Pragmatic Naturalism: An Introduction

17. Religion and the Religious

PRAGMATIC NATURALISM I70 which all art objects must conform. This interpretation is rejected in the pragmatic naturalist's philosophy of art. If the experience which the artist is expressing happens to have a moral quality to it, then it is proper that this moral quality find expression in the art object. Where the aesthetic experience and its expressive object have no moral quality inherent in them, dragging in a moral meaning distorts and falsifies the experience. When Mead and Dewey interpret art as having the possibility of being as wide as the experience of humanity, they open the road for making the aesthetic uppermost in ways that liberate the emotional life. They make the aesthetic quality of life as lived in the ordinary and in the refined experiences found in special media a carefully and lovingly constructed achievement. Appreciation of the aesthetic follows from heightened and enhanced experience. 17. Religion and the Religious The pragmatic naturalists inherited an intellectual world in which traditional supernaturalism was one of the oldest and most widely held interpretations of human experience . Some thinkers like Thomas Paine had advocated a kind of minimal supernaturalism which went by the name of "Deism." By mid-nineteenth.century Ralph Waldo Emerson and others had founded a school called "Transcendentalism ," a version of an outlook which emphasizes the mind and its intimate relations with a God-Mind or Spirit. The view of ultimate reality as Mind or Spirit is called "philosophical idealism," 'and James had, as his colleague at Harvard, Josiah Royce who was one of America's VALUE I7I leading idealists of the time. Opposing supernaturalism, transcendentalism, and idealism was the philosophy of materialism , a view which claims to be scientific in its outlook. Philosophical materialism denies that there is any supernatural or any metaphysical entity such as spirit or mind. Materialists hold that matter in motion is basic reality, and they generally believe inquiry should be limited to observable events and to cause-and-effect relationships which are scientifically determined. All beliefs, they say, which go beyond what can be verified by observation are speculative, and one should take a sceptical or agnostic view toward them. When Darwin's theory of evolution is added to the basic concepts of materialism, then the traditional beliefs about God, nature, and man are severely challenged. The foregoing views of experience created a serious conflict in William James. He thinks that physical objects and organisms are real parts of experience, but he rejects the materialist's reduction of all emergent forms of experience and nature, including religious responses, to the physical or material. James also thinks that ideas and ideals are parts of experience, but he rejects the idealists' notion of an Absolute Mind or Spirit. The beliefs of this latter group allow the finite parts of experience to be dissolved into an organic and absolute whole. James admits that the hypothesis of the Absolute Form might be true, but he claims that as yet we do not have empirical evidence that it is true. Furthermore, he thinks that the philosophy in which the source, meaning, and outcome of everything in nature and experience depends upon the Absolute discourages human endeavors. Darwin had shown that life is in a precarious situation in its evolutionary development, that all human living is a venture and a risk, and that we cannot be sure where all will come out. To believe that there is an Absolute which is securely bound to all the finite items of living is to nurse a delusion. One might wish that this Absolute Being exists, says James, but the evidence at present is insufficient.57 PRAGMATIC NATURALISM I72 For James the philosophic choice among supernaturalism , idealism, materialism, or some other philosophy is a forced option. Thus he argues that if one had to choose between an infinite, absolute God on the one hand, and a finite God on the other, then it seems that a finite God suits best the facts of experience as we know them.58 The practical implications of the latter view are that God need not be held responsible for all the cosmic evils and maladjustments of nature and that human moral choices and actions are determinate and significant. A finite God needs human beings in making and directing an evolving world, and human beings need God in the process of living. There has always been some speculation as to whether or not...