James, Humanism and Religion

Experience and Knowledge

·       Our experience (=culture) grows haphazardly and is initially consolidated in common sense (not a sixth sense, but “what everybody knows”),

·       which the various disciplines (biology, psychology, sociology, etc.) refine, and

·       philosophy reviews and contextualizes

Humanism and Its Limitations

·       Any given idea is a historical development.

·       “The trail of the human serpent is over everything.”

·       “You can’t weed out the human contribution” (98).

This humanist orientation calls into question our ability to know reality; hence the need for Peirce’s strategy for “the fixation of belief” by means of the experimental method and the understanding that the pragmatic maxim provides.  We know what there is by what it does.  Example: getting lost in Venice Mestre on way to hotel.

But this reality apprehending approach will not enable us to come into contact with non-sensible reality—the reality that the various religions claim to reveal.

Thus WJ seems to have veered too much to the empirical side, neglecting rationalism and its access to the religious.

James’ Religious Innovation

WJ handles this problem in two ways:

·       If the sense-experience, scientific approach does not decide the issue—if the issue is genuinely open, then we are free to believe what we like.  Moreover acting on this hypothesis will produce a sensible confirmation of its own (see end of lecture 2).  But the religious object in which we put our trust has no more confirmed existence than this—it is real to the extent that it produces sensible effects.

·       So ultimately the religious does become an attitude or disposition that shapes our lives.  (More on this later when we get to Dewey.)