Introductory Lecture to LBST 402 and to The Varieties of Religious Experience Ian Johnston, Malaspina University-College January 1997 A. Introduction In this lecture I would like to attempt two things: first, to offer something of an introduction to LBST 402 and, second, to move from that into a brief entry into our first text of the semester, James's Varieties of Religious Experience. In the process, I wish to raise a few questions and perhaps establish some guidelines for the semester, without, at the same time, being too simple about many complex issues. In some important ways LBST 402 is different from other semesters in Liberal Studies, mainly because we are dealing with works very close to our own time. This presents special problems for all of us, because, as I shall mention, our judgement is certainly affected by the fact that we are still very much immersed in the context of many of the writers we study. I would like to clarify this point somewhat by discussing briefly the issues of drawing up a reading list in Liberal Studies. B. Curriculum Narratives The basis of the Liberal Studies curriculum is a chronological arrangement of books, so that in each semester we arbitrarily designate a particular period of Western Culture and construct a short list of books from that period, which we then read together. This seems like a simple enough procedure, but it raises certain important questions, because any list of texts creates what amounts to a curriculum narrative--an intellectual account of a particular period. When we, for example, begin with something called Ancient Jewish and Greek civilization and present a relatively short list of books for study, we are implicitly announcing that these titles are linked in important ways to what is most notable or memorable about these particular periods. We are, in effect, whether we wish to or not, creating a narrative account of those times--defining, say, Greek Civilization by an attention to the Odyssey, the Republic, the Nicomachean Ethics, and the other titles on the list. Such a procedure can be seriously misleading, because obviously whatever ancient Greek civilization consisted of, it contained a great deal more than these texts and because our selection of relatively few texts creates a certain sense of the priorities and shape of that culture based upon a very small sample, something very different from a different list of book from the same period. We could seek to mitigate this problem by studying more texts from the period. That would create a different shape or narrative basis to our understanding of the period, but the problem would remain. Even if we included all the extant texts and works of art and all the archaeological evidence, we would still not be able to say that we have an exact idea of that cultural moment. We would have more confidence that we were approaching a more honest and fuller narrative, but we could never include everything that contributes to defining a culture, most of which is irrecoverably lost. I take it that this problem is clear enough. It was (and still is) the source of many of the major objections to programs like this. When the Liberal Studies program was first proposed and sample curriculum lists were distributed, the major criticisms concerned the adequacy of the narratives and the priorities implied by the selections of texts. So, for example, the feminists criticized the emphasis on works by dead white European males, the Canada- first enthusiasts decried the excess of attention to European narratives. the social context critics pointed out the lack of attention to matters of material culture, the multiculturalists objected to the absence of narratives from other cultures, and so on. Having read Marx, you will appreciate the major basis of these criticisms: any curriculum implicitly expresses an apparent ideology, so that any selection of texts needs to be evaluated by its total ideological message--what has been called the "hidden curriculum," for many people a major source of educational oppression. What's interesting, in passing, about all such critics is that, while they have no trouble pointing out the deficiencies of a curriculum list, they often have much difficulty creating one that could be put in its place without drawing an even more intense fire from all the others. Teachers in Liberal Studies deal with such criticisms by acknowledging the basis of the criticism and by stressing that we are not trying to construct an authoritative narrative line through Western Civlization and by pointing out that the process of studying a book does not mean that we therefore become unquestioning adherents to the vision of life proposed there. We are reading a few great books-- important parts of whatever the correct narrative might be, could we ever capture it--trying to focus on ideas or fictions or visions of experience which many people have found and continue to find valuable and influential and beautiful, which are, in short, worth reading for their style, ideas, and power to stimulate the imagination in various ways. Such a study, we insist, is a valuable educational experience, no matter what the overall narrative implications of the total list may be. Nevertheless, for all this faith in the power of the individual texts, we do worry about the narrative implications of the list we select. And the meetings of instructors where the book list for a semester is under discussion are among the most lively we have, the only time when faculty meetings get physically dangerous. Usually they go something like this: we start putting titles up on the board, then we prune them, then we add some more. One member of the team keeps shouting about the way the rest of us are trying to marginalize science, another keeps trying to import works of fiction into the list. By trial and error we end up finally with something, and everything seems all right until one red headed instructor bangs the table and shouts, "Just a cotton picking minute here--What kind of a narrative are we constructing?" So we start arguing again--adjusting and readjusting the list--until another member of the team finally brings things to a close by crying out "Hey, they're all good books. Let's go for a smoke." Now, although we worry about the narrative implications of the book list, we do have some confidence, up until LBST 402, that the books we select are an important part of the major narrative. They may not represent everything that might be put on the list, but they certainly do belong on any super list of texts defining the period. We have that confidence largely because these books have passed the only test that seems to work in these situations: the test of time. Moments in Western Culture have come and gone, but Homer and Plato and Genesis and Exodus remain as imaginatively appealing as ever--the works clearly transcend the cultural moments which created them and remain available to later generations. So when we put them on the list, we are confident, not only that these are interesting books, but that they matter. When we come to the twentieth century, however, we can have no such confidence, simply because not enough time has elapsed for us to judge. We are too close to the works we select, and we cannot firmly say that two hundred years from now, history will have endorsed the texts we select. It may be the case that by then our culture will have judged that, say, Freud and Eliot and Kafka were strange aberrations, footnotes to the onward march much more clearly defined by some work of which we are still unaware. If we were setting up Liberal Studies in, say, 1670, it is highly unlikely that we would emphasize the harsh and ill mannered works of that playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon who died about fifty years before; Hobbes would clearly be off limits; and the writings of many of the so called new natural scientists would have seemed absurd--a dangerous threat to what was most valuable about our culture. We would probably have paid far more attention to Milton, to John Donne's sermons (never touching his poetry), and to the various "proofs" for the existence of God through the design argument. And in acting in this way, we might very well have been doing our best to capture the most important part of our own age. What all this adds up to is obvious enough. We think that the book list we shall be dealing with in this semester features, for the most part, texts which are valuable and important in their own right, but which are also important elements, shaping visions, of the world we live in. But we cannot be so sure. And the narrative which emerges out of them--the "take" on the twentieth century which the list represents--provides only our educated guess at a story that will remain an important one years from now. By way of illustrating this point, I attach to this lecture a quick list of various intellectual, political, and artistic movements which have arisen or found new energies in this century. They are some of the things which a cultural history of our century has to take into account. From our perspective the list is bewildering, and one might be tempted on the basis of it to see our time as a period of cultural anarchy. Years from now, however, most of what appears here have long since faded from view, and the prominent features of our century_the ones which emerge as the equivalent of Hobbes's Leviathan or Kant's Critique will be more evident. Before leaving this list, one should remember that it is possible to construct similar lists for almost any moment in our cultural history. The passage of time simplifies such lists because we come to recognize the short-term failed experiments from those which had a lasting impact (e.g., the various Protestant sects during the Reformation, the competing theories about the history of the earth in the eighteenth century, the enormous menu of spiritual schools in the latter nineteenth century, and so on). C. Some Contextual Background to the "Narrative" of LBST 402 With this warning in mind, let me try to provide something of an introduction to the latest chapter in the story we have been following. If you can remember back to LBST 401, you will recall that we have followed a number of trends which tended increasingly to undermine the high hopes established by the Enlightenment for rational progress and reform--for a just society founded upon the universal morality of reason and equality as a replacement for the more or less shared religious belief which had fallen apart in the Reformation. The first of these trends formed a major part of what we read and discussed in LBST 401, namely the tendency to approach an understanding of the world historically, so that, as Dewey points out in his essay on Darwin, whatever looked like unchangingly firm grounds for understanding ourselves became increasingly undercut by writers calling attention to its historical development. This trend culminated last semester in the work of Charles Darwin, who puts all life on a contingent historical footing and of Friedrich Nietzsche, who does the same for all inherited systems of belief. A second trend, to which we have paid little attention but which will be an important feature in James and Freud and Kafka, is the growing interest in the psychology of the unconscious (we have already met some of this in Nietzsche). For nineteenth century studies of hysteria, dreams, hallucinations, forms of madness, and the like were revealing all too clearly that the idea of a mind easily controlled by reason, shaped by education into a shared sense of rational duty, was hopelessly simple, that human psychology (the "queen of the sciences" as Nietzsche calls the discipline) simply did not fit the easy assumptions of the optimistic Enlightenment reformers. Nietzsche was by no means the first to suggest that our rational selves are merely the servants of our unconscious urges. Now, it's true that relatively few people worried about Darwin (the number increased as the century drew to a close) and almost none of the common folk read Nietzsche or the early psychologists. So why should it matter if intellectuals got upset about such things? Surely for most of the people such things did not matter? Well, that brings me to the third trend, to which we have paid passing attention now and then: the continuing population explosion in Europe and the increasing dislocation caused by the growth of the massive new industrial towns, the continuing movement of people away from the land into the city, emigration to the new world, and the concomitant destruction of the small agricultural communities upon which up to this point the majority of Europeans had based their sense of themselves and the values by which they should live. By the late 1800's the railway and the huge industrial towns were facts of life in Europe and America (the vast majority of people now lived in cities), and the chief feature of a good deal of artistic and intellectual life was an accelerating gloom--an increasing sense of purposelessness. The lack of some widely shared agreement about what mattered, the large numbers of competing systems of "Truth" (from traditional religious orthodoxies, to liberalism, to communism, to a host of new spiritualist movements springing up all around), together with the aggressive anti-religious attitudes of many Darwinists, eroded a great deal of the confidence characteristic of Europe earlier in the century and in the previous century, when for many Newton's achievements had finally demonstrated the divine design of the cosmos and the universal power of reason to resolve ancient problems). And so the late nineteenth century presents a paradoxical picture in Europe of countries (especially England, France, and Germany) growing more and more rich and powerful through the application of science and capitalism to business and the military and yet at the same time in many quarters growing less and less certain about what really mattered, less and less sure that what was going on all around them was, in fact, what ought to be going on. The mood of the time is frequently caught best in the those Victorian poems of gloom and despair (by, for example, Matthew Arnold) or by the famous Victorian prayer: "Oh God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul." In addition, of course, the conditions diagnosed by Marx continued--with the industrial working class going through periodic bouts of unemployment and a growing gap between the increasingly militant working organizations and the property owners. A number of concessions were made, especially concerning the franchise, the rights to organize, and safety standards to keep the lid on the pot. A fascinating response to these conditions in the latter half of the nineteenth century, is the creation of some of the most powerful nationalistic myths, something designed to hold people together by a love of the nation state in an age where religion and community had failed. And so to this period we owe many of the pseudo Medieval myths about Merrie Olde England, the revival of gothic architecture for public institutions like Houses of Parliament, universities, and churches, many of the ceremonial processions surrounding the monarchy, and so on. In the arena of competing religions and visions of the world, central governments worked hard to hold people's allegiance together by the notion of the nation state and to establish that myth as a tradition centuries old (including, some argue, the elaboration of the notion of a Romantic movement at the start of the century as something antithetical to the reform program of the Enlightenment). A second response (and one James is dealing with directly throughout his text) is the proliferation of what he calls mind-cure sects: Mme Blavatsky's Theosophy, Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science, various styles of New Thought, Swami Vivekananda's Raja Yoga, Esoteric Buddhism, various orientalisms and occultisms--all professing to enlarge, restore, or heal the spirit. In James time there was, as in our day and for much the same reason, a huge menu of mind cures, so that the title of his text, The Varieties of Religious Experience, is a direct acknowledgement of the realities of the spiritual life of his age. So in this period of enormous prosperity (for many) and peace in Europe (after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 Europe enjoyed one of the longest peacetime periods in recent centuries), combined in intellectual circles with a sense of growing unease and disorientation, the difficulties were much of the time to a great extent covered over with a patina of confidence in the glory and rightness of the modern European state, a faith which, for the masses, seemed to be confirmed by the succcessful imperial conquests in many parts of the world by all the major industrial powers: England, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Holland, and America. Europe must be on the right track, for look at how it was, in effect, taking over the world. All this came crashing down in the century's most devastating conflict, World War I. No event brought up more clearly the enormous gap between the mechanical power now in the hands of European leaders and an intelligent sense of how to use that power justly. In the trenches of World War I, the moral bankruptcy of the ruling classes exposed itself so clearly, that from then on, the working class in Europe has always regarded the ruling class as its enemies (in spite of the continuing popularity of the Royal Family-- until the recent fiascos). The Great Depression which followed hard upon the heels of the World War simply confirmed for many what the war had revealed: that Marx had been right all along and that the Russians were on the right track with their violent repudiation of the old order. [Parenthetically, let me point to an eloquent example of how the Great War contradicted so many of the best hopes for rational progress. In that war, the reality of massive death tolls rested on a single invention: the machine gun. Here, in a letter from 1877, the inventor of the device, Richard Jordan Gatling, explains his moral purpose: It may be interesing to you to know how I came to invent the gun that bears my name. . . . In 1861, during the opening events of the war [the American Civil War] . . . I witnessed almost daily the departure of troops to the front and the return of the wounded, sick and dead. The most of the latter lost their lives, not in battle, but by sickness and sickness incident to service. It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine--a gun--that would by its rapidity of fire enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would to a great extent, supercede the necessity of large armies, and consequently exposure to battle and disease would be greatly diminshed.] Much of what we read this semester is written in the shadow of that devastating event. What Europeans did to each other then, what the rulers of Europe inflicted on their own subjects in that horrific experience, stripped the illusions away and for many brought to the forefront the nightmarish scenario of a civilization which no longer had any sense of how to use its own power, no sense of the value of the human community, no commitment to anything we might recognize as traditional values of responsibility, duty, faith, hope, and charity. All that died in the Battle of the Somme. Much of what we read this semester is going to be very bleak, very pessimistic--a response to the great disillusionment: Freud, Kafka, Conrad, and Eliot, in particular, although in different ways, are an anticipation of or a direct reaction to this growing gap between the worldly "success" of Western culture and any confident inner justification in the face of the intellectual uncertainties and the physical barbarities. It is, in a last analysis, a profound moral conflict, and it leads different thinkers in different directions: Eliot's early poetry is an apocalyptic lament for the loss of cultural meaning (a stance he, an American, resolved for himself by embracing traditional European religion); Kafka's prose visions are famous expressions of a nightmarish sense of a world which seems to require justification but which never provides what is required, Freud's diagnosis offers only a pessimistic hope that we may be able to make our personal lives slightly more bearable, and Conrad sees life in Europe as a "choice of nightmares." Many of the artists we shall discuss bring out in their world the same sense of nightmarish despair. Even the most amusing work we read (and comic visions are often hard to come by), Tom Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead the author himself has described as a retreat with style from the chaos. Those for whom the World War was not a sufficient lesson soon had another: the rise of Fascism and the genocidal policies of Hitler's Germany. How could one reconcile such a union of modern technology with barbarous insanity, especially in the country most proud of its immediate cultural, philosophical, and religious traditions? After what an experience, what forgiveness, what conclusions? In Hannah Arendt's examination of the Eichmann Trial (the real Trial of the Century) we will be dealing with one person's attempt to explore ancient questions of justice in the light of the new barbarities. We are also going to meet a new individual hero, a person paralysed in some important ways by an incomplete sense of self, intelligent enough at times to realize that something is wrong, but incapable of resolving the difficulties, because he brings to the world no faith robust enough to take a chance, no faith in live itself. In Prufrock, Gregor Samsa, Marlowe, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern we meet a characteristic concern of twentieth century fiction and art- -the paralysis of the fractured self who lacks the resources to address significant concerns, deficient in what the Greeks would call eros, passionate striving for a moral cause. Thus, the despair we shall be reading about is not simply a cultural matter; it manifests itself in the daily realities of individual lives, at the level of the self. You will notice, too, in what we read and in the art we discuss the emergence of a powerful new symbol, which, I would argue, is one of the defining images of the century, the lonely room, in which twentieth century personality sits and broods, hoping that someone will knock upon the door, too fearful to go out into a public space and confront the world and the people in it, to engage meaningfully in life. This is a prominent image in Eliot, central to Kafka's Metamorphosis, and an important part of a great deal of modern art. It reached its most best known expression in The Diary of Anne Frank, in which the absurdity of the modern world becomes manifest--people locked into an attic room trying to carry out a normal life ruled by ritual traditions in a world gone destructively insane. Not everyone, of course, was pessimistic. For a time, especially immediately after the World War, Communism seemed to offer the best hope for rational or revolutionary reform. And Western intellectuals and artists flocked to the cause-- only to become horribly disappointed. More successful were the scientists dedicated to continuing the Renaissance project of conquering nature for the relief of man's estate. For them the intellectual unease of the time often had little effect. What did they care for Nietzsche when the results in their laboratories were mapping more and more of nature, from the intricacies of atomic structure to the genetic make up of human beings. We will be reading one of the best examples of that in the work of Richard Dawkins, the most enthusiastic and best known exponent of neo- Darwinian interpretations of life, and a thinker to whom doubts and despair are quite foreign. The most powerful source of optimism in the twentieth century for Western Culture has been and remains the United States of America. Thus, it is not surprising that the leadership of the Enlightenment project should have crossed the Atlantic. There are complex historical reasons for this, which we not be exploring. One of them we can locate in the new approach to experience best defined in the work of Henry James, who was among the first American intellectuals, if not the very first, to be taken seriously in Europe and to have a significant effect upon European intellectual life. D. An Brief Introduction to The Varieties of Religious Experience William James is, as most of you know, one of the two famous James brothers. The other one was not the famous gangster Jesse James but the novelist Henry James, who resolved his uneasiness about the moral complexities of his time by moving to England and becoming an English citizen (the same "solution" T. S. Eliot would adopt a generation later). William James was an eminent scientist, trained as a doctor and very well known as a foremost authority in the developing science of psychology and in the launching in America's most original contributions to the development of philosophy, Pragmatism, of which this book is a particular famous example.. The basis for this book as we have it was an invitation to William James to deliver the Gifford Lectures in Great Britain. This lecture series had been founded by Adam Gifford (1820-1887), "for promoting, advancing, teaching, and diffusing the study of natural theology, in the widest sense of that term, in other words, the knowledge of God" and "of the foundations of ethics." James was not the first American to be invited, but his lecture series turned out to be far and away the most popular. In the ten years following their publication in 1902, twenty-one impressions were required and fifteen more during the next twenty years. As a response to this text and to other works of James, Pragmatic Clubs were founded in the European capitals and for the first time American ideas exerted a wide influence on European thought. By now in Liberal Studies you should be familiar with a useful approach to any text such as this: first, examine carefully the initial assumptions, then move to the methodology, and finally assess the conclusions. In doing this, we have stressed again and again, the importance of not leaping directly to an evaluation of the conclusions, on the ground that in many (perhaps even most) cases, the real importance of the book lies not in the persuasiveness of its conclusions but in the nature of the method, particularly the shaping of the initial questions which themselves as often as not shape immediately the method necessary to explore the questions. In keeping with this method, then, let me begin by focusing on how James sets up his argument E. The Opening of James's Argument James begins by setting aside very firmly the often used argument that by explaining the origins of something we have somehow satisfactorily explained its value. He is attacking what came to be known later in the century as the Genetic Fallacy. Yes, of course we can explain human actions or belief systems in terms of how they have come to be, but that tells us nothing about their value, which must be something divorced from origins. Hence, history does not necessarily resolve all questions of truth and value. Let me cite a common example: students are often heard to complain that the mark they receive for an assignment is not commensurate with the amount of work they put into it. "But I worked so hard on that essay," they say, "I should get a higher mark." This is a particularly common version of the Genetic Fallacy that James is attacking. For it is clear that hard work is no criterion of quality, frustrating as it may be for many students that their work receives lower marks than the assignments of someone else who just happens to dash off the work apparently very casually. At any rate, this opening argument enables James to set aside those who think they have explained religion adequately by pointing to this or that physical cause (a school of thought that James calls Medical Materialism). And in the course of this discussion James introduces the single most important principle that is the major theme, not only of James's discussion of religion, but also of his entire philosophy--that the value of something is to be judged by its effects, not by its origin, or, in James's phrase, by your fruits you shall know them, not by their roots. It quickly becomes apparent here that James is a radical empiricist, perhaps the most extreme example we have met. For him all questions of value have to meet the text of experience. And by experience he does not mean something with a capital E_some universal norm. No, he means experiences, the active consequences which occur in the lives of particular individuals. At any rate you must all be ready now to judge the religious life by its results exclusively, and I shall assume that the bugaboo of morbid origin will scanalize our piety no more. (38) As an empiricist, James furthermore denies to the word "religion" any single principle or essence. The name is a collective word, a classification label, for a huge number of different experiences, and the proper job of investigating religion must be to consider very specific examples of all the different manifestations of human experiences which fit into this rubric. His approach is thus at the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum from anyone who seeks a priori to define "religion" and then to deduce its characteristics in some logically systematic manner which will then enable him to judge what is religion and what is not.. The method is clearly similar to Aristotle's but far more ruthlessly applied. Much of the opening is then taken up with explaining the criteria for inclusion in the category of religious experiences. Obviously, James has to establish some of these, and he does so on the basis of numerous, often very lengthy examples (as a good empiricist should). This, it should be clear, is not an attempt to arrive at a single clear definition of religion but simply to impose some limits on what will count as a religious experience. The discussion leads to his famous and in some quarters controversial definition of the sorts of experiences he is going to include: Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. (46) And he goes on to narrow the definition of the divine a few pages further on: So I propose--arbitrarily again, if you please--to narrow our definition once more by saying that the word "divine," as employed therein, shall mean for us not merely the primal and enveloping and real, for that meaning if taken without restriction might prove too broad. The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest. (51) This definition and many of James's examples have been criticized for their very Protestant emphasis, but that criticism does not hurt the heart of James's argument. Since, for him, all experience is radically individualistic- -our life is made up of our experiences as individuals--the emphasis on the privacy of religious experience naturally follows. So much of his book necessarily consists of a catalogue of personal accounts of private religious experiences. His methodology commits him to such a survey, and the classifications he produces (for example, the famous one between the healthy-minded and the sick souls) provide an interesting way of organizing his data. He admits that his criteria for determining a religious experience are arbitrary by he appeals to his audience for their agreement. And, as we see, any disagreement with this or that criterion (like, say, seriousness) does no harm to James's position, although it might make the book much longer, since it would require him to include more examples. What does emerge as interesting--and something I will return to because it is worth debating--James displays a distinct preference for certain forms of religious experience over others. On the face of it, these statements of preference would seem to be unjustified. After all, if we judge the value of something by its results, as he announces at the start, and all lives are a collection of personal experiences lived individually, then who is to claim that one set of consequences is preferable to another? We shall return to this problem at the end of the lecture. F. The Value of the Religious Life: Pragmatism This question brings me to the most important and intriguing part of this lecture, namely, James notions of truth and value. For James, as an empiricist, is determined to rescue our understanding of religion from dogmatic systems asserting logical truths about religion, and yet at the same time he is clearly ready to proclaim that some forms of experience are worth a lot more than others. This question James faces squarely in the final lectures of the series, starting with the section on "The Values of Saintliness" (278). Any discussion of this topic immediately involves the name of the philosophical system most closely associated with James--Pragmatism, which he is widely credited with launching in August 1898 in lecture at the University of California at Berkeley (although the origin of Pragmatism is a matter of dispute). For James, Pragmatism is not primarily a philosophical method. It is, by contrast, a system of judging whether our ideas and beliefs are true and valuable. As a psychologist James believes that what he calls Pragmatism is indeed the way almost everyone really does think, so the term is as much descriptive as anything else. In brief the main elements of the theory are as follows: Human beings lead purposeful individual lives. We make decisions for ourselves on the basis of who we are, driven by the unique make up of our experiences, our desires, our unconscious motives, our culture, and our particular circumstances. James is no determinist--we do have the freedom to make decisions and moral choices. But his view of human beings is firmly rooted in biology--our decisions and choices arise out of the organic natures we possess, and these are radically individual. The life that confronts us is, in James's famous phrase a "buzzing, blooming confusion." When we seek what is the right thing to do we bring to bear all the equipment of our individual minds in a "pragmatic" search, looking for what is going to succeed in these particular circumstances. We do not consult some ideal blueprint or some universal rule (like, say, the categorical imperative)--instead we focus on the consequences of various actions. And we test our decisions, not in accordance with any rational formula, but on the basis of their success for us. If particular ideas work for us, then they are true and we will bring them to bear on further experiences. "Beliefs, in short," James claims, "are rules for action; and the whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of active habits." (369) The basis for this view of human action was firmly biological. James claims that is, in fact, is the way we actually do think. As he puts the matter in "Reflex Action and Theism": the structural unit of the nervous system is in fact a triad, neither of whose elements has any independent existence. The sensory impression exists only for the sake of awaking the central process of reflection, and the central process of reflection exists only for the sake of calling forth the final act. All action is thus re-action upon the outer world; and the middle stage of consideration or contemplation or thinking is only a place of transit, the bottom of a loop, both whose ends have their point of application in the outer world. If it should ever have no roots in the outer world, if it should ever happen that it led to no active measures, it would fail of its essential function, and would have to be considered either pathological or abortive. The current of life which runs in at our eyes or ears is meant to run out at our hands, feet, or lips. The only use of thoughts it occasions while inside is to determine its direction to whichever of these organs shall, on the whole, under the circumstances actually present, act in the way most propitious to our welfare." (qu. Barzun 21). In his analysis of this thinking "loop" that begins and ends in experience, James gives an important emphasis in The Varieties of Religious Experience to the unconscious (in Lecture 3, "the Reality of the Unseen"), stressing that the choices we make for action and the ideas we adopt to suit our purposes arise out of our unconscious needs: Nevertheless, if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it which rationalism can give an account is relative superficial. . . . If you have intuition at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. . . . The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favour of the same conclusion. The, indeed, our intuitions and our reason work together. . . . Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow. (78) James is no strict determinist, even though such a passage might suggest that he is. We do, as individuals make choices and are free to change our minds. But the importance he gives to the unconscious in religion (and by implication in all really important motivating ideas) calls into question the easy assurances of many earlier Enlightenment thinkers about the efficacy of reason alone. This reflex action that James describes is, in his view, the way people really do think and act (and we should recognize in this point something Nietzsche also stressed: that philosophical systems are just rationalizations of personal unconscious desires). And the result is a infinite multiplicity of ideas justifying actions. Thus, generalizations from some preconceived normative definition of human thought and action applicable to all does not fit the facts of experience, which James, as a confirmed empiricist, makes the basis of all our understanding. We judge our ideas in action, in their consequences: "To develop a thought's meaning we need therefore only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its sole significance; and the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice" (369). How does one know that the idea has met the test of experience, that our belief, judged by its results, is rationally true? James replies (in "The Sentiment of Rationality"): "The only answer can be that he will recognize rationality as he recognizes everything else, by certain subjective marks. What, then, are the marks? A strong feeling of ease, peace, rest, is one of them. The transition from a state of puzzle and perplexity to rational comprehension is full of lively relief and pleasure." James, Barzun notes, liked to use an example he borrowed from the Italian pragmatist Papuan, who likened Pragmatism to a corridor running down a hotel floor, leading to different rooms (Suckiel 6). In each room, a different belief system may be offered, but in each room if the philosophy is to be practised it should meet the pragmatic test. If the experience is successful, if the belief system is useful to you, then it is true. Religious ideas, in other words, like all ideas, do not exist for us to contemplate or ague abstractly about. They exist for us to use. They are, in effect, to use a favorite metaphor of many later pragmatists, tools which we use to achieve our human purposes. It they work for us, they are good (just like tools); if they serve no purpose, they are without value and truth for us. Anything which has no connection with the practical experiences of our actions is irrelevant. This was the basic method proposed by the American Charles Sanders Pierce in 1878 in an essay called "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," in which he suggested that if particular changes in an idea had no practical consequences for our actions then there was no difference between the original and the changed idea and the truth or falsity of the issue was therefore irrelevant. To this rule, Pierce gave the name Pragmatism (after the Greek word pragma, meaning "a thing done"). James reiterates this stance with great emphasis in the section "Philosophy," stressing that the various "proofs" for many of the attributes of God are in this sense irrelevant, since their truth or falsity has no practical consequences for us. And he strives to link this approach to the truth with the greatest philosophical traditions of the country in which he is a guest: What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. The Continental schools of philosophy have too often overlooked the fact that man's thinking is organically connected with his conduct. It seems to me to be the chief glory of English and Scottish thinkers to have kept the organic connection in view. The guiding principle of British philosophy has in fact been that every difference must make a difference, every theoretical difference somewhere issue in a practical difference, and that the best method of discussing points of theory is to begin by ascertaining what practical difference would result from one alternative or the other being true. What is the particular truth in question known as? In what facts does it result? What is its cash value in terms of particular experience? This is the characteristic English way of taking up a question. In this way, you remember, Locke takes up the question of personal identity. What you mean by it is just your chain of particular memories, says he. That is the only concretely verifiable part of its significance. All further ideas about it, such as the oneness or manyness of the spiritual substance on which it is based, are therefore void of intelligible meaning; and propositions touching such ideas may be indifferently affirmed or denied. So Berkeley with his "matter." The cash-value of matter is our physical sensations. That is what it is known as, all that we concretely verify of its conception. That, therefore, is the whole meaning of the term "matter"--any other pretended meaning is mere wind of words. Hume does the same thing with causation. It is known as habitual antecedence, and as tendency on our part to look for something definite to come. Apart from this practical meaning, it has no significance whatsoever, and books about it may be committed to the flames, says Hume. . . . When all is said and done, it was English and Scotch writers, and not Kant, who introduced "the critical method" into philosophy, the one method fitted to make philosophy a study worthy of serious men. For what seriousness can possible remain in debating philosophic propositions that will never make an appreciable difference to us in action? (367-8) Thus, questions about religious beliefs which make no difference to our practice, to our understanding and our actions, which have, in James's very unfortunate choice of phrase, no "cash value" for us, are totally irrelevant: they are useless tools. This view of religion enables James strongly to endorse religious experience as an essential, perhaps the most essential, part of life, for it provides us with practical benefits in a way that no other form of experience, least of all science, can. His justification of religious truth is therefore practical, pluralistic, always approximate, fluid, tolerant, individualistic, and undogmatic--in a word, very much in keeping with the spirit of liberal individualism of the society of which he was a part. Thus, we must value religious experience as a magnificent contribution to human life; its truth manifests itself in the wonderful ways in which it enriches human conduct and feeling. Yet we must never deceive ourselves that we will ever be able conclusively to demonstrate by rational argument the objective presence of God--and we should not try, because such arguments have no practical value. To this point James returns again and again, giving at one point something of the last word on the favourite nineteenth century "proof" for the existence of God, the Design Argument. The quotation is long, but I cannot resist such a fine example of James's prose, even in a footnote: It must not be forgotten that any form of disorder in the world might, by the design argument, suggest a God for just that kind of disorder. The truth is that any state of things whatever that can be named is logically susceptible of teleological interpretation. The ruins of the earthquake at Lisbon, for example: the whole of past history had to be planned exactly as it was to bring about in the fullness of time just that particular arrangement of debris of masonry, furniture, and once living bodies. No other train of causes would have been sufficient. And so of any other arrangement, bad or good, which might as a matter of fact be found resulting anywhere from previous conditions. To avoid such pessimistic consequences and save its beneficent designer, the design argument accordingly invokes two other principles, restrictive in their operation. The first is physical: Nature's forces tend of their own accord only to disorder and destruction, to heaps of ruins, not to architecture. This principle, though plausible at first sight, seems, in the light of recent biology, to be more and more improbable. The second principle is one of anthropomorphic interpretation. No arrangement that for us is "disorderly" can possible have been an object of design at all. This principle is of course a mere assumption in the interests of anthropomorphic Theism. When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement, useful, aesthetic, or morel--so interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention. The result is that we work over the contents of the world selectively. It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from our point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at, and by choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of any chaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that the pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this. She is a vast plenum in which our attention draws capricious lines in innumerable directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the special lines we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things "unadapted" to each other in this world than there are things "adapted"; infinitely more things with irregular relations than with regular relations between them. But we look for the regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve it in our memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the collective of them fills our encyclopedias. Yet all the while between and around them lies an infinite anonymous chaos of objects that no one ever thought of together, of relations that never yet attracted our attention. The facts of order from which the physico-theological argument starts are thus easily susceptible of interpretation as arbitrary human products. So long as this is the case, although of course no argument against God follows, it follows that the argument for him still fails to constitute a knockdown proof of his existence. It will be convincing only to those who on other grounds believe in him already. (365) It is important to stress, however, that for all his dismissal of "proofs" of God's existence or attributes, James stongly emphasises that only a belief in God can give us sufficient justification for our natural desires for a morally strenuous life marked by concern for others (in other words for certain parts of our humanity). James clearly values this form of life more than others, and he believes that human beings will devote themselves to the heroic, the charitable, and the morally demanding if religious ideas are available to them. Without religious experience, James claims, such human potentialities would never occur. Thus, those who would maintain that James's view will encourage a shallow relativism, in which each person selects the easiest, least demanding religious faith available miss James's point. There will always be people who do that, no matter what religious or scientific views are available, James would reply, but there will always be people for whom that sort of life is not satisfying, who demand something more of themselves. Whether this is true or not is open to debate, but no one can deny, I think, that religion can be and has been inspiring to individuals in their conduct towards others. Thus, those who miss the point by accusing James of encouraging hedonism_if it feels all right to me then it must be true_miss the point. Without religious ideas (whatever their origin) we will lack any proper justification for a morally strenuous life and we will even fail to understand those for whom the morally strenuous life is more important than commodious living. Without religious ideas, therefore, the quality of human life for James will suffer enormously. On this point James differs pointedly with Nietzsche (to whom he is in many other respects quite similar). Nietzsche, you recall, saw the religious life as encouraging a slave mentality, forcing passionate spirits into obedience in a way that severely limits their potential. James's view is quite different here. For him the varieties of religious life are an encouragement to the finest potentialities of the human spirit; without such encouragement many worthy human actions would never take place. Does this pragmatic view commit us to a certain relativism? Well, yes and no. Religious truths are a matter of consequences to particular individuals, yet human beings belong to particular historical periods from which they cannot entirely divorce themselves. So individuals are not free to be whatever they want. Nor, as we shall see, are all choices equally valuable, equally true. On the other hand individuals are the final determiners of the adequacy of their ideas: "The most salient criterion of cognitive value is the fulfillment of subjective preference" (Suckiel 29). And James's pragmatism would seem to involve one of the oldest views hostile to mainstream philosophy--that the end justifies the means. Since there is nothing inherently true in a belief system, we adopt it as we would a tool and judge its efficacy by the result--our faith is justified if the end is appropriate, if its "cash value" works for us. What happens then to communal or shared values? Those, James argues, are the product of our accidentally determined historical circumstances_the things we happen to agree upon because of the events of our history because we find their consequences useful to us. There is no question here of "progress" towards some universal fulfilment (as in Kant or Marx)_the values we share in our communities, like the ideas we have in our personal lives, we adopt and follow because they are useful, they work for us. Thus, things which we value a great deal in our shared life just happen to be ideas which we have found useful. As Barzun points out, for example, "It follows that the idea of human equality is a social assumption made for its desirable consequences. . . . Modern egalitarian theory is thus a pragmatic moral assumption, which has largely created what it hoped for. It replaces by fiat the separate equalities of birth, fighting ability, religion, or whatever." What led us to adopt this idea? Well that is a matter of our historical circumstances, determined by the accidents of history. Thus, the subjective view of an action's value does not rule out judgements about competing systems of belief. This becomes explicit at the opening of Lecture 19, "Other Characteristics," where James makes the following claim: the uses of religion, its uses to the individual who has it, and the uses of the individual himself to the world, are the best arguments that truth is in it. We return to the empirical philosophy: the true is what works well, even though the qualification "on the whole" may always have to be added. (380, italics added) The italicised phrase calls attention to how we are to adjudicate "the uses of the individual to the world." Without some overarching view of justice, how are we to judge? James's views of this point are consistent with his pragmatic view of truth. We judge according to the standards of our time, according to the rules we have, for practical reasons, adopted. In considering the value of saintliness, for example, James is scathing about those whose religious views are of no practical benefit to others: But when the intellect, as in this Louis, is originally no larger than a pin's head, and cherishes ideas of God of corresponding smallness, the result, notwithstanding the heroism put forth, is on the whole repulsive. Purity, we see in the object-lesson, is not the one thing needful; and it is better than a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted. (299) James makes clear, however, that this is a modern judgement, based upon a much stronger modern sense among human beings of the importance of human interaction: Today, rightly or wrongly, helpfulness in general human affairs is, in consequence of one of those secular mutations in moral sentiment of which I spoke, deemed an essential element of worth in character; and to be of some public or private use is also reckoned as a species of divine service. (299) There is no sense here or elsewhere that James thinks that we are more progressive or better than the age which worshipped and canonized Louis--there is no right and wrong in the processes of history. Our culture has mutated (the biological metaphor is deliberate) and we have determined for our better survival that conduct like St Louis' is a lower form of religious life than something more immediately useful to others. Such a view obviously calls for a new philosophical mission of the sort which John Dewey refers to in his essay on Darwin. And, like Dewey, James calls upon philosophers to be less dogmatic and more helpful, more useful, or in the phrase of a modern pragmatist Richard Rorty, to turn from trying to edifying us all about the Truth (with a capital T) toward trying to provide intellectual therapy which will assist our discussions. They must foster the process of clarifying our conceptions and promoting the discussions which will permit people to become more aware of how and why they act and of reaching agreement on useful truths, but they cannot rule with dogmatic power and certainty. This raises a final question concerning the social and political consequences of such a view. To what extent is a commitment to immediate experiences and the shared values produced by the community's sense of usefulness simply an endorsement of a particular status quo (in James's case a pluralistic liberal society). What happens to ideals of justice, when all we have is a contingent historical stage of agreement? What if what we agree upon is unjust? James would presumably state that dogmatic standards of just and unjust are irrelevant, unless they become an integral part of our successful actions. For those standards to become true, they would have to become socially effective, they would have to, that is, become useful tools in people's individual and collective lives. And for that to happen, the historical circumstances and the cultural efforts of human beings in their interrelationships will have to persuade whoever needs to be persuaded of the efficacy of the new ideal. But change will never come about, cannot ever come about, simply because someone has claimed to "prove" the truth of the ideal. The consequences of this position I leave for you to consider, and I urge you to bring to the seminar discussions this afternoon your reflections on that subject. Bibliography Barzun, Jacques. A Stroll With William James (New York: Harper and Row, 1983) James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Mentor, 1958) Suckiel, Ellen Kappy. The Pragmatic Philosophy of William James (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982)