1. Introduction
Religious concerns pervade the thought of William
James. In but a few of his philosophical works are the moral and religious
implications of his position ever far from view, and often they provide the
most prominent unifying thread of an entire work.[1]
Among the most recurrent religious themes that feature in James’s writings is
that of mankind’s deep desire to achieve intimacy with God, and a fair amount
of his philosophic effort is expended warring against the forces that he takes
to be blocking the satisfaction of this desire. In the span of several of his
philosophical works, James grapples with the problems of existential angst,[2]
religious pessimism,[3]
and suicide.[4] His general
diagnosis of each of these problems is the same, and can be traced back the
frustration of a single impulse: the impulse for rational unity.
According to James, this impulse is what motivates absolutist monist
philosophies, and is what must ultimately be denied in order to achieve
conciliation with nature, and consequently with God. More precisely, what James
argues for in the various works in which these topics are addressed is a sort
of delimitation of the rationalistic impulse, or a narrowing of its field of
application. Such a move makes room for pluralism, which, “in exorcising the
absolute, exorcises the great de-realizer of the only life we are at home in,
and thus redeems the nature of reality from essential foreignness.”[5]
In this essay, I will assess James’s arguments for pluralism as a solution to
the problems of existential angst and religious pessimism within the
metaphysical backdrop that he provides.
2. Existential Angst
2.1 Overview
The
feeling that one is a stranger in this world, most often provoked by the
discovery of discord between one’s internal nature and the nature of the
universe that environs him, has long proved an impediment to the exercise of
mankind’s spiritual impulse. There is a sense, therefore, in which achieving
conciliation with nature is a necessary precondition for attaining intimacy
with God whose nature we take it in some degree to express. In the introductory
chapter to A Pluralistic Universe, James
invokes Hegel to support his account of the function of human reason: “The aim
of knowledge,” says Hegel, “is to divest the objective world of its
strangeness, and to make us more at home in it.”[6]
But, as James later reflects, this task requires more than simply discovering
order underneath all its apparent chaos. Not only must “an order be made,”
explains James, “[but] in that order the higher side of things must dominate.”[7]
For mankind to truly feel at home in his environment, in other words, he must
find the “inner life of things [to] be substantially akin…to the tenderer parts
of [his own nature].”[8]
Throughout the remainder of A Pluralistic Universe, James sets out to demonstrate how the doctrine of
pluralism can be applied to resolve this problem of existential angst.
2.2 Diagnosis
At
the bottom of mankind’s angst over his existence is a single frustrated
impulse, the impulse for rational unity. James once referred to this impulse as
“the mind’s most necessary law,”[9]
and describes it as providing one of the primary stimuli for all philosophic
activity.[10]
As implicit in the previous section’s remarks, rationality comes in two species.
The first of these is variably characterized as formal, intellectual, and
logical, and corresponds to the domain of the theoretical sciences. The impulse
for rational unity as applied to our theoretical interests expresses itself in
seeking order amidst chaos, especially in the form of logical and mathematical
harmonies. The second species of rationality is variably described as
sentimental, aesthetic, and teleological, and corresponds to the domain of
moral and practical affairs.[11]
According to James, it is this latter species that motivates the various
spiritualistic philosophies. The spiritual way of thinking is that which
underlies all sorts of religious attitude, and is characterized by a kind of
insistence that “the intimate and human surround and underlie the brutal.”[12]
Perhaps a better way to express this sentiment is to say that the spiritual way
of thinking imagines external nature to be governed by the same aesthetic and
sentimental principles that govern our own internal nature.
Corresponding
to each of these rational interests is a distinct species of existential angst,
which is precipitated whenever foreignness erupts into either domain and
frustrates our activity there. As James writes,
Accidents, either
moral, mental, or physical, break up the slowly built-up equilibriums men reach
in family life and in their civic and professional relations. Intellectual
enigmas frustrate our scientific systems, and the ultimate cruelty of the
universe upsets our religious attitudes and outlooks. Of no special system of
good attained does the universe recognize the value as sacred.[13]
As I understand it, the species of
existential angst that corresponds to our moral and practical interests is of
the same basic form as the problem of religious pessimism to be addressed
later. Setting these concerns aside, then, for the time being, let us focus on
the species corresponding to our theoretical interests.
C.I.
Lewis once described the problem that is our present target in the preface to
his book, Mind and the World Order. In
it he writes,
[Abstractness]
and systematic precision go together, and…exact deductive procedures may give
rise to no corresponding certainty about empirical nature. Logical integrity
and concrete applicability are quite separate matters…[The] analytic character
and abstractness of exact systems, which assure to them that kind of certainty
which they have, tend to divorce them from that empirical truth which is the
object of natural science and the content of our possible knowledge of nature…[I]t
appears that we must accept a kind of double-truth: there are the certainties,
such as those of mathematics, which concern directly only what is abstract; and
there are the presentations of our sense-experience to which we seek to apply
them, but with a resultant empirical truth which may be no more than probable.[14]
Highlighted
in this passage is the failure of conceptual models of empirical reality to
make our predictions concerning the latter perfectly secure. Such models are
constructed via abstraction, which is the primary mechanism of man’s rational
impulse. James understands abstraction to proceed in two phases. The first of
these involves the breaking up of the stream of experience into functional
objects.[15] Such
objects, as James conceives them, are mere “mock-ups, pockets, boxes of
relations that are snipped and packaged for reasons of utility.”[16]
The second phase of abstraction involves the creation of conceptual substitutes
for these objects, which are then employed theoretically to predict the quality
of future experience. Such concepts are said to “know” their objects whenever
they can act as effective substitutes for all the practical functions of the
object itself, i.e.,
an experience that
knows another [i.e., a concept] can figure as [the percept’s] representative,
not in any quasi-miraculous ‘epistemological’ sense, but in the definite
practical sense of being its substitute in various operations, sometimes
physical and sometimes mental, which lead us to its associates and results. By
experimenting on our ideas of reality, we may save ourselves the trouble of
experimenting on the real experiences which they severally mean.[17]
While
James recognizes that paths that run through conceptual experiences are often
highly advantageous paths for thought to follow,[18]
he also stresses their inherent limitations.[19]
“Most thought-paths,” writes James, “are substitutes for nothing actual; they
end outside the real world altogether, in wayward fancies, utopias, fictions or
mistakes.”[20] When these
paths fail to terminate where we expect them to, or end outside the real world
altogether, this brings our activity to a screeching halt. Such disruptions in
our active lives generate feelings of distress similar to that experienced when
the breathing impulse is suppressed, as James explains:
Just as we feel no
particular pleasure when we breathe freely, but a very intense feeling of
distress when the respiratory motions are prevented, – so any unobstructed
tendency to action discharges itself without the production of much cogitative
accompaniment, and any perfectly fluent course of thought awakens but little
feeling; but when the movement is inhibited, or when the thought meets with
difficulties, we experience distress.[21]
Naturally, relief is sought through
the reparation of our conceptual models; i.e., we revise our theories, “making
changes as local and minimal as possible,”[22]
until our activity is freed again. James, however, sees this project as
ultimately futile and argues instead for a decisive delimitation of the rational
impulse. Such an impulse, he admits, has many times proven prophetic,
discovering logical and mathematical harmonies to truly “lie hidden between all
the chinks and interstices of the crude natural world.”[23]
But these harmonies are forever incomplete, according to James, and only by
ultimately embracing pluralism can we definitively exclude foreignness from the
theoretical domain.[24]
The
only appropriate attitude to take toward such a world as our own, argues James,
is one in which every conceptual model of reality is treated merely as a
hypothesis. James’s own view, which he calls radical empiricism, is built upon
just such a principle.[25]
“He who takes for his hypothesis the notion that [pluralism] is the permanent
form of the world,” writes James, “is what I call a radical empiricist. For him
the crudity of experience remains an eternal element thereof. There is no
possible point of view from which the world can appear an absolutely single
fact.”[26]
Set in stark contrast to this attitude is that of absolutist philosophies, the
great claim of which is precisely that the absolute is no hypothesis, but rather “a presupposition implicated in all
thinking, and needing only a little effort of analysis to be seen as a logical
necessity.”[27] In the
absolutist’s universe, consequently, “Advance in thinking…[has] to proceed by
the apodictic words must be
rather than those by the inferior hypothetic words may be, which are all that empiricists can use.”[28]
Such
an approach to philosophical inquiry, as one commentator remarks, is anathema
in James’s search for truth, meaning, and insight.[29]
The religious implications of the absolutist’s claim, for instance, include the
absurd conclusion that, if God exists, then he is reflected in nature. This, in
turn, weds us to the impossible task of trying to reconcile our notion of God
with the facts of experience.[30]
The theoretical implications are perhaps less severe, but are nonetheless
troublesome to James. These primarily include the inability to extricate
ourselves from what is essentially a futile endeavor to have our conceptual
models match up with the empirical world. In a world such as ours, insists
James, “openness to experience, to novelty, to surprise is a cardinal tenet of
the philosophical enterprise,”[31]
and no philosophy will ultimately be deemed rational that fails to anticipate
these features. Treating our theoretical models as mere hypotheses, however,
subject always to revision in light of future experiences, decisively prevents
us from passing final judgments on the nature of reality. All conclusions that
we might draw within such a system are reduced to mere maybes, thus preserving a domain for the exercise of faith
in religious and moral possibilities.[32]
Furthermore, it allows us to anticipate novelties in experience, effectively
neutralizing their disruptive tendencies within our active lives.
2.3 Objections and Replies
By
reinforcing the boundary between the conceptual and the empirical, James seeks
to preserve indefinitely a domain for the exercise of faith. But, as he admits
in The Will to Believe, this method is
effective only at safeguarding one’s faith in those possibilities that have not
already been reduced to zero, i.e., those not already determined by the
evidence.[33] For
example, the fact that future experience may always turn up a white crow
safeguards my faith in the belief that “all crows are black” is a false
proposition (perhaps indefinitely). But note that the same white crow is
sufficient to defeat my faith in the opposite belief, namely that “all crows
are black” is true. Therefore, while it is true that certain possibilities will
always be available under James’s system upon which I may exercise my powers of
faith, this is no guarantee that the set of possibilities that are truly
important to me will fall among that set.
Turning
first to the theoretical domain, it seems that James’s solution is almost
superfluous. That is to say, when we consider the great successes of science
under the guidance of our theoretical instincts, it is not clear that our
formal or scientific interests were ever under serious threat from the
absolutist’s thesis. In fact, adopting pluralism in our theoretical endeavors
would seem rather like shooting ourselves in the foot if the world’s unity,
considered formally, turned out to be complete – which, indeed, seems to be the
direction we’re heading. In such a case, pluralism would just be one more
theoretical model that failed to faithfully represent empirical reality. While
we might be happier to be proved wrong in this latter case having expected
irrationality and discovered rationality than we would have otherwise been had
our hypothesis predicted rationality at the start and then discovered none,
this advantage seems trifling.
The
more genuine threat, rather, seems to be to our moral and sentimental
interests; for while the scientific enterprise continues to thrive under the
guidance of our theoretical instincts, our moral ideals appear to languish
under the inspiration of our religious instincts. James himself seems to recognize
the superior track record of the former to the latter when he writes,
Without an imperious
inner demand on our part for ideal logical and mathematical harmonies, we
should never have attained to proving that such harmonies lie hidden between
all the chinks and interstices of the crude natural world. Hardly a law has
been established in science, hardly a fact ascertained, which was not first
sought after, often with sweat and blood, to gratify an inner need…But the
inner need of believing that this world of nature is a sign of something more
spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative in those
who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation ever can be in a
professionally scientific head. The toil of many generations has proved the
latter need prophetic. Why may not the
former one be prophetic, too? And if needs of ours outrun the visible universe,
why may not that be a sign that
an invisible universe is there? What, in short, has authority to debar us from
trusting our religious demands?[34]
In other words, our theoretical
instincts have been tried and proven prophetic; it is our religious
instincts whose prophetic potential remains
questionable. Such considerations should lead us to conclude that pluralism is
not really much help to our theoretical interests (and, all things considered,
might actually do more harm than good), and that if such a solution is
necessary at all, it must be to serve our interests in the moral domain.
Turning
then to the moral domain, what reasons do we have to believe that those
possibilities that are truly important in supporting our moral interests are
among those that James’s solution succeeds in preserving? Assume, for the sake
of argument, that included among these vital possibilities were Kant’s three
ideas, God, freedom, and the soul. Can we not imagine having an experience that would be sufficient to
defeat any of these hypotheses, a “white crow” of sorts relative to each of
these hypotheses? If such an experience were in principle possible – and I
argue in the next section that it is
– then our moral interests would again fall under threat, and existential angst
would reemerge.
James
might reply, however, that the hypotheses with which he is concerned do not
make such sweeping generalizations concerning the possibilities within
experience. Believing in God, for James, is not so much like believing “all
crows are black,” which, due to its sweeping nature, is highly susceptible to
defeating experiences, but rather like believing “some crows are black,” or perhaps “most crows are black,” claims that can withstand the
discovery of a few white crows. As he writes, “Let God but have the least
infinitesimal other of any kind
beside him, and empiricism and rationalism might strike hands in a lasting
treaty of peace.”[35]
Before we give any more thought to this feature of James’s argument, however,
let us first turn to consider the problem of religious pessimism to which it
more fully applies.
3. Religious Pessimism
3.1 Overview
The
problem of existential angst as it manifests itself in the moral and practical
domains is deeply intertwined with the problems of religious pessimism and
suicide. James addresses these latter issues in various works, the most notable
of which include a chapter in The Varieties of Religious Experience entitled “The Sick Soul,” and in an essay published
in The Will to Believe entitled
“Is Life Worth Living?” In both of these works, he appeals to the resources of
radical empiricism – primarily its central feature, pluralism – to resolve the
core difficulty.
3.2 Diagnosis
“Pessimism,”
writes James, “is essentially a religious disease. In the form of it to which
you are most liable, it consists in nothing but a religious demand to which
there comes no normal religious reply.”[36]
Translated into terms with which we are now more familiar, religious pessimism
is the result of our religious instincts failing to guide us into fruitful
correspondences with reality – either actively or reflectively. Understood
actively, religious pessimism is just the psychic discharge that results from a
particular kind of practical failure. For example, someone might set out in
life with some sense of providence, and sensing herself to be guided along by
it, might imagine that a certain prospect is guaranteed to her (i.e., if only
she does her part). If later, having faithfully kept to the course,
circumstances did not subsequently align so as to secure the hoped-for
prospect, she might feel that she had been cheated or misled by providence, and
her faith in it would consequently suffer.[37]
Such disappointments would naturally discharge themselves as distress of a
distinctly religious quality.
The
reflective sources of religious pessimism are equally potent. In fact, it is
they that are responsible for supplying us with those instincts that so often
run our active lives afoul. James identifies the great reflective source of
pessimism as “the contradiction between the phenomena of nature and the craving
of the heart to believe that behind nature there is a spirit whose expression
nature is.”[38] So
understood, religious pessimism bears many of the marks that characterized the
angst of our previous section’s discussion. Not surprisingly, then, pluralism
plays an important role in James’s two-stage resolution. As he explains,
Now this inner
discord (merely as discord) can be relieved in either of two ways: The longing
to read the facts religiously may cease, and leave the bare facts by
themselves; or, supplementary facts may be discovered and believed-in, which
permit the religious reading to go on. These two levels of relief are the two
stages of recovery, the two levels of escape from pessimism…[39]
The
initial step towards getting into healthy ultimate relations with the universe,
according to James, is the act of rebellion against the idea that a God of
nature, simply taken as such, exists.[40]
This move involves the rejection of absolute monism, which effectively blocks
any final conclusions from being drawn concerning the nature of God from the
presence of evil in the world. As James explains, “With evil simply taken, men
can make short work, for their relations with it then are only practical. It
looms up no longer so spectrally, it loses all its haunting and perplexing
significance, as soon as the mind attacks the instances of it singly, and
ceases to worry about their derivation from the ‘one and only Power.’”[41]
The second stage in the recovery process is the adoption of pluralism as our
new working hypothesis, and the exercise of faith in a supernatural order.[42]
“[W]e have a right,” argues James, “to believe the physical order to be only a
partial order [and] to supplement it by an unseen spiritual order which we
assume on trust, if only thereby life may seem to us better worth living
again.”[43]
What
faith in such a reality would look like in exercise – i.e., what its practical
effects would be once adopted – is of supreme importance to our final
assessment of this solution. As initially advertised, the second stage of this
solution would bring “joy” and the “freer exercise of religious trust and
fancy.”[44]
We are clearly entitled, therefore, to expect this second iteration of faith to
work better than its abandoned predecessor – not just reflectively, but
actively as well. What this would require, minimally, is (1) that we are not
led back into systematic practical
failure under faith’s influence, and (2) that it provide some mechanism to
neutralize the disruptive force of individual moral and religious defeats. Failure to satisfy
either of these conditions would leave an opening for the pessimistic attitude
to reemerge and thus leave our central problem unresolved.
3.3 Objections and Replies
We
closed the last section’s objections with a quote by James that encouraged us
to dilute our religious hypotheses such that they might withstand a few
contrary facts in experience. Having explored the problem of religious
pessimism, we are now ready to evaluate the full potential of this idea. Our
quote read, “Let God but have the least infinitesimal other of any kind beside him, and empiricism and
rationalism might strike hands in a lasting treaty of peace.”[45]
Diluting our religious and moral hypotheses to just this extent, argues James,
preserves “the maximum amount of rationality practically attainable by our
minds.”[46]
But how so?
James’s
notion of rationality, if you recall, is tightly bound up with that of
congeniality to our spontaneous powers.[47] Several of
these powers, e.g., man’s theoretical instincts and his capacity for faith,
have already been discussed. Taken by themselves, it would seem that the most
rational world for humans to inhabit would simply be one in which their
theoretical and religious instincts proved fruitful in practice. But James
imagines us to possess further powers the exercise of which requires the
presence of resistance and opposition. As he reflects, “Need and struggle are
what excite and inspire us…Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days
of Solomon’s glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible
come.”[48]
If our moral powers really do thrive best under conditions of struggle and
lack, then perhaps pluralism is just what the doctor ordered.
Furthermore,
there are a significant number of passages in which James flirts with the
possibility of the world’s plurality “blossoming” into perfect unity,
particularly as a result of men’s investments in that direction.[49]
Take, for instance, his continuation of the previous thought that our moral
instincts thrive under conditions of struggle, applied here to the question of
whether life is worth living:
What sort of thing
would life really be, with your qualities ready for a tussle with it, if it
only brought fair weather and gave these higher faculties of yours no
scope?...This life is worth living, we
can say, since it is what we make of it, from the moral point of view; and we are determined to make it from that point of
view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success…If this life be not a
real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success,
it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw
at will. But it feels like a real
fight, – as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with
all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all
to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild,
half-saved universe our nature is adapted.[50]
Here, in man’s fighting impulse, we
have a possible mechanism for neutralizing the disruptive force of individual
moral and religious defeats. By taking the possibility of religious failure as
evidence that our battle is a genuine one, we can choose to respond to our
religious distress constructively rather than resignedly, allowing it to
reinvigorate our spiritual lives.
But
this mechanism only extends so far, as the inadequacy of the rationalist’s
brand of faith to sustain our religious lives has already served to
demonstrate. A few well-absorbed punches might merely rouse the boxer’s
fighting spirit, but a sustained series of direct blows will end the fight for
even the most dogged fighter. Therefore, while we may appreciate the
inspirational nature of James’s life-as-a-battle metaphor, we must not allow
the emotional force of such words to suffice for their accurateness. James’s
imagery above will be apt just in case experience meets our moral and religious
instincts (exercised in the way James prescribes) with mere resistance, which
serves to incite, and not outright defiance, which serves to extinguish. The
question, then, is whether James’s prescription for the proper exercise of
faith will hold up any better than the rationalist’s.
As
we turn to James’s account of how faith is to be properly exercised, however,
it’s not apparent to me why it should fare any better in practice than that
which we previously rejected. First, he defines faith as “belief in something
concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible.” Second, we are told,
“as the test of belief is willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness
to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in
advance.”[51] Finally, we
are encouraged to trust our religious demands, where this is taken to mean “to live in the light of them, and to act
as if the invisible world which they suggest were real.”[52]
It is at this point that we must challenge the aptness of James’s battle
imagery to capture the reality of our situation. If James intends, for
instance, to include among our religious demands the demand for teleological
unity, which I suggested before underlies our feeling of being guided by
providence,[53] then I
think the battle imagery quite misleading, for experience meets this particular
instinct of ours with not just rousing provocation but outright defiance. Our
sense of providence is a paradigm religious instinct our trust in which leads
to systematic failure in our active lives. Therefore, while I acknowledge the
potential of James’s solution to neutralize the disruptive force of individual
defeats in our moral and spiritual lives, I deny that it helps much to render
our religious instincts more fruitful in practice or to make chronic failures
in this regard less problematic to the project of providing a theoretical
defense of faith.
James’s
solution suffers from two more weaknesses that I will only mention briefly
before concluding. First, while the notion of a receding pluralism makes decent
sense in the moral realm, in which many of the vital possibilities are
intersubjective in nature (and therefore directly adaptive to our influence), I
don’t see how it is meant to translate into the theoretical domain, in which
the vital possibilities are purely objective. Faith in our theoretical
instincts may be required to discover
that the world exists as a complete formal unity, e.g., by making us attentive
to the data that would corroborate such a fact, but it certainly doesn’t determine the outcome one way or the other, as faith in the
moral sphere has the potential to do. Second, even in the moral sphere, the
efficacy of our faith to determine future states of affairs extends only to those vital possibilities that are
intersubjective in nature – which not all of them are. Therefore, unless we’re
ready to reduce God’s reality itself to a merely intersubjective possibility,
then even the best universe that we might achieve through our cooperative faith
will nonetheless be a godless one. Needless to say, such a universe would fall
pitifully short of the religious ideal.
4. Conclusion
James’s
argument succeeds or fails according to its ability to preserve a domain in the
realm of experience for the free exercise of faith. However, if the health and
functionality of faith as a psychological capacity is dependent on its
practical successes and failures when exercised, as I insist it is, then it
will not likely survive in a world in which no moral laws actually obtain.
Frustration of the religious impulse serves to excite it only to the most
minimal extent before it is ultimately overwhelmed and extinguished. In order
to grow our religious capacities, the individual moral and religious defeats
they suffer must be compensated for with many more successes under
faith’s influence. Therefore, without providing also a rule of practice to
guide our religious instincts into fruitful correspondences with reality, we
must reject James’s solution as ultimately, though however tragically,
inadequate.
Bibliography
Bach, Kent. “An
Analysis of Self-Deception.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Mar., 1981), 358.
James, William. A
Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present
Situation in Philosophy. New York:
Longmans. Green, and Co., 1920.
James, William. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways
of Thinking. New York: Barnes
and Noble, Inc., 2003.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: a
Study in Human Nature. New York:
Barnes and Noble Books, 2004.
James, William. The Will to Believe and other essays in
popular philosophy. New York: Dover
Publications
Inc., 1956.
Lewis, Clarence
Irving. Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge. New York: Dover Publication, Inc., 1929.
Stuhr, John J. Pragmatism
and Classical American Philosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretive Essays. Second edition. New York: Oxford University Press,
2000.
[1] Consider, for instance, that James presents his
metaphysics in A Pluralistic Universe
in the context of a religious dilemma, and pluralism itself largely as a
necessary postulate to account for the universe’s indifference to our moral interests.
[2] William James, A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert
Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy (New York: Longmans. Green, and Co., 1920). See “The
Types of Philosophic Thinking,” pp. 1-40.
[3] William James, The Varieties of Religious
Experience: a Study in Human Nature
(New York:
Barnes and Noble Books, 2004). See “The Sick Soul,” pp. 119-150.
[4] William James, The Will to Believe and other
essays in popular philosophy (New
York: Dover Publications Inc., 1956). See “Is Life Worth Living?” pp. 32-62.
[6] John J. Stuhr, Pragmatism and Classical American
Philosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretive Essays, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000), 153.
[7] Ibid., 159.
[8] Ibid., 158.
[10] William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old
Ways of Thinking (New York: Barnes
and Noble, Inc., 2003). See p. 56 where James discusses the definition of
philosophy as “the quest or the vision of the world’s unity.”
[11] See, e.g., James 1920, 320.
[12] Stuhr 2000, 156.
[13] James 1920, 89.
[14] Clive Irving Lewis, Mind and the World Order:
Outline of a Theory of Knowledge (New
York: Dover Publication, Inc., 1929), viii-ix.
[15] Stuhr 2000, 188.
[16] Stuhr 2000, 146.
[17] Stuhr 2000, 186.
[18] E.g., “Not only do they yield inconceivably rapid
transitions; but owing to the universal character which they frequently
possess, and to their capacity for association with one another in great
systems, they outstrip the tardy consecutions of the things themselves, and sweep
us on towards our ultimate termini in a far more labor-saving way than the
following of trains of sensible perception ever could” (Stuhr 2000, 186-187).
[19] As one commentator remarks, “The flow of
consciousness is whole and continuous, whereas our conceptual formulations tend
to break it up into definitions, names, nouns, and other assorted categories.
It is true, of course, that to survive, human beings need placeholders,
perches, moving points in the flow [of experience], which act as redoubts, way
stations, and abodes. Were they not present, we would be carried in the stream
as flotsam, rudderless. The task then is twofold: (1) forge those moorings that
are most propitious and advantageous for our human needs and (2) avoid becoming
trapped and mired such that we confuse our own temporary bunker with the entire
fabric of possibility” (Stuhr 2000, 149).
[20] Stuhr 2000, 186-187.
[22] Kent Bach, “An Analysis of Self-Deception,” Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research, Vol.
41, No. 3 (Mar., 1981), 358. Cf. James 2003, 26-27.
[23] “Without an imperious inner demand on our part for
ideal logical and mathematical harmonies, we should never have attained to
proving that such harmonies lie hidden between all the chinks and interstices
of the crude natural world” (James 1956, 55).
[24] “Pluralism, in exorcising the absolute, exorcises the
great de-realizer of the only life we are at home in, and thus redeems the
nature of reality from essential foreignness” (James 1920,49-50).
[25] “Were I obliged to give a short name to the attitude
in question, I should call it that of radical empiricism…I say ‘empiricism’ because it is contented to regard
its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to
modification in the course of future experience; and I say ‘radical,’ because
it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis (James 1956, vii-viii).
[29] Stuhr 2000, 147.
[30] As James writes, “we of the 19th century,
with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical philosophies, already know
nature too impartially and too well to worship unreservedly any God of whose
character she can be an adequate expression” (James 1956, 43).
[31] Stuhr 2000, 147.
[32] “Faith means belief in something concerning which
doubt is still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness
to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the
prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance” (James 1956, 90). Similarly, James writes, “possibilities, not
finished facts, are the realities with which we have actively to deal; and to
quote my friend William Salter, of the Philadelphia Ethical Society, ‘as the
essence of courage is to stake one’s life on a possibility, so the essence of
faith is to believe that the possibility exists’” (James 1956, 62).
[33] “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but
must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that
cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds…”(James 1956, 11; italics mine). Also, “we are free to trust at our own risks
anything that is not impossible, and that can bring analogies to bear in its
behalf” (James 1956, 57).
[35] James 1920, 312.
[37] The intimate connection between mankind’s felt
awareness of providential forces and his aesthetic instinct, as expressed in
the quest for the world’s “aesthetic” or “teleological” unity, makes this an
especially potent example. See James 2003, 62-63.
[38] James 1956,
40. James imagines this contradiction to have the most adverse affect on those
who are empirically minded by nature. As he writes, “Now, suppose a mind [of
the more strongly empirical type], whose imagination is pent in consequently,
and who takes its facts ‘hard;’ suppose it, moreover, to feel strongly the
craving for communion, and yet to rationalize how desperately difficult it is
to construe the scientific order of nature either theologically or poetically,
– and what result can there be but
inner discord and contradiction?” (James 1956, 40-41).
[41] James 1956, 46.
[42] James treats religion in the supernaturalist sense,
which “declares that the so-called order of nature, which constitutes this
world’s experience, is only one portion of the total universe, and there
stretches beyond this visible world an unseen world of which we now know
nothing positive, but in its relation to which the true significance of our
present mundane life consists” (James 1956, 51).
[44] James 1956, 39-40.
[45] James 1920, 312.
[46] James 1920, 319. In explicating this point, James
seems to acknowledge that adopting pluralism for its services in the moral
sphere comes at a substantial cost to our desire for absolute formal unity.
See, e.g., James 1920, 313-314.
[47] “For a philosophy to succeed on a universal scale it
must define the future congruously with our spontaneous powers. A philosophy may be unimpeachable in other respects,
but either of two defects will be fatal to its universal acceptance. First, its
ultimate principle must not be one that essentially baffles and disappoints our
dearest desires and most cherished powers…[A] second and worse defect in a
philosophy than that of contradicting our active propensities is to give them
no object whatever to press against…Any philosophy which annihilates the
validity of the reference by explaining away its object or translating them
into terms of no emotional [pertinence], leaves the mind with little to care or
act for” (James 1956, 83). See also pp. 54-55, 77, 82-83, 86-88, 196.
[49] Stuhr 2000, 193. For example, in the conclusion to
his essay “A World of Pure Experience,” he writes, “The world is in so forth a
pluralism of which the unity is not fully experienced as yet. But, as fast as
verifications come, trains of experience, once separate, run into one another;
and that is why I said, earlier in my essay, that the unity of the world is on
the whole undergoing increase” (Stuhr 2000, 193). In another essay, James goes
even further and acknowledges, “That there may be one sovereign purpose, system, kind, and story [in
the world], is a legitimate hypothesis” (James 2003, 63).
[50] James 1956,
60-61. This idea also features in The Varieties of Religious Experience, where James writes, “[According to the gospel of
healthy-mindedness,] evil [need not] be essential; it might be, and might
always have been, an independent portion that had no rational or absolute right
to live with the rest, and which we might conceivably hope to see got rid of at
last…Here we have the interesting notion fairly and squarely presented to us,
of there being elements of the universe which may make no rational whole in
conjunction with the other elements, and which, from the point of view of any
system which those other elements make up, can only be considered so much
irrelevance and accident – so much ‘dirt,’ as it were, and matter out of
place...[A]lthough most philosophers seem either to forget [this notion] or to
disdain it too much ever to mention it, I believe that we shall have to admit
it to ourselves in the end as containing an element of truth” (James 2004,
123-124).
[51] James 1956, 90.
[52] James 1956, 56.
[53] See footnote 37.
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