Rorty, Richard - Religious faith, intellectual responsibility, and romance

06/12/2009

The Cambridge Companion to William James, Ch 5, RA Putnam ed, 1997

This article is an overview of James' commitments to utilitarianism and pragmatism and how it provided the basis for James' view of religion. Author also suggests an alternate strategy of argumentation that he believes might have been more effective, using the same basic commitments. According to author, there are two major aspects of James' philosophy that provides space for the Will to Believe: (1) is that Mill's version of utilitarianism features the Harm principle, which is the principle that if a subject s does action x and x is not hurting anybody else, only s is the judge on whether to do x; and (2) that scientific pragmatism holds that intellectual responsibility is primarily to other people in a joint project of creating a workable description of the world. If you sufficiently privatize religion to isolate it from such a joint project, there is some room for it regardless of the scientific justification or evidence. (pg85)

Author reviews Clifford's main claims about evidence and justification, suggesting that there are two minimal ways to take Clifford: (1) that the meaning of a belief is what inferences it creates to other beliefs-- a kind of holism-- making any one belief inseparable from the social project; (or even more generally) (2) that to be rational is to submit belief to scrutiny, to intersubjective confirmation-- a belief that is not open for testing is not really a belief. (pg87-8) Clifford argues that without evidence then it is one's responsibility not to hold a belief, yet James 'resists', and creates a kind of forced, momentous and live choice as a result. (pg88) Author finds this unsatisfying (pg90) and suggests that James take another approach: instead of agreeing on a firm distinction between (public) beliefs and (private) desires/hopes, to cash out cognitive states in terms of actional consequences, using utilitarianism to talk about intellectual obligations to others, and areas where there are no such obligations. (pg89) Thus if religion is private action, then it can be pursued without obligation to others. While privatizing religion might make accepting religion not, strictly speaking, a belief, author argues it should make little difference to James. (pg90-1)

Privatization of religion is unsatifying to many (e.g. MacIntyre), since it seems to remove most actional elements (ex hypothesis) and talks vaguely about "the eternal". Author tries to distinguish pragmatists from instrumentalists: pragmatists are realists about theoretic entities but also believe that justification for any entity takes place within a human-interest context. Such a position allows for the justification of macro-objects like tables, micro entities like atoms, and perhaps even social institutions. (pg92) Author tries to show that pure scientific realists and religious fundamentalists 'are products of the same urge.... private projects which have gotten out of hand.' (pg93)

James' focus of the religious hypothesis 'perfection is eternal' can be unsatisfying since it removes much of the specific actional elements of a creed. Author tries to compare the private religious pursuit to that of love of another human. (pg94) Loving another certainly has actional consequences, but not because you are trying to 'predict or control' them or their behavior. (pg94) (Further, we commonly do not ask for justification for such love.) This sort of life-area carve-out threatens the theory that we can reduce all intentional states into belief-desire pairs with definite inferences and actional consequences. Without this reduction, pragmatism might be unable to support its claim of the inextricable nature of desire and beliefs, making it difficult to substitute intersubjective justification for so-called objective verification. (pg95) Luckily there is an externalist interpretation of the behavior of someone in love (or religious) that imputes beliefs and desires onto them based on their actions, though the beliefs might be unjustifiable intellectually. Author states that even though such belief-desire imputations might not fit into a scheme of justification that other beliefs of the subject would, they are still explanatory.

Author lastly discusses what he believes should have been the religious focus for James-- not in something external to human life (eternal things), but in the 'future possibilities of mortal humans', a faith that looks a lot like hope, love, or Romantic commitments. (pg96-7) Author tells a story about how we used to look to external forces for something better but now we should be looking only to our own human future. (pg97)