PHIL/RS 335
JAMES, VARIETIES, PT. 1
WILLIAM JAMES
• William James, in whose
company we will be
spending the first part of the
semester, is an important
American philosopher and
psychologist.
• He belongs to the school of
philosophy known as
pragmatism.
• Pragmatism can be defined
as the assertion that, “the
meaning of any proposition
can always be brought
down to some particular
consequence in our future
practical experience”
The Meaning of Truth, 210
RADICAL EMPIRICISM
• Though James identifies with the Pragmatist tradition, he
describes his own particular philosophical perspective as
a radical empiricism.
• Let's explore this conjunction:
• Empiricism: typically contrasted with rationalism (emphasizes
universals; wholes prior to parts). Empiricism focuses on
explanatory role of parts (whole merely a collection; universals
an abstraction). As James puts it, empiricism is "a philosophy of
plural facts."
• Radical: James' empiricism is not the same as the classical
empiricists’ (which focuses on atomistic sense-datum). James's
empiricism is radical because it demands that all directly
experienced features of our experience–including the relation
between things–be included in our investigations.
• In other words, conjunctive and disjunctive relations are real
elements of experience.
A POSTULATE, A STATEMENT, AND A
CONCLUSION
• "Radical empiricism consists (1) first of a postulate, (2) next of a
statement of fact, (3) and finally of a generalized
conclusion…" (The Meaning of Truth, xii-xiii).
• "The Postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among
philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience."
• This is what James calls the "principle of pure experience," a "methodological
postulate."
• "The statement of fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive
as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct experience,
neither more so nor less so than the things themselves."
• This statement serves to distinguish radical empiricism from its more traditional
brethren.
• "The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience
hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves part of
experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no
extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own
right a concatenated or continuous structure.”
A "MOSAIC PHILOSOPHY"
• "To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its
constructions any element that is not directly
experienced, nor exclude from them any element that
is directly experienced" (Essays in Radical Empiricism,
42).
• "Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms
connected…" (Essays in Radical Empiricism, 86-7).
• "Let empiricism once become associated with religion,
as hitherto, through some strange misunderstanding it
has been associated with irreligion, and I believe that a
new era of religion as well as of philosophy will be
ready to begin" (A Pluralistic Universe, 314).
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
• The Varieties was the published version of James's
Gifford Lectures, delivered at the University of
Edinburgh during the 1901-02 academic year.
• The Gifford lectures are devoted to the topic of
natural theology which, understood in this particular
instance, refers to theological inquiry in its
relationship to the human and physical sciences.
• Part of the bequest which funds the lectures
requires that they be made available to the public
in published form. The Varieties is one of the most
popular and enduring of these publications.
LECTURE 1: RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY
• After beginning with the usual modesties, James
specifies his approach. He is going to offer a descriptive
psychological survey of human religious propensities.
• What propensities?
• Not institutional or conventional. This form of religious
experience is dead, "His religion has been made for him by
others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to
him by fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit."
• Rather, James is interested in the subjective phenomena of
religion, "If the enquiry be psychological, not religious
emotions, but rather religious feelings and religious impulses
must be its subject, and I must confine myself to those more
developed subjective phenomena recorded in literature
produced by articulate and fully self-conscious men in
works of piety and autobiography" (5).
THE FORM OF ADDRESS
• In addition to specifying the object of an inquiry, it is
also necessary to specify the form that the inquiry will
take.
• James acknowledges that the focus on religious
experience could be pursued in a couple of different
ways.
•
•
We could inquire into the nature and origin of the propensities
in question.
Or we could pursue the issue of their philosophical significance
(importance, meaning).
• Two orders of judgment correspond to these forms of
inquiry. The first he characterizes as existential, the
second as spiritual.
• James makes clear that he is pursuing the first of these
forms/judgments.
RELIGIOUS GENIUSES
• As James makes clear, he is interested in
the recorded experiences of figures that he
describes as "religious geniuses."
• What tends to characterize such genius is
the close proximity of profound, extreme
religious experience and psychological
abnormality (8).
• A characteristic example: George Fox (the
founder of Quakerism): "Wo to the bloody city of
Lichfield!"
MEDICAL MATERIALISM
• James is quick to anticipate and defend himself from
the criticism that he is reducing religion to pathology or
sully it with the merely physical.
• James is careful to differentiate his approach from
what he calls "medical materialism," which is essentially
the reduction of psychological phenomenon to
underlying material causation.
•
See the examples on pp. 16-17.
•
Consider the case of St. Teresa of Avila and the discussion of
Maudley and Edwards (21-22, 23-4).
• It is not that James is denying the appropriateness of
this reduction. Rather, he is insisting that it is no measure
of the living significance of a particular behavior, idea
or state of affairs.
DO WE NEED TO BE WEIRD?
• Despite this distinction, it might legitimately be
protested that James's focus on extreme religious
eccentricity distorts the reality of religious
experience.
• James offers two justifications for his focus.
• The focus on abnormality helps shed light on the normal
(either by establishing boundary descriptions or by
illustrative contrast).
• History suggests that psychological instability, when allied
with talent or ability, often produces the highest level of
human accomplishment.
"A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE"
• The subtitle of the work helps us understand
James's aim.
• Religious experience is one specific region of
human experience, one which is commonly
characterized by extreme forms of common
psychological phenomena.
• An evaluation of religious experience that keeps
this in mind thus has the double value of revealing
something to us about the specific character of
that experience while also helping us understand
experience in general (28-9).