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Lecture 8 Pragmatism and Religion At the close of the last lecture I reminded you of the first one in which I had opposed tough-mindedness to tender-mindedness and recommended pragmatism as their mediator.
Tough-mindedness positively rejects tender-mindedness' hypothesis of an eternal perfect addition of the universe coexisting with our finite experience.
On pragmatic principles we cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it.Universal conceptions as things to take account of may be as real for pragmatism as particular sensations are.
They have indeed no meaning and no reality if they have no use.
but if they have any use they have that amount of meaning and the meaning will be true if the use squares well with life's other uses well the use of the absolute is proved by the whole course of men's religious history the eternal arms are then beneath remember Vivekananda's use of the Atman it is indeed not a scientific use for we can make no particular deductions from it
It is emotional and spiritual altogether.It is always best to discuss things by the help of concrete examples.Let me read, therefore, some of those verses entitled, To You, by Walt Whitman.
You, of course, meaning the reader or hearer of the poem, whosoever he or she may be. Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you.That you be my poem, I whisper with my lips close to your ear.
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.Oh, I have been dilatory and dumb.I should have made my way straight to you long ago.I should have blabbed nothing but you.I should have chanted nothing but you.
I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you.None have understood you, but I understand you.None have done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself.None but have found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you.
Oh, I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you.You have not known what you are.You have slumbered upon yourself all your life.What you have done returns already in mockeries.But the mockeries are not you.
Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk.I pursue where none else has pursued you.
Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustomed routine, if these concealed you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me.
The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others, they do not balk me.The pert apparel, the deformed attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside.
There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied anew.There is no virtue nor beauty in man or woman, but as good is anew.No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is anew.
No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you. Whoever you are, claim your own at any hazard.These shores of the East and West are tame compared to you.
These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are immense and interminable as they.You are he or she who is master or mistress over them.Master or mistress in your own right over nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.
The hopples fall from your ankles, you find an unfailing sufficiency.Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself.Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted.
Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way. Verily a fine and moving poem in any case, but there are two ways of taking it, both useful.One is the monistic way, the mystical way of pure cosmic emotion.
The glories and grandeurs, they are yours absolutely, even in the midst of your defacement.
whatever may happen to you whatever you may appear to be inwardly you are safe look back lie back on your true principle of being this is the famous way of quietism of indifferentism its enemies compare it to a spiritual opium yet pragmatism must respect this way for it has massive historic vindication
But pragmatism sees another way to be respected also, the pluralistic way of interpreting the poem.
The you so glorified to which the hymn is sung may mean your better possibilities phenomenally taken, or the specific redemptive effects even of your failures upon yourself or others.
It may mean your loyalty to the possibilities of others whom you admire and love so that you are willing to accept your own poor life, for it is that glorious partner.
you can at least appreciate, applaud, furnish the audience of so brave a total world forget the low in yourself, then think only of the high identify your life therewith then, through angers, losses, ignorance, inui whatever you thus make yourself, whatever you thus most deeply are picks its way
In either way of taking the poem, it encourages fidelity to ourselves.Both ways satisfy, both sanctify the human flux.Both paint the portrait of the you on a gold background.
but the background of the first way is the static one while in the second way it means possibles in the plural genuine possibles and it has all the restlessness of that conception.
Noble enough is either way of reading the poem but plainly the pluralistic way agrees with the pragmatic temper best for it immediately suggests an infinitely larger number of the details of future experience to our mind
it sets definite activities in us at work.Although this second way seems prosaic and earth-borne in comparison with the first way, yet no one can accuse it of tough-mindedness in any brutal sense of the term.
Yet if, as pragmatists, you should positively set up the second way against the first way, you would very likely be misunderstood.You would be accused of denying nobler conceptions and of being an ally of tough-mindedness in the worst sense.
You remember the letter from a member of this audience from which I read some extracts at our previous meeting?Let me read you an additional extract now.It shows a vagueness in realizing the alternatives before us which I think is very widespread.
I believe, writes my friend and correspondent, in pluralism.I believe that in our search for truth we leap from one floating cake of ice to another on an infinite sea and that by each of our acts we make new truths possible and old ones impossible.
I believe that each man is responsible for making the universe better and that if he does not do this it will be insofar left undone.
Yet at the same time I am willing to endure that my children should be incurably sick and suffering, as they are not, and I myself stupid, and yet with brains enough to see my stupidity, only on one condition, namely, that through the construction, in imagination and by reasoning, of a rational unity of all things, I can conceive my acts and my thoughts and my troubles as supplemented
by all the other phenomena of the world, and as forming, when thus supplemented, a scheme which I approve and adopt as my own.
And for my part I refuse to be persuaded that we cannot look beyond the obvious pluralism of the naturalist and pragmatist to a logical unity in which they take no interest or stock.
such a fine expression of personal faith warms the heart of the hearer but how much does it clear his philosophic head?does the writer consistently favor the monistic or the pluralistic interpretation of the world's poem?
his troubles become atoned for when thus supplemented, he says, supplemented that is, by all the remedies that the other phenomena may supply
Obviously here the writer faces forward into the particulars of experience which he interprets in a pluralistic, melioristic way.But he believes himself to face backward.
He speaks of what he calls the rational unity of things, when all the while he really means their possible empirical unification.
He supposes at the same time that the pragmatist, because he criticizes rationalism's abstract one, is cut off from the consolation of believing in the saving possibilities of the concrete many.
He fails, in short, to distinguish between taking the world's perfection as a necessary principle and taking it only as a possible terminus ad quem. I regard the writer of this letter as a genuine pragmatist, but as a pragmatist sounds less wow.
He appears to me as one of that numerous class of philosophic amateurs whom I spoke of in my first lecture as wishing to have all the good things going without being too careful as to how they agree or disagree.
Rational unity of all things is so inspiring a formula that he brandishes it offhand and abstractly accuses pluralism of conflicting with it, for the bare names do conflict.
although concretely he means by it just a pragmatistically unified and ameliorated world.
Most of us remain in this essential vagueness, and it is well that we should, but in the interest of clear-headedness it is well that some of us should go farther, so I will try now to focus a little more discriminatingly on this particular religious point.
Is then this Jew of Jews, this absolutely real world, this unity that yields the moral inspiration and has the religious value to be taken monistically or pluralistically?Is it anterim or in rebus?
Is it a principle or an end, an absolute or an ultimate, a first or a last?Does it make you look forward or lie back?
It is certainly worthwhile not to clump the two things together, for if discriminated, they have decidedly diverse meanings for life. Please observe that the whole dilemma revolves pragmatically about the notion of the world's possibilities.
Intellectually, rationalism invokes its absolute principle of unity as a ground of possibility for the many facts.Emotionally, it sees it as a container and limiter of possibilities, a guarantee that the upshot shall be good.
Taken in this way, the Absolute makes all good things certain and all bad things impossible, in the Eternal, namely, and may be said to transmute the entire category of possibility into categories more secure.
One sees at this point that the great religious difference lies between the men who insist that the world must and shall be, and those who are contended with believing that the world may be saved.
The whole clash of rationalistic and empiricist religion is thus over the validity of possibility.It is necessary therefore to begin by focusing upon that word.What may the word possible definitely mean?
To unreflecting men the possible means a sort of third state of being, less real than existence, more real than nonexistence, a twilight realm, a hybrid status, a limbo into which and out of which realities ever and anon are made to pass.
Such a conception is, of course, too vague and nondescript to satisfy us.Here, as elsewhere, the only way to extract a term's meaning is to use the pragmatic method on it.When you say that a thing is possible, what difference does it make?
It makes at least this difference that if anyone calls it impossible, you can contradict him.If anyone calls it actual, you can contradict him.And if anyone calls it necessary, you can contradict him too.
But these privileges of contradiction don't amount to much.When you say a thing is possible, does not that make some farther difference in terms of actual fact?
It makes at least this negative difference that if the statement be true, it follows that there is nothing extant capable of preventing the possible thing.
The absence of real grounds of interference may thus be said to make things not impossible, possible therefore in the bare or abstract sense.But most possibles are not bare, they are concretely grounded, or well-grounded as we say.
What does this mean pragmatically? It means, not only that there are no preventive conditions present, but that some of the conditions of production of the possible thing actually are here.
Thus a concretely possible chicken means, one, that the idea of chicken contains no essential self-contradiction, two, that no boy skunks or other enemies are about, and three, that at least an actual egg exists.
Possible chicken means actual egg, plus actual sitting hen or incubator or whatnot.As the actual conditions approach completeness, the chicken becomes a better and better grounded possibility.
When the conditions are entirely complete, it ceases to be a possibility, and turns into an actual fact.Let us apply this notion to the salvation of the world. What does it pragmatically mean to say that this is possible?
It means that some of the conditions of the world's deliverance do actually exist.The more of them that are existent, the fewer preventing conditions you can find.
The better grounded is the salvation's possibility, the more probable does the fact of the deliverance become. so much for our preliminary look at possibility.
Now it would contradict the very spirit of life to say that our minds must be indifferent and neutral in questions like that of the world's salvation.Anyone who pretends to be neutral writes himself down here as a fool and a sham.
We all do wish to minimize the insecurity of the universe we are and ought to be unhappy when we regard it as exposed to every enemy and open to every life-destroying draft.
Nevertheless, there are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible.Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism. Optimism, in turn, would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation inevitable.
Midway between the two, there stands what may be called the doctrine of Meliorism, though it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant doctrine in European philosophy.
Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet.Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible.
It treats it as a possibility which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become. It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism.
Some conditions of the world's salvation are actually extant and she cannot possibly close her eyes to this fact.And should the residual conditions come, salvation would become an unaccomplished reality.
Naturally, the terms I use here are exceedingly summary.You may interpret the word salvation in any way you like and make it as diffuse and distributive or as climacteric and integral a phenomenon as you please.
Take for example any one of us in this room with the ideals which he cherishes and is willing to live and work for.Every such ideal realized will be one moment in the world's salvation.But these particular ideals are not bare abstract possibilities.
they are grounded they are live possibilities for we are their live champions and pledges and if the complementary conditions come and add themselves our ideals will become actual things but how are the complementary conditions?
they are first such a mixture of things as will in the fullness of time give us a chance a gap that we can spring into and finally our act End of lecture 8, part 1.
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