Dewey, John - A Common Faith Ch 1

04/10/2009

Yale University Press, 1934

This chapter tries to create an adjective 'religious' that is distinct from 'religion'. The first discussion is about how diverse and varied the practice of religion is (pg4-6) and how, once placed in the cultural and historical context, it isn't obvious that the current cultural context is the correct one. Yet to try to give a theory of religion so that it covers all of the practices around the world and throughout history will make it so abstract and disjointed to be unrecognizable. Author concludes that there are instead 'a multitude of religions'. (pg7-8)

The next move is to distinguish between 'religion' and 'religious', which does not have the institutional history or theology that a religion is committed to. A religious attitude is different from a 'religious experience' however. A religious experience as a kind separate from aesthetic or political experiences is not what author has in mind. (pg10-11) This kind of experience is characterized by its outcome but labeled according to whatever culturally/institutionally relevant categories the individual may have handy. (pg11-13) But what is important about the experience is the 'adjustment' made within a person's self; different religions will call it different things. The important experience that can underwrite a religious attitude is one whose effects are an enduring deep-seated adjustment or orientation. (pg16-17)

Author takes pains to articulate the meta-psychological underpinning of a religious attitude: the imagination has an ideal for the self to strive for as it strives for integration, since integration takes place with something external to the self-- an ideal. (pg19) The non-objective nature of an ideal-- the non-factual aspect of it-- is contrasted by author to 'faith', which has become an evidential claim, a part of metaphysics instead of human imagination. (pg20) Author suggests that once the moral (imaginative) ideal of the religious attitude was converted into a claim of objective metaphysics by religion, it actually diminished moral faith, since it was not discovered to be present objectively (pg20-22).

Going to the positive account of the religious attitude, it should not just be an intense emotional feeling but also a broadly inclusive self-unifying end-ideal.(pg22-23) In this way the religious attitude involves a willful submission. Further discussion about the history of religions to assist (or inhibit) with the religious attitude follows (pg24-25). Lastly, author gives a discussion the human condition and asserts that the religious attitude includes cooperation and seeing one's place in a larger whole (pg25).