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James, Rationality and Religious Belief

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

W. J. Wainwright
W. J. Wainwright
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, P.O. Box 413, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201
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Extract

One of James's earliest philosophical essays sounds a note which will echo through his writings. Criticizing Spencer's definition of truth as (‘mere’) correspondence, James asserts that a ‘correspondence’ between the mind and reality is a ‘right mental action’, and rightness is determined by ‘pure subjective interests …brought… upon the scene and corresponding to no relation already there’ (EP 11).

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , June 1991 , pp. 223 - 238
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

* Abbreviations. DD, ‘The Dilemma of Determinism’, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Dover Publications, 1956.Google ScholarEP, Essays in Philosophy. (The Works of William James.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.Google ScholarERM, Essays in Religion and Morality. (The Works of William James.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.Google ScholarMT, The Meaning of Truth. (The Works of William James.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.Google ScholarPrag, Pragmatism. New York: Meridian Books, 1955.Google ScholarPrinciples, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. New York: Dover Publications, 1950.Google ScholarPU, A Pluralistic Universe. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1947.Google ScholarSPP, Some Problems of Philosophy. (The Works of William James.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.Google ScholarSR, ‘The Sentiment of Rationality’, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy.Google ScholarVRE, The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: The Modern Library, c. 1902.Google ScholarWTB, ‘The Will to Believe’, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy.Google Scholar

1 The first hypothesis is compatible with systems like absolute idealism in which the ideal world ‘never bursts into the world of phenomena at particular points’ but ‘ leaves the laws of life just as naturalism finds them, with no hope of remedy in case their fruits are bad’ (VRE 511). The second hypothesis is not.

2 I have reversed the order of James's last two tests. We surely want to distinguish symbolism from what is to be taken literally in the case of all the plausible hypotheses and not just (as James implies) of those that survive testing. If we do not, we wi11 not be in a position to test them.

3 Although I cannot argue this here, I believe that James thinks that mystical states should have some authority over non-mystics, and that interpretations to the contrary are mistaken. What he denies is that they ‘have a right to be absolutely authoritative over the’ non-mystic; that non-mystics have ‘a duty … to accept their revelations uncritically’. Those who are not mystics must ‘sift and test’ them as we sift and test ‘what comes from the outer world of sense’ (VRE 414, 417f., my emphases). James only rejects the claim that these experiences’ prima facie weight is sufficiently reat to close the issue for non-mystics.

4 As Peter Madden points out in his introduction to the Harvard edition of The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, James has a weak and strong version of his will to believe doctrine – that we have a right to believe either alternative in the cases in question and that, because of certain features of our passional nature, we should believe one alternative rather than the other. He stresses the first when speaking to the ‘tough-minded’ and the second when speaking to the ‘tender-minded’. On the whole, James seems committed to the stronger version.

5 Smith, John E., Purpose and Thought: The Meaning of Pragmatism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

6 Smith cites the monism–pluralism debate as an example. For reasons already given, I do not believe that James thinks this issue can be fully resolved without appealing to ‘subjective’ factors.

7 Myers, Gerald, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 452–3.Google Scholar

8 For example, in a footnote to ‘The Will to Believe’, James equates them on the grounds that ‘belief is measured by action’. But note that the footnote concludes, ‘I myself believe…that the religious hypothesis gives to the world an expression which specifically determines our reactions, and makes them in large part unlike what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme of belief (29f.). James's remarks in other places make it clear that these reactions include not only actions but also emotions, attitudes, and expectations.

9 James, , ‘Preface’, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, pp. xi–xiii.Google Scholar

10 See, e.g. ‘Faith and the Right to Believe’: ‘If the “melioristic” universe were really there, it would require the active good-will of all of us, in the way of belief [my emphasis] as well as of our other activities, to bring it to a prosperous issue’ (SPP 115). Cf. VRE 54–5, where (in discussing Kant) James glosses acting ‘as if there were a God’ or ‘as if we were to be immortal’ with ‘our faith that [what Kant believes to be] these unintelligible objects actually exist’.

11 I do not mean to distinguish sharply desires and yearnings from intuitions and dumb convictions. Nor does James do so.

12 Cf. James's notes for ‘The Sentiment of Rationality’: ‘Why is not this will, this blind substance of the living man… his third dimension extending from the painted surface of the intelligible world into the deep of ontology… why is not this absolute being?’ (EP 344). James's point here may be that life, the lebenswelt, is the given on which all systems rest (see Essays in Radical Empiricism), and that it is only in willing (acting) that we ‘feel’ life (‘only not understood because above understanding’) (EP 344). There is, I think, a deep connection between James's distrust of abstractions and insistence on immersing ourselves in preconceptual experience, his enthusiasm for Bergson, and his trust in our passional nature.

13 An interesting consequence is that intellectuals' intuitions should be distrusted. Many of James's critics were sceptical of the needs and believing tendencies which he appealed to in arguing for the religious hypothesis, indeterminism, and meliorism. They either denied their existence (at least in their own case and in the case of others who, like themselves, were at the forefront of humanity's advance into the future) or thought they were pathological. James was acutely conscious of this but believed that their resistance was the result of their having stifled this side of their nature.

14 This is strongly suggested by James's discussion in ‘The Sentiment of Rationality’. The ‘sense of irrationality’ is a feeling of cognitive disturbance. The ‘sentiment of rationality’ is experienced when this disturbance has been eliminated and thought again flows smoothly. If this is right, it seems natural to identify reasons with the sorts of consideration that tend to eliminate these disturbances. Good reasons are considerations that tend to do so in the long run and on the whole.

15 Cf., e.g. Myers, , op. cit. p. 457.Google Scholar

16 See MT 8 where James asserts that ‘The existence of the object, whenever the idea asserts it “truly”, is the only reason, in innumerable cases, why the idea does work successfully.’ (As John E. Smith says, the qualification [‘in innumerable cases’] is due to James's conviction that some future facts depend on our present responses [Purpose and Thought, 60–1].) There is, however, an apparent inconsistency in James's thought. Although he often speaks as if truth is constituted by satisfactions, he also says that the latter are ‘insufficient unless reality be also incidentally led to’ (MT 106). I believe that the inconsistency is only apparent. ‘Satisfaction’ is sometimes used to refer to such things as emotional solace, a sense of meaning or moral significance, the release of our active powers, fulfilled expectations, coherence with our other beliefs, and so on. It is also used to refer to successful relations with reality (successful ‘leadings’ to an idea's object or its ‘near neighborhood’). Only satisfactions of the first kind are directly available to us. They therefore constitute ‘truth for us’; they are what truth is ‘known as’, or are truth's ‘cash value’. Truth for us, however, indicates that we are successfully dealing with reality and therefore possess truth simpliciter.

17 Myers, , op. cit. p. 455.Google Scholar

18 Smith, , op. cit. p. 119.Google Scholar