American Pragmatism

Pragmatism, the most significant intellectual movement in the United States, was influenced by the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce, William James, George Santayana, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead in the first half of the twentieth century, and Wilfrid Sellars, W. V. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, Nelson Goodman, and Richard Rorty in the second half. The various forms of pragmatism differ mainly in terms of their dependence on experience or language, and the paradigmatic status accorded to natural science.

American philosophers who dealt with religion from the 1870s to the 1930s brought both naturalism and pragmatism to bear on topics such as religious experience, the meaning and reference of "God," the nature of religious truth, and the community of interpreters. Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, worked as a logician, experimental scientist, and mathematician, and his theories were governed by a conception of evolutionary change. He believed that beliefs were treated as habits of action, and truth was defined as inquiry.

Peirce was an early anti-foundalist, abandoning the Cartesian quest for incorrigible grounds for knowledge claims. His metaphysical investigations defended the threefold claim of synechism, tychism, and agapeism, and developed a complex and intricate system out of three simple categories of possibility, actuality, and necessity or law.

In his 1908 essay, "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," philosopher John Peirce introduced the Humble Argument, which concluded that God is real and rational belief in God is universally accessible. The argument highlighted musement and abduction as common stages of scientific or religious inquiry. Musement was a process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definitive belief, while abduction was a generative process neither deduced from evidential premises nor inductively generalized from them.

Peirce believed religion was a universal sentiment, more a way of living than a way of believing. His theism was left somewhat vague, functioning as a regulative hope of the possibility of inquiry. Commentators are divided on whether Peirce's theism should be interpreted according to process philosophy in a panentheistic way (Donna Orange) or in a more traditional Thomistic direction (Michael Raposa).

William James' chief contributions to philosophy of religion are often associated only with his arguments in The Will to Believe (1897) and his conclusions in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). He argued that an individual has a right to believe a hypothesis that cannot be proved by direct evidence, but overinflationated the distinction between intellectual and passional interests and problematically defined the religious hypothesis to mean " perfection is eternal."

James became too good a historicist over the course of his career to remain content with stale dualisms between nature and supernature, the temporal and the eternal, the physical and the mental. Radical empiricism complemented his pragmatism, providing a notion of "experience" that could bear the weight of a naturalized theory of religious experience while avoiding the charge of subjectivism invited by The Varieties.

Peirce's Humble Argument and James' radical empiricism were significant contributions to the field of philosophy of religion. While they both contributed to the understanding of religious experience, their differing approaches and perspectives have shaped our understanding of the world around us.

James formulated his pluralistic pantheism, rejecting the monistic view that the divine exists authentically only when the world is experienced all at once in its absolute totality. He envisioned a single universe of nature in which the whole is neither absolutely one nor absolutely many, and both human and non-human powers cooperate together. The whole exhibits "concatenated unity" or a multiplicity of irreducibly particular events in the midst of intricate patterns of relatedness.

James was willing to believe that there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected, and that some of it may remain outside of the largest combination of it ever made. The pluralistic world is more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom. While monism and pluralism can stimulate stressful moods, James believed that the world's salvation depend upon the energizing of its several parts, among which we are.

John Dewey aimed to divorce the meaning of the adjective "religious" from the traditional sense of the noun "religion." He defined the religious as any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value. Life was lived with a religious quality whenever and wherever anyone experienced a sense of human nature as a cooperating part of a larger whole.

Dewey proposed three proposals for how the self is integrated as a whole: first, the religious aspect of experience pointed to some complex of conditions that operated to effect a significant adjustment in life, a transformative and integrative reorientation. Second, imagination played a key role in unifying the self in harmony with its surroundings. Both the ideal of the whole self and the American pragmatism ideal of the totality of the world were held as imaginative projections, but the work of self-integration was dependent on an inflow from sources beyond conscious deliberation and purpose.

Dewey's pragmatic naturalism captured the evolutionary, processive-relational sense of "uniting" as an ongoing activity. He struggled to slough off the vestiges of idealism by affiliating the "continuity" of the many with each other as many, but not their literal oneness.

Dewey's philosophy of religion, criticized for offering only a form of secular humanism and excessive optimism, had more resonance and breadth than A Common Faith alone reveals. He believed that consummatory experiences of quality or value were the very aim of human praxis. In aesthetic experience, the continuities of form and matter appeared directly and with consummatory power that was a good in itself. Works of art created a sense of communion which could generate or shade off into religious quality. The sense of belonging to a whole which accompanied intense aesthetic perception also explained the religious feeling.

Nature in turn was understood as both thwarting and supporting human efforts. Humankind was continuous with and dependent upon an environing world which should evoke heartfelt piety as the source of ideals, possibilities, and aspirations. This made natural piety a genuine and valuable part of human life in the world, needing more careful cultivation and expression to play a positive role in the development of society and culture.

Dewey repeatedly appealed to "a sense of the whole," "the sense of an enveloping whole," that is experienced as a natural response of the human organism to its environment. The religious, reconstructed naturalistically, represented an intensification and broadening of the aesthetic quality of experience, having to do with what Dewey called "consummatory moments" involving fulfillments and immediately enjoyed meanings. Wholeness was the quality that linked aesthetic experiences, ordinary secular experiences, and religious experiences.

Dewey's final verdict was that the conditions and forces in nature and culture that promote human well-being were plural. In contrast to H. N. Wieman's thesis, he found no inherent unity to the forces and factors which made for good, and the organizing and integrating of these forces or factors was the work of human imagination and action.

Pragmatism is a philosophical approach that emphasizes antifoundationalism, pluralism, and secular forms of transcendence without otherworldliness. It is influenced by various American philosophers of religion, such as Jeffrey Stout's modest pragmatism, H.S. Levinson's festive Jewish American pragmatic naturalism, Cornel West's prophetic pragmatism, William Dean's naturalistic historicism, and Sheila Davaney's pragmatic historicism. These authors emphasize that religious beliefs are tools for dealing with reality, focusing on historically contingent forms of consensus and social practice within religious communities. They view commitment to democratic communal activism as a consequence of pragmatism in religious American life and thought.

A significant shift in contemporary pragmatism occurred with the work of Willard V. O. Quine, Donald Davidson, and Richard Rorty. These "linguistic pragmatists" combined a naturalistic, Darwinian view of human life with an antifoundationalist, holist account of meaning and truth. A fruitful area of research for philosophy of religion's habitual interest in the concept of "truth" is now open, with some pragmatist philosophers of religion ready to jettison the pragmatist theory of truth in favor of the holist account.

Pragmatism also challenges the use of distinctions such as cognitive-noncognitive, scheme-content, objective-subjective, intellectual-emotionive, and the reinstatement of the vague in human understanding. Exploring the transitions, felt qualities, and indeterminacies of experience is essential for a pragmatist reconstruction of the causes, consequences, and reference range of religious phenomena.