Latest / Logic Library / 08 Part 2 - Pragmatism and Religion - Pragmatism - William James

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08 Part 2 - Pragmatism and Religion - Pragmatism - William James · Logic Library

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  Does our act then create the world's salvation so far as it makes room for
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  itself, so far as it leaps into the gap? Does it create not
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  the whole world's salvation, of course, but just so much of this as
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  itself covers of the world's extent. Here I take the bull by the horns,
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  and, in spite of the whole crew of rationalists and monists, of
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  whatever brand they be, I ask, why not our acts, our turning
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  places where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow are the parts of
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  the world to which we are closest, the parts of which our knowledge is
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  the most intimate and complete. Why should we not take them at their face
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  value? Why may they not be the actual turning places and growing places which
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  they seem to be of the world? Why not the workshop of being where
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  we catch fact in the making, so that nowhere may the world grow in
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  any other kind of way than this irrational we are told? How can new
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  being come in local spots and patches which add themselves or stay away at random,
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  independently of the rest? There must be a reason for our acts.
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  And where in the last resort can any reason be looked for? Save in
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  the material pressure or the logical compulsion of the total nature of the world.
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  There can be but one real agent of growth or seeming growth anywhere, and
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  that agent is the integral world itself. It may grow all over if growth
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  there be, but that single parts should grow per se is irrational. But
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  if one talks of rationality and of reasons for things and insists that they can't
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  just come in spots, what kind of a reason can there ultimately be why
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  anything should come at all? Talk of the logical necessity and categories and the
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  absolute and the contents of the whole philosophical machine, shop as you will.
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  The only real reason I can think of why anything should ever come is that
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  someone wishes it to be here. It is demanded, demanded it may be
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  to give relief to no matter how small a fraction of the world's moss.
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  This is living reason, and compared with it, material causes and logical necessities
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  are spectral things. In short, the only fully rational world would be the
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  world of wishing caps, the world of telepathy, where every desire is fulfilled
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  instanter without having to consider applicate surrounding or intermediate powers. This is the absolute's
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  own world. He calls upon the phenomenal world to be, and it is
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  exactly as he calls for it, no other condition being required. In our
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  world. The wishes of the individual are only one condition. Other individuals are
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  there with other wishes, and they must be propitiated first. So being grows
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  under All sorts of resistances in this world are the many, and from compromise
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  to compromise only gets organized gradually into what may be called secondarily rational shape.
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  We approach the wishing cap type of organization only in a few departments of life.
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  We want water and we turn to a falcet. We want a codec
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  picture and we press a button. We want information and we telephone. We
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  want to travel, and we buy a ticket. In these and similar cases,
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  we hardly need to do more than the wishing. The world is rationally
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  organized to do the rest. But this talk of rationality is a parenthesis and
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  a digression. What we were discussing was the idea of a world growing not
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  integrally, but piecemeal by the contributions of its several parts. Take the hypothesis
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  seriously and as a live one. Suppose that the world's author put the case
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  to you before creation, saying I am going to make a world not certain
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  to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional, merely,
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  the condition being that each several agent does its own level best. I
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  offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety,
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  you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure with real danger,
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  yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of cooperative work genuinely
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  to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and
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  trust the other agents enough to face the risk? Should you, in a
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  all seriousness, if participation in such a world were proposed to you feel bound
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  to reject it as not safe enough? Would you say that, rather than
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  be part and parcel of so fundamentally pluralistic and irrational a universe, you preferred
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  to relapse into the slumber of non intensity from which you had been momentarily aroused
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  from the tempter's voice. Of course, if you are normally constituted, you
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  would do nothing of the sort. There is a healthy minded buoyancy in most
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  of us which such a universe would exactly fit. We would therefore accept the
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  offer top punchlak Alfschlach. It would be just like the world we practically live
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  in and loyalty to our old nurse nature would forbid us to say no.
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  The world proposed would seem rational to us in the most living way. Most
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  of us, I say, would therefore welcome the proposition and add our fire
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  to the fight of the creator. Yet perhaps some would not, for there
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  are morbid minds in every human collection, and to them the prospect of a
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  universe with only a fighting chance of safety would probably make no appeal. There
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  are moments of discouragement in us all, when we are sick of self and
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  tired of vainly striving. Our own life breaks down and we fall into the
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  attitude of the prodigal sun. We mistrust the chances of things. We want
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  a universe where we can just give up, fall on our father's neck,
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  and be absorbed into the absolute life as a drop of water melts into the
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  river or the sea. The peace and rest the security desiderated at such moments
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  is security against the bewildering accidents of so much finite experience. Nirvana means safety
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  from this ever lasting round of adventures of which the world of sense consists.
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  The Hindu and the Buddhist, for this is essentially their attitude are simply afraid,
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  afraid of more experience, afraid of life. And to men of this
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  complexion, religious monism comes with its consoling words all is needed and essential.
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  Even you, with your sick soul and heart, all are one with God,
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  and with God all is well. The everlasting arms are beneath. Whether
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  in the world of finite appearances you seem to fail or to succeed, there
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  can be no doubt that when men are reduced to their last sick extremity,
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  absolutism is the only saving scheme. Pluralistic moralism simply makes their teeth chatter,
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  it refrigerates the very heart within their beast. So we see creatly two types
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  of religion in sharp contrast. Using our old terms of comparison, we may
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  say that the absolutistic scheme appeals to the tender minded, while the pluralistic scheme
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  appeals to the tough. Many persons would refuse to call the pluralistic scheme religious
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  at all. They would call it moralistic, and would apply the word religious
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  to the monistic scheme alone. Religion in the sense of self surrender and moralism
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  in the sense of self sufficientness have been pitted against each other as incompatibles frequently
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  enough in the history of human thought. We stand here before the final question
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  of philosophy. I said in my fourth lecture that I believe the monistic pluralistic
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  alternative to be the deepest and most pregnant question that our minds can frame.
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  Can it be that the disjunction is a final one, that only one side
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  can be true? Are a pluralism and monism genuine incompatibles, So that if
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  the world were really pluralistically constituted, if it really existed distributably and were made
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  up of a lot of eaches, it could only be saved piecemeal and de
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  facto as the result of their behavior and its epic history in no wise short
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  circuited by some essential oneness in which the severalness were already taken up beforehand and
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  eternally overcome. If this were so, we should have to choose one philosophy
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  or the other. We could not say yes yes to both alternatives. There
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  would have to be a no in our relations with the possible. We should
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  confess an ultimate disappointment. We could not remain healthy minded and sick minded in
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  one indivisible act. Of course, as human beings we can be healthy minds
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  on one day and six souls on the next, and as amateur dabblers in
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  philosophy we may perhaps be allowed to call ourselves monistic pluralists, or free will
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  determinists, or whatever else may occur to us as a reconciling kind, But
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  as philosophers aiming at clearness and consistency, and feeling their pragmatistic need of squaring
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  truth with truth, the questions forced upon us are frankly adopting either the tender
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  or the robustious type of thought. In particular, this query has always come
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  home to me. May not the claims of tender mindedness go too far?
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  May not the notion of a world already saved in Toto anyhow, be too
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  saccharine to stand? May not religious optimists be too idyllic? Must all be
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  saved? Is no price to be paid in the work of salvation? Is
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  the last word? Suite? Is all yes in the universe? Doesn't the
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  fact of no stand at the very core of life? Doesn't the very seriousness
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  that we attribute to life mean that ineluctable knows and losses form a part of
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  it, That there are genuine sacrifices somewhere, and that something permanently drastic and
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  bitter always remains at the bottom of its cup. I can not speak officially
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  as a pragmatist here. All I can say is that my own pragmatism offers
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  no objection to my taking sides with this more moralistic view and giving up the
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  claim of a total reconciliation. The possibility of this is involved in the pragmatistic
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  willingness to treat pluralism as a serious hypothesis. In the end, it is
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  our faith and not our logic, that decides such questions, and I deny
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  the right of any pretended logic to veto my own faith. I find myself
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  willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing
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  out and crying no play. I am willing to think that the prodigal sun
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  attitude open to us, as it is in many vicissitudes, is not the
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  right and final attitude towards the whole of life. I am willing that there
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  should be real losses and real losers, and no total preservation of all that
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  is. I can believe in the ideal as an ultimate, not as an
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  origin, and as an extract not the whole. When the cup is poured
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  off, the dregs are left behind forever, but the possibility of what is
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  poured off is sweet enough to accept. As a matter of fact. Countless
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  human imaginations live in this way, more realistic in epic kind of a universe,
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  and find its disseminated and strong, long successes sufficient for their rational needs.
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  There is a finely translated epigram in the Greek Anthology which admirably expresses this
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  state of mind, this acceptance of loss as unatoned for, even though the
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  lost element might be one's self, a shipwrecked sailor buried on this coast,
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  bids you set sail full many a gallant bark. When we were lost weathered
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  the gale. Those Puritans who answered yes to the question, are you willing
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  to be damned for God's glory? Where in this objective and magnanimous condition of
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  mind, the way of escape from evil on this system is not by getting
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  it alf kehorben or preserved in the whole as an element essential, but overcome
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  it is by dropping it out altogether, throwing it overboard, and getting beyond
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  it, helping to make a universe that shall forget its very place and name.
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  It is then perfectly possible to accept sincerely a drastic kind of a universe
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  from which the element of seriousness is not to be expelled. Whoso does so
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  is it seems to me a genuine pragmatist. He is willing to live on
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  a scheme of uncertified possibilities which he trusts, willing to pay with his own
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  person if need be, for the realization of the ideals which he frames.
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  What now actually are the other forces which he trusts to cooperate with him in
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  a universe of such a type, They are, at least his fellow men
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  in the stage of being which our actual universe has reached. But are there
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  not superhuman forces also, such as religious men of the pluri lists type we
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  have been considering have always believed. In their words, may have sounded monistic
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  when they said there is no God but God. But the original polytheism of
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  mankind has only imperfectly and vaguely sublimated itself into monotheism, and monotheism itself so
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  far as it was religious and not a scheme of class room instruction. For
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  the metaphysicians has always viewed God as but one helper primus entreparis in the midst
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  of all the shapers of the great world's fate. I fear that my previous
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  lectures, confined as they have been, to human and humanistic aspects, may
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  have left the impression on many of you that pragmatism means methodically to leave the
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  superhuman out. I have shown small respect, indeed for the Absolute, and
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  I have until this moment spoken of no other superhuman hypothesis but that. But
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  I trust that you see sufficiently that the Absolute has nothing but its superhumanness in
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  common with the theistic God on pragmatistic principles. If the hypothesis of God works
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  satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true now, whatever
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  its residual difficulties may be. Experience shows that it certainly does work, and
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  that the problem is to build it out and determine it so that it would
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  combine satisfactorily with all the other working truths. I cannot start upon a whole
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  theology at the end of this last lecture. But when I tell you that
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  I have written a book on men's religious experience, which on the whole has
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  been regarded as making for the reality of God, you will perhaps exempt my
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  own pragmatism from the charge of being an atheistic system. I firmly disbelieve myself
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  that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe.
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  I believe rather, that we stand in much the same relation to the whole
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  of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human
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  life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes
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  of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of
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  history, the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken.
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  So we are tangents to the wider life of things. But just as
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  many of the dogs and cats ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs
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  and cats have daily living proof of the fact, so we may well believe,
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  on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are
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  at work to save the world of ideal lines similar to our own. You
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  see that pragmatism can be called religious if you allow that religion can be pluralistic
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  or merely melioristic in type. But whether you will finally put up with that
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  type of religion or not is a question that only you yourself can decide.
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  Pragmatism has to postpone dogmatic answers, for we do not yet know certainly which
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  type of religion is going to work best in the long run. The various
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  over beliefs of men there several faith ventures are, in fact what are needed
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  to bring the evidence in. You will probably make your own ventures severely.
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  If radically tough, the hurly burly of the sensible facts of nature will be
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  enough for you, and you will need no religion at all. If radically
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  tender, you will take up with a more monistic form of religion. The
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  pluralistic form with this lines on possibilities that are not necessities, will not seem
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  to afford your security enough. But if you are neither tough nor tender in
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  an extreme and radically sense, but mixed as most of us are, it
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  may seem to you that the type of pluralistic and moralistic religion that I have
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  offered is as good a religious synthesis as you are likely to find. Between
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  the too extreme of crude naturalism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism on the
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  other, you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the pragmatistic
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  or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require. The End of Pragmatism.
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  End of Lecture eight. End of Pragmatism by William James