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?