WILLIAM JAMES: PHENOMENOLOGY AND PRAGMATISM

Beyond Rationalism and Empiricism (New Immanent Explanation of Human Consciousness - Critique of Mind, Body, Brain, Will to Believe and Pluralism)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: JAMES' LIFE AND THOUGHT

MIND-BODY-CONSCIOUSNESS

James in Nineteenth Century ContextJames' Consciousness

CRITIQUE OF MIND-BODY-CONSCIOUSNESS

Critique of Mind-ConsciousnessCritique of Mind-Body/Brain

PRAGMATISM

Nineteenth Century ContextPragmatic TheoryCritique of Pragmatism

WILL TO BELIEVE. AND RELIGION

James' ContextWill to Believe, And PsychologyReligionCritique of Will to Believe, and Religion

PLURALISM

Nineteenth Century ContextTheory of PluralismCritique of Pluralism

POSTSCRIPT

SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

This paper will look at James' psychology; theory of radical empiricism; pragmatic epistemology; and theory of pluralism versus monism. It will also critique these theories. I will

be looking at James in the context of the views, issues, and questions of nineteenth century theologies/philosophies and how he attempted to resolve those issues with radical empiricism, pragmatism, and pluralism. I will first give a brief introduction to James and his principal ideas.

James' came from a pietistic, Calvinistic home. As a child he was surrounded by discussions on religion, as his father was a Swedenborgian theologian. James also was influenced through literary associations with men like Oliver Wendell Holroes, and Sr. and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In 1861 James entered Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, and began studying in the chemistry department. While there he learned the importance of evolution which greatly influenced his philosophical views. In 1864 James transferred to the medical school. James went from medicine to physiology, to psychology. "James draws from evolution and physiology the neurological foundations necessary to account for consciousness, purpose, habit, attention, thought, and action. Radical Empiricism extends the theory of consciousness, especially its cognitive function, as laid down in the psychology. Building on the relation that he had early established between percepts and concepts, he analyzes further the problems of selective perception and of alternate conceptual orderings, including their claims to be real. Pragmatism continues as a theory of the meaning of "truth" concerned now with the success or warrant of one conceptualization over another", (Flower, p.639).

Perry felt that James' notion of pure experience was one of his deepest insights and also his most constructive idea. Perry also felt that this was James' favorite solvent to the traditional philosophical difficulties of James' day. James* pragmatism provided his method, radical empiricism gave him his building material, and pluralism was the architecture of the finished product, (Perry, p.278).

"The key to understanding James' thought is found in his insistence that all thinking takes place in and through the life of the individual person who is interested in the world and responds to it as an integral self possessed of will and what he liked to call a 'passional nature' (Smith in Smart, p. 316)

MIND-BODY-CONSCIOUSNESS

James in Nineteenth Century Context

Nineteenth century discussions about the dualism of "mind-body" stemmed generally from Descartes' proposition that the mind and body are two different substances. Descartes stated in his Meditations (1641), "that one could be sure of the existence of mental events while being in complete doubt about the existence of bodies, and ... that God could make the mind exist in separation from the body" (Phil., Meditations, p.336). Descartes' concept of mind is, "a thing which doubts, understands, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels" (Meditations II, Phil., p.337). "Descartes claimed that there are two sorts of substances in the world which are mental substances and corporeal substances. The essence of a mental substance is that it is a thing that thinks; the essence of a corporeal substance is that it is extended in space. Man is composed of both substances so intimately combined that events in the one can affect events in the other" (Phil., p. 341) .

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James revolted against Descartes' dualism. He argued against Descartes theory of mind/body by saying that object subject difference is one of context solely. "The two worlds differ, not by the presence or absence of extension, but by the relations of the extensions which in both worlds exist" (Radical Empiricism, p.19).

James is also responding to Kant's theory of consciousness which is that experience is dualistic in structure. He disagrees with Kant in that he felt Kant failed to explain the relationship between subject and object adequately. James says we need the point of contact to connect mind and body. For example, my point of consciousness of a book comes at the point of intersection of outer space and inner mind. "In its pure state, or when isolated, there is no self-splitting of it into consciousness and what consciousness is 'of'" (Radical Empiricism, p.15).

The rationalist sought to explain consciousness through the use of such terms as soul and ego. These as such have no empirical evidence for their existence. The rationalist explained the faculty of remembering by saying that we have a memory. This only named it. But it did not explain why the memory works as it does; Such as why we remember some things and forget other things. James was also in debate with idealism because he felt matter had a larger role in the process of consciousness than idealism allowed.

Since Hume the traditional empiricist have not used ego to explain consciousness. But empiricist can not explain effects of drugs, old age, or the variety of our ideas. Also they could not explain why one event can dominate memory. Nor could they explain the making of decisions and plans (Flower, pp.642-644).

James' Consciousness

James' solution to this was his psychological doctrine of "stream of thought" (His radical empiricism is a philosophical application of this doctrine. See, The Thought and Character of William James, pp.195-196 for further explanation). This doctrine pervades his whole work.James divides this "stream of thought" into five traits of thought: 1)thought is personal, e.g. my thought; 2) thought changes; 3) there is continuous in thought; 4) thought deals with objects outside of itself; and 5) thought is selective (The Principles of Psychology, p.146).

William James was accused of having borrowed Henri Bergson's doctrine of the primacy of action (Perry, p.338). Bergson's theory in many points, coincides with James's description of the "stream of thought". However, Bergson defends James and says if one studies his theory of the "Duree reelle" and James' stream of thought one can see they do not spring from the same source. He goes on to say that James' is clearly psychological and his, "...is a critique ofthe idea of homogeneous time, as one finds it among philosophers and mathematicians" (Perry, p.338). James did take the "spirit of Bergson" in his writings. One place they differed was, "..for Bergson the crucial truth was temporal passage, for James time was only one of many cases of that transitiveness or continuity which was his crucial truth" (Perry, p.340). James thought he found the key to metaphysics in a certain aspect of conscious experience. He saw this as a method to deal with dualism, and the problem of the one and the many.

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In his earlier writings, such as in the Principals, he was still trying to show that thoughts are continuous, but that things themselves can be discontinuous. But by the time he wrote his Essays in Radical Empiricism his contrast between things and thoughts had changed. In James' Psychology he accentuated the uniqueness of the individual stream of consciousness. James had definitely renounced the dualism of thoughts and things; in their place were only "experiences". James' problem was how to give experience both the properties of the transient life of the subject and the stable world of common objects (Perry, p.279).

James denied that we are able to distinguish the thinker from the thing thought about (Passmore, p.108). James states in his essay 'Does Consciousness Exist?', "My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff "pure experience," then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation toward one another into which portions of pure experience may enter" (Radical Empiricism, p.4). "Pure experience" means its original or pristine character- its priority to distinctions; especially the distinction between subject and object (Perry, p.278). James explains this "oneness" by saying that the same experience can play different roles. "Just so, I maintain , does a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of 'consciousness'; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective 'content'" (Radical Empiricism, p.7-8).

James saw problems with both epistemologies of empiricism and rationalism and attempted to solve them through radical empiricism. James' Radical Empiricism critiques classical British empiricism claiming that British empiricism ignored the connections and transitions. "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" (Radical Empiricism, pp.24-25).

James defines rationalism and empiricism as follows. "Rationalism tends to emphasize universals and to make wholes prior to parts in the order of logic as well as that of being. Empiricism, on the contrary, lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the element, the individual, and treats the whole as a collection and the universal as an abstraction. My description of things accordingly, starts with the parts and makes of the whole a being of the second order. It is essentially a mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural facts, like that of Hume and his descendants, who refers these facts neither to Substances in which they inhere nor to an Absolute Mind that creates them as its objects" (Radical Empiricism pp.24-25).

James divides experiences as real or existing only in the mind. "Mental knives may be sharp, but they won't cut real wood....With real objects on the contrary , consequences always accrue; and thus the real experiences get sifted from the mental ones, the things from our thoughts of them, fanciful or true, and precipitated together as the stable part of the whole experience-chaos, under the name of the physical world" (Radical Empiricism, p.20). Thus James can argue what is true of experience is true of reality. James confuses consciousness/mind with an act of the brain. If this is the case then we need a neurological model to think; the result being no possibility of a thinking God.

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CRITIQUE OF JAMES' MIND-BODY-CONSCIOUSNESS THEORIES

Critique of Mind-Consciousness

"A third form of unity which is situated above spatial and temporal unity is the form of objectifying synthesis. ...relations disclose the same fundamental characteristic of consciousness, namely, that the whole is not obtained from its parts, but that every notion of a part already encompasses the notion of the whole, not as to content, but as to general structure and form. Every particular belongs from the outset to a definite complex and in itself expresses the rule of the complex. It is the totality of these rules which constitutes the true unity of consciousness, as a unity of time, space, objective synthesis, etc", (Cassirer, p.102). "Yet it is precisely this relation of the "part" to the "whole" that is fundamentally surpassed in the true syntheses of consciousness. Here the whole does not originate in its parts, it constitutes them and gives them their essential meaning. In thinking of any limited segment of space we also think of its orientation to the whole of space; in every particular moment of time we encompass the universal form of succession; and in positing any particular attribute we posit the general relation of "substance" and "accident", hence the characteristic form of the object...The empirical rules it sets up regarding the mere flow of ideas fail to make intelligible the specific and fundamental forms in which ideas combine, or the unity of "meaning" that arises among them", (Cassirer, p.103).

Fabro critiques empiricism by stating that empiricism has come to be identified with materialism, "for which the objective reality is matter as such. But matter is something abstract which cannot, as such, be imagined or represented at all and can therefore be not to exist as such...empiricism is compelled to make this abstract matter the foundation of every sensible object; the result is a drastic and absolute individualization and singularization of reality, for the ultimate foundation is an abstract something whose existence can only be in the form of a concrete singularized individual. This introduces an element of ultimate fragmentation which is a brute datum and thus makes empiricism a theory of "un-freedom" since freedom consists in my having absolutely no alien other over against me but rather in my depending upon a content which I myself constitute" (pp.753-54).

Critique of Mind-Body/Brain

"From the time of Descartes on, dualists have been content to affirm that mind affects body and that body equally affects mind. But this theory of causal interaction in Evans' perceptive words, "does not seem adequate to account for the peculiarly intimate relationship which I have to my body. A threat to my body is a threat to me. The multitude of intimate relationships between physiological and mental happenings discovered by modern brain research, while perhaps compatible with dualism, do not seem congenial to it", (Van leeuwen, p.101). We have to affirm with James that man is intricately bound up with his body, for, "...it is equally true that certain surgical and chemical interventions in the brain have proved helpful to people who, because of epilepsy, chronic depression, or other problems, have apparently lost much of that capacity for responsible freedom that we associate with full personhood" (Van Leeuwen, p.90). Yet, the fact remains that the mind also transcends over the body (see, Jaki, Stanely. Brain, Mind, and Computers.)

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Further, in the mind body debate a different perspective has been offered by Evans called "minimal dualism" or the doctrine of the "separable souls". "Minimal dualism is the claim that human souls (understood as selves or persons rather than as parts of persons or selves) and human bodies are related in the following way: the soul is functionally separate from the body, but as a substance, it is only separable", (Evans in Van Leeuwen, p. 104). Van leeuwen goes on to explain Evans by saying that persons continue to, "...function as selves without their earthly bodies at the resurrection. Scripture implies they will be more than their earthly bodies --glorified bodies in fact" (Van Leeuwen, p.105).

And, "finally". Science tells us the what and the how of the material universe, but science can not give us the moral groundwork. The scientific account of people as part of the natural order can not be seen as competing with the Biblical account with man as a moral agent made in the image of God (Van Leeuwen, p.102).

PRAGMATISM

Nineteenth Century Context

James in his pragmatic theory goes beyond the empiricism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. James drew upon Locke's Essay wherein Locke, "argues that it does not matter of what substance the self is made, provided its functions remain the same" (Perry, p.297). James calls this "practicalism" which he later uses as a synonym for pragmatism. James is writing in the midst of the scientific revolution. He is revolting against rationalism's and idealism's respective views of absolute knowledge and Monism. His Psychology, Pragmatism, and Meaning of Truth were directed against these epistemologies. Truth was no longer seen as permanent or absolute but changing with new discoveries in science. As a result pragmatism fit the criteria of changing "truths". Truth now becomes a name for a working hypothesis that helps us deal with our experiences. As stated earlier, for a belief to be true it had to agree with reality. James' theory of truth said that all knowledge can be tested by experience (Flower, pp.672-676).

James draws from Kant in that he holds that there are categories and conceptual systems ,though giving a different account of them than Kant. He says the structuring of experiences are never final. We are constantly changing and reaccessing and reaccommodating all our knowledge versus Kant's static structure of knowledge.

James' pragmatism was also in response to positivism and scientific materialism because as a result of these he saw his contemporaries either ignoring religion or keeping a religion that was not empirical. James wanted to combine religion, facts, and science. James saw the philosophies of materialism, idealism, and traditional theism as being the choices the common man had to choose from. He saw his pragmatism as the answer to these philosophical dilemmas. Pragmatism gave the facts and also preserved the religious values. The pragmatic method asserts that what a concept means is its consequences.

James is also indebted to C.S. Peirce for his pragmatism. He admits his debt to Pierce (Collected Essays and Reviews, p.410). James' pragmatism has gained prominence as a uniquely American

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position. He points out in his book, Pragmatism, that a philosopher's temperament colors his philosophy. James sees pragmatism as a philosophy which can tie empiricism and rationalism together.

Pragmatic Theory

James defines pragmatism as a method which is, "primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be indeterminable. Is the world one or many?...The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences" (Pragmaticism, p.42). Pragmatism for James is a method for determining meanings of concepts. "To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve-what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all (Pragmaticism, P.47).

James goes beyond Pierce's pragmatism in that he also sees his pragmatism as a theory of truth. "The pivotal part of my book named Pragmatism is its account of the relation called 'truth' which may obtain between our idea and its object" (The Meaning of Truth, p.v). In James' pragmatic theory of truth is seen as an attribute of ideas rather than of reality. James' doctrine of pragmatic method and pragmatic truth together form James' empiricism (Perry, p. 297). Truth is seen in the context of an idea being validated. James does verify that there are many truths that are yet to be verified, they are truths in 'posse'. With this he is answering rationalists who say there are timeless truths. He says this timeless truth is only truth in 'posse'.

Pragmatism accepts only those ideas that work as true. "...the workableness which ideas must have in order to be true, means particular workings, physical or intellectual, actual or possible, which they may set up from next to next inside of concrete experiences" (Meaning of Truth, p.xii). James sees truth as in following a plan of action and then finding the idea is correct, "...true ideas are those we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify" (Meaning of Truth, p.196). "The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its viety is in fact an event, a process, the process namely of its verifying itself, its verification. Its validity is the process of its validation" (Meaning of Truth, p.196). When James speaks of a truth working he is referring to it agreeing with previous truths and with the new experience (Pragmaticism, p.216-217). "But, owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one. Every one is insufficient and of its balance, and responsible to later points of view than itself" (The Meaning of Truth, p.250). James does not see that there is any absolute truth outside all experience to which all truth must conform (Copleston, p.99). "All the sanctions of a law of truth lie in the very texture of experience. Absolute or no absolute, the concrete truth for us will always be that way of thinking in which our various experiences most profitably combine" (Meaning of Truth, p.241).

Critique of Pragmatism

"The final conclusion and essence of this Jamesian pragmatic position is that the idea of god has a practical significance and importance: it is useful in human experience. But it is useful solely

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as an idea or a prospect of vocation; it has no objective reality whatsoever. This notion of God's involvement in human activity and his consequent finitude expresses the very paradox it would like to resolve; the paradox of considering the deity from within human life and experience and consequently finding him to be infinite; and of subsequently inconsistently positing God as the foundation and propulsive force powering human life and action. For God must have no attribute that would create any gulf between him and man or render him inaccessible or unattainable. Above all, there must be no descendent continuity of consciousness as between god and man. The net result is a radical empiricism in the shape of vialism and panypsychism, with the contention for a universal mind and consciousness, embracing in man the entire reality of the universe" (Fabro, p.767).

"The true is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our behaving", (Meaning of Truth, p.vii). Bertrand Russell and Arthur 0. Love joy critiqued James in the following areas: 1) James is not clear in what he means by his concept of a truth "working". A belief can work in having the predictions come true, or by giving energy to those who hold it. 2) James ignored the usual meaning given to truth. Russell gives the following example: James says a) "It is true that other people exist, and b) "It is useful to believe that other people exist." Russell says these are both saying the same thing (Edwards, p.428-430).

Critics of James's theory point out that his pragmatic theory of truth is subjective and that his theory of truth is not related to reality. For if truth is only related to satisfying someone's needs then truth has to do with attitude not reality (World Philosophy, p.1649). "I had supposed it to be a matter of common observation that, of two competing views of the universe which in all other respects are equal, but of which the first denies some vital human need while the second satisfies it, the second will be favored by sane men for the simple reason that it makes the world seem more rational" (Meaning of Truth, p. 197). However, James responded to his critics in his first few essays in Meaning of Truth that truth does need to deal with reality. "The truth which the conforming experience embodies may be a positive addition to the previous reality, and later judgments may have to conform to it. Yet virtually at least, it may have been true previously. Pragmatically, virtual and actual truth mean the same thing: the possibility of only one answer, when once the question is raised" (Meaning of Truth, p.256).

James critics go on to say that erroneous views and beliefs are often satisfactory to the person who holds them, thus the satisfactory feeling cannot guarantee the objective truth of a reality (World Philosophy, p.1653). James countered this by saying that one would not feel satisfied unless it led to the future experiences that one expected.

The rationalist confronted James' pragmatism by stating that he confuses the truth of a proposition with the process of showing it is true (Copleston, p.99). James's rebuttal is that the rationalist can not explain truth without referring to practical consequences, "...how can we know what the word true means, as applied to a statement, without invoking the concept of the statement's workings" (Meaning of Truth, p.221).

In present day discussions the pragmatic view involves, "the belief that there is no global framework for a representation to world connection by which we can distinguish ideas that have real truth to them, in virtue of their connection to the world's own structure..." (Robbins, p.230).

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Pragmatism has no, "determinate relationship to a definite set of propositions such as those that have the structure of the world itself" (Robbins, p.233). "Apart from some specific local, context of practical familiarity there simply is no way to decide which representations are connected to reality as opposed to being merely our own constructions" (Robbins, p. 233). In James' theory of truth he articulates this theory of reality being our own construction, "whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief" (Robbins, p.233). "Consequently, there is no basis whatever for claiming that it alone, of all our practices, involves representations which, distinct from being useful to us, are also connected to reality in their own right" (Robbins, p.234). Although Robbins was actually using the following quote about critical realism in support of pragmatism, what he says of critical realism can be used to critique pragmatism. He says realist say science over time have modified their propositions to more closely approximate, "the propositions that have the structures of the world...As such, these scientific practices have a definite prepositional structure underlying them...this is suppose to define what it is for representations to have real truth to them because of their connection to reality as opposed to their being merely useful to us" (Robbins, p.232). Robbinson rejects this because he sees science as resorting to the use of metaphores at times in order to copy, or explain reality. However, this is not a problem because language is by its very nature symbolic. Further, being specific about contexts is not the same as pragmatism.

WILL TO BELIEVE AND RELIGION

James' Context

James with his neo-realism was in opposition to the dominance in America of absolute idealism. The origins of realism in America stem from the Puritan heritage. Pragmatism is distinctly post-evolutionary, for its ideas were inconceivable prior to evolutionary theories. "Pragmatism is unmistakably a post-Darwinian philosophy. Its empiricism is a biologically oriented empiricism: "experience" itself progressively comes to be interpreted as involving a living organism and its world" .(Morris, p.7-8). Pragmatism as James uses it is a criterion of truth. James is seen as a process philosopher due to his advocacy of varieties of metaphysical realism (Dewey, p.324-327). James' process views are an extension of his realist assumption rather than his pragmatism. James' pragmatism is compatible with realism (Rosenthal, p.95-201). James strongly rebelled against Hegel's Absolute Idea.

James did not accept empiricism alone but said that one needed faith also. After having read the French philosopher Charles Renouvier he wrote, "I think that yesterday (April 29, 1870) was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second 'Essais' and see no reason why his definition of Free Will-'The sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts' need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present-until next year-that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will" (The Letters of William James, pp.147-148).

The Will to Believe, And Psychology

James saw the centrality of religion as being in the individual soul. James saw feeling as the deeper source of religion. This was based partly on, "his belief that religious and metaphysical

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doctrines are basically living options proposed to the believing will of the individual so that their validity can never be independent of their consequences in integrating and sustaining a significant life for the one who adopts and embodies them" (Smith in Smart, pp.342-343). James wrote The Will to Believe as an attempt to justify belief and not to try to convince us that God exists (Perry, p.215).

In The Principles of Psychology James defined belief as "...every degree of assurance, including the highest possible certainty and conviction...In it's inner nature, belief, or the sense of reality, is a sort of feeling more allied to the emotions than to anything else" (Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, p.283). James describes belief between two options as a hypothesis. The choice between two hypotheses is called an option. Options may be: 1) living or dead; 2) forced or avoidable; 3) momentous or trivial. For an option to be genuine it must be living, forced, and a momentous kind. For a hypothesis to be alive to one it must be something one could do. For example, if I said, "Do you want to go to Mars or the moon tomorrow?", both would be dead options to you. Next an option needs to be forced, in other words you have to make a choice between the two options. Thirdly the option needs to offer you a momentous opportunity (Will to Believe, pp.4-5).

James goes on to explain that faith, "means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible; as the test of belief is the willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance" (WTB, p.90). He did not see faith as blind trust. James felt that without belief man, "is led to the edge of the slope, at the bottom of which lies pyrrhonistic skepticism, absolute pessimism, and intellectual suicide" (James in Gini, p.496).

James saw faith working hand in hand with reality. Faith cannot create a new reality. There must be facts behind a faith. James also believed that at times one by having faith in a fact, can actually help to create that fact. James gives the example of the man who's only escape is by a terrible leap and because he does not believe he can do it fails. "There are then cases where faith creates its own verification" (WTB, pp.96-97). "Faith is the willingness to believe in the possibility that a given belief can be justified or that a certain goal can be attained, and, in the latter, it is the acceptance of and trust in the transforming powers of the 'unseen order' which James took to be the hallmark of all religion" (Smith in Smart, p.318).

James sees the universe as being unfinished and faith as necessary. James defends his thesis in 'Reflex Action and Theism' in Will to Believe. Within this essay he presents the thesis that the reflex action theory, "leads to the conclusion that the God of Theism forms the most adequate possible object for minds like our own to envision as the basis for the universe. On the reflex theory, trains of thought (Department Two) are middle terms standing between an incoming sensation (Department One) and an outgoing nervous discharge which is the response or act itself (Department Three)....the reflex theory can be seen as pointing to a harmony between the human mind and the structure of reality, so that a God, 'whether existent or not' must be understood as "the only ultimate object that is at the same time rational and possible for the human mind's contemplation'" (Smith in Smart, p.319).

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James' main thesis in Will to Believe is the right to hold a belief even though there may not be enough evidence to confirm it. James put the choice of religious faith in the hands of each individual. James constructed a "faith ladder" which follows his "will to believe" doctrine. "1) A conception of the world arises in you somehow, no matter how. Is it true or not? 2) It might be true somewhere, you say, for it is not self-contradictory. 3)It may be true, you continue, even here and now. 4) It is fit to be true, it would be well if were true, it ought to be true, you presently feel. 5) It must be true, something persuasive in you whispers next; and then-as a final result- 6) It shall be held for true, you decide; it shall be as if true, for you 7) And your acting thus may in certain special cases be a means of making securely true in the end" (Pluralism, pp.328-29).

Religion

James describes faith claims are overbeliefs "and their credibility depends on the electric connection which they make with our needs and sensibilities. Only those beliefs which elicit our passions come alive, and only 'living options' inspire faith" (Whittaker, p.203). Overbeleifs according to James function as truths to live by and over-beliefs are tested by living by them. James uses overbelief as a defense of and a, "postulator of new facts as well. The world interpreted religiously is not the materialistic world over again with an altered expression; it must have, over and above the altered expression, a natural constitution different at some point from that which a materialistic world would have" (Varieties, p.518).

James says that, "our passional nature should not be allowed to decide a question of truth and falsity unless that question is irresolvable on intellectual grounds" (Essays on Faiths and Morals, p.42). James tries to give a defense of rational religious beliefs. He defined overbeliefs to escape the limits of psychology. "Disregarding the over-beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common and generic, we have in the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come" (Varieties, p.388).

James' defense of religion also reflects a universalism , "Most religious men believe (or know, if they be mystical) that not only they themselves, but the whole universe of beings to whom the God is present, are secure in his parental hands. There is a sense, a dimension, they are sure, in which we are all saved, in spite of the gates of hell and all adverse terrestrial appearances", (Varieties, p.390).

James' defends religious beliefs by saying that, "What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas that our minds have framed? .. Evidently, then, the science and the religion are both of them genuine ways for unlocking the world's treasure house to him who can use either of them practically."

In The Varieties of Religious Experience James supported a plurality of religions. He spoke of an unseen order as the divine versus the 'mental personality' spoken of in his earlier writings like Will to Believe. James did constantly hold to two points about his conception of God in his writings. "First the divine reality is the deepest power in the universe and it is not ourselves, but a real and distinct source of transforming power, and second, that power 'makes a difference' in affecting the lives of individuals in specific instances" (Smith in Smart, pp.320-21).

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In Varieties James identified God with features that were 'practical' in the sense of making a difference in a person's life. For example, qualities such as God is omniscience and is just has practical consequences such as He sees us in the dark and He rewards and punishes us. James opposed classical metaphysical theology . He opposed defining God's attributes a priori from a theoretical standpoint and he insisted on a divine attribute having practical significance in connection with man (Smith in Smart, 321).

James's insistence on the practical and experiential in religion can be seen in his, "determination of the 'real meaning' of materialism or Theism. The former, he claimed, is not essentially a doctrine concerning the essence of matter, but rather the assertion that there is no moral order and no ultimate hope. Nor is Theism essentially a doctrine concerning the essence of matter, but rather the assertion that there is moral order and ultimate hope. One can readily see in these interpretations what James called the 'principle of practicalim at work. The meaning of a world view is found not in what it asserts about the nature of a world in the past, but in the consequences for human life which follow from the kind of world which that view declares to be real" (Smith in Smart, p.321).

James' basic idea in his Will to Believe is that we, "have a right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, despite the fact that 'our merely logical intellect' may remain uncoerced" (WTB, pp.1-31 in Smith in Smart, p. 321). James tried to give practical examples of believing in God such as the example that the transforming power of forgiveness can be experienced.

James saw as essential to all religions the, "belief that the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe" and that a harmonious relation, including perhaps some form of union, with the unseen world is our true destiny. "James sees prayer as a process wherein there is a passage of "spiritual energy" (Smith, p.323).

James' concern for the person, for the individual caused him to subordinate the intellect and exalt the feeling (Varieties, p.492). "If you wish to grasp (religion's) essence you must look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more constant elements" (Varieties, p.494). A consequence of James seeing feeling as the root of religion was his seeing the social dimension of the church as being secondary (Smith in Smart, p.324).

James sees the common bond of all religions as having two structures. One is that there is 'something wrong about us" and the other is that we are 'saved from the wrongness' by our relation to the spiritual universe. James' illustrations of the divided self can be understood in terms of this model. James' union of man with 'his better half take the form of the 'existential movements'. James was concerned with offering a hypothesis concerning the unseen power which would agree with, "both a common body of doctrine derivative from a science of religions and the demands of a psychology with scientific stature" (Smith in Smart, p.325 citing Varieties, p.383).

The "hypothesis is that the more-the unseen world, the sacred order, etc.- with which the religious person feels connected is on its hither side, 'the subconscious continuation of our conscious life' (Varieties, p.502). James saw in this notion of a continuation a way of doing

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justice to the scientific requirement that recognized psychological facts be cited and also to the theological claim that a reality or exterior power is involved" (Smith in Smart, p.326).

"James' fundamental over-belief is: the world from the truly religious standpoint is not the materialistic world taken over again but now seen in a rosier light; it is a world with a different natural constitution in which novel events take place requiring conduct of a sort different from that appropriate in the scientific world" (Smith in Smart, p.326 citing Pragmatism). "James' aim was to arrive at a new conception of the divine based on experiences of a religious sort and consistent with his vision of a developing cosmos in which there is always 'more to come'.James' theology is summed up in his following statements from the Varieties of Religious Experience. "The practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all. Thus would a sort of polytheism return upon us ..."(pp.525-26).

Critique of Will to Believe

James was accused by his contemporaries of making something true by just believing in it, and also just believing in something without finding out if it is true or false. James' answer is that he was trying to justify belief. He said he was trying to formulate rules for belief. He argued that where both doubt and belief were possible there was a greater chance of gaining truth by believing, than by doubting.

James' overbelief theory is critiqued here by others in that it is, "difficult to see how overbeliefs could postulate new facts without being subject to the same canons of judgment which govern scientific claims, or underbeliefs" (Whittaker, p.206). Whittaker says if there is no independent evidence of that overbelief, "the practical value of a belief can never testify to its truth. It can only excuse a believer for maintaining a useful belief in the absence of rational grounds" (Whittaker, p.207).

"James' notion of God's involvement in human activity and his consequent finitude expresses the very paradox it would like to resolve;: the paradox of considering the deity from within human life and experience and consequently finding him to be infinite; and of subsequently inconsistently positing God as the foundation and propulsive force powering human life and action. For God must have no attribute that would create any gulf between him and man or render him inaccessible or unattainable. Above all, there must be no descendent continuity of consciousness as between God and man. The net result is a radical empiricism in the shape of vitalism and panpsychism, with the contention of a universal mind and consciousness, embracing in man the entire reality of the universe", (Fabro, p.767).

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PLURALISM

Nineteenth Century Context

James' pluralism was grounded in a defense against monism and Hegel's Absolute. This also resulted in James' thesis on freedom. James in writing to Francois Pillon said, "My philosophy is what I call radical empiricism, a pluralism, a "tychism," which represents order as being gradually won and always in the making. It is theistic, but not essentially so. It rejects all doctrines of the Absolute", (Perry, p.275).

Theory of Pluralism

James' pluralism is developed in the theology of his Will To Believe. James felt that belief may be dictated by the preferences of our individual natures. This results in pluralism. James' pluralism results in a finite God, "who evokes a passionate allegiance because he is in some measure hampered by circumstances, and dependent on the aid of others", (Perry, p.209). In James' essay The Dilemma of Determinism he is concerned with rejecting monistic determinism, in which the world is seen as all one piece and thus can be condemned as a unit. James sees the moral will as needing a pluralistic environment because it is according to James essentially partisan. This Thesis allows James to keep good from having any compromise with evil, and thus to also keep one moral being from being compromised by another. James sees the world as a "sort of republican banquet...where all the qualities of being respect one another's personal sacredness, yet sit at the common table of space and time" (WTB, p.270). James thus unites pluralism with individualism (Perry, p.210).

James sees the universe as unfinished, therefore he cannot accept Absolute Idealism or a "block universe". James felt plurity answered the diversity in human personality. "Not everyone has the same problems and, consequently, he maintained a 'god of battles' is appropriate for one kind of person and a 'god of peace' for another" (Smith in Smart, p.324). James saw God as finite, a Power seeking to make the world better but limited by evil. He saw pluralism as the answer to rid the world of evil. Thus he made God finite. God is more powerful than we are, but not all-powerful. James sees a pluralistic world as one that provides a setting for such a God. The world as James saw it was unfinished and imperfect, a world being shaped into a definite order (Perm, pp.356-358).

"Actually, remarks James in the most representative work of this second period, we live in a pluralistic universe, crisscrossed by a plethora of results, positive and negative, such as to make the monistic solution of the transcendental ideal evaporate into a sheer abstraction. God is a part of this pluralistic universe and so he is finite. God is not outside of us, is not extrinsic to us: "We are indeed internal parts of god and not external creations, on any possible reading of the panpsychic system. Yet, because God is not the absolute, but is himself a part when the system is conceived pluralistically, his functions can be taken as not wholly dissimilar to those of the other smaller parts,-as similar to our functions consequently" (Pluralism, p.318 cited in Fabro, p. 764.). In James' view God is neither Absolute nor infinite, thus He is part of human experience (Fabro, p.766). "I myself read humanism theistically and pluralistically. If there be a God, he is no

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absolute all-experiencer, but simply the experiencer of widest actual conscious span" (Religious Experience, p.194 cited in Fabro, p. 768).

Critique of Pluralism

"These pragmatic notions of practical familiarity and coping carry with them a broader cultural vision. It is that of a culture whose activities are not supervised by a global theory of truth or reference that makes explicit the underlying representational structure in virtue of which those activities are connected to reality" (Robbins, p.244). With this theory of pluralism, one needs to ask again, "if there is no global truth then who is to decide what is right. "Such a pragmatic culture would be free of the clamor of competing, conflicting claimants to this position of cultural overseer" (Robbins, p.244). Yet whose culture will order?

POSTSCRIPT

As Christians we need to look at James' theories from a creation world view, rejecting what does not fit within those perimeters, and accepting those theories that are true. Truth is not adequately defined from James' perspective i.e. what works, but rather truth is found within the creation world view perimeters. We, I need to help others understand how James' pragmatism has influenced us within the church and how it is keeping us from having our lives under the total Lordship of Christ. For example, Christians often feel that if their relationship with God is right everything in their life will be "working right". This is not true from a creation world view. From a creation world view sin has entered this world so our lives will be affected.Another example of how James theories have influenced the Christian church is his "faith ladder" theory. James says if we believe something it will come true. This is reflected in the "claim it and it's yours" gospel.

James' theory of the unfinished universe speaks of the fact that man is still working to perfection. This does not reflect creation which says the universe was finished, but man sinned and brought imperfection into the world.

The influence of James' teaching in our churches in America are being felt in the twentieth century. Putting this also as all perimeters of our lives under the Lordship of Christ, let us awaken the church to the truth!

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Indiana University Press, 1967.Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind. Tr. by Mabelle L. Andison. New York, 1946.

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Burtt, E.A. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. 2nd ed., rev. N.J.: Humanities Press, 1952.

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James D. Strauss

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