That Shape Are We, Potentially: Social Meliorism in the Religious Pragmatism of William James

Abstract

Social Meliorism in the Religious Pragmatism of William James Tadd Ruetenik William James has been criticized for having a narrowly individualistic bias regarding religious experience. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, he famously focuses on the "feelings, acts and experiences" of solitary individuals standing "in relation to what they may consider the divine" (1902, 34), while explicitly neglecting consideration of the religious institutions that such individuals derive. According to James, these institutions are just the dull-habit repetition of what once was the feverish passion of some religious genius. Charles Taylor identifies what seems to be James' shortsightedness here: What James can't seem to accommodate is the phenomenon of collective religious life, which is not just the result of (individual) religious connections, but which in some way constitutes or is that connection. In other words, he hasn't got a place for a collective connection through a common way of life. (2002, 24) Using the example of the shared joy that takes place when a local sports team wins a championship, Taylor notes that "there are certain emotions that you can have in solidarity that you cannot have alone" (28). James misses something by locating real religious experience only in the individual. For many critics from Josiah Royce onward, the opinion is that James's failure to distinguish religious communities from "organized religion" made him unable to appreciate religion in terms of the shared faith that naturally arises in communities. Eugene Fontinell, for example, notes that "James has been criticized—quite properly in my opinion—for failing to grasp the contribution of communal experience to the religious life." He offers that a consideration of the "relational character of all reality, including the human self" allows that "James' religious self is not only open to the communal but is diminished without it" (1999, 149). I believe that that there is a place for collective experience in James's religious philosophy, but that one must look to essays such as "The Moral Equivalent of War" and "What Makes Life Significant" in order to find it. Considering the Varieties along with these essays, which involve important notions of social [End Page 238] meliorism, will exemplify what I take to be the two parts of James's religious pragmatism: the lonely experiences of sick souls, and the collective activities of social amelioration in which these sick souls become connected with a higher power. Expressed generally, as James does when concluding the Varieties, religious experience involves an uneasiness and its solution. "The uneasiness reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand," while "the solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers" (1902, 522). Using the final anecdote from "The Sick Soul" chapter of the Varieties to exemplify the uneasiness, and the aforementioned essays to exemplify the solution, I will now fill out James's general formula with more detail. It is well known that one of the narratives in "The Sick Soul" chapter of the Varieties is actually from James himself, and thus has special significance.1 Whether the dark story about an epileptic patient and the threat of insanity is an actual experience of James, or whether it is a fabrication loosely based on some panic-attack crisis is unclear. It seems to be James's contribution to a family tradition of writing philosophically pithy ghost stories.2 His father writes an account involving a man's peaceful, self-assured home life being threatened by an abject apparitional figure. The perception of what seems to be an abject alter-ego causes the subject to want to scamper into the street "and appeal to the public to protect me" (Henry James Sr. 1879, 56). The story is intended as an illustration of the psychological violence that occurs during one's transformation from an individual to a communal consciousness. William James's famous sickroom vision also refers to an individual being confronted by a mysterious danger, although it differs from his father's account by not referring directly to the saving force of the community. Although I believe it alludes to the idea...