William James wanted a philosophy that rested on experience, not logic, because life exceeds logic
(Part 8, of an 8-part series by Mark Vernon beginning with Part 1: "A Religious Man for Our Times")
"The most important thing about a man," wrote Chesterton, "is his philosophy." William James agreed. He was fond of quoting the saying. Our philosophy, or "over-belief", shapes our "habits of action", which is to say our ethos – who we are becoming. Pragmatism, the philosophy of "what works", is taken to be James' philosophy. And yet, his pragmatism is different from that of his confrères.
Pragmatism is often associated with deflationary accounts of truth. Truth, with a capital T, is a pipe dream, it implies. No fact, rule or idea is ever certain – nor is even the possibility of facts, rules and ideas.
Philosophy and science can make progress, but only in relation to current experience. "Truth is the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate", wrote one pragmatist philosopher,
John Dewey Charles Sanders Peirce. Or as Richard Rorty pithily averred: "Time will tell, but epistemology won't." When it comes to religion, such pragmatism implies that theologians are more like poets than metaphysicians. They are aestheticians – conjuring meaning with their descriptive powers, as opposed to capturing Truth in their formularies.
It's called ironic pragmatism. "There is an all" is inverted to "that's all there is." Such a stance requires the philosopher, or scientist, to be committed to finding the truth as it if existed, though it probably doesn't. It's truth as a "regulative ideal", to use another phrase. So, if James is a pragmatist, what of his religious quest? Is he condemned to perpetual agnosticism – longing for more and never finding it? It's a big debate amongst Jamesian scholars. But I think his ethos, his philosophy, can be summarised like this.
In the Varieties, he had found that the higher religious emotions – those associated with profound conversions and saintly lives – commonly give rise to a monist view of ultimate reality. (There is an all, and it is One.) But he wondered about such absolutism. What he disliked about it was its reifying tendency. He feared that the abstract language it fosters forgets the "thickness of reality". He wanted a philosophy that rested on experience, not logic, because life exceeds logic. In this sense, he was an empiricist, and a "radical empiricist" to boot – as in "rooted". He believed our experiences are rooted in reality, for all that we will misunderstand what's real, and get it wrong.
The process was captured in one of his many pregnant phrases: "stream of consciousness". The flowing waters of our experience – with its eddies, torrents and occasion pools of stillness – are steeped in the wider waters of consciousness that surround us. We perceive things from our point of view, sure. But that is not to say we cannot glimpse a fuller perspective too, as we're touched by other flows.
It's the usually unseen reality that spiritual virtuosi detect – the "more". But while we can hope that our experiences participate in these truths, our understanding of them must always be hedged with doubt: no-one ever perceives the whole of reality – the dream of the monist. We live piecemeal, in what he came to call a "pluralistic universe". (His final theological position is not contained in the Varieties, but in A Pluralistic Universe – the book of his Hibbert lectures of 1908.) To put it another way, truth is found in the quest itself. This is what his pragmatism means.
Ludwig Wittgenstein read James, and he offers an illuminating reflection on this quest in the Philosophical Investigations. He imagines James listening to some music and, whilst knowing that it's glorious, not being quite able say why it's glorious. "Our vocabulary is inadequate," he has James conclude, which raises the possibility that a richer vocabulary might contain a word for the way in which the music is glorious. Only, that's not the point, Wittgenstein notes. It's not that we don't have the words. It's that language itself is inadequate.
For much of his life, James devoted his imaginative energies to finding words that might better capture the superabundance of our inner lives. In the Principles of Psychology, his major work before the Varieties, he'd revolutionized the vocabulary used by the discipline. But there is always the more that lies beyond words too – the ineffable quality of the music. And so this opens up a second dimension to James' pragmatism. If truth is in the quest, the quest is never over too.
In another inventive phrase, James wrote that he was "ever not quite" at home with the existence of God. He couldn't easily live with belief in God. But he couldn't quite live without it either. It could never be otherwise for him. It's implicit in his perspectival empiricism.
It's a religiously-inclined agnosticism that demands an ethos of toleration coupled to curiosity. James wrote an essay entitled "On a certain blindness in human beings", that blindness being a tendency to forget that different people see the world in radically different ways. It leads to the mutual misunderstandings that lie at the root of so much human discontent, warfare and strife. Toleration is the necessary corrective to this blindness.
And we can recognise our blindness – which is why curiosity is a virtue too. By respecting another's point of view we might not only save ourselves the embarrassments of narrow-mindedness, but open ourselves to the unexpected and new. "Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer," he writes in the essay, "although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands."
"Human intelligence must remain on speaking terms with the universe," he affirms. That is to remain committed to the reality of the ineffable about which we'd speak, and to admit we'll never be able completely to capture it in our words. But our best mutterings will address us body and soul. Our deepest musings will "hover around" deeper insights. There's reason to have faith. As Wittgenstein observed: "The unutterable will be – unutterably – contained in what has been uttered."
Mark Vernon
Guardian
