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%7D, 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/%7D 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?