When Fierrabras (D796), Schubert's last completed and best opera, received its Austrian premiere in 1988, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung proclaimed in its bold headline: “against the judgment of history: Schubert's ‘Fierrabras’ rescued triumphantly.” Although not all critics agreed, the headline succinctly captured the issues at stake in the Austrian premiere of Fierrabras, and indeed in any modern consideration of Schubert's operas in general. For “history” – some notable voices aside, such as Maurice J. E. Brown and Elizabeth Norman McKay – has generally judged Schubert a failure as an opera composer. The Vienna Fierrabras revealed the risks of making such judgments without experiencing these works in the theater.

With the exception of three commissioned works, Schubert's theatrical works were neither performed during his lifetime, nor for a long time afterward. While some of his Singspiels have enjoyed intermittent exposure, his “grand” operas have almost never been performed in their original form. For example, there have been performances of a work such as Alfonso und Estrella (D732) in abridged versions (Franz Liszt, Weimar, 1854), freely adapted versions (J. N. Fuchs, Vienna, 1882), bowdlerized versions (Kurt Honolka's Die Wunderinsel, 1958), and concert versions. Recently, there have even begun to be full performances, although Alfonso, unlike Fierrabras, has not yet made it to a major international opera house. In short, the generally negative body of received opinion about Schubert's operatic talent and accomplishment remains largely untested in the theater.

In the late eighteenth century the composition of Lieder was principally an amateur pursuit, taken up by composers who concentrated their efforts on this genre alone. Composers of the more acclaimed public genres, whether instrumental music or opera, only occasionally turned to song as a diversion, which explains why there are so few truly distinguished songs by Mozart and Beethoven. Even the most memorable of their songs only marginally challenge the amateur status of the genre, or else, like Beethoven's Adelaide, they resemble Italian aria more than the simple folk manner of the German Lied. Beethoven's An die feme Geliebte, Op. 98, is the only attempt by a composer of stature to compose a more ambitious work from songs so deeply invested in the Volkston. Yet significantly, the immediate roots of Beethoven's only song cycle lie much less in the tradition of the north-German Lied, with which he had had contact from his earliest years in Bonn, than in his extensive confrontation with British folksong resulting from the arrangements he was commissioned to provide for the popular series of Irish, Scotch, and Welsh folksongs issued by the English publisher George Thomson. (Haydn, too, had been enlisted in this enterprise.) The deep association of Lied with the naive and heartfelt expression of folksong must have served as a form of restraint as well as inspiration for Beethoven, defining both the character and the outer limits of the genre.

“Poor Schubert.” Ever since his death on November 19, 1828, this expression appears over and over again in the writings of Schubert's friends, critics, and biographers. One reason, of course, is that he died so young, at the age of thirty-one. More prosaically, the adjective refers to the composer's precarious financial state throughout his life, although he was far from the destitute artist later sentimentalized in novels, operettas, and movies. The tag also conveys the sense that Schubert was neglected, that his gifts went largely unrecognized.

How and why did these recurring images of Schubert come about? Their outlines are remarkably consistent, from initial portrayals found in his friends’ reminiscences, to the first entries in German encyclopedias of the 1830s, to accounts in even the Encyclopaedia Britannica at the turn of the century and in college textbooks today.

One can easily pick out a few more brush strokes in the established portrait: Schubert is viewed as a natural and naive genius who wrote incomparable songs – the Liederfürst (“Prince of Songs”). And then there are his festive friends in the background. Even if the public at large ignored him, at least he enjoyed the loyal support of his circle. Always the best man, never the groom, Schubert is seen as unlucky in love. Early death meant that his artistic mission was left unfinished. Even with so many miserable circumstances, Schubert's music laughs through its tears, and the maudlin conflation of his life and works in myriad biographies and fictional treatments makes readers past and present weep. Poor Schubert.

The conviviality of Schubert's milieu thoroughly colors our image of him. It seems fitting that his contemporaries should have known him best not only for his Lieder but also for his work in other genres conducive to friendly music-making by amateurs. This social music included part-songs and dances for solo piano, as well as pieces for two pianists at one instrument – a medium, Alfred Einstein noted, that is “symbolic of friendship.” Because they suited the tastes of the rising middle classes and the configuration of the Viennese music world, many such compositions by Schubert were published and performed during his lifetime, yet they are often overlooked today. Even in his Vienna, sociability would not usually have been considered an elevated attribute, and each genre had further limitations. Despite the popularity of the social music, it could never have ranked high in the system of genres.

Einstein, for one, was bothered by the “sociable” Schubert, in particular the composer of the four-hand music, whom he set in opposition to the “deeply serious Schubert,” the “real and great Schubert” of the later string quartets and piano sonatas. The implicit standard to which he held Schubert was, of course, Beethoven, the master of the string quartet and piano sonata who expended little effort on his work in the lesser genres. Although their careers overlapped, the two men had come of age as composers in different circumstances: Schubert did not compose for the aristocracy as Beethoven had. If he sometimes wrote with publishers (as opposed to patrons) in mind, Schubert for the most part did not regard his social pieces as mere potboilers.

Long underestimated, Schubert's compositions for piano have recently begun to assume their rightful place beside Beethoven's legacy as works of almost unparalleled expressive range and depth. Several factors contributed to their neglect: the fact that much of this music remained unpublished during Schubert's lifetime; the dominance, in these works, of musical expression over technical virtuosity; and the overpowering influence of Beethoven, whose works set standards that are not directly applicable to Schubert. Complaints of an alleged looseness of organization in Schubert's music, as expressed by critics like Theodor W. Adorno, who once described Schubert's thematic structure as a “potpourri,” have often arisen from an inadequate understanding of the aesthetic idiom of these works. Schubert's music is less deterministic than Beethoven's in that it does not present a self-sufficient sequence of events; it seems that the music could have taken a different turn at many points. Yet these very shifts in perspective are often exploited by Schubert as structural elements in the musical form, and they also embody a latent psychological symbolism. A key to this symbolism is found in Schubert's songs, in which the protagonist, or Romantic wanderer – who assumes the role of the lyrical subject – is so often confronted by an indifferent or hostile reality. Musically, Schubert uses a combination of heightened thematic contrast, juxtaposition of major and minor keys, and abrupt modulation to reflect this duality between internal and external experience, or imagination and perception – between the beautiful, bright dreams of the protagonist, on the one hand, and a bleak external reality, on the other.

This was the way the eminent Austrian author and painter Adalbert Stifter (1805–68), writing during the mid 1840s, recalled his first impression of Vienna. He penned this description in a thinly veiled autobiographical sketch about himself and two friends who came to Vienna to enter the university. The year was 1826. Stifter was twenty-one years old when he arrived from Bohemia to take up the study of law. Franz Schubert, already quite well known in the city, was twenty-nine and living with his close companion Franz von Schober, two blocks from St. Stephen's.

To the young Stifter – and to most other literate contemporaries of his generation raised in the German-speaking regions of the Habsburg Empire – Vienna was already the stuff of legend. It was a place of seductive paradoxes and symbol of both past grandeur and modernity. Danger, opportunity, squalor, and beauty existed side by side. Vienna with its own uniquely alluring surface possessed (as Stifter recounted) the power to render the ugly seemingly invisible, as if by magic. Yet the conditions of daily life in the city during Schubert's adult life were grim if not sinister. Vienna simultaneously ennobled and threatened the lives of those drawn to it.

In “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (WB,* 184-216), William James offers a general survey of moral philosophy and its central problems. Its main interests lie in answering what James calls the “casuistic” question of the “measure of the various goods and ills which men recognise,” and in the role which religious belief may play there. In that standard context of a justification for moral principles, he veers toward a utilitarian view but is also critical of any such philosophical task. But before he discusses that question he also identifies and answers two others; first a “psychological” question about the “historical origin of our moral ideas” and second a “metaphysical” question about the “meaning of the words 'good,' 'ill' and 'obligation' ” (185). The apparent contrast between those two questions is, however, blurred in James's answers to them. For even the metaphysical question, it seems, has more to do with the origins of moral discriminations than with what we should understand as an account of the meanings of those moral terms. This raises a general problem about James's enterprise in those two initial sections which I want to consider in this essay.

The pronouncements on the nature of truth in Pragmatism evoked howls of indignation (e.g., Russell 1945) as well as exaggerated praise. The howls (and some of the praise) came from readers who thought that James identified truth as whatever it gives us “satisfaction” to believe: the critics believed that this amounted to irrationalism, while the enthusiasts thought that the idea that truth is jibing with reality deserves to be abandoned (Rorty 1982), and the Italian pragmatist Giovanni Papini thought that irrationalism is a good thing (Perry 1935, 2:570-9).

The howlers and the enthusiasts were careless readers, however. They virtually ignored what James wrote about truth elsewhere. But it is not easy to say in a few words what James did think about truth, for, as I shall argue, James's view developed in complicated ways as he worked out his metaphysical system. In the present essay, I isolate the elements in James's theory of truth and show how they were linked by James's metaphysics of radical empiricism.

In thinking about William James, it helps to remember that James not only dedicated Pragmatism to John Stuart Mill, but reiterated some of Mill's most controversial claims. In “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” James says that “The only possible reason there can be why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is desired” (WB, 149). This echo of the most ridiculed sentence in Mill's Utilitarianism is, I suspect, deliberate. One of James's most heartfelt convictions was that to know whether a claim should be met, we need only ask which other claims - “claims actually made by some concrete person” - it runs athwart. We need not also ask whether it is a “valid” claim. He deplored the fact that philosophers still followed Kant rather than Mill, still thought of validity as raining down upon a claim “from some sublime dimension of being, which the moral law inhabits, much as upon the steel of the compass-needle the influence of the Pole rains down from out of the starry heavens” (WB, 148).

The view that there is no source of obligation save the claims of individual sentient beings entails that we have no responsibility to anything other than such beings. Most of the relevant sentient individuals are our fellow humans. So talk about our responsibility to truth, or to reason, must be replaced by talk about our responsibility to our fellow human beings. James's account of truth and knowledge is a utilitarian ethics of belief designed to facilitate such replacement. Its point of departure is Peirce's treatment of a belief as a habit of action, rather than as a representation. A utilitarian philosophy of religion must treat being religious as a habit of action.

When William James began to write in the nineteenth century, technological, industrial, and political revolutions had destroyed ways of life evolved over centuries of adaptation to nature. James belongs with those who tried to reweave a coherent world in thought and experience. At the end of his life, he evolved what he called a “comminuted” - pulverized - “Identitätsphilosophie.” Without grasping this world-view, there is no way to know what James was up to, for example, his pragmatic theory of truth.

The view that spirit (or mind) and nature (or matter) are identical was advanced most famously by Schelling very early in the nineteenth century, with key concepts refined, disciplined, and constricted by Hegel a little later. Early on, James has little or nothing to say about Shelling, as if even acknowledging his existence were to give him too much credit. With regard to Hegel, he bristles with contempt. We will see how he inched over the decades toward the views he ridiculed. He tried to retain a vision of the individual's intimate inclusion in a whole, but a whole construed pluralistically. His method was a phenomenology divested of rationalistic presuppositions.

William James was John Dewey's philosophical hero, because his “biological psychology” of the 1890 The Principles of Psychology led Dewey out of bondage in the land of Hegel and into the wonderful land of naturalism. Dewey attempted to repay his debt by passionately expounding and defending James's philosophy over a period of fifty-one years, stretching from 1897 to 1948. While not calling into question the philosophical brilliance of these essays, it will be shown that they gave a blatantly distorted, self-serving account of James's philosophy, the basic aims of which were to despookify and depersonalize it so that it would agree with Dewey's naturalism and socialization of all things distinctively human. The intent of my “exposé” of this act of hero worship-turned-philosophical usurpation, however, is to bring into bold relief the salient features of their philosophies by highlighting their deep-seated differences. Because of the limitations of space, only Dewey's attempted naturalization of James will be considered.

“Naturalism” has meant very different things to different philosophers. Since my claim is that Dewey attempted to make James into “a good naturalist like himself,” it is Dewey's sense that is relevant. His naturalism comprises two components. First, there is no ontological dualism between the mental and the physical, be it in the form of an irreducible mentallphysical substance or a mental1 physical event dualism, psychological states and processes being reducible to certain distinctive ways in which an organism interacts with its natural environment. This is called “biological behaviorism” by Dewey and is invidiously contrasted with a “physiological behaviorism” that understands mental phenomena exclusively in terms of physical processes and states within the organism.

One of the most interesting and problematic threads in the literature on James concerns the relationship between his philosophy and Kant's. It is difficult to imagine at first two philosophers farther apart than Kant and James. Kant was a lover of unity and systematicity, and exalted the absolute and necessary features of our experience; James had little patience with philosophical systems, thought there was much less unity to the world than often imagined, and denied there were any utterly indefeasible elements in our experience. These deep differences are undeniable. It is perhaps then no surprise when we find Richard Rorty arguing that James's pragmatism is part of what he thinks of as “the anti-Kantian revolution” (Rorty 1979, 7). Elsewhere he writes:

The last decade of William James's life was his most productive and distinguished, beginning in 1901-2 with his hugely successful Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and seeing the publication of virtually all of his strictly philosophical writings, with the notable exception of The Will to Believe. Although his output in this period was voluminous in pages and expansive in topic, James expressed dissatisfaction throughout the decade with his failure to produce a systematic work explicitly on metaphyics. From Varieties itself, which was to have had a philosophical complement, until the final effort, posthumously published as Some Problems in Philosophy, nearly every project of James's harbored both the hope and the disappointment of this desire to found and defend his radically empiricist Weltanschauung in a thoroughgoing manner.

In 1907 when an invitation to lecture at Oxford from the Hibbert Trust Committee arrived, James appears to have been more interested in working on a book to fulfil1 his promise for a metaphysics than in offering yet another series of public lectures. He found himself nonetheless unable to resist the temptation to attack philosophies of the absolute one last time. Originally titled “The Present Situation in Philosophy” and delivered in 1908, the lectures include a mixture of rousing polemical refutation and spirited constructive exposition, thus manifesting both interests.