American Religious Liberalism

Thirteen: Each Attitude a Syllable: The Linguistic Turn in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience

t h i r t e e n Each Attitude a Syllable The Linguistic Turn in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience L i n d s ay V. R e c k s o n Often, though, the differences between liberalism and secularism are those of inflection. —William E. Connolly Listening to William James When William James began the Gifford Lectures in Natural Religion before a larger than expected and by all accounts sympathetic audience at Edinburgh, in May 1901, he did so with a bit of anxiety (or at least, performed anxiety) around the very act of speaking: “To us Ameri­ cans,” he intoned, “the experience of receiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of European scholars, is very familiar. . . . It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans listen, we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makes the adventure it begets a certain sense of apology due for being so presumptuous.”1 Like his brother Henry James, William knew how to work a room of Europeans; but this was not simply a show of cultural modesty or a tribute to his philosophical progenitors. De-­ naturalizing the scene of the lecture, James began Varieties of Religious Experience by carving out a novel rhetorical moment, transforming 293 294 Lindsay V. Reckson the unfamiliar territory of the European lectern into a veritable transatlantic verbal “adventure.” Five and a half years later, he would begin the Lowell Lectures on Pragmatism—this time to an Ameri­ can audience—with a similar, self-­ deprecatory nod to the conventions of the lecture form: “Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use” (Pragmatism, 487). To take note of such disarmingly humorous moments is to recognize in James’s lectures a sustained, playful awareness of the relation between philosophical content and its delivery; it is also to proffer the rather presumptuous suggestion that attending to these idiosyncratic moments may yield significant information about the practice of religious liberalism. As my epigraph signals , this essay turns to a more ephemeral instantiation of the loose network of ideas and cultural phenomena that characterized liberalism’s flourishing at the turn of the century; working to catch a certain inflection at work in James’s lectures, I argue that Varieties of Religious Experience set the tone for a pragmatic approach to religion that increasingly characterized liberal belief. Such an argument depends on the possibility that liberalism might be described not just as a historical development but also as a linguistic practice. Over the course of twenty lectures, James did not simply ventriloquize a variety of religious ­ sentiments—­ he also performed religion as a practice of linguistic uncertainty . Having no use for “a universe definable in two sentences,” James insisted on the extended task of articulating experience, while offering an antinomian wink at the traditional standards governing that task. And James’s speech—with its starts and stops, anxious tremors and sure resonances—has much to tell us about how we might begin to speak now about the varieties of Ameri­can religious liberalism.2 Listening to James, then, we might recognize that what he called the “adventure ” of speaking was just that: an adventurous romp through the inflections of religious liberalism. This despite James’s acknowledgment that he drew much of his material from the “extremer examples” of religious experience, collating “radical expressions” and “extravagances of the subject” in hopes that they might “[yield] the profounder information” (Varieties, 436). James’s selections perhaps indicate his playful experimentation with the nascent disciplinary and experiential boundaries of “religion” tout court.3 Indeed the most explicit articulation of liberalism in Varieties rests precisely—if ­reductively—­on a change Each Attitude a Syllable 295 of tone to suit the prevailing winds of optimism: “The advance of liberal­ ism, so-­called, in Christianity, during the past fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-­mindedness within the church over the morbidness with which the old hell-­fire theology was more harmoniously related” (Varieties, 88).4 Such a description makes clear the stakes of reading James’s liberalism more as a­ linguistic method than as a matter of content; even from within a decidedly...