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Though it is a commonplace to link Jack London and the German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, this paper shows that the most pervasive philosophical influence on America’s prolific and popular turn-of-the-last century novelist was, in fact, classical American pragmatism. In addition to the works of the founders of pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, London’s thought was especially shaped by the biologist turned philosopher and president of Stanford University, Daniel Starr Jordan. This paper lays out the basic positions of American pragmatism, notably its pluralistic and materialistic dimensions that London dramatized throughout his works, showing that these themes are especially prominent in “The Sea-Wolf” (published in 1904) and “South of the Slot” (published in 1909).
Keywords: Jack London, William James, American philosophical pragmatism, Nietzsche
Introduction
While virtually every narrative expresses a “philosophy”, some writers—Jack London is notably one of them—take great care to shape their writing to expressly articulate (and often critique) specific philosophical positions. London’s letters make clear that he was not only keenly interested in philosophy for its own sake, but he also saw his stories as an opportunity to have readers to confront philosophical ideas. Hence paying attention to the metaphysical and moral positions that undergird his works will pay rich pedagogical dividends and will add significant dimensions to scholarly commentary on this prolific and popular turn of the (last) century American writer. While we do not usually think of reading the essays of the founders of classical American philosophy, the pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, alongside the works of London, there is much to be gained from doing so. Accordingly, this paper will provide teachers and students with an introduction to a distinctively American philosophy—pluralistic, materialistic, and pragmatic—that Jack London’s espoused.
Jack London, Autodidact
Jack London was a world-class reader of books. He reports that he must have learned to read at the age of four or five because he could not remember a time when he did not read. He read with relish and rigor, direction, and energy to entertain and to educate himself. At his untimely death at the age of 40, his estate contained more than 15,000 books. Hamilton’s invaluable research volume, The Tools of My Trade”: The Annotated Books in Jack London’s Library (1986) summarized the comments, markings, and inscriptions that London made in
metaphysics: “I am”, he insists, “a materialistic monist” (Labor et al., 1988, p. 603); “a ‘positive scientific thinker’”(Labor et al., 1988, p. 1339); “All my reasoning is of the positive, scientific school” (Labor et al., 1988, p. 1504). More expansively, he explains that “It is my conclusion that for as long as I live, I shall be heavily ballasted with this material world in which I live, and of which it seems that I am a very material part” (Labor et al., 1988, p. 1445). Further, even though the last novel published during his lifetime, The Star Rover, celebrated spiritualism and immortality, London adamantly insists, “In The Star Rover I merely took the right of the fiction writer to exploit reincarnation. Again, I repeat, I do not believe in reincarnation at all… Neither am I a believer in immortality. I believe that when I die I am dead, I mean I am dead for all time and forever” (Labor et al., 1988, pp. 1502, 1504).
Peirce, Jordan and a Scientific Model for Philosophy
London’s straightforward and significant delineation of his materialistic position is his account of his philosophy of psychology. Especially challenging for materialists are problems concerned with the genesis of our belief in personal identity, our sense of uniqueness and our awareness of self-consciousness and the need to provide convincing mechanisms to explicate character formation and ethical development. On these difficult philosophical/psychological issues, note the sophistication of London’s thinking in two letters, the first to Henry Mean Bland on August 23, 1906 and the second to Ralph Kaspar on June 25, 1914. London writes:
As a state of consciousness, arising out of the aggregation of matter that constitutes me, I believe in the soul. But in the immortal soul I do not believe. (Labor et al., 1988, p. 603)
I see the soul as nothing else than the sum of the activities of the organism plus personal habits, memories, and the experiences of the organism, plus inherited habits, memories, experiences, of the organism. I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you or I smashed. (Labor et al., 1988, p. 1339)
In these statements, London neatly recapitulates the “Stream of Thought” and “The Consciousness of Self”chapters of William James’ The Principles of Psychology (1890).
Beyond assigning the works of James, the author has had good pedagogical success with having students search out early issues of Popular Science Monthly where the initial formulations of the pragmatic position appeared and where the early commentaries and reactions to this philosophy were printed. For instance, the November 1877 and December 1878 numbers, less than a half dozen years after its founding, this journal published a pair of articles by Charles Sanders Peirce, “Illustrations in the Logic of Science: ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’”, which became seminal statements of pragmatism. These two essays by Peirce commanded the close attention of Jordan (and in turn, Jack London). Jordan’s appreciation of pragmatism is both keen and insightful; he also believed that his own essay “The Stability of Truth” had made a significant contribution to the emerging “school” of classical American pragmatism. In his autobiography Jordan comments:
whose sole advanced degree was in medicine. Jordan’s articulation of pragmatism crucially appreciates Peirce’s initial premise that philosophy has to repudiate the Cartesian project of building a lasting philosophy upon an indubitable starting point. Instead he urges philosophers to embrace the modest and achievable posture of fallibilism that is modeled after the self-corrective methods and probabilistic goals of science. Peirce suggested that the door to inquiry must remain open, because even long-established and presumably well-supported and reasonable opinions might be revised and could be improved by further study and investigation. For Peirce, a true opinion is one that eventually emerges in the convergence of opinion by expert inquirers.
Clearly, Jordan’s use of science as a model for philosophy particularly appealed to London’s materialistic and empirical bent. Jordan’s argument for the interplay between science and philosophy thoroughly convinced London. Jordan celebrates the utility of scientific methods in providing highly reliable and genuinely practical results while candidly admitting (like Peirce and James before him) that absolute and unchanging truth is not achievable by humans: “It is therefore no reproach to human science that it deals with human relations, not with absolute truths… science has no ‘ultimate truths’. There are none know to man” (Jordan, 1897, p. 646). Jordan conceded (1897) that “As science advances in any field, philosophy is driven away from it” (p. 647); this does not mean, however, that the discipline of philosophy will be eliminated. Instead, for Jordan and the pragmatists, this implies that once philosophy’s goals and methods emulate science it, too, will be able to contribute proposals and procedures that will contribute to human welfare and progress. Gone will be the philosophical claims of Enlightenment thinkers like Kant, Descartes, and Hegel. Jordan (1897) observed:
The history of human thought is filled with the rise of philosophic doctrines, laws, and generalizations not drawn from human experience and not sanctioned by science. The attempt to use these ideas as a basis of human action has been one of the most fruitful sources of human misery. (p. 749)
If we seek to help instead of harm humans, Jordan (1897) recommended that we devote ourselves to applied science and practical philosophy:
There is no alleviation for the woes of life, “save the absolute veracity of action; the resolute facing of the world as it is”… The intense practicality of all this must be recognized. The truths of science are approximate, not absolute. They must be stated in terms of human consciousness, and they can never be dissevered from possible human action. (p. 752)
Practical philosophy and applied science, equally at work on human problems, generate hypotheses to be tested. Thereafter these beliefs, sanctioned by experience, furnish us with patterns of actions that will satisfactorily guide our environmentally adaptive behavior. We are already familiar with how highly London prized Jordan’s conclusion, “How do we know this is true? Because belief in it adds to the safety of life, We can trust our lives to it. If it were an illusion it would kill, because action based on illusion leads to death” (Jordan, 1897, p. 754), since he directly inserted its key sentences into Chapter 37 of “The Sea-Wolf”.
There is, then, little doubt that London closely studied Jordan’s essays and that, in great measure, Jordan’s pragmatism shaped his own philosophy. Some eight years after he had Maud Brewster quote Jordan, and 15 years after Jordan’s essay “The Stability of Truth” was published, in his October 11, 1912 letter to Charles E. Woodruff, London clearly remembers what he had read. He concluded his letter by rehearsing the central maxims of pragmatism, “As Dr. Jordan put it long ago, that is the test of truth. Does it work. Will you trust your lives to it?”(Labor et al., 1988, p. 1091).
A Word of Caution and Correction Regarding London and Nietzsche
Since commentators have so often linked London and Nietzsche, it is imperative for teachers to make sure their students correctly understand the situation. There is no doubt that London had a remarkable and intense interest in the thought of Nietzsche. He told several correspondents, including Charmian Kittredge, that he had read a great deal of Nietzsche in 1904—the year “The Sea-Wolf” was published. In fact, in September 1904 he writes his future(second) wife, “Have been getting hold of some of Neitzsche [sic]. I’ll turn you loose first on his Genealogy of Morals—and after that, something you’ll like—Thus Spake Zarathustra” (Labor et al., 1988, p. 446). In 1906, he wrote Frederic Bamford, “Personally I like Nietzsche tremendously, but I cannot go all the way with him” (Labor et al., 1988, p. 584). In 1912, he told George P. Brett, “I, as you know, am in the opposite intellectual camp from that of Nietzsche. Yet no man in my own camp stirs me as does Nietzsche or as does De Casseres” (Labor et al., 1988, p. 1072), and later the same year he wrote directly to De Casseres: “The bunch of manuscripts you sent me was great… By ‘St. Nietzsche’, they’re the real stuff!” (Labor et al., 1988, p. 1085). Hamilton notes that London’s library contained annotated copies of five of Nietzsche’s works—The Case of Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche Contra Wagner (all 1896), The Dawn of Day (1903), and A Genealogy of Morals (1897).
And so, even if Nietzsche’s dramatic rhetoric “stirred” and inspired London, few, if any, specifically Nietzschean philosophical positions, claims or arguments made their way into London’s works. Further, London himself believed that he had gained critical distance from the iconoclastic German thinker. In 1915, 11 years after“The Sea-Wolf” appeared, even as he expresses admiration for aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, he dismisses him as an intellectual and philosophical mentor:
To H. E. Kelsey (April 3): “Please read my Sea-Wolf and my Martin Eden—both novels being indictments of the superman philosophy of Nietzsche and of modern German ideas” (Labor et al., 1988, p. 1439).
To J. H. Greer (August 4):
I have been more stimulated by Nietzsche than by any other writer in the world. At the same time I have been an intellectual enemy to Nietzsche. Both Martin Eden and The Sea Wolf were indictments by me of the Nietzschean philosophy of the super-man—of course both such indictments were based on the vital lie of life. (Labor et al., 1988, p. 1485)
I have again and again written books that failed to get across. Long years ago, at the very beginning of my writing career, I attacked Nietzsche and his super-man idea. That was in The Sea Wolf. Lots of people read The Sea Wolf, no one discovered that it was an attack upon the super-man philosophy. (Labor et al., 1988, p. 1513)
In a word, despite a wide-spread perception and oft-repeated observations, London’s philosophy is not Nietzschean. Instead, teachers and students who correctly understand the materialistic and pragmatic aspects of London’s world view will gain an appreciation for the intellectual depth of his works. Further, especially with regard to “The Sea-Wolf” and “South of the Slot”, there is much of value to be gained in regarding London, in his own right, as an interesting and convincing American philosopher.
Keywords: Jack London, William James, American philosophical pragmatism, Nietzsche
Introduction
While virtually every narrative expresses a “philosophy”, some writers—Jack London is notably one of them—take great care to shape their writing to expressly articulate (and often critique) specific philosophical positions. London’s letters make clear that he was not only keenly interested in philosophy for its own sake, but he also saw his stories as an opportunity to have readers to confront philosophical ideas. Hence paying attention to the metaphysical and moral positions that undergird his works will pay rich pedagogical dividends and will add significant dimensions to scholarly commentary on this prolific and popular turn of the (last) century American writer. While we do not usually think of reading the essays of the founders of classical American philosophy, the pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, alongside the works of London, there is much to be gained from doing so. Accordingly, this paper will provide teachers and students with an introduction to a distinctively American philosophy—pluralistic, materialistic, and pragmatic—that Jack London’s espoused.
Jack London, Autodidact
Jack London was a world-class reader of books. He reports that he must have learned to read at the age of four or five because he could not remember a time when he did not read. He read with relish and rigor, direction, and energy to entertain and to educate himself. At his untimely death at the age of 40, his estate contained more than 15,000 books. Hamilton’s invaluable research volume, The Tools of My Trade”: The Annotated Books in Jack London’s Library (1986) summarized the comments, markings, and inscriptions that London made in
metaphysics: “I am”, he insists, “a materialistic monist” (Labor et al., 1988, p. 603); “a ‘positive scientific thinker’”(Labor et al., 1988, p. 1339); “All my reasoning is of the positive, scientific school” (Labor et al., 1988, p. 1504). More expansively, he explains that “It is my conclusion that for as long as I live, I shall be heavily ballasted with this material world in which I live, and of which it seems that I am a very material part” (Labor et al., 1988, p. 1445). Further, even though the last novel published during his lifetime, The Star Rover, celebrated spiritualism and immortality, London adamantly insists, “In The Star Rover I merely took the right of the fiction writer to exploit reincarnation. Again, I repeat, I do not believe in reincarnation at all… Neither am I a believer in immortality. I believe that when I die I am dead, I mean I am dead for all time and forever” (Labor et al., 1988, pp. 1502, 1504).
Peirce, Jordan and a Scientific Model for Philosophy
London’s straightforward and significant delineation of his materialistic position is his account of his philosophy of psychology. Especially challenging for materialists are problems concerned with the genesis of our belief in personal identity, our sense of uniqueness and our awareness of self-consciousness and the need to provide convincing mechanisms to explicate character formation and ethical development. On these difficult philosophical/psychological issues, note the sophistication of London’s thinking in two letters, the first to Henry Mean Bland on August 23, 1906 and the second to Ralph Kaspar on June 25, 1914. London writes:
As a state of consciousness, arising out of the aggregation of matter that constitutes me, I believe in the soul. But in the immortal soul I do not believe. (Labor et al., 1988, p. 603)
I see the soul as nothing else than the sum of the activities of the organism plus personal habits, memories, and the experiences of the organism, plus inherited habits, memories, experiences, of the organism. I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you or I smashed. (Labor et al., 1988, p. 1339)
In these statements, London neatly recapitulates the “Stream of Thought” and “The Consciousness of Self”chapters of William James’ The Principles of Psychology (1890).
Beyond assigning the works of James, the author has had good pedagogical success with having students search out early issues of Popular Science Monthly where the initial formulations of the pragmatic position appeared and where the early commentaries and reactions to this philosophy were printed. For instance, the November 1877 and December 1878 numbers, less than a half dozen years after its founding, this journal published a pair of articles by Charles Sanders Peirce, “Illustrations in the Logic of Science: ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’”, which became seminal statements of pragmatism. These two essays by Peirce commanded the close attention of Jordan (and in turn, Jack London). Jordan’s appreciation of pragmatism is both keen and insightful; he also believed that his own essay “The Stability of Truth” had made a significant contribution to the emerging “school” of classical American pragmatism. In his autobiography Jordan comments:
whose sole advanced degree was in medicine. Jordan’s articulation of pragmatism crucially appreciates Peirce’s initial premise that philosophy has to repudiate the Cartesian project of building a lasting philosophy upon an indubitable starting point. Instead he urges philosophers to embrace the modest and achievable posture of fallibilism that is modeled after the self-corrective methods and probabilistic goals of science. Peirce suggested that the door to inquiry must remain open, because even long-established and presumably well-supported and reasonable opinions might be revised and could be improved by further study and investigation. For Peirce, a true opinion is one that eventually emerges in the convergence of opinion by expert inquirers.
Clearly, Jordan’s use of science as a model for philosophy particularly appealed to London’s materialistic and empirical bent. Jordan’s argument for the interplay between science and philosophy thoroughly convinced London. Jordan celebrates the utility of scientific methods in providing highly reliable and genuinely practical results while candidly admitting (like Peirce and James before him) that absolute and unchanging truth is not achievable by humans: “It is therefore no reproach to human science that it deals with human relations, not with absolute truths… science has no ‘ultimate truths’. There are none know to man” (Jordan, 1897, p. 646). Jordan conceded (1897) that “As science advances in any field, philosophy is driven away from it” (p. 647); this does not mean, however, that the discipline of philosophy will be eliminated. Instead, for Jordan and the pragmatists, this implies that once philosophy’s goals and methods emulate science it, too, will be able to contribute proposals and procedures that will contribute to human welfare and progress. Gone will be the philosophical claims of Enlightenment thinkers like Kant, Descartes, and Hegel. Jordan (1897) observed:
The history of human thought is filled with the rise of philosophic doctrines, laws, and generalizations not drawn from human experience and not sanctioned by science. The attempt to use these ideas as a basis of human action has been one of the most fruitful sources of human misery. (p. 749)
If we seek to help instead of harm humans, Jordan (1897) recommended that we devote ourselves to applied science and practical philosophy:
There is no alleviation for the woes of life, “save the absolute veracity of action; the resolute facing of the world as it is”… The intense practicality of all this must be recognized. The truths of science are approximate, not absolute. They must be stated in terms of human consciousness, and they can never be dissevered from possible human action. (p. 752)
Practical philosophy and applied science, equally at work on human problems, generate hypotheses to be tested. Thereafter these beliefs, sanctioned by experience, furnish us with patterns of actions that will satisfactorily guide our environmentally adaptive behavior. We are already familiar with how highly London prized Jordan’s conclusion, “How do we know this is true? Because belief in it adds to the safety of life, We can trust our lives to it. If it were an illusion it would kill, because action based on illusion leads to death” (Jordan, 1897, p. 754), since he directly inserted its key sentences into Chapter 37 of “The Sea-Wolf”.
There is, then, little doubt that London closely studied Jordan’s essays and that, in great measure, Jordan’s pragmatism shaped his own philosophy. Some eight years after he had Maud Brewster quote Jordan, and 15 years after Jordan’s essay “The Stability of Truth” was published, in his October 11, 1912 letter to Charles E. Woodruff, London clearly remembers what he had read. He concluded his letter by rehearsing the central maxims of pragmatism, “As Dr. Jordan put it long ago, that is the test of truth. Does it work. Will you trust your lives to it?”(Labor et al., 1988, p. 1091).
A Word of Caution and Correction Regarding London and Nietzsche
Since commentators have so often linked London and Nietzsche, it is imperative for teachers to make sure their students correctly understand the situation. There is no doubt that London had a remarkable and intense interest in the thought of Nietzsche. He told several correspondents, including Charmian Kittredge, that he had read a great deal of Nietzsche in 1904—the year “The Sea-Wolf” was published. In fact, in September 1904 he writes his future(second) wife, “Have been getting hold of some of Neitzsche [sic]. I’ll turn you loose first on his Genealogy of Morals—and after that, something you’ll like—Thus Spake Zarathustra” (Labor et al., 1988, p. 446). In 1906, he wrote Frederic Bamford, “Personally I like Nietzsche tremendously, but I cannot go all the way with him” (Labor et al., 1988, p. 584). In 1912, he told George P. Brett, “I, as you know, am in the opposite intellectual camp from that of Nietzsche. Yet no man in my own camp stirs me as does Nietzsche or as does De Casseres” (Labor et al., 1988, p. 1072), and later the same year he wrote directly to De Casseres: “The bunch of manuscripts you sent me was great… By ‘St. Nietzsche’, they’re the real stuff!” (Labor et al., 1988, p. 1085). Hamilton notes that London’s library contained annotated copies of five of Nietzsche’s works—The Case of Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche Contra Wagner (all 1896), The Dawn of Day (1903), and A Genealogy of Morals (1897).
And so, even if Nietzsche’s dramatic rhetoric “stirred” and inspired London, few, if any, specifically Nietzschean philosophical positions, claims or arguments made their way into London’s works. Further, London himself believed that he had gained critical distance from the iconoclastic German thinker. In 1915, 11 years after“The Sea-Wolf” appeared, even as he expresses admiration for aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, he dismisses him as an intellectual and philosophical mentor:
To H. E. Kelsey (April 3): “Please read my Sea-Wolf and my Martin Eden—both novels being indictments of the superman philosophy of Nietzsche and of modern German ideas” (Labor et al., 1988, p. 1439).
To J. H. Greer (August 4):
I have been more stimulated by Nietzsche than by any other writer in the world. At the same time I have been an intellectual enemy to Nietzsche. Both Martin Eden and The Sea Wolf were indictments by me of the Nietzschean philosophy of the super-man—of course both such indictments were based on the vital lie of life. (Labor et al., 1988, p. 1485)
I have again and again written books that failed to get across. Long years ago, at the very beginning of my writing career, I attacked Nietzsche and his super-man idea. That was in The Sea Wolf. Lots of people read The Sea Wolf, no one discovered that it was an attack upon the super-man philosophy. (Labor et al., 1988, p. 1513)
In a word, despite a wide-spread perception and oft-repeated observations, London’s philosophy is not Nietzschean. Instead, teachers and students who correctly understand the materialistic and pragmatic aspects of London’s world view will gain an appreciation for the intellectual depth of his works. Further, especially with regard to “The Sea-Wolf” and “South of the Slot”, there is much of value to be gained in regarding London, in his own right, as an interesting and convincing American philosopher.