HUMAN AFFAIRS 24, 103–111, 2014
DOI: 10.2478/s13374-014-0209-x
EXPERIENCING LIFE AND (RELIGIOUS) HOPE:
PRAGMATIC PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION1
LUDWIG NAGL
Abstract: Is pragmatism, as focused on a future considered producible by our finite actions, ill equipped
to analyze religion (or “Erlösungswissen”, as Max Scheler said); is it unable, as Stanley Cavell writes,
to sufficiently explore “skepticism” and negativity? This paper argues that William James succeeds in
pragmatically re-thematizing “Erlösungswissen”, and that Josiah Royce—who develops a post-pragmatic,
pragmaticist concept of; religion—carefully re-investigates “negativity”, in a Peirce-inspired mode, by
focusing on the “mission of sorrow”.
Keywords: pragmatism; philosophy of religion; “Erlösungswissen”; “mission of sorrow”; Stanley Cavell;
Max Scheler; William James; Josiah Royce.
Introduction
The “future-orientedness” of pragmatism (Rorty) has not only—as its adherents argue
—produced results that clearly outstrip earlier, more withdrawn, “intellectualist” modes of
experiencing the world and reflecting life. Pragmatism’s fascination with practical “results”
can also —as was argued in some of the more guarded assessments of its merits—as it is
focused on a notion of future considered producible by our finite actions—help atavizing2 the
in-depth exploration of those hope horizons (in James’s terminology: those “faith states” and
“over-believes”) that in the historic religions re-dimension our limit-experiences (experiences
of finiteness, accompanied by sorrow and despair). In Europe, this objection was, first and
famously, raised by the phenomenological philosopher Max Scheler.
1
This paper was originally presented at the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy, Athens, August 8,
2013, Section IS06 “Classical American pragmatism: Practicing philosophy as experiencing life”,
organized and chaired by Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński, Opole University, Poland.
2
This “atavization” takes place, for instance, in Dewey. For a critical analysis of his “naturalized”
(re)interpretation of religion by means of an “adverbial religious” (which tries to stabilize itself via an
aesthetics of Naturfrömmigkeit), see Nagl (2011a).
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Max Scheler’s “instrumentalistic”(mis-)reading of pragmatism
Scheler’s critical analysis of pragmatism has been influential up to this day in continental
Europe, specifically via the impact of (post-)phenomenology3 on contemporary theological4
discourse.5 In his article of 1926 “Erkenntnis und Arbeit. A study on the value and the limits
of the pragmatic approach for the knowledge of the world”6, Scheler asserts that pragmatism
is insolubly intertwined with “Herrschafts- oder Leistungswissen”, an ultimately reductionist,
instrumental type of knowledge, constitutive for modern (natural) sciences and the purposiverational structure of contemporary bureaucracies. By generalizing this “instrumental” type of
knowledge, pragmatism excludes (or—even more problematic—pretends to re-incorporate,
i.e. colonizes) the two other central modes of thought: “Bildungswissen” (“self-exploration”
and non-instrumental norm-reflection) and “Erlösungswissen” (the religious relations to the
world, and the theological attempts to conceptualize “salvation”) (Scheler, 1960, p. 205).
Scheler’s attack is sweeping indeed: it disregards not only the multi-faceted ethics
discourse within pragmatism, but also avoids dealing, in any detail, with the sophisticated
contributions by William James (1956; 1982), Charles Sanders Peirce (1998b) and Josiah
Royce (1912 and 2001) to contemporary philosophy of religion. By ignoring Royce,
Scheler paradoxically misses one of the last philosophical attempts to re-think (aspects of)
“Erlösung”: Royce’s extensive reflections on “atonement”.
In contemporary European discourse, Jürgen Habermas and K. O. Apel highlighted that
pragmatism—as an interested and non-polemical reading shows—does not only make possible, contrary to Scheler’s claims, innovative analyses of the “function circuit of instrumental
reason and action”, but that its “experimentalism” has the potential to elucidate, in new ways,
those experiences that Scheler wanted to set aside for “Bildungswissen” and “Erlösungswissen”. As the Frankfurt discourse showed (Apel, 1981; Habermas, 1984), pragmatism does not
only, in an innovative manner, re-analyze “work”, but is also able to explore, in new “semiotic” contexts, what Scheler termed “the realm of love”7: in Peirce’s mature writings, for
instance, via a pragmaticist cosmology of “evolutionary love” (Peirce, 1992).
3
See the Scheler-related passages in the entry “Pragmatismus” in Vetter (2004, p.432).
Scheler’s critical account of pragmatism’s philosophy of religion seems to inform, for instance, the
rejection of pragmatism in the Encyclical of Pope John Paul II, Fides et ratio.
5
Its aftermath can be found up to very recent times. Peter Sloterdijk, for instance, characterizes—very
much along Schelerian lines—pragmatism as “traditionslose Befürwortung einer instrumentalistischen
Haltung zur Welt” (as a “traditionless endorsement of an instrumentalistic attitude toward the world”),
and in the “Vorwort” to his 1997 edition of James’s Varieties he says that pragmatism’s account of
religion is embedded in “[eine] einigermaßen nackte Metaphysik des Lebenserfolges” (a “rather naked
metaphysics of success in life”). (See Hartmann, Liptow, & Willaschek, 2013, p. 31.)
6
Scheler (1960). For a broader—and more positive—assessment of Scheler’s, Husserl’s and
Heidegger’s relation with American pragmatism—an assessment i.e. not primarily dealing with the
question of Erlösungswissen, see Stikkers (2013).
7
Scheler characterizes the philosophical idea of knowledge as “die sich selbst und sein eigenes Sein
transzendierende Teil-nahme, die wir im formalsten Sinn ‘Liebe’ nennen” (“the taking-part by which
one transcends oneself, and one’s being, which we call, in a most formal sense, ‘love’”) (Scheler, 1960,
p. 240; translation L.N.)
4
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Does pragmatism avoid an in-depth analysis of “skepticism”? Stanley Cavell’s
reservations
But are the analyses of “praxis” that core texts of classical pragmatism provide,
indeed, complex enough to satisfy a (post) modern public? According to Stanley Cavell,
Wittgenstein and Emerson scholar at Harvard, pragmatism is compromised, at least in
some of its forms, by avoiding to deal sufficiently with “skepticism” (Cavell, 1998, p. 7280) (with “negativity” i.e., or—as Cavell says, quoting Emerson: with the condition not of
progress, but of “mourning”). This reproach, Cavell concedes (p.77), may seem “hasty”, if
we look, for instance at James´s analysis of “The Sick Soul” (in The Varieties of Religious
Experience); but it has a true ring if we focus on the predominant, science-driven mode
of socio-political pragmatisms. Cavell writes in this context: “The following sentence
from Dewey’s Experience and Education is, I assume, characteristic of what makes him
Dewey. ‘Scientific method is the only authentic means at our command for getting at the
significance of our everyday experiences of the world in which we live’” (p. 73). Unlike
philosophers in the “perfectionist tradition” (from Plato to Wittgenstein, p. 79), Dewey, by
insisting on the desirability of the scientification of all life forms, leaves unanalyzed—Cavell
says—the recurrent negativity that characterizes any (finite) action, thus over-emphasizing,
activistically, the (un-renounceable, but never in toto successful) attempt to get rid of all the
circumstances which make possible sorrow and evil.
James’s attempt to pragmatically re-thematize “Erlösungswissen”
Cavell is right in maintaining that the evasion of negativity is not characteristic of
all forms of pragmatism. Careful explorations of alienated states of self-experience are
constitutive, for instance, for James’s analyses of the motor of pragmatism itself: of the will.
Our ability to choose between alternatives (and its sub-specification: the “will to believe”,
situated in the “open space” of modernity; see, in this context, Nagl 2011b)—abilities which
are not demonstrable but postulated—deconstruct the (disturbing) scientistic image that man
is the prisoner of a deterministically structured world. James’s self-affirmation as a free
“agent” which allowed him to overcome a deep crisis induced by the specter of a generalized
physicalism, was motivated, as he notes, by his study of the Neo-Kantian Renouvier (see
Nagl, 2000), whose approach toward freedom as a postulate made possible not only James’s
“radical empirical” conception of a human “experience” but also something which Scheler
considered in toto excluded from the episteme of pragmatism: the inspired defense of man’s
“right to believe”. James’s argument pro religion feels, as Charles Taylor recently remarked,
as if it had not been written hundred years ago but today (Taylor, 2002, p. 3). For James
(religious) hope is tied, however, not only to freedom but to a further postulate: to the hope,
i.e., that our faltering practice will not have been in vain, but will find itself (re-)situated in a
context of meaning that we, as finite beings, can neither theoretically anticipate, nor (in toto)
produce by our own—individual or collective—actions. James defends this hope against
attempts to debunk it—by brilliantly criticizing “medical materialism”, for instance, in his
Varieties of Religious Experience (James, 1982)—and starts to explore the inner structure
of religious motivations (the affirmative, “healthy-minded” one’s as well as those that deal
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with severe crises of practice: the “sick soul” facing failure, melancholia and hopelessness).
James’s reflections contain amazing analyses (which deeply influenced Wittgenstein, as the
final passages of his Tractatus show)8 and terminate in an “unhesitating repudiation” of the
“survival theory” of religion (James, 1982, p. 500), the thesis i.e., that modern science will
turn religion into a mere “anachronism” (p.490, 498). But James does not fully succeed,
since he cannot produce what he had hoped for: “the beginnings”, so James, “of a ‘Science
of Religions’, so called” (p. 433), i.e. the “extraction” from “the privacies of religious
experience” of “some general facts which can be defined in formulas upon which everybody
can agree” (p. 433). This failure to complete (on new pragmatic terms) Kant’s enlightenment
project—to reconstruct the core of historical religious motivations via generally acceptable
postulates of hope—is, in part, due to James’s (as his critics claimed: overly narrow) focus
on “individual” religion9, and due also to the precarious psychological support thesis by
which he concludes his pragmatic re-assessment of religion: “that whatever it may be on
its farther side, the ‘more’ with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected
is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life” (p. 512). This
“hypothesis”—as Royce pointedly said—makes religion, in James—due to the unresolved
ambivalence at its core—“a prey to endless psychological caprice” (Royce, 1969, p. 22).
Thus, although James’s analyses express “the whole spirit of hopeful unrest, of eagerness
to be just to the modern life”, they remain, in the end, not only incomplete but, so Royce,
“indeed chaotic” (Royce, 1969, p. 25).
A pragmaticist concept of religion: experiences of finitude and the “mission of
sorrow” (Royce)
Mature, “peirceanized” Royce is, as far as I see, the most sophisticated philosopher of
religion operating within the paradigm of a post-pragmatic, “pragmaticist” philosophical
approach. Royce addresses in his work the role of loss and evil over and over again. Unlike
Dewey, who “would simply emphasize life’s precariousness and set out to get rid of as many
evils as possible” (Oppenheim, 2005, p. 402), Royce concentrates his philosophical energies
8
On the importance of James for Wittgenstein see Goodman (2002), in particular chapter 2,
“Wittgenstein and The Varieties of Religious Experience”, pp. 36-59.
9
Josiah Royce was the first to criticize, as deficient, his fried James’s “individualistic” approach
to religion. Royce´s critique is situated—which is not widely known—in an interesting intellectual
environment. In Lectures VI and VII of his Lectures on Modern Idealism (Royce, 1967), Royce
interprets, inter alias, Hegel’s analysis of unglückliches Bewußtsein (“unhappy consciousness”).
His re-reading of - extra-religious and religious - modes of estrangement adds substantial support
to Royce’s questioning of James’s individual-centered concept of religiosity. James’s account has
serious flaws, since it brackets “community” (in Hegel’s Phenomenology “social consciousness”, and
in his Philosophy of Religion, Gemeinde: the core category of the mature stage of religion, offenbare
Religion). In his post-1912 texts on religion, Royce starts to extensively focus on “community” as
his leading idea: not in a Hegelian frame of reference, however, but primarily informed by Peirce´s
triadic notion of semiosis. For a short assessment of Royce´s relationship to Peirce and Hegel see
“Methodological Interlude: Peirce and/or Hegel” in Nagl (2004); see also Nagl (2010), Teil III,
Pragmatismus/Neopragmatismus, “Pragmatistische Religionsphilosophie: Der Jamessche Ansatz beim
Individuum und das am ‘community’-Begriff orientierte Religionskonzept von Royce”, pp. 259-294.
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on an in-depth analysis of the finitude of man and community, and tries to reflectively
deal with the—persistent and recurrent—experiences of negativity and grief. “What I miss
in Prof. Dewey’s universe”, Royce writes as early as 1891, is “the aspect that Hegel bids
one look for, the Geduld und Schmerz des Negativen, those real pangs and the terrible
negations of the actual moral world, whose theoretical correlates are the deeper problem
of ethics.”10 John Clendenning, the biographer of Royce, points out that in addressing “the
problem of Job”—“Why do we suffer? Why do the heavens rain such misery upon innocent
heads”—Royce offers “two answers: one metaphysical; another existential. In the first, the
metaphysical thesis, Royce insists that we never see the whole of reality. Over each instance
of suffering, ‘a larger dome’ overarches and supplements our finite grief. ‘I believe in the
supplement’, Royce affirmed, ‘but I have no sort of right to conjecture about its details.’
[…] In the second, the existentialist formulation, Royce insists that suffering can become
the source of our creative insight” (Clendenning, 1999, p. 296). “Grief”, he wrote, “is our
greatest opportunity for creation. Grief has created all the world’s highest religious thought,
all that is noblest in poetry, all that is deepest in human relationships.”11
Royce’s hope postulates
For Royce (as for Kant) religion is not a prerequisite of ethics (since ethics supports
itself; see Nagl, 2012). It is not the “theonomic” foundation of our actions, but deals with
the limits of our (potentially) autonomous deeds—with their consequences “in the long
run” (that are not foreseeable for us) and with their starting points (that are not—or, at least,
not in toto—produced by our actions): with the idea of a “whole”12 i.e., whose existence we
10
Royce (1891, p. 505). The question of “negativity” (which is important for pre-1912 Royce as well
as for his later, periceanized philosophy) is foregrounded in his Lectures on Modern Idealism where
Royce emphasizes that Hegel rightly insisted on a non-linear (today we might say: non-analytical)
concept of truth: on a concept, i.e. that—as Wittgenstein (1953/2001), similar to Royce, pointed out
in Philosophical Investigations—is always embedded in “Widerspruch”: in a “bürgerliche Stellung
des Widerspruchs: seine Stellung in der bürgerlichen Welt” (par. 125). Thus “it is not the business of
philosophy to resolve a contradiction by means of a mathematical or logico-mathematical discovery”
(par. 125). Hegel’s insistence on the unavoidability of negatio, as well as on its Aufhebbarkeit in a nondyadic mode of semiosis, remains important for mature Royce who in his Lectures on Modern Idealism
emphasizes that “the dialectical method reaches in [Hegel’s] work an explicitness not previously known
in philosophical literature” (Royce, 1967, p. 154). Hegel, as Royce says, “points out that each of the
negative discoveries, however tragic from the point of view of the life, that is of the idea or opinion
or attitude concerned, is in fact also a positive discovery, a new revelation as to the inter-relation of
the mind and of things” (Royce, 1967, p. 154). Or, to say this in a language closer to mature Royce:
re-interpretation—the way to express the identical, more explicitly, in a non-identical mode—always
implies negatio.
11
Josiah Royce to W.E.Hocking, (January 22, 1908). In Hocking Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard
University (quoted in Clendenning, 1999, p. 296).
12
In Lectures on Modern Idealism Royce quotes Hegel: “The truth […] is the whole”. This provides
(in a post-Hegelian re-interpretation) the template for a thought that Royce develops in his Ingersoll
Lecture 1899, “The conception of immortality”. A full knowledge of our “individuality”, Royce argues
there, is not available to us during our lifetime: “Myself, I do not know in any concrete human terms
wherein my individuality consists” (Royce, 1900, p. 71); such a full knowledge would be available only
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can neither theoretically deduce, nor, as finite knowers, anticipate in its specificity. This
(near)Kantian set of thoughts—cautious thoughts terminating in postulates (that are the
result of an “enlightened” self-reflection: a reflection i.e. that critically reflects upon the
limits of enlightenment itself; see Nagl, 2013)—inspires Royce´s first, metaphysical attempt
to answer to the problem of suffering and defeat: his “belief in a supplement” to (i.e. a nonfinite re-readability of) our finite actions. Royce´s investigation of the religious horizon of
hope is not “ruchlos” (nefarious) in Schopenhauer’s (or James’s) sense, since it is not tied to
a “teleology” that pretends to “justify” the supposed “necessity” of particular instances of
“loss” and “evil”13, but merely explicates—reflectively—(some of the) assumptions that are
always (potentially) contained in any motivational state of non-despair (basic, widely shared
assumptions of a continuity of sense that—to speak with James—open the space for the
various images of—historically shaped—religious “over-believes”).
Sorrows and “moral growth”
Royce’s existentialist—or ethical—considerations regarding “the mission of sorrow”—
i.e. the subjectivist complementum to the (“metaphysical”) postulate that “‘a larger dome’
overarches and supplements our finite grief”—defend the relevance of interpretations
which (at hindsight) make it certain to those experiencing loss and defeat, that our moral
sensibilization can progress via negation: via an occurrence of negativity (sorrow i.e., and
evil), that nobody, who is of good will, can affirm in itself, but that—as endured since it
can’t be altered—has (subjectively, for the enduring person) the potential to, ultimately,
change into a re-settling, and deepening, moral experience.14 As Jacquelyn Kegley puts this
in her Royce book: sorrows “become part of a ‘constructive process’ that involves growth
rather than destruction” (Kegley, 2008, p. 90). Theodor W. Adorno, after a very dark period
of twentieth century history, cautiously articulated (elements of) this precarious inversion via
his ethical core category of Standhalten (“standing firm”) (Adorno, 1997, p.15): a Kantian
notion that, in Adorno, assumes an explicitly anti-teleological ring. Royce does not stop
at this action-related level, however, but starts, not un-riskily, to explore—in the context
to an Absolute (to the “Spirit-Interpreter”, in the terminology of late Royce; to a “semiotician” i.e.,
who, to use Kant’s term,is also “Herzenskündiger”: a (re-)interpreter and re-settler of our finite deeds
who can judge (better than the public and we ourselves) what—in relation to the all-encompassing
whole (unknown to us)—is our “unique place” in the world process.
13
Royce does not trivialize suffering and evil by re-interpreting particular instances of loss in ways
the sufferer cannot accept; he rather seeks to do justice, in his formal analysis of the (basic) structure
of religious hope, to those motifs that—in the post-Leibnizian critique of full-blown, material
“teleologies”—lead to moral “anti-theodicies.” For the ongoing debate on teleology see Shearn
(2013); for Royce’s rejection of all forms of “external theodicy” see Foust (2012), and the critical
considerations, in Viale (2013), concerning Foust’s defense of Royce.
14
Like Dewey, Royce is convinced that, a) evils “are there to be conquered”. But this ethical dealing
with “negativity” remains, b) deeply embedded in experiences that re-emphasize our finiteness,
and, ultimately, lead to questions concerning the (trans-finite) hope horizon of our (individual and
collective) practical endeavors. “The narrow life may be base”, Royce says in Lectures on Modern
Idealism: “[Y]et through a conquest over this baseness the larger life with which this narrow life, as an
expression is bound up, may be triumphantly rational” (Royce, 1967, 257; emphasis L.N.)
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of his community-oriented, i.e. post-rationalistic “absolute pragmatism”15—the (possible)
trans-ethical aspects of this (subjectivized) negation of negation: the religious hope i.e.
which aims at a non-finite re-readabilty of negatio. His considerations do neither re-enact
the pre-Kantian discourse on teleology, nor do they resort to precarious, quasi-teleological
modes of “closure”: to “adverbial” modes of “the religious” accompanied by an aesthetizised
conception of “nature” (like Dewey), or to an ethics-focused “religion without God” (like
Dworkin, 2013).
That various classical pragmatists further specify their postulate of hope (informed
again, indirectly, by Kant) through elaborate reflections on the conceivability—as well as
the in-conceivability—of immortality, is a fascinating (today often overlooked16) aspect of
this complex discourse. Peirce17 as well as James18 and Royce (1900); and “Immortality” in
Royce, 1969, pp. 256-298) discuss this topic in compelling ways: all avoid—while arguing
from different reasons for the defensibility of (elements of) the idea of immortality - any
general dogmatic answer (be it positive or negative19). Thus pragmatism manages to keep
on the agenda, at least in its philosophically advanced forms, mankind´s attempt to explore,
as fully as possible, those questions that are tied to the anticipation of our (individual and
collective) limit of “experiencing life”.
15
The third important theme which Royce explores in his Lectures on Modern Idealism is the claim
(derived from Kant and Hegel) that, once pragmatism starts to carefully analyze its own depthstructure, it will become evident that it cannot do away, in toto, with “absolutes”. Any pragmatism
which attempts to do this, gets entangled, so Royce, in self-contradictions (in “performative
Selbstwidersprüche”, as K. O. Apel—in indirect reference to Royce—argues today). But Apel—while
offering a partial rehabilitation of Royce’s “absolute pragmatism”—stops at an epistemology-focused
notion of Letztbegründung (Apel, 1973, pp. 405-414), and thus avoids to fully explore Royce’s mature
position which, in his late masterpiece The Problem of Christianity, has its focal point in the hope
horizon of the “Beloved Community”. See Nagl (2007, pp. 390-411).
16
Hans Joas characterizes the contemporary situation very well when he writes: “Über das zu sprechen,
was nach dem Tod kommt, scheint mir [heute] tatsächlich gegen ein Tabu zu verstoßen. Man löst
Reaktionen aus, die von stillem Unbehagen über Peinlichkeitsbekundungen bis hin zu lautstarker
Empörung reichen. Dies war bei der ersten Generation der Pragmatisten nicht der Fall. Auch Peirce und
Royce schrieben über diese Fragen und James’s Beiträge waren ganz offensichtlich Teil eines breiteren
Diskurses.” (“To talk about that which comes after death seems to me, today, to, indeed, violate a
taboo. It causes reactions that reach from silent discontent to embarrassment and loud protest. This was
not the case in the first generation of pragmatists. Peirce and Royce did write about these questions,
and James’s contributions were obviously part of a larger discourse.” (Translation L.N.) (Joas, 2011, p.
230).
17
See Peirce (1998b). Peirce is very cautious, however, with regard to the possibility, and the mode, of
his own “future life”. See Peirce (1995), “Antworten auf Fragen über meinen Glauben an Gott”, pp.
287-313 (especially 311).
18
See William James, Ingersoll Lecture 1897, “Human Immortality”, in James (1956), pp. 1-70; and F.
Krämer, “James über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele”; “Einleitung”, pp. 31-41 (in James (2010).
19
Royce explicitly reflects upon (and stays clear of) Nietzsche’s peculiar positive negativity: he is the
first pragmatist who extensively, and critically, deals with Nietzsche’s attempt to substitute the idea of
“eternal recurrence” for the postulate of immortality. See Nagl (forthcoming 2014).
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Department of Philosophy,
University of Vienna,
Universitätsstrasse 7/2/2,
A-1010 Vienna,
Austria
E-mail: [email protected]
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