilkinson, confirmed for him both the power of moral idealism and the practical and difficult wartime realities of discipline and perseverance.

Based on these ideas and experiences, James developed a new concept of masculinity. Manhood, he argued, was not a fixed state of being that could be attained and held onto, but an intellectual method and dynamic process by which the self was continually reshaped through ongoing mental struggle. Masculinity, like truth, had to be strenuously fought for—though James defined strenuousness in terms of intellectual rather than physical fitness. James developed this method most fully in Pragmatism (1907), where he combined an empirical, rationalistic “tough-minded” stance and an idealist, ethical “tender-minded” stance into a “pragmatic method” by which truth is evaluated and revised based on actual lived experience.

Ultimately, James urged men to believe actively and willfully in a spiritual, transcendent order of the universe and to remain open to continual rethinking, rather than resting passively on old-fashioned, inherited dogmatism. He wished to hold on to moral and ethical values and foundations of society as long as they could be concretely applied in real life; at the same time, he placed a premium on the rigorous use of empirical data, while insisting that their value stood in direct relation to the extent they served larger ethical purposes.

Many others would borrow from James's ideas about manly individualism: He counted among his students President Theodore Roosevelt (whose interpretation of the strenuous life in support of imperialism James publicly opposed); the author Van Wyck Brooks, who advocated the founding of a new, democratic culture that would transcend inherited ideas about manliness; the Harvard philosopher George Santayana; the psychoanalyst Granville Stanley Hall; and the black civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, whose thoughts on race and manhood in Souls of Black Folk (1903) reflects James influence.

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