December 2013 - WilliamJames

relationship to the universe
by Eric Purdy 28 Dec '13

28 Dec '13

I found it interesting that James considers everyone to have some sort of characteristic relationship to the universe. What do people think their relationship to the universe is? -- -Eric

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Week III thinksheet
by Jesse Raber 24 Dec '13

24 Dec '13

Merry Christmas all! I'm thinking I'll change up the format of my comments. Instead of doing a thinksheet and a lecture, I'll just expand the thinksheet into something more lecture-like, and the rest of my comments will just be responses to specific questions. THINKSHEET - WEEK III Earlier Beth asked, if pragmatism demands that beliefs be put to an experiential test, "What are we testing religious opinions for? Truth seems out." Each of this week's supplementary essays, "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth" and "The Will to Believe," addresses this question, which James also discusses in this week's Varieties lecture. "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth" was published in the 1907 volume _Pragmatism_, relatively late in James's career, when his upstart philosophy had attained enough popularity to attract casual, often sloppy followers, as well as hostile attention from professional philosophers. He opens with a testy joke that's become a classic: "First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it." Over the course of the essay he describes several important facets of the pragmatist theory of truth, including: - The rejection of the "correspondence" theory of truth, in which a true thought is one that copies the outside world, or else copies "the Absolute's eternal way of thinking." (It might be worth clarifying what James means by the Absolute, which is not at all the same thing as the "gods" of the Varieties. Over the course of his career James devotes a surprising amount of attention to criticizing the Absolute, including the entire book _A Pluralistic Universe_; you could say that it was his favorite thing to define pragmatism against. The Absolute is a concept specific to the school of thought known as absolute idealism {http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/5k.htm}, which (more or less) begins with Hegel, and founders on the rocks of pragmatism, analytic philosophy, and continental phenomenology in the early twentieth century. {http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/} Hegel picks up a problem famously left unresolved by Kant: if the mind can see the "thing-in-itself" only through its own mental categories, and can never get outside of itself to apprehend reality directly, how is it that the mind nonetheless succeeds in working on the world? Hegel posits that there is some deep affinity between the way minds work and the way things work, and that a thing that exists in reality must simultaneously be a thought in some mind -- "the rational is the real," he says. Yet the human mind is clearly not capable of holding the world in its thoughts, either in terms of the world's sheer volume or its rigorous consistency. So Hegel invokes an all-encompassing mind, called Absolute Consciousness or just "the Absolute," which is capable of thinking in ways that are infinitely self-reflective and self-controlled. The famous and often misunderstood Hegelian dialectic describes the development of the world, from nothingness through increasingly complex levels of physical, biological, psychological, and social existence, as the Absolute "thinking through" its one all-encompassing thought in a series of logically necessary steps. James objects to this idea on every level. He finds it epistemologically unsound (because we aren't in a position to make such wide generalizations about the universe), overly concerned with things as knowable rather than things as experiencable in other ways (e.g., by tasting, loving, hating), and incompatible with human motivations (making the individual mind a kind of pawn whose goal is to to will the moves it must make in a game it isn't really playing).) - The description of truth as an ongoing process rather than a fixed property of certain ideas. "Truth happens to an idea," James writes. "It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: namely the process of verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation." - The need to make do with partially verified ideas, since verification occurs in real life and therefore takes time. "Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system," writes James in a celebrated passage. "Our thoughts and beliefs 'pass,' so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them." - The role of math and logic, which are based on gut-check intuitions that feel as concrete as our sense-perceptions. In the earlier "The Will to Believe" (1896), James builds to a ringing defense of the philosophical propriety of holding religious beliefs -- and of not holding them.He argues that the intellect can rightfully overrule the passions, but when facing choices in which the intellect can never reach a decision, we can and must let our passions decide, and people with different passions can then appropriately reach very different conclusions about what is right and good. "We ought," James writes, "delicately and profoundly to respect one another's mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless [...] then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as in practical things." (Compare to this famous line from the Roe v Wade decision: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.") This essay also contains an interesting discussion of what you might call the power of positive thinking -- that is, the power of the passions to change reality merely by existing. This week's Varieties reading, "The Reality of the Unseen," further develops James's claim that the existence of the divine cannot be established by the intellect, but must work through what he calls the "sense of reality." We are capable of perceiving things as real, he argues, even if we cannot describe just what they are. "It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling," writes James; "and as if, through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies. Such a bar of iron could never give you an outward description of the agencies that had the power of stirring it so strongly; yet of their presence, and of their significance for its life, it would be intensely aware through every fibre of its being." QUESTION: Have you had this feeling about anything before? What would you think if someone close to you told you of such an experience? James suggests that over such feelings argumentation is powerless: "In the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion. [...] Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our philosophy is but its showy verbalized translation." He makes sure to point out that he doesn't necessarily *like* the fact that religion works this way, but insists that it just does. QUESTION: Is there ever any use to arguing about religion? Whatever your answer is, do you wish it were otherwise?

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Poverty, "the universe", defining religion
by Ruth Raubertas 21 Dec '13

21 Dec '13

1. Comments on "James wondering whether poverty is ennobling, debasing, or irrelevant to the life of the spirit, and about whether society's material progress is a promise or a threat to that life." (Jesse's quote re: James essay, "What Makes a Life Significant.")... Our affluent society is definitely a threat to the "religious" mind........as Jesus said, "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” - Matthew 19:24. This was in reply to the rich young ruler who inquired of him - his specific problem was attachment to his possessions, a distraction from his true spiritual life. Some religious traditions emphasize this more than others. There is definitely a place for occasional fasting (from food, sex, or money) described in the New Testament. Hardship focuses the mind like almost nothing else. But this can be taken too far too. In the book of Proverbs it says: "...give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, “Who is the Lord?” or lest I be poor, and steal, and profane the name of my God." - Proverbs 30:8-9 ...and Jesus also says: "For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.” Apparently, people were trying to discredit both of them by trying to find fault in their habits, but in fact this was just an avoidance tactic...they didn't like the words of these prophets regardless of whether they fasted or not. 2. Jesse's question: "..James asks what it means to assign attributes to "the universe." Is there anything meaningful we can say about the world as a whole, or does it only make sense to talk about specific parts of it? These are relevant questions for James's thinking about religion, which he describes in this week's Varieties reading as man's attitude toward "the divine," which he in turn describes as a force or entity that encompasses everything....Can one be religious without believing in an all-embracing unity?" ...an interesting question (will address definition of "religion" below)...in Judaism, (Islam, I think?) and Christianity, the concept of the divine is of an invisible Spirit and Mind that existed before creation and is the Author of creation. Hence the "force or entity that encompasses everything." A beautiful flower or animal or human or piece of music might so dramatically impact us that it feels religious, but all these things are parts of the creation, they all originated in the mind of the Creator who alone is worthy be worshipped as a god. 3. I was (pleasantly, from my perspective) surprised by Lecture 2 and James' definition of religion. It is more narrow than I was expecting, perhaps. His "gods" are to be "first in being and power" and have the last word of truth. Religion requires a serious state of mind (as opposed to a flippant, "devil-may-care" attitude). Grumbling and complaint are not welcomed. Tragedy can be purging of sins. Solemn, serious, tender. "Hearty" acceptance of the universe, joyful serving. "The Christian God is to be loved." We are to submit to the Eternal Good. "Infinitely passionate." "...adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally deduced." All of the above is true of Christianity, but I'm not sure if it is all true of other religions as well...probably Judaism and Islam, but what about polytheisms? And will he be including Buddhism as "religion"? He mentions "Buddhist pessimism" (and Emersonian optimism!). Hope I haven't written too much, this is all quite interesting. Ruth

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Philip k Dick's unmedicated prophecy
by Eric Purdy 20 Dec '13

20 Dec '13

http://deoxy.org/pkd_tcs.htm

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week 1 comments and questions
by Elizabeth Topczewski 17 Dec '13

17 Dec '13

*1. "But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance?"* What does James mean by spiritual significance? Also, spiritual significance to whom? *2. "By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots."* This seems to me to sum up James' position on how to determine value of religious ideas. But what makes a fruit desirable or not? How do we tell between good and bad (or useful or non-useful) fruits? Religion is one of the main things that claims to offer judgments on whether fruits themselves are good or bad. *3. "In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to any one to try to refute opinions by showing up their author's neurotic constitution. Opinions here are invariably tested by logic and by experiment, no matter what may be their author's neurological type. It should be no otherwise with religious opinions...Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria."* What logic and experiment can test religious opinions? Also, what are we testing religious opinions for? Truth seems out. Perhaps James would say usefulness? Then, it seems desirable to outline a set of desirable fruits. See (2). What does he mean by "immediate luminousness" or "philosophical reasonableness"? --Beth

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Week II thinksheet
by Jesse Raber 17 Dec '13

17 Dec '13

I think I'm too sick to think of anything very provocative, but here are a few things to think about. First of all, for people who are mostly planning to just do the Varieities, I really recommend taking an hour to read "What Makes a Life Significant." It's one of James's most famous or infamous essays, depending on who you ask. He dives into a tangle of thorny questions about whether poverty is ennobling, debasing, or irrelevant to the life of the spirit, and about whether society's material progress is a promise or a threat to that life. Good reading during a recession. "The One and the Many" is also interesting, if a bit more technical. Here James asks what it means to assign attributes to "the universe." Is there anything meaningful we can say about the world as a whole, or does it only make sense to talk about specific parts of it? These are relevant questions for James's thinking about religion, which he describes in this week's Varieties reading as man's attitude toward "the divine," which he in turn describes as a force or entity that encompasses everything. (Forgive the gendered pronoun; I'll follow James's usage.) Can one be religious without believing in an all-embracing unity? (James answers in the affirmative in another book, *A Pluralistic Universe*. But in doing so he dispenses with some ideas, such as the omnipresence of the deity, that many religious believers wouldn't want to part with.) And here are a few questions for this week's Varieties reading: - James says he won't try to define religion, but will instead just "circumscribe the topic" of his own lectures in an "arbitrary" way. Do you agree that there is no one quality that defines all religion? - James defines the topic of the lectures as "*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*," and goes on to define the divine as follows: "gods are conceived to be first things in the way of being and power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there is no escape. What relates to them is the first and last word in the way of truth. Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true might at this rate be treated as godlike, and a man's religion might thus be identified with his attitude, whatever it might be, toward what he felt to be the primal truth." First and last words in the way of truth, primal truth ... these are deeply unpragmatic ideas. James could have defined divinity in a more pragmatically acceptable way (as Dewey does in his book *A Common Faith*). Why do you think he defines it in terms that his philosophy is so ill-equipped to incorporate (even if people's *attitudes towards it*can be pragmatically weighed)? - Most religions claim to be the source of morality, but James distinguishes between the religious and the moral, locating the religious in a place "beyond" the moral. What do you think of this distinction?

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[Varieties] syllabus
by Jesse Raber 16 Dec '13

16 Dec '13

For those who just joined, here's our "syllabus": Week I - *Varieties *Lecture I, "Religion and Neurology" -- "The Present Dilemma in Philosophy" -- "What Pragmatism Means" Week II - *Varieties *Lecure II, "Circumscription of the Topic" -- "The One and the Many" -- "What Makes a Life Significant" Week III - *Varieties *Lecture III, "The Reality of the Unseen" -- "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth" -- "The Will to Believe" Week IV - *Varieties *Lectures IV and V, "The Religion of Healthy Mindedness" -- "The Gospel of Relaxation" Week V - *Varieties *Lectures VI and VII, "The Sick Soul" -- "Pragmatism and Religion" -- "The Absolute and the Strenuous Life" Week VI - *Varieties *Lecture VIII, "The Divided Self, and the Process of Its Unification" -- "The Importance of Individuals" Week VII - *Varieties *Lectures IX and X, "Conversion" Week VIII - *Varieties *Lectures XI, XII, and XIII, "Saintliness" Week IX - *Varieties *Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness" -- "The Moral Equivalent of War" -- "Great Men and Their Environment" Week X - *Varieties *Lectures XVI and XVII, "Mysticism" -- "The Sentiment of Rationality" Week XI - *Varieties *Lecture XVIII, "Philosophy" -- "On a Certain Blindness" Week XII - *Varieties *Lecture XIX, "Other Characteristics" Week XIII - *Varieties *Lecture XX, "Conclusions," plus postscripts

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question on Pierce
by Ruth Raubertas 15 Dec '13

15 Dec '13

Can you explain/expound on this quote from Pierce: "...consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object." ...from "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" ......... : )

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Introduction
by Mary Haake 14 Dec '13

14 Dec '13

I'm a clinical psychologist, an atheistic Christian, and the girlfriend of Andrew Cone's father. I read Varieties of Religious Experience a few years ago, cold, with no background and got a few interesting ideas but welcome a chance to learn more about what James was trying to do. If I gain some insight into why I find it meaningful to read the Bible, that would be great. Best, Mary Mary Haake, Ph.D. 17 Glen Eden Avenue, #7 Oakland, CA 94611 Phone: 510-528-9543 email: maryhaakephd(a)gmail.com website: maryhaakephd.com Notice of Confidentiality: This email, and any attachments, is intended only for use by the addressee(s) and may contain privileged, private or confidential information. Any distribution, reading, copying or use of this communication and any attachments by anyone other than the addressee(s), is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this email in error, please immediately notify me by email (by replying to this message) or telephone, and permanently destroy or delete the original and any copies or printouts of this email and any attachments. It is important that the addressee(s) be aware that email communication can be relatively easily accessed by unauthorized people and hence can compromise the privacy and confidentiality of such communication. Emails, in particular, are vulnerable to such unauthorized access due to the fact that servers have unlimited and direct access to all emails that go through them. A non-encrypted email, such as this, is even more vulnerable to unauthorized access. Please notify me if you decide to avoid or limit, in any way, the use of email. Unless I hear from you otherwise, I will continue to communicate with you via email when necessary or appropriate.

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participation
by Jesse Raber 14 Dec '13

14 Dec '13

Hi all, Tomorrow marks the end of our first week. My plan was to look over everyone's comments tomorrow afternoon and write another little essay trying to speak to them. It's a lot easier for me to respond to questions than to cook something up from scratch. But so far we only have one comment! That's not really enough to go on. I know that some people are not reading along yet and are planning to catch up later, and of course that's fine. But for those of you who are keeping up with the reading, I'd really appreciate it if you could offer at least one short comment or question each week -- even if it's only a single sentence. And please don't worry that you're too ignorant to comment -- you aren't! In fact, people who aren't already immersed in philosophy often have the most interesting and vital questions. Naggingly yours, Jesse

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