Varieties of Religious Experience
I am almost done with William James's "Varieties of Religious Experience." Up until the last few chapters, I found it a fair-minded discussion of religion. James seems not to believe in a religion, but he goes out of his way to treat it seriously. The book provides a lot of interesting examples of conversions, spiritual despair, saintliness, and mysticism. (Almost all but the last are from Christians.)
Then he gets to a chapter on religious philosophy, and he burns through all the good will I had developed for him. He begins by giving some academic theology by John Henry Newman about God, such as this: "This makes Him absolutely unlimited from without, and unlimited also from within; for limitation is non-being; and God is being itself." (He cites Newman at some length, which I will not do because it is boring.) And he concludes that Newman's theology is fairly abstract and pointless, which I find difficult to argue with. However, he then goes on to make a digression in favour of Pragmatism, which I disagree with in multiple ways. To begin with, James says that Pragmatism says that, "If there were any part of a thought that made no difference in the thought's practical consequences, then that part would be no proper element of the thought's significance." I do not believe this is actually part of Pragmatism. I might be wrong (not having studied it in depth), but my understanding is that Pragmatism only regards something as a true belief if one is willing to act on it. That is quite different from saying that an idea must have practical significance to be important.
Second, James argues, "candidly speaking, how do such qualities as these [which Newman has assigned God] make any definite connection with our life?" I can agree that they have no apparent connection to our lives, but the same could be said of plenty of other knowledge, say, the commutative property of arithmetic. What possible benefit could it be to know that "a + b = b + a"? What could be more abstract and divorced from our lives? But we may have occasion to use that information to solve a problem; or, even if we don't, some mathematician or engineer has surely used that information to solve a problem in a way that benefits us. I have no idea how properties such as God's "aseity" or necessariness or immateriality would affect me; I'm not even sure that I believe them; but, if they could be demonstrated, I think there is a strong possibility that they would have implications somewhere. So James has picked the most abstract and foundational parts of theology and used them to dismiss theology as a whole, just as if I had taken the axioms of geometry to claim that there is nothing useful to learn from classical geometry, and he has been exactly as convincing.
As if this were not enough, James then proceeds to explain what kind of religious philosophy he finds more credible, and it is: Hegelianism and Transcendentalism. He actually quotes the following passage with approval:
I won't say that I understand it. I doubt William James understands it. I doubt the person who wrote it understands it, because these words seem to be devoid of meaning. They are just vacuous abstractions that strain credibility every bit as much as Newman's theology. The difference is, I think I could argue with Newman. I might not convince him, but he is at least trying to prove things logically. I have no idea what this person (or any Transcendentalist) is trying to say, and I feel that all I could do would be to contradict him, just as all he is doing is making unprovable assertions.
Then he gets to a chapter on religious philosophy, and he burns through all the good will I had developed for him. He begins by giving some academic theology by John Henry Newman about God, such as this: "This makes Him absolutely unlimited from without, and unlimited also from within; for limitation is non-being; and God is being itself." (He cites Newman at some length, which I will not do because it is boring.) And he concludes that Newman's theology is fairly abstract and pointless, which I find difficult to argue with. However, he then goes on to make a digression in favour of Pragmatism, which I disagree with in multiple ways. To begin with, James says that Pragmatism says that, "If there were any part of a thought that made no difference in the thought's practical consequences, then that part would be no proper element of the thought's significance." I do not believe this is actually part of Pragmatism. I might be wrong (not having studied it in depth), but my understanding is that Pragmatism only regards something as a true belief if one is willing to act on it. That is quite different from saying that an idea must have practical significance to be important.
Second, James argues, "candidly speaking, how do such qualities as these [which Newman has assigned God] make any definite connection with our life?" I can agree that they have no apparent connection to our lives, but the same could be said of plenty of other knowledge, say, the commutative property of arithmetic. What possible benefit could it be to know that "a + b = b + a"? What could be more abstract and divorced from our lives? But we may have occasion to use that information to solve a problem; or, even if we don't, some mathematician or engineer has surely used that information to solve a problem in a way that benefits us. I have no idea how properties such as God's "aseity" or necessariness or immateriality would affect me; I'm not even sure that I believe them; but, if they could be demonstrated, I think there is a strong possibility that they would have implications somewhere. So James has picked the most abstract and foundational parts of theology and used them to dismiss theology as a whole, just as if I had taken the axioms of geometry to claim that there is nothing useful to learn from classical geometry, and he has been exactly as convincing.
As if this were not enough, James then proceeds to explain what kind of religious philosophy he finds more credible, and it is: Hegelianism and Transcendentalism. He actually quotes the following passage with approval:
Two things may without difficulty be proved, viz., that this reality is an absolute Spirit, and conversely that it is only in communion with this absolute Spirit or Intelligence that the finite Spirit can realize itself. It is absolute; for the faintest movement of human intelligence would be arrested, if it did not presuppose the absolute reality of intelligence, of thought itself. Doubt or denial themselves presuppose and indirectly affirm it. When I pronounce anything to be true, I pronounce it, indeed, to be relative to thought, but not to be relative to my thought, or to the thought of any other individual mind. From the existence of all individual minds as such I can abstract; I can think them away. But that which I cannot think away is thought or self- consciousness itself, in its independence and absoluteness, or, in other words, an Absolute Thought or Self-Consciousness.
I won't say that I understand it. I doubt William James understands it. I doubt the person who wrote it understands it, because these words seem to be devoid of meaning. They are just vacuous abstractions that strain credibility every bit as much as Newman's theology. The difference is, I think I could argue with Newman. I might not convince him, but he is at least trying to prove things logically. I have no idea what this person (or any Transcendentalist) is trying to say, and I feel that all I could do would be to contradict him, just as all he is doing is making unprovable assertions.
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