RELIGIOUS FAITH, SELF-UNIFICATION, AND HUMAN FLOURISHING IN JAMES AND DEWEY
MICHAEL R. SLATER
As fellow pragmatists, it should come as little surprise that William James (1842–1910) and John Dewey (1859–1952) held similar views on a wide range of philosophical issues. To give but a few salient examples, both philosophers defended an expansive conception of pragmatism as a practical method for resolving traditional philosophical problems, in contrast to the narrower and strictly semantic conception of pragmatism developed by Charles S. Peirce.1 James and Dewey both argued, furthermore, that philosophy itself needed to become more empirical and experimental in its methods, while at the same time becoming less focused on the solution of theoretical puzzles and more focused on the practical concerns of human beings. And both also affirmed a distinctive combination of empiricism, fallibilism, and verificationism in epistemology, a pragmatic view of the nature of concepts and theories, and broadly Darwinian views of the nature of mind and the basis of morality. On the issue of religion, however, James and Dewey held remarkably different views, with James defending the legitimacy and practical value of supernatural religious experiences, beliefs, and practices, and Dewey defending the need to naturalize and secularize traditional forms of religion in order to make them epistemically and morally justifiable. These are deep and important differences, to be sure, yet even here one finds notable similarities within differences and differences within similarities, to borrow Lee Yearley’s helpful model for comparative study. For both philosophers regarded their views as thoroughly “pragmatic” and fully in line with their larger defenses of pragmatism; indeed, both understood themselves as having been led to their respective conclusions by considering the practical consequences of holding and acting on religious commitments. James and Dewey also agreed at a general level that religious faith could play a uniquely important role in helping individuals to achieve a more unified sense of self—and, with it, certain distinctive forms of human flourishing—by ordering and integrating their ideals, and by uniting them in turn with those ideals. And yet, James and Dewey disagreed over such fundamental issues as the nature of the object of religious faith, the nature of faith in or commitment to that object, and the desirability of moral transformation through personal religious experience, and these substantive differences in their pragmatic accounts of religion arguably reflect underlying differences in their respective conceptions of pragmatism.
My aim in this essay will be to explore these differences and similarities in more detail, with a particular focus on James’s and Dewey’s respective views on the connections between religious faith, self-unification, and human flourishing. As we shall see, both philosophers endorsed a religious version of the oneness hypothesis, insofar as each maintained, first, that human beings are capable of realizing a more expansive sense of self by making connection with, and understanding their personal identity as inextricably intertwined with, an object of faith that exceeds and transcends themselves (a descriptive claim), and, second, that realizing an expanded sense of self of this kind is an important, and possibly even an essential, ingredient in human flourishing at both the individual and the social levels (a normative claim). To anticipate my conclusions, I hope to show that the differences in their pragmatic accounts of oneness largely stem from differences in their metaphysical views and their positions on the epistemology of religious belief (which inform their understanding and application of their respective versions of pragmatism), and that each account—in spite of its shortcomings—captures something important about the relationship between religious faith and the widespread human longing for happiness and a sense of wholeness.2 Although I do not think that either account is wholly unproblematic, much less that either is fully commensurable with the other, I nevertheless believe that a comparative study of James’s and Dewey’s accounts of oneness can help us to understand each of their views more fully than if we considered them independently of each other, and can possibly assist us in working out our own views on the nature of oneness in the process.
James’s Account of Self-Unification Through Religious Faith
James was unique among the classical pragmatists in making the study and defense of religious faith a central feature of his pragmatism. Although it would be a mistake, in my view, to reduce his many interests in the subject of religion to a single feature or issue, even a cursory glance at James’s religious writings reveals that one of his chief interests in religious faith was its capacity to meet certain important human needs and improve the quality of individual human lives. As most readers of James know, one of the most pronounced features of his major work on religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience (hereafter Varieties), is its deliberate focus on the empirically observable and testable practical effects of religion—its “practical fruits”—and its corresponding deemphasis on theoretical questions concerning the “roots” or causes of religious beliefs, experiences, and attitudes.3 Such an approach is informed by James’s view that religion itself is primarily practical as opposed to theoretical in nature, and that its most valuable function in human life is to provide a means of securing happiness, understood in the eudaimonic sense of that term as human well-being or flourishing (VRE, 44–51, 71–72, 122–23, 139, 382–83, 400–1, 405, 413).4 Although James acknowledged the importance of theoretical questions concerning the truth of religious beliefs and the scientific value of attempts to explain religion, his own interests as psychologist and philosopher of religion were primarily therapeutic in nature, and were focused on the aim of understanding and providing an ethical justification for those forms of religion that were capable of fulfilling that practical function in the lives of particular human beings. If we are interested in those questions, he believed, and if we furthermore take an empirical, cross-cultural, and historical approach to answering them that draws upon our best science and is not beholden to the teachings or assumptions of any particular theological or religious tradition, we find that there is considerable evidence in support of the following claims.
First, that religion, on the whole, is a vital means of securing happiness for a majority of human beings, and that this happiness is typically achieved when an individual believes (usually on the basis of her personal religious experiences and as a consequence of having engaged in religious practices such as prayer or meditation) that she has gotten into a proper relationship—or, more specifically, a state of union or harmonious relation—with an “unseen order,” or a transcendent higher power that is continuous with us and friendly with us and our ideals (VRE 51, 382–83, 400–2, 409–13). And second, that there is no good reason to think—as many religions maintain—that there is one religion or one type of religious attitude that is uniquely capable of or objectively better at fulfilling that function, or that is capable of satisfying all of the various religious needs that human beings have (VRE 383–85, 401–2). I think James is right on both counts, but for reasons of space I will confine my discussion in this essay only to the first of these claims.
One of James’s larger aims in Varieties was to use the methods of empirical psychology—in conjunction with his pragmatism and a broad sample of firsthand reports of religious experience and religious autobiographies—to arrive at a tradition-independent appraisal of the practical value of religious faith. Rather than taking religious traditions or communities and their own self-appraisals as his focus, James instead focused his attention on a widespread kind of religious attitude, which he variously termed the “faith-state” or the “state of assurance,” which one finds among both traditionally religious and nontraditionally religious persons (VRE 201–2, 397–401).5 Although this psychological attitude or state typically took either a “healthy-minded” or a “sick-souled” form, he believed, in both cases it was usually preceded by a period of division within the self (“the divided self”) followed by a process of conversion (which could be either sudden or gradual), and it displayed a fairly definite set of phenomenological characteristics that we can discern across many different times and cultures. James gives at least three different but overlapping formulations of these characteristics in Varieties, but in his most comprehensive formulation he states that it includes a set of very general beliefs and a set of general psychological characteristics. These include the following:
- The belief that the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance.
- The belief that union or harmonious relation with that universe is our true end.
- The belief that prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof—be that spirit “God” or “law”—is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, either psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
- A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and takes the form either of lyrical enchantment or of appeal to earnestness and heroism.
- An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections (VRE 382–83).
On James’s view, then, what it means to be a person of faith, in the most general terms, is to hold a set of beliefs concerning the reality of an unseen order (or of a higher or larger power, as he adds on VRE 400 and 413) and concerning our need to get into a proper union or relationship with that order, and to hold that there are certain practices such as prayer or meditation that we can engage in to effect that union or relationship (see also VRE 411–12). And once we have made a proper connection with that unseen order, furthermore, there are certain experiences and changes of character that we should expect to have, including a new zest for life, an increase of loving affections for others, and a psychological state of assurance, which involves “the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the willingness to be, even though the outer conditions [of life] should remain the same” (VRE 201).6 At least in the case of religions that promise some form of salvation or liberation, which is by far the most prevalent type of religion today, James thinks that we can identify a two-stage psychological process in which the individual moves from a state of uneasiness, or a sense that there is “something wrong about us as we naturally stand,” to a state of solution in which the individual believes herself to be “saved from the wrongness by making proper connexion with the higher powers” (VRE 400). As he continues, in one of the most well-known passages in Varieties:
The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticizes it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is coterminous and continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.
(VRE 401)
The process of moral self-transformation through religious experience that James describes is similar in a number of respects to his earlier discussion in The Principles of Psychology (hereafter Principles) of how human beings manage to pursue ends or lead lives that violate established social norms by identifying themselves with a potential or ideal social self, a higher and possible self against which they measure their own thoughts and conduct, as well as prevailing social norms and the thoughts and actions of others (PP 300–2). By imagining themselves as being approvingly judged by future generations, or by God, many persons are able to pursue ideals or to adopt new worldviews or ways of life that might earn them the disapproval or censure of their families, communities, and societies.7 In such cases, James thinks, “I am always inwardly strengthened in my course and steeled against the loss of my actual social self by the thought of other and better possible social judges than those whose verdict goes against me now” (PP 300). Indeed, he adds a little later on that “probably no one can make sacrifices for ‘right,’ without to some degree personifying the principle of right for which the sacrifice is made, and expecting thanks from it” (PP 301–2).
One of the more fascinating and surely controversial features of James’s account of the ideal social self in Principles is his view that this psychological process, which he thinks can be explained along purely naturalistic lines, can also lead us—if pursued sufficiently far—to the idea of God or an Absolute Mind, “a highest possible judging companion, if such companion there be” (PP 301). This sounds a bit like an incipient piece of natural theology, and it is one of several places in Principles where James appears to have some difficulty in sticking to the strictly empirical and nonmetaphysical point of view that he promises to take at the outset of the work (see PP 6). James does not develop this suggestive line of reasoning very far, however; and equally significantly, he does not argue that God’s existence can be proved in this way, nor does he give any indication that he is trying to provide rational support for belief in God. Yet, James also clearly thinks that this way of extending our powers of moral imagination to their furthest conceivable limit is a natural one for reflective people to make, and that it bears directly on the question of why many people persist in holding religious beliefs and engaging in religious practices such as prayer in a scientific age. He observes:
We hear, in these days of scientific enlightenment, a great deal of discussion about the efficacy of prayer; and many reasons are given us why we should not pray, whilst others are given us why we should. But in all this very little is said of the reason why we do pray, which is simply that we cannot help praying. It seems probable that, in spite of all that “science” may do to the contrary, men will continue to pray to the end of time, unless their mental nature changes in a manner which nothing we know should lead us to expect. The impulse to pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilst the innermost of the empirical selves of a man is a Self of the social sort, it yet can find its only adequate Socius in an ideal world.
(PP 301)
As others have pointed out, the notion of a Socius that James develops in Principles—or, more specifically, his psychological view of God as an ideal social self against whom we can evaluate our thoughts and conduct and to whom we can pray for assistance—is noticeably similar to his notion of a “wider self” in Varieties. Indeed, in both works James argues that for most persons identification of the self with an ideal and higher self is indispensable for achieving happiness, and that without a process of self-identification of this sort most people would be unable to lead psychologically healthy, much less flourishing, lives.8 Yet there are also some important differences between the accounts that he gives in these works. First, James’s account of the various forms that this process of self-identification can take is much richer and more extensively developed in Varieties than in Principles. Second, and perhaps more importantly, in Varieties James argues that belief in the reality of an unseen order or higher power, and having unifying religious experiences of that order or power, seems to be required in order to realize the full, practical benefits of religious faith, which he now describes in terms of an influx of “energy” from the subconscious or subliminal mind that can empower us morally and spiritually and can produce “regenerative effects” in our character; indeed, he clearly regards these characteristics as defining features of religious faith itself (VRE 400–13).9 Belief in a merely ideal Socius or wider self, in other words, is not enough to achieve the happiness that is characteristic of religion in its most developed forms, and in order to realize the full practical benefits of religion one must believe (1) that the wider self exists, (2) that it produces real effects in the world, and (3) that it has some bearing on how we should lead our lives. As James explains this “thoroughly ‘pragmatic’ view of religion,” 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. It must be such that different events can be expected in it, different conduct must be required” (VRE 408).
On the pragmatic view of religion that James defends in Varieties, then, one of the essential functions of religion is to realize certain important practical goods in the lives of human beings, which I have elsewhere described in terms of the possession of a morally strenuous attitude and the achievement of metaphysical intimacy, a saving or liberating sense of union with an unseen order or wider self.10 While the empirical evidence does not clearly or uniquely support the truth-claims of a specific religious tradition or theological view, he believed, much less the claim that one religion is practically superior to another on the whole, it does nevertheless provide considerable support for the view that religion functions to secure the earlier-mentioned goods for many human beings. James personally believed that religious faith was necessary to secure both of these practical goods, but his arguments regarding the first are not very well developed or supported. In the case of the second, however, he is surely right in thinking that a practical good of this sort—one that seems to be inherently religious or metaphysical by its very nature—cannot plausibly be realized without holding supernatural religious beliefs and having religious experiences, ones that appear to unite the believer (in one way or another and from the believer’s point of view) with the object of her faith.11 To believe, as most religious people do and as James himself did, that there is a knowable, really existent unseen order or higher power of some sort, one that is “ideal” but that also has efficient causality and produces real effects in the world and the lives of human beings, is to affirm a very general religious view that he terms “piecemeal supernaturalism” (VRE 409–14).
Although most traditional religious believers have much “thicker” theological views than this, James himself believed that the practical needs and experiences of religion were “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 to his ideals” (VRE 413). By believing or disbelieving in the existence of a supernatural power or order of this sort, or in a more specific set of beliefs about that power or order, we commit ourselves to what James calls an “overbelief,” or a metaphysical belief that is compatible with—but that cannot be confirmed by—the available empirical evidence (VRE 402–14). Under the terms of such a view, both naturalists and supernaturalists are committed to various overbeliefs in the matter of religion, but neither can justifiably claim—at least in a neutral, non-question-begging way—to have a demonstrably true belief, or to have drawn the inference to the best explanation, or something similar. Both sorts of believer, as James sees it, can appeal to various forms of evidence in support of their preferred view. Yet they are unlikely to agree completely about such matters as what should count as evidence, about which background assumptions may or should be privileged, or about how to determine the relevant probabilities when arguing for their preferred view (or against rival views, for that matter).12 In the end, each believer is engaged in a “faith-venture” that cannot be settled at present by appealing to strictly objective reasoning or evidence, and these different ventures have definitely different practical effects on the kinds of lives we lead. As James explains:
By being faithful to [my own overbelief], I seem to myself to keep more sane and true. I can, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist’s attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word “bosh!” Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow “scientific” bounds. Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperament—more intricately built than physical science allows. So my own objective and subjective conscience both hold me to the overbelief which I express.
(VRE 408)
James believed that piecemeal supernaturalism has a number of theoretical and practical advantages over its rivals, although in his brief discussion of those advantages in the postscript to Varieties it is—unsurprisingly—the latter that take pride of place. Unlike naturalism, piecemeal supernaturalism does not seek to debunk the religious believer’s understanding of her religious experiences or insist that she give up her supernatural beliefs, both of which are incompatible with most forms of religious faith (and which consequently pose a threat to many people’s ability to have their religious needs met). And unlike “refined” versions of supernaturalism, which deny that we can know or stand in causal relations with the supernatural realm (a view that many philosophers and some theologians in James’s day subscribed to, largely due to the influence of Kant and absolute idealism), piecemeal supernaturalism does not rule out the possibility of our having genuine religious experiences, nor does it seek to reform the nature of faith itself so as to eliminate supposedly incredible or indefensible religious beliefs and practices such as belief in miracles or “providential leadings” or petitionary prayer (VRE 409–11).
Contemporary naturalists, of course, will likely have a number of objections to realistic religious views of this sort, and James himself was well aware that it is one thing to show that religious believers tend to understand their faith along realistic lines, and another to show that their realistic religious beliefs are true. To show the latter would be an exceedingly tall order, and to James’s credit he does not presume to have done anything of the sort in Varieties, or in any of his other religious writings for that matter. As for his reasons for defending piecemeal supernaturalism, James says the following:
If asked just where the differences in fact which are due to God’s existence come in, I should have to say that in general I have no hypothesis to offer beyond what the phenomenon of “prayerful communion,” especially when certain kinds of incursion from the subconscious region take part in it, immediately suggests. The appearance is that in this phenomenon something ideal, which in one sense is part of ourselves and in another sense is not ourselves, actually exerts an influence, raises our centre of personal energy, and produces regenerative effects unattainable in other ways. If, then, there be a wider world of being than that of our every-day consciousness, if in it there be forces whose effects on us are intermittent, if one facilitating condition of the effects be the openness of the “subliminal” door, we have the elements of a theory to which the phenomena of religious life lend plausibility. I am so impressed by the importance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesis which they so naturally suggest. At these places at least, I say, it would seem as though transmundane energies, God, if you will, produced immediate effects within the natural world to which the rest of our experience belongs.
(VRE 411–12, emphasis added)
Such an argument is unlikely to convince James’s contemporary naturalist critics, no matter how friendly they might be, as it asks for concessions that most naturalists would be unlikely to make. Nevertheless, this frank and humble admission nicely captures the heart of James’s pragmatic approach to defending the practical value and legitimacy of religious faith, I think, for it shows that James did not base his defense of piecemeal supernaturalism on an impartial and objective consideration of the available evidence, which in any case he believed to be too indeterminate to play the supporting role that many critics and defenders of religion want, and too colored by individual temperaments to qualify as impartial and objective in the first place. Rather, he defended that view on account of its practical importance to the lives of most religious people, whose faith would not be sustainable apart from the convictions it describes. What we have in James’s pragmatic account of religion, then, and his concomitant defense of piecemeal supernaturalism, is an empirical and pluralistic framework for evaluating religious beliefs, experiences, and practices on essentially practical and nontheological grounds, with the aim of providing empirical support for the view that religious faith—in a remarkably wide variety of forms—is an important and possibly irreplaceable good in the lives of many human beings.
Dewey’s Account of Self-Unification Through Religious Faith
William James was John Dewey’s philosophical hero, but before his conversion to pragmatism he was as a Hegelian, and Hegel remained a lifelong influence on his thinking.13 As Richard Gale has recently (and I think convincingly) shown, one of the most pervasive and neglected features of Dewey’s version of pragmatism was a basically Hegelian concern with the ideal of self-unification, and the various ways in which art, religion, and philosophy—the classic Hegelian trio—could serve as instruments for promoting the growth of human values, ideals, and relationships.14 As Gale observes of Dewey’s pragmatist-cum-Hegelian view of growth as self-unification:
Growth involves the realization by an individual of ever richer and more extensive unifications, both within herself and with other persons, as well as with her natural environment, each of these unifications being dependent on the other two. This naturalizes the Hegelian dialectical development by having human beings replace the Absolute or God as the determiners of the historical process in which more widespread and rich syntheses are achieved. It is something that we must earn through our own free endeavorings rather than have imposed on us by some behind-the-scenes machinations by the Absolute or God.15
All human action, on Dewey’s view, should ultimately aim at the achievement of this kind of growth, which involves not merely the overcoming of obstacles to growth but also their ongoing dialectical “sublation.” As Dewey himself writes, there is “but one issue involved in all reflection upon conduct: The rectifying of present troubles, the harmonizing of present incompatibilities by projecting a course of action which gathers into itself the meaning of them all.”16
Dewey’s marriage of pragmatism and left-wing Hegelianism is an interesting topic in its own right, to be sure, but it is largely ancillary to my interests in this essay. In what follows I will pass over some of the problems surrounding his view of growth as self-unification, most notably what Gale has termed Dewey’s “growth fanaticism,” as well as certain features of that view which lie outside the scope of this essay, such as how the idea of growth connects with other important ideas in Dewey’s philosophy like inquiry, democracy, and education, and I will focus instead on how this view informs his distinctive understanding of religious faith.17 For reasons of space, I will confine my discussion to A Common Faith (1934), where Dewey offers his most extensive statement of his views on religion and where, more importantly, he undertakes to justify a naturalistically reconstructed conception of faith on pragmatic grounds on account of its capacity to unify the self and to strengthen our commitment to secular moral values and ideals.18
If we want to understand Dewey’s views on self-unification through religious faith, we first need to situate those views within the context of his pragmatic and naturalizing reconstruction of religious faith, which has a number of interrelated aims. I will highlight just two of these here. The first is Dewey’s aim of occupying a viable middle ground between two opposed camps, both of which Dewey finds objectionable. For the sake of convenience, we might call these Camp Supernaturalism and Camp Militant Atheism. The former camp is occupied by traditional religious believers, or those who hold supernatural religious beliefs, engage in religious practices connected with those beliefs, and are affiliated with religious institutions such as churches and synagogues that conserve and transmit those beliefs and practices from one generation to the next. In spite of their many differences, Dewey thinks, traditional religious believers share an underlying commitment to supernaturalism, which typically includes such things as belief in the existence of a transcendent, supernatural being or beings and some sort of belief in afterlife (CF 1).19 This is true not only of religious fundamentalists, but even of liberal Protestants who have “largely abandoned the idea that particular ecclesiastical sources can authoritatively determine cosmic, historic and theological beliefs” (CF 30). Camp Militant Atheism, in contrast, is occupied by atheists who are hostile or unfriendly to religion as such, and who think not only that religious beliefs, practices, and institutions have been completely discredited by modern science and modern cultural norms, but also that “with the elimination of the supernatural not only must historic religions be dismissed but with them everything of a religious nature” (CF 1).
What Dewey proposes is to avoid both camps by rejecting an assumption that they share in common, namely, “the identification of the religious with the supernatural” (CF 2). By rejecting supernaturalism and separating “the religious” from its unnecessary association with “religion,” Dewey argues that we can affirm what is valuable about religious ideals, attitudes, ways of living, and so on while dispensing with those aspects of religion that conflict with modern science and hinder the full realization of secular humanist values and ideals. Summarizing his basic line of argument, he writes:
In the discussion I shall develop another conception of the nature of the religious phase of experience, one that separates it from the supernatural and the things that have grown up about it. I shall try to show that these derivations are encumbrances and that what is genuinely religious will undergo an emancipation when it is relieved from them; that then, for the first time, the religious aspect of experience will be free to develop freely on its own account.
(CF 2)
By emancipating the “religious aspect of experience” from religion, Dewey believes, this valuable function in human life will be free to develop of its own accord for the first time, having been relieved of the burden of supernatural commitments that has until now limited its therapeutic possibilities. What Dewey is proposing is that there is no essential connection between “religion” in the traditional, supernatural sense of the term and “religious” attitudes or aspects of experience, which essentially concern ethical attitudes that “may be taken toward every object and every proposed end or ideal” (CF 10). While such attitudes have historically tended to take supernatural forms, Dewey thinks that it is not only possible but also desirable to “emancipate” this therapeutic function from religion, and to enlist it in the service of purely natural and secular humanist ends.
The major advantage of this secularized or naturalized conception of faith, as Dewey sees it, is that it allows us to jettison those aspects of traditional religion that are a hindrance to the full realization of natural or secular values and ideals, or are intellectually suspect, or both, while also preserving a sense of reverence or “natural piety” that is lacking in militant atheism, which rejects religion but typically leaves us unable to account for a profound sense of connection, “in the way of both dependence and support,” between ourselves and the universe (CF 29–57). As he explains:
Natural piety is not of necessity either a fatalistic acquiescence in natural happenings or a romantic idealization of the world. It may rest upon a just sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts, while it also recognizes that we are parts that are marked by intelligence and purpose, having the capacity to strive by their aid to bring conditions into greater consonance with what is humanly desirable. Such piety is an inherent constituent of a just perspective in life.
(CF 25–26)
So long as we conceive of faith along naturalistic lines as “the unification of the self through allegiance to inclusive ideal ends, which imagination presents to us and to which the human will responds as worthy of controlling our desires and choices” (CF 33), Dewey thinks, there is nothing morally or intellectually objectionable about faith, and indeed there are very good practical reasons to do so.20 I will have more to say about Dewey’s naturalized reconstruction of religious faith later in this section.
The second aim of Dewey’s account of religion that I want to emphasize is its proposed accommodation of religious ideals and values to secular humanist ones, which comes most clearly into focus in lecture 3 of A Common Faith, “The Human Abode of the Religious Function.” Here Dewey observes that his distinction between religion and the religious and his prescription of a secularized version of the latter have the added benefit of not requiring us to draw an invidious division between a religious sphere and a secular or profane social sphere (CF 66). The future of “the religious function,” he believes, “seems preeminently bound up with its emancipation from religions and a particular religion” (CF 67), and one consequence of this process of secularization is a sense of confusion over how to integrate religious meanings and values into “normal social relations” (CF 70). This is one of the most pressing intellectual and social problems of our time, as Dewey sees it, and what he encourages us to do is to abandon the attempt to give religious meanings and values a supernatural foundation, and to base them instead in what has been their true source and ground all along: the human abode or realm (CF 70–87). If we can bring ourselves to accept this disorienting but ultimately liberating truth, and affirm that the “goods actually experienced in the concrete relations of family, neighborhood, citizenship, and the pursuit of art and science are what men actually depend upon for guidance and support, and that their reference to a supernatural and other-worldly locus has obscured their real nature and has weakened their force,” then we will be able for the first time to affirm purely natural social values and relations as the highest values and relations (CF 71). This revolutionary “revaluation of values,” to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase, is necessary on Dewey’s view if we are to avoid devaluing the only values there really are, and if we are to realize the full potential of natural human social relations, or what Dewey calls “the values of natural human intercourse and mutual dependence” (CF 71–87).21 He writes:
What would be the consequences upon the values of human association if intrinsic and immanent satisfactions and opportunities were clearly held to and cultivated with the ardor and the devotion that have at times marked historic religions? The contention of an increasing number of persons is that depreciation of natural social values has resulted, both in principle and in actual fact, from reference of their origin and significance to supernatural sources.
(CF 71)
Dewey thus views supernatural religions at once as obscuring the real source and ground of our values and ideals, as siphoning off energies that might be put to better use in the pursuit of realizing purely natural values or human social ideals, and as a hindrance to the effective realization of those values and ideals. Indeed, he makes clear a few pages later that his basic objection to supernaturalism is that it “stands in the way of an effective realization of the sweep and depth of the implications of natural human relations. It stands in the way of using the means that are in our power to make radical changes in these relations” (CF 80). Although Dewey concedes that traditional religions have made important contributions to the progress of human values and social ideals, he thinks that this has largely been in spite of—and not on account of—their supernatural commitments. These religions have often sought to develop and promote important human qualities and values such as affection, compassion, justice, equality, and freedom, but they have erred in directing their efforts toward “a less promising object” than humanity itself—namely, the supernatural (CF 81).
Having completed this admittedly brief sketch of Dewey’s account of religion, I now want to consider his views on self-unification through religious faith in more detail. As we have already seen, Dewey conceives of faith—or, rather, reconceives it—as “the unification of the self through allegiance to inclusive ideal ends, which imagination presents to us and to which the human will responds as worthy of controlling our desires and choices” (CF 33). This “persuasive definition” of Dewey’s requires a bit of unpacking.22
As I have already mentioned, one of the obvious features of Dewey’s conception of faith is that it is a moral or ethical conception, in which faith is to be understood in terms of an individual’s commitment to certain moral values or ideals, specifically ones that are “worthy of controlling our desires and choices.” Dewey does not specify the content of such a moral faith in much detail, perhaps due in part to the supreme value that he places on growth (which on his view is an intrinsically valuable end, and, more controversially, one that precludes having fixed moral principles, a fixed account of the virtues, or a fixed conception of human nature and the good life for human beings). But he nevertheless indicates that moral feelings, emotions, and values such as affection, compassion, justice, equality, and freedom are the sorts of things he has in mind, and what is needed, on his view, is something that can “weld all these things together” (CF 81). In the past that thing has tended to be a supernatural object of some sort such as God, but, given Dewey’s rejection of supernaturalism, that will not do. But a commitment to promoting moral ends such as the perpetual increase of compassion, or justice, or equality, or freedom, or something similar is not inclusive or holistic enough to do the work that Dewey thinks needs to be done; rather, faith must have an object that somehow includes all of these ends and integrates them, presumably in much the same way that a person can possess and exemplify all of these moral qualities. As he explains, “in a distracted age, the need for such an idea is urgent. It can unify interests and energies now dispersed; it can direct action and generate the heat of emotion and the light of intelligence” (CF 51–52). Without such a unifying object, Dewey believed that a purely secular or naturalized faith could not avoid the pitfalls of militant atheism, which suffers from a lack of natural piety and too often takes the nihilistic attitude of human beings “living in an indifferent and hostile world and issuing blasts of defiance” (CF 53). If he is right about all of this, then what is needed is a clear and compelling alternative to both supernatural religions and militant atheism, and what Dewey proposes is that we take the traditional concept of a personal God and reconceive it along purely ethical lines, by regarding God as a symbolic representation and synthesis of our highest moral ideals—variously, as “the unity of all ideal ends arousing us to desire and action” (CF 42) and the “active relation between ideal and actual” (CF 51), an idea that is “connected with all the natural forces and conditions—including man and human association—that promote the growth of the ideal and that further its realization” (CF 50).
Putting all of this together, then, to have faith in God on Dewey’s proposed reconstruction of faith is to express one’s moral commitment to the earlier-mentioned ideals—indeed, to all worthy ideal ends, presumably including even ideals that one hasn’t yet thought of, let alone committed oneself to—and to the collaborative human project of realizing those ideals in ever-increasing ways. To possess such a faith, Dewey thinks, can unify a person’s various moral commitments into a single moral vision, and indeed bring about a kind of harmony or unity in herself, with her fellow human beings, and even with the natural world. In short, we get to enjoy the best features of both religious and naturalist or secular humanist views of the world, while overcoming the theoretical and practical disadvantages of supernatural religions and the practical disadvantages of militant atheism.23
It is reasonable, however, to ask some hard questions of Dewey’s view, such as what exactly it means, how it works, who might find it convincing, and whether it is even necessary for the defense and advance of secular humanism. Unfortunately, Dewey does not really address these questions, and this presents a rather serious problem—or rather a set of problems—for understanding and evaluating his view. I have no great difficulty understanding what it might mean to think of God as a symbolic representation of our highest moral ideals, and by drawing an analogy with Hegel’s concept of Absolute Spirit (which isn’t entirely clear to me, either) I think I have some sense of what he means by claiming that the idea of God is “connected with all the natural forces and conditions—including man and human association—that promote the growth of the ideal and that further its realization” (CF 50). But I find Dewey’s claim that this idea of God could serve as the “active relation between ideal and actual” (CF 51) extremely puzzling, especially given his avowed rejection of supernaturalism. This makes Dewey’s God sound like an agent who realizes or actualizes ideals in the world and in the lives of human beings, but Dewey explicitly denies that God should be thought of as a real or actually existing divine being who produces real effects in the world. The trouble, though, is that an idea of God all by itself does not plausibly have the power that Dewey wants to ascribe to it, any more than the idea of Batman all by itself could frighten criminals or make a large city a safer place to live. A real Batman could accomplish those tasks, of course, and so too, perhaps, could people who were inspired by the idea of Batman and began dressing up and fighting crime by night (though I suspect they would look a lot sillier and get hurt much more often). But in those cases it would be persons, and not ideas, that were realizing the ideals of justice and freedom that Batman stands for—or to use Dewey’s language, functioning as “the active relation” between those ideals and their actualization. Even if one grants that ideas can function as causes (say, Aristotelian formal causes), it is very hard to see how ideas all by themselves can produce real effects, any more than the idea of a statue all by itself can carve a block of stone.
This presents a rather serious problem for Dewey’s defense of his common faith, and for at least two reasons. First, the success of his argument depends in part on convincing atheists who are also secular humanists that they either need to have faith in his “God” if they are to achieve the aims of secular humanism and lead a spiritually fulfilling life, or at least would be better able to achieve those ends by doing so (it is hard to tell whether Dewey is making the stronger or the weaker of these claims). But if human beings can achieve those ends satisfactorily without believing in Dewey’s God, then that God seems to be a fifth wheel to the coach. Indeed, many of these atheists will likely find Dewey’s continued flirtation with theism, even in this naturalized form, an unnecessary distraction that impedes rather than aids the cause of secular humanism. Second, the success of Dewey’s argument also depends in part on convincing theists and other traditional religious believers that they are losing nothing of practical or theoretical value by giving up their supernatural religious beliefs. But if a real God can produce real moral effects in the world and can provide an objective basis for moral values and obligations, and an imaginary or purely ideal God can do neither of those things, then, all other things being equal, Dewey’s purely ideal God seems to be deficient by comparison.
Presumably one of Dewey’s reasons for retaining the concept of God as the object of his “common faith” is that the concept of a divine person seems to be well (if not uniquely well) suited to the job of providing a perfect moral standard by which we assess our moral beliefs and actions, and because the belief that one stands in a proper relationship with such a being, or is loved, or commanded, or assisted by such a being, or something similar, can have powerful and positive transformative effects on an individual or group of individuals, such as inspiring them to labor for the kingdom of God on earth (or the Kantian kingdom of ends or whatever secularized substitute one prefers). How the latter process works, exactly, is not entirely clear—and to be fair, there don’t seem to be any detailed and testable supernatural explanations for this either—but presumably Dewey thinks that there is, or at least could be, a sufficient naturalistic explanation for this process. As we have already seen, however, in the case of Dewey’s common faith the divine person must be understood by the believer as an imaginative unification and projection of her own highest moral values and ideals—and imaginative projections do not provide a plausible basis for objective moral values, and are notoriously unable to love, command, or assist us.
Once again, I suspect that most theists would probably view Dewey’s God as a poor and decidedly inadequate substitute for the God they already believe in, and most atheists would probably find it unnecessary or even harmful to the cause of promoting secular humanism. If the secular humanist is already committed to noble moral ideals such as the promotion of compassion, justice, equality, and freedom, and if she derives a deep sense of fulfillment and purpose in life by working to realize those ideals—including a stable and unified sense of self and an ethical orientation toward other human beings and the natural world—then why, exactly, does she need to personify them? And what practical or theoretical benefits would she obtain by doing so? Furthermore, if the secular humanist takes an attitude of reverence toward the natural world and the human social world and acknowledges her dependence upon them, can she not have a form of natural piety without believing (if that is the right word) in Dewey’s God? I think there are better contemporary alternatives to Dewey’s common faith for secular humanists of this sort, and in the absence of a compelling argument for the necessity of belief in a quasi-religious object such as Dewey’s God, it is not clear why contemporary secular humanists should accept it.24
As we observed in the previous section, James’s views on the religious unification of the self might be convincing to many traditional religious believers, but they are likely to be dead on arrival for most contemporary naturalists. What we can now observe of Dewey’s views is that they are likely to be dead on arrival for most traditional religious believers and for most contemporary naturalists, who are likely to find Dewey’s proposed naturalistic reconstruction of religious faith unpersuasive and unnecessary. Perhaps some very liberal Christians or Jews might be persuaded to adopt Dewey’s religious vision, in particular those who have been influenced by the writings of religious thinkers like Paul Tillich or Mordecai Kaplan, but it is difficult to imagine that a majority of theists or atheists would ever be converted to Dewey’s common faith.
So where does this leave us, and what valuable insights, if any, can we take from James’s and Dewey’s pragmatic accounts of self-unification through religious faith?
In response to the first question, what we are left with is the insight that a commitment to pragmatism can support a remarkably wide range of views on this topic, and that it can be adapted to suit the practical needs of both traditional religious believers and committed naturalists or secular humanists. And this is chiefly because pragmatism is compatible with a wide range of metaphysical views, including James’s “piecemeal supernaturalism” and Dewey’s rejection of supernaturalism in any form. Rather than seeing this diversity as a weakness or shortcoming of pragmatism, however, I happen to see it as one of its strengths, and as fully consistent with pragmatism’s insistence that practical philosophical issues not only do but also should have primacy over theoretical ones. What James and Dewey both held, in their respective and frequently differing ways, was that religious faith or commitment can have a powerfully unifying and positive effect in the lives of human beings, that it can be justified under certain conditions on this basis, and that the loss of this great good in human life has far-reaching and potentially serious implications at both the individual and the social level—and I am inclined to agree with them. Furthermore, what both philosophers sought to do, in their own ways and in line with their own particular metaphysical beliefs, was to defend this practical good in human life against the criticisms of certain religious skeptics, such as the “medical materialists” and scientific positivists that James criticized in Varieties or the militant atheists that Dewey criticized in A Common Faith.25 These are both admirable aims, and while I am personally more sympathetic to James’s views on the whole I also think there is much to like about Dewey’s account of natural piety, which describes a kind of ethical and (for lack of a better word) spiritual attitude or orientation that is, or at least could be, widely shared by many traditional religious believers and many nonreligious people alike, and which potentially might help some individuals to achieve a unified worldview and sense of self without holding what P. J. Ivanhoe calls “heroic” supernatural religious or metaphysical commitments (including quasi-supernatural religious commitments such as faith in Dewey’s God).26
In response to the second question, I would submit that James can help us to see that scientific inquiry and philosophical inquiry into the nature of religious belief—or religious disbelief, for that matter—have their uses as well as their limits and, perhaps even more importantly, to see where those limits lie. Dewey, in turn, usefully draws our attention to the social function and value of religious faith, which James never denied but tended to give relatively less attention to than his fellow pragmatist. He also helps us to see some of the inadequacies of militant versions of atheism, and to see that there are possible alternatives to traditional supernatural religions on the one hand and the outright rejection of religious faith on the other, even if his own religious alternative is not fully viable at the end of the day. At a time when militant versions of atheism have come to dominate popular reflection on and discussion of religion (not to mention the best-seller lists), and when scientific positivism seems to be enjoying something of a contemporary renaissance, James and Dewey can both provide important correctives and help us to see other possibilities that we might otherwise have missed.
Notes
1. Dewey’s version of pragmatism (which he variously termed “instrumentalism” and “the method of intelligence”) was, if anything, even broader and more ambitious than James’s, insofar as it aimed to resolve not only the traditional problems of philosophy but also “the problems of men,” or the various social challenges that human beings confront. In contrast, Peirce—who was the originator of pragmatism—insisted that pragmatism (or “pragmaticism,” as he later called it) should be thought of simply as a method for clarifying the meanings of unclear terms, one to be used in the service of scientific inquiry and toward the end of making philosophy a more scientific discipline.
2. I am not particularly interested in the question of which, if either, of these philosophers had the better or more correct understanding of pragmatism, because I do not think that there is a single, widely agreed upon conception of what pragmatism is, and because I think that the differences in James’s and Dewey’s views on religion have relatively little to do with their views on the nature of pragmatism. Although I do not have the space to argue this point here, I have argued elsewhere that pragmatism is compatible with a wide range of views on metaphysical and religious issues, and that the pragmatist tradition exhibits much more diversity on these issues than is commonly recognized. See, in particular, the introduction to Pragmatism and the Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–7.
3. I have argued elsewhere that this strategy of James’s is a perfectly defensible one, and that it should not be taken as evidence that he had some sort of principled hostility to attempts to investigate religion using the tools of the natural and social sciences. Rather, his minimization of attempts to explain religion scientifically follows from his view that explanations of religion—whether of the naturalistic or the supernatural variety—inevitably beg the question on a range of important metaphysical and epistemological questions and are themselves expressions of particular philosophical “temperaments,” which load the empirical evidence in advance in favor of a particular interpretation. See Pragmatism and the Philosophy of Religion, chapters 1 and 7.
4. All references to James’s works are to The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas Skrupskelis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975–88). I will use the abbreviation “VRE” for references to The Varieties of Religious Experience (1985, originally published in 1902), and “PP” for The Principles of Psychology, (1981, originally published in 1890), followed by the page number.
5. James is not entirely consistent in his use of these terms, but I am not sure that this greatly affects the larger argument that he wants to make concerning the practical value of such states for life. On page 201 of Varieties, for example, he draws a distinction between the faith-state and the state of assurance when discussing the work of the psychologist James Henry Leuba, and uses the latter term to refer to the affective experience of faith as opposed to its cognitive or doxastic content. Yet when James summarizes his previous conclusions on pages 397–99 of Varieties he omits this distinction, and reverts to using Leuba’s term faith-state in such a way that it includes the state of assurance. (Indeed, he draws a different contrast here between the faith-state, which he now takes to consist essentially of religious feelings and conduct, and creeds, or the positive intellectual content of particular religions, which when taken together form “religions.”)
6. In his previous discussion of the state of assurance in lecture 10, James adds that it also typically involves the sense of perceiving truths not known before, and the sense that the world has undergone an objective and positive change (VRE 201–2).
7. One friendly amendment to James’s view would be to add ancestors and past moral exemplars such as sages to this list. In any case, these would seem to be two other types of “ideal social selves” that many human beings, both past and present, have measured their thoughts and actions against, particularly in the traditional cultures of East Asia.
8. As James writes in Principles, “The humblest outcast on this earth can feel himself to be real and valid by means of this higher recognition. And, on the other hand, for most of us, a world with no such inner refuge when the outer social self failed and dropped from us would be the abyss of horror” (PP 301).
9. James develops his views on how contemplative practices such as prayer, meditation, and yoga can increase our moral and spiritual “energies” at greater length in two essays written after Varieties, “The Energies of Men” (1907) and “The Powers of Men” (1907), although even here his views remain quite speculative.
10. See Slater, William James on Ethics and Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. 7–8.
11. James took a pluralistic view of the kinds of religious union that are or could be practically efficacious in this way, including not only mystical experiences (whether of the monistic or the dualistic variety) but also more commonplace religious experiences such as the state of assurance, which could be realized by engaging in religious practices such as prayer and meditation. And he took this view, at least in part, because the available empirical evidence does not support specific theological claims about the nature of the unseen order (or “wider self,” “higher power,” and so on), such as that it is really a personal, omnipredicate God. Rather, the only thing that the evidence “unequivocally testifies is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace” (VRE 413).
12. James thus would be critical, I think, of contemporary Christian philosophers who use logical formulas such as Bayes’s Theorem to argue that their preferred religious beliefs and hypotheses are more probably true than rival beliefs and hypotheses, such as atheism or naturalism. From James’s point of view, such arguments—like the traditional arguments for God’s existence—are likely only to convince those who are willing to grant certain crucial assumptions from the outset, such as the probability calculations upon which such arguments are based. They are, in other words, simply more sophisticated ways of preaching to the choir, and are unlikely to convince religious skeptics to change their beliefs.
13. For an extensive and carefully researched historical account of Hegel’s influence on Dewey, see James A. Good, A Search for Unity in Diversity: The “Permanent Hegelian Deposit” in the Philosophy of John Dewey (Oxford: Lexington, 2006).
14. See Richard M. Gale, John Dewey’s Quest for Unity: The Journey of a Promethean Mystic (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2010).
15. Gale, John Dewey’s Quest for Unity, 11.
16. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (1922), in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 14, 1899–1924 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983, 2008), 146; quoted in Gale, John Dewey’s Quest for Unity, 89.
17. Gale argues, among other things, that Dewey’s obsession with growth at the expense of other goods imposes some impossible demands for many moral choices, and that it leads him to hold some “perversely silly” views about the nature of good human beings. I am sympathetic to these criticisms, but for reasons of space I cannot rehearse them here. See Gale, John Dewey’s Quest for Unity, 90–91.
18. I offer a more extensive discussion of Dewey’s account of religion in chapter 4 of my Pragmatism and the Philosophy of Religion.
19. John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934). All references to this work in the text are abbreviated as “CF,” followed by the page number.
20. Dewey also remarks at one point that the very idea of a whole—whether of a unified self or world, or of the unification of the self with the world—is an ideal and imaginative construction that we project upon ourselves or the world. “The whole self is an ideal, an imaginative projection. Hence the idea of a thoroughgoing and deep-seated harmonizing of the self with the Universe (as a name for the totality of conditions with which the self is connected) operates only through imagination—which is one reason why this composing of the self is not voluntary in the sense of an act of special volition or resolution” (CF 19). This is especially significant in the case of various ways of unifying the self or the self with the world, Dewey thinks, because it entails that such unification cannot be attained simply in terms of itself. “The self is always directed toward something beyond itself and so its own unification depends upon the idea of the integration of the shifting scenes of the world into that imaginative totality we call the Universe” (CF 19). This recognizably Hegelian feature of Dewey’s account of religious faith is perhaps most pronounced in his idea of natural piety, and in his naturalized “reconstruction” of the concept of God as the unification of ideal values or ends and the active relation between these ideals and the natural forces and conditions (including human beings) that “promote the growth of the ideal and that further its realization” (CF 43–52).
21. Nietzsche’s views regarding the need to “revalue” our inherited moral values have received far more attention from contemporary philosophers than Dewey’s, which is unfortunate for several reasons, not the least of which is that Dewey, unlike Nietzsche, championed the democratic ethical and political values that most contemporary Westerners—and most contemporary philosophers—actually tend to affirm. This is pure conjecture on my part, but I suspect that this phenomenon can be partly explained by the fact that Nietzsche’s views on this topic are much “edgier” and more iconoclastic than Dewey’s, and by the fact that many philosophers place a high (I am tempted to say inordinate) value on those qualities.
22. As Richard Gale has observed, Dewey frequently employed “persuasive definitions” in his writings, or “unannounced linguistic innovation[s] whose purpose was to inculcate in the reader an attitude toward the referent of the definition that would aid the establishment of a moral democracy.” See Gale, John Dewey’s Quest for Unity, 10. I thank David Solomon for pointing out to me that Charles Stevenson was the first to use this term of art.
23. Dewey usually gives the impression that militant atheism has only practical disadvantages, in contrast to supernaturalism, which has both practical and theoretical disadvantages. What he does not seem to consider is that some versions of militant atheism might also have theoretical disadvantages, especially those that accept or entail what Owen Flanagan calls an “imperialistic” version of ontological naturalism, which among other things wrongly assumes that we can know that the natural world is the only world there is, and has difficulty accounting for things like moral properties because it assumes that they are necessarily “spooky.” For Flanagan’s discussion of this version of ontological naturalism and his defense of a nonimperialistic alternative, see “Varieties of Naturalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 430–52.
24. For a recent defense of secular humanism that derives inspiration from Dewey’s views in A Common Faith but that dispenses with what we might call his “quasi-theism,” see Philip Kitcher, Life Without Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). Interestingly (and fittingly), both works were originally delivered as the Terry Lectures at Yale.
25. I discuss these features of James’s philosophy of religion at greater length in chapter 5 of William James on Ethics and Faith, and chapter 1 of Pragmatism and the Philosophy of Religion.
26. Heroic meaning that they call upon us to live up to high ideals but require belief far in excess of what evidence supports. For this idea, see Ivanhoe, “Senses and Values of Oneness,” in The Philosophical Challenge from China, ed. Brian Bruya (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), 231–51.