Harry Stack Sullivan and American Intellectual Life

THIS PAPER DOES NOT primarily concern itself with the justification, refinement, or usefulness of Sullivanian concepts. My purpose is not even so much to trace the evolution of Sullivan's ideas as to locate them in the currents of American intellectual life of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In so doing I do hope that some of Sullivan's concerns and attitudes will become more comprehensible.

There are two developments I want to speak about at length. The first of these is what I call the naturalization of idealistic self-realization ethics in academic circles in the United States, and I'm going to spend some time explicating what that phrase means.

In post-Civil War America, absolute idealism was the conventionally accepted viewpoint among philosophers and theologians. Reality, they claimed, was ultimately spiritual and mental in nature; the physical world was somehow a part or aspect of an absolute consciousness, and sentient beings were finite, fragmentary, and partial embodiments of this spirit. Most commentators have lost sympathy for this doctrine, but we should not underestimate its respectability in the nineteenth century. It had an influential and impeccable lineage in Kant and the post-Kantians, especially Hegel; and it successfully made its way from Germany to Great Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century and, slightly later, to the New World. Moreover, while absolute idealism was obviously attractive to thinkers as a religiously oriented antidote to popular materialism, we need also to remember that it was simultaneously intellectually credible—idealism had sophisticated answers to complex questions in epistemology and metaphysics that had brought British empiricism to a dead-end in David Hume.

Idealism also provided a philosophy of morality that could be read off from its theoretical suppositions: goodness lay in the increasing