What is human life worth? William James and Bossuet

Il a eu le paradoxe pour parrain, et le poesie pour marraine – Delvau on Gerard Nerval

In the third lecture of William James’ Pragmatism (1907), James gives us his sense of the pragmatic response to the great metaphysical question: is there only matter, or is there spirit too? A question which implies: is there a God?  And if there is not, does this have a bearing on the meaning of life in a world that is an ephemeral collection of molecules, which will be utterly swept away as all solar systems are ultimately swept away?

James takes Herbert Spencer as his defender of materialism – although, save for the Darwinism, the position Spencer defends could as well have been taken from Helvetius. Spencer sees no problem in substituting matter for God, and James concedes that Spencer is right not to think of matter as somehow “dirty” (James doesn’t explore, as 20^th century anthropologists will, dirtiness itself as a cultural construct, the abject pole in the sacred economy). At this point in the lecture, James paints an interesting counter-example to matter’s “dirtiness”:

Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To any one who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact of matter could have taken for a time that precious form ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate cooperates, lends itself to all life’s purposes.”

The intrusion here of the dead child or parent, this semi-explicit flashback, lends to James’s essay, at this point, a certain hortatory tone that derives from the sermon. It is not for nothing that James’s father was a religious figure, the leading American Swedenborgian. Metaphysics, for James I think, comes out of the funeral – out of death.

Which is my justification to compare what James is doing to a funeral sermon – an oraison funébre – by  Bossuet, the 17^th century French Bishop. England’s Anglican preachers, Donne, John Taylor, etc., were perhaps the greatest English artists of the sermon. In France, Bossuet holds that title. I’ve been reading his famous funeral sermon for Madame – Henriette d’Angleterre, the sister of Charles II of England and the (unfortunate) wife of Monsieur, Louis XIV’s brother . Monsieur was not into the female sex – at least sexually, although he loved dressing up as a woman. Unfortunately for him, he had to be married and his wife had to produce children, hence the incredibly unhappy marriage of Henriette. Not that she was incredibly unhappy – much of the time, she was entertaining lovers too, which probably included Louis XIV. Her problem with her husband came about as much from the fact that she was infinitely intellectually superior to him, and everybody knew it. Henriette was the friend and patron of Corneille, Moliere and Racine, all of whom dedicated work to her. She was, as well, Bossuet’s friend – he was her confessor. Her sudden death has given rise to speculation that she was poisoned, and the case has never been cleared. Monsieur’s second wife was told by a servant a story about one of the friends of Monsieur’s banished lover, the Duc de Lorraine, that seems to have been told to Saint Simon too, who records it in his Memoires. The story could easily be an Edgar Allen Poe story, replete with poisoned cups, substituted drinks, etc., etc.

Bossuet tells us in the sermon that her death, which was so sudden, left him unprepared to prepare her funeral sermon. So opening the Scriptures he came by chance to Ecclesiastes, which offered him the texts that he uses to structure the sermon. Already, then, the listener is clued in to accident as not only possible in the great wide world, striking down princesses, but also as a formal element in the sermon itself. Quite a neat trick.

Accident led to Ecclesiastes, and Ecclesiastes leads Bossuet to contemplate vanity. To an extent that is unparalleled in the Bible, the writer of Ecclesiastes seems prepared to write off the creation as an accident – defining our delusive satisfactions in that  accident as vanity.

There has long been a Christian thematic about the vanity of the world, and Bossuet follows it up to a point, where he asks if this is all the story. If man himself is a vanity, did God send his only child to die “for a shadow”?

This moment, this question, begins a re-ascent of the other side of the Christian scold, the discourse of amour de soi. It is a re-ascent that is not only rhetorical, but that points to the desire for “balance” that was not only inscribed in the classical age’s aesthetic, but as well in its metaphysics. Balance is not merely a formal preference, but a sort of end-state towards which rationality pushes the soul.  At the point of balance, the forces arrayed against that the forces arrayed for can be transcended. Balance is the grace of reason.

Balance is, as well, the grace of economics in the classical age. Fortuna plays a zero-sum game. When God exchanges his life for “man”, man must be as valuable as God’s life. Man’s redemption is, then, man’s value. And yet underneath this placid understanding of the ransom of souls is another thought – what if man is not worth God’s death? Or what if our reckoning here is absurd, an exchange of the infinite for the finite, of all for zero, of light for shade?

That fierce baroque irrationality breaks through in Pascal, but not in Bossuet. And even Pascal retreats to a less absurd articulation of the terms – Pascal’s wager is a way out of the question.

Bossuet himself considers the terms as double: on the one hand, the exchange of the infinite for the finite, in the world’s terms, is absurd – instead of revealing the value of the finite, it reveals its insignificance. Measured against God, however, man’s acts become suddenly important.

“Oh God, says the prophet king, you have made my day measurable, and my substance is nothing before you.” It is so, Christians: everything that is measured finishes; and everything that is born to finish never completely escapes nothingness, into which it is soon replunged. If our being, if our substance, is nothing, what about everything we build on it? No edifice is more solid than its foundation, nor is the accident attached to being more real than being itself.”

Bossuet’s movement pre-figures Hegel’s 19^th century notion of the two infinities, one of which is simple endlessness, and one of which is the Idea, the Spirit. The Spirit is the heir of this escape from the universal dissolvent of the bad infinity that is, ultimately, worth nothing more than a program that gives you an algorithm for always adding +1.  A program that is useless.

To return to James: in his pragmatic metaphysics, there is a variation of Bossuet’s dialectic, which goes to an interesting place.

James contrasts two time frames – or, really, two frames of reference which seem to be distinguished temporally.

One is that frame in which the entire contents of the world are irrevocably given – which is how James defines the “past”: “to end at that very moment, and to have no future, and then let a theist and a materialist apply rival explanations to its history.”

Immediately one senses that we are in trouble with this thought experiment when we see it commences with a “then”. Thought experiments are much more difficult to do than is thought of, for the most part, in philosophy. Here in James’ scenario, we encounter a scenario that seems to be larger than the philosopher’s attempt to understand or imagine it. If indeed the world is vanished in some absolute sense, the one thing that we won’t have is a materialist or a theist then applying their analysis to it. This is, in a sense, an example of Hegel’s bad infinity – the confusion of a finite endlessness and the infinite interiorization of the Spirit – which is something like what Christians like Bossuet would call eternity. In James’ scenario, the materialist and the theist exist only in a condition of impossibility. Any recollection, analysis, theory, expression, pulse beat – violates the conditions of their existential credentialing. It is important to remark on the invalidity of the thought experiment – that is, to remark on the fact that if a philosopher can imagine a thing, it doesn’t mean that he or she can imagine it well – before remarking on the fact that for James, this thought experiment is meant to lead us to what we might call the Ecclesiastes doctrine: all is vanity. All distinction between the theist and the materialist, for James, vanishes into uselessness.

Such is the prelude to his second scenario, which presses on the idea of the future:

“… in every genuine metaphysical debate some practical issue, however conjectural and remote, is involved. To realize this, revert with me to our question and place yourself, this time, in the world we live in, in the worth that has a future, that is yet uncompleted while we speak.”

Here, again, James has an uncertain grasp of the temporal mode. For the first scenario too has a future – unless of course time itself is abolished. Unconsciously, James is supposing a wholly subjective cast to the future – the future is only a human perception of time. It is upon this foundation – a shaky one, from Bossuet’s viewpoint – that he moves to a very American moment of “positive thinking”.

While the materialist has nothing to say about the nihilism of the endpoint, the theist, from James’s point of view, does. “… tragedy is only provisional  and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things… Here, then, is the different emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the delicate consequences which the differences entail lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism.”

This, then, becomes James’s argument about the truth of the matter:

“Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.” 

For a long period of time after World War One – perhaps all the way up to the 21^st century – this kind of thing was damning to the modernist. Hemingway mocks this kind of American optimism in one of the last lines in The Sun Also Rises:  “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” For the modernist, better the nihilism of the final end, as imperfectly envisioned by James, then the flatness of “positive thinking”. In American culture, though, positive thought has had a strong presence as a sort of defense of capitalism and the American order. From James to Dale Carnegie we can draw a line. Oddly, at the turn of the twentieth century there was a strong rush on the citadels of pessimism. Happiness therapy engages in just this kind of pragmatist sleight of hand. At the same time that Happiness therapy started to gain a foothold in academia, the positive thought meme in the general culture at large started to deflate. We have had more than enough evidence, over the last twenty years, of a despair culture – a culture of rising suicide and drug overdose rates. Meanwhile, the vision of the world’s end has become more real, and it doesn’t involve the sun exploding as much as it involves the climate shifting due to our very human success in making this world ours – even to the egotistical extent of calling this the Anthropocene.

Bossuet, in this sense, is less of a monument now, and more of a conversation partner, while James, in this instance, is less of a conversation partner and more of a monument.  Is there any importance to human life if it isn’t validated by some enormous, trans-human sacrifice? Are these our choices?