Abstract
As suggested in the Introduction to this volume, there is, for pragmatists, no such thing as a single, absolute, privileged, or overarching perspective from which religious issues ought to be viewed, but a plurality of relevant philosophical approaches, reflecting the plurality of our practices of life. This plurality must be taken seriously even when it comes to exploring such an abstract issue as the problem of realism, as applied to religious belief and religious language. I hope to elaborate on this idea through my examination of William James’ peculiar form of pluralism.
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Notes
For a detailed analysis of the tension between realism and its alternatives in classical and contemporary pragmatism, see S. Pihlström (1996) Structuring the World: The Issue of Realism and the Nature of Ontological Problems in Classical and Contemporary Pragmatism (Acta Philosophica Fennica 59, Helsinki: The Philosophical Society of Finland). For my previous engagements with James’ philosophy of religion, in particular, see
S. Pihlström (2008) ‘The Trail of the Human Serpent Is over Everything’: Jamesian Perspectives on Mind, World, and Religion ( Lanham, MD: University Press of America).
M. R. Slater (2008) ‘Pragmatism, Realism, and Religion’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 36, 653–81. Slater has recently offered a more comprehensive version of his argument in
M. R. Slater (2009) William James on Ethics and Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), but I will focus on the 2008 paper here.
R. Audi (ed.) (1999), Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). See Slater, ‘Pragmatism, Realism, and Religion’, p. 658n5.
In addition to Putnam’s many works, see Pihlström, Structuring the World, chapters 3–4. It should be noted that Putnam has recently once again reconsidered his views on realism: see several essays in H. Putnam (2012) Philosophy in an Age of Science (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press).
D. M. Armstrong (2004) Truth and Truthmakers ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
See S. Pihlström (2009) Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology ( London and New York: Continuum), chapter 2.
Cf. Pihlström, ‘The Trail of the Human Serpent Is over Everything’; and S. Pihlström (2013) Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God (New York: Fordham University Press), for the suggestion that there must be something analogous to transcendental idealism at work in James’ pragmatism, if, e.g., his essentially ethical argumentation in favor of theistic metaphysics is supposed to get off the ground.
See N. Goodman (1978) Ways of Worldmaking ( Indianapolis: Hackett). Goodman, having been told that his views resembled those that James had defended decades earlier, famously once quipped that James quoted him without mentioning the source.
See H. Putnam (1990) Realism with a Human Face, ed. J. Conant (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press);
and H. Putnam (2004) Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press). (As noted above, Putnam’s most recent volume, Philosophy in an Age of Science, reconsiders some of these views.) Cf. also
R. B. Goodman, ‘Some Sources of Putnam’s Pluralism’, in M. Bahgramiam (ed.) (2012) Reading Putnam (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 205–18, for a recent discussion of the different versions of, and the historical background influences (including James) of Putnam’s pluralism. Goodman also speaks about there being a ‘plurality of pluralisms’ (p. 205) and notes that pluralism can be seen as a species of realism (p. 206)—both extremely important observations also regarding the argument of the present chapter.
I am here deliberately redescribing transcendental idealism by employing Jamesian terminology. Orthodox Kantians (as well as Jamesians) will find my Jamesian rearticulations of Kant problematic; however, my main interest lies in systematic issues in the philosophy of religion, pragmatically considered, rather than in detailed historical questions. Some work has, however, been done on the historical relations between Kant and James: see, e.g., S. Pihlström (2006) ‘Synthesizing Traditions: Rewriting the History of Pragmatism and Transcendental Philosophy’, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 23, 375–90. Let me also note that
Peter Byrne (1998), in his The Moral Interpretation of Religion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), explicitly compares Kant’s moral argument for God’s existence with James’ ‘will to believe’ argument (see chapter 7). My approach is quite different, though, because (unlike some of the other contributors to this volume) I am not here focusing on ‘The Will to Believe’ (but, rather, on Pragmatism) and because I view James’ own ideas ‘transcendentally’; cf. section 1 above.
I deal with these issues concerning the pragmatist ontology of subjectivity in Pihlström, ‘The Trail of the Human Serpent Is over Everything’, chapter 5. See also S. Pihlström (2009) ‘Pragmatism and Naturalized Transcendental Subjectivity’, Contemporary Pragmatism, 6, 1–13, for a more comprehensive discussion of this particular topic, in relation to more standard pragmatist accounts of subjectivity.
See C. Diamond (1991) The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press). Putnam also finds this conception of realism important (though not uncontroversial) both as a reading of Wittgenstein and as a general philosophical approach. Cf., e.g., his essays on Wittgenstein in Putnam, Philosophy in an Age of Science (cited above).
For a critical comment on too strongly (dogmatically) therapeutic readings of Wittgenstein and the pragmatists, see S. Pihlström (2012) ‘A New Look at Wittgenstein and Pragmatism’, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 4, URL: www.journalofpragmatism.eu (accessed 17 July 2012 ).
As one of the few recent theorists of evil inspired by pragmatism, Richard Bernstein, explains (without specifically referring to these Jamesian considerations), there is no essence of evil; rather, evil can take very different forms in different historical situations. See R. Bernstein (2002) Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation ( Cambridge: Polity Press);
and R. Bernstein (2005) The Abuse of Evil (Cambridge: Polity Press). For a more Jamesian approach to the problem of evil, see Pihlström, Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God, chapter 5.
On the importance of James’ conception of relational identities, see J. Medina (2010) ‘James on Truth and Solidarity: The Epistemology of Diversity and the Politics of Specificity’ in J. J. Stuhr (ed.) 100 Years of Pragmatism: William James’s Revolutionary Philosophy ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press ), pp. 124–43.
V. Colapietro (forthcoming 2012 ) ‘The Tragic Roots of Jamesian Pragmatism’, forthcoming in Journal of Speculative Philosophy, ms., 19.
W. James ( 1958 [1902]) The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: New American Library ), Lectures IV and V.
This concept is explored by James in ibid., Lectures VI and VII. Compare Russell B. Goodman’s characterization in R. B. Goodman (2012) ‘Encountering Cavell: The Education of a Grownup’ in N. Saito and P. Standish (eds.) Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups (New York: Fordham University Press), pp. 62–3: ‘I soon concluded that what James calls “the sick soul” in Varieties of Religious Experience is a form of the lived skepticism that Cavell describes in his essays on Thoreau, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. I found that, like Cavell and Heidegger, James searches for an “intimacy” between self and world.’ While I will avoid comparisons between James and the other thinkers invoked by Goodman here, I very much sympathize with the idea that the sick soul attempts to find a kind of ‘intimacy’ he or she never fully succeeds in finding. ( Cf. also Proudfoot’s chapter in this volume. )
We should duly note that the phrase, ‘pragmatism and the tragic sense of life’, was coined by Sidney Hook in his book with the same title: see S. Hook (1974) Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Basic Books). However, I am not going to deal with Hook’s (largely Deweyan rather than Jamesian) version of pragmatism in any detail here. The fact that the phrase, ‘the tragic sense of life’, originates with Miguel de Unamuno, should also be acknowledged. James is, clearly, a thinker with a philosophical temperament very close to this famous Spanish thinker and essayist.
W. James (1977 [1911]) Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy, eds. F. H. Burkhardt, F. Bowers and I. K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press), p. 138. See also James, Varieties, p. 115.
See S. Neiman (2002) Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press); Bernstein, Radical Evil and Abusing Evil (cited above).
While this chapter has not explicitly addressed James’ views on death and mortality (for my earlier discussions of that topic, see S. Pihlström (2002) ‘William James on Death, Mortality, and Immortality’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 38; reprinted in an expanded form in S. Pihlström, ‘The Trail of the Human Serpent Is over Everything’, chapter 3), it seems to me clear that human mortality—or, more generally, vulnerability and potential helplessness—is a key source of the sick soul’s attitude to the world: ‘The fact that we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us, the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity. We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature.’ (James, Varieties, p. 121.)
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Pihlström, S. (2013). Pragmatic Realism and Pluralism in Philosophy of Religion. In: Rydenfelt, H., Pihlström, S. (eds) William James on Religion. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317353_5
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