Pragmatism and Religion

The Pragmatist's Problem

• To understand pragmatic religious proposals, one must understand the centrality of God for Western religion.  This god is otherworldly yet pervasively active in this world.
• So the pragmatists with their empirical and naturalistic orientation have a problem: Religion is a practice that is alien in many ways to their newly developing beliefs about the world yet is a practice with which they are still comfortable in many ways.

William James (1842-1910) does not know God personally

In a letter to James Leuba, a psychologist, WJ says:

"My personal position is simple.  I have no living sense of commerce with a God.  I envy those who have, for I know the addition of such a sense would help me immensely."  Then he describes Leuba's position as "dogmatic atheistic naturalism" [17 April 1904].

But James does believe in God

Yet in a response to a 1904 survey by Prof. James B. Pratt, James indicated that he believed in God not because of any personal experience or the authority of the Bible but because he needed such a belief.  Why? He admired religious people and for "social reasons."

William James

• does not reject his felt need for God,
• studies the psychology of religious experience, and
• thinks that there is something valuable beyond the empirically knowable.

In a letter to Miss Frances R. Morse, April 12, 1900, he writes:

The problem I have set myself [in The Varieties of Religious Experience] is a hard one: first, to defend . . . "experience" against "philosophy" as being thereal backbone of the world's religious life . . . . and second, to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean its creeds and theories), yet the life of it as a whole is mankind's most important function.

Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Let me propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the "more" with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life.

"The Will to Believe" (1897)

. . . Science says things are; morality says some things are better than other things; and religion says essentially two things.

    First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word.  "Perfection is eternal"--this is the phrase of Charles Secrétan seems a good way of putting this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all.

    The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true.

Theology's "Truth"

If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much.  For how much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowleged [Pragmatism (1907), p. 29].

John Dewey (1859-1952)

• embraces James' attitudinal approach (as seen in A Common Faith, lecture/chapter one),
• impersonalized and naturalizes the divine (lecture/chapter two), and
• locates the religious life in secular society and its institutions (lecture/chapter three)

A Common Faith (1934)

There is one idea held in common by these two opposite groups [the traditionally religious and their opponents]: identification of the religious with the supernatural. The question I shall raise in these chapters concerns the ground for and the consequences of this identification: its reasons and its value. In the discussion I shall develop another conception of the nature of the religious phase of experience, one that separates it from the supernatural and the things that have grown up about it. I shall try to show that these derivations are encumbrances and that what is genuinely religious will undergo an emancipation when it is relieved from them; that then, for the first time, the religious aspect of experience will be free to develop freely on its own account [LW 9.4].

Religion as an Intense, Inclusive and Self-Unifying Activity

What has been said does not imply that all moral faith in ideal ends is by virtue of that fact religious in quality. The religious is "morality touched by emotion" only when the ends of moral conviction arouse emotions that are not only intense but are actuated and supported by ends so inclusive that they unify the self [LW 9.16].

 Naturalistic Religious Activity

Any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value is religious in quality. Many a person, inquirer, artist, philanthropist, citizen, men and women in the humblest walks of life, have achieved, without presumption and without display, such unification of themselves and of their relations to the conditions of existence. It remains to extend their spirit and inspiration to ever wider numbers. If I have said anything about religions and religion that seems harsh, I have said those things because of a firm belief that the claim on the part of religions to possess a monopoly of ideals and of the supernatural means by which alone, it is alleged, they can be furthered, stands in the way of the realization of distinctively religious values inherent in natural experience. For that reason, if for no other, I should be sorry if any were misled by the frequency with which I have employed the adjective "religious" to conceive of what I have said as a disguised apology for what have passed as religions. The opposition between religious values as I conceive them and religions is not to be bridged. Just because the release of these values is so important, their identification with the creeds and cults of religions must be dissolved [LW 9.19f].

Dewey's Understanding of Religious Faith

The positive lesson is that religious qualities and values if they are real at all are not bound up with any single item of intellectual assent, not even that of the existence of the God of theism; and that, under existing conditions, the religious function in experience can be emancipated only through surrender of the whole notion of special truths that are religious by their own nature, together with the idea of peculiar avenues of access to such truths. For were we to admit that there is but one method for ascertaining fact and truth--that conveyed by the word "scientific" in its most general and generous sense--no discovery in any branch of knowledge and inquiry could then disturb the faith that is religious. I should describe this faith as the unification of the self through allegiance to inclusive ideal ends, which imagination presents to us and to which the human will responds as worthy of controlling our desires and choices [LW 9.23].

An Impersonalized and Naturalized Deity

The discussion has arrived at a point where a more fundamental objection to the position I am taking needs consideration.  The misunderstanding upon which this objection rests should be pointed out. The view I have advanced is sometimes treated as if the identification of the divine with ideal ends left the ideal wholly without roots in existence and without support from existence. The objection implies that my view commits one to such a separation of the ideal and the existent that the ideal has no chance to find lodgment even as a seed that might grow and bear fruit. On the contrary, what I have been criticizing is the identification of the ideal with a particular Being, especially when that identification makes necessary the conclusion that this Being is outside of nature, and what I have tried to show is that the ideal itself has its roots in natural conditions; it emerges when the imagination idealizes existence by laying hold of the possibilities offered to thought and action. There are values, goods, actually realized upon a natural basis--the goods of human association, of art and knowledge. The idealizing imagination seizes upon the most precious things found in the climacteric moments of experience and projects them. We need no external criterion and guarantee for their goodness. They are had, they exist as good, and out of them we frame our ideal ends [LW 9.32f].

God as the Active Relation of Ideal and Actual

We are in the presence neither of ideals completely embodied in existence nor yet of ideals that are mere rootless ideals, fantasies, utopias.  For there are forces in nature and society that generate and support the ideals. They are further unified by the action that gives them coherence and solidity. It is this active relation between ideal and actual to which I would give the name "God." I would not insist that the name must be given. There are those who hold that the associations of the term with the supernatural are so numerous and close that any use of the word "God" is sure to give rise to misconception and be taken as a concession to traditional ideas [LW 9.34f].

Social Intelligence as Dewey's "Religion"

The emphasis that has been put upon intelligence as a method should not mislead anyone. Intelligence, as distinct from the older conception of reason, is inherently involved in action.  Moreover, there is no opposition between it and emotion. There is such a thing as passionate intelligence, as ardor in behalf of light shining into the murky places of social existence, and as zeal for its refreshing and purifying effect. The whole story of man shows that there are no objects that may not deeply stir engrossing emotion. One of the few experiments in the attachment of emotion to ends that mankind has not tried is that of devotion, so intense as to be religious, to intelligence as a force in social action [LW.9.52f].

Human Nature and Conduct text

The religious experience is a reality in so far as in the midst of effort to foresee and regulate future objects we are sustained and expanded in feebleness and failure by the sense of an enveloping whole [MW 14.182].

Analytical Reconstruction

The religious experience is a reality in so far as [note qualifier]  in the midst of effort to foresee and regulate future objects [intelligence] we are sustained and expanded in feebleness and failure by the sense of an enveloping whole [by what?]

Not some external force but our imagination, beliefs and attitudes are what sustain-expand us.  We are “sustained and expanded” in our efforts to intelligize our practices by a sense that we are a part of an inclusive, supportive reality.

Problems with Dewey's Solution

•         Some don’t get it; they continue to understand religion in traditional and conventional terms.

•         Those who do get it may

–   embrace the proposal but the situation now (=need) may not be the same as it was then; if so it would be unpragmatic to adopt uncritically the proposal.  (Of course one could think that the situation is essentially unchanged and the proposal is still useful.)

–   wonder why one needs to accept the religious frame of reference—the God-talk.

–   not be satisfied with this humanized and naturalized proposal.  They many continue to need a relationship with a supernatural power or at least an authority that is not of human construction

My Reaction/Commitment

Pragmatism often tries to find a via media.  In this case the polarities are Religion and Secularity and the middle way is a religious naturalism.  But I think that James and Dewey conceded too much to religion. I am satisfied with the recommended way of life—commitment to social intelligence and the realization of inclusive ideals.  But I do not see the need for god-talk.  Whether my behavior is religious or not I will leave for someone else to determine.  I personally have no need to describe my conduct in this language.