Abstract
As part of his general polemic against monism and idealism, William James advocated a God, or a multitude of gods, as both limited in influence and set off against other forces in the cosmos. It was by championing a deity amenable to a pluralistic and open-ended universe that James sought not only to promote the morally vigorous life, but to do justice to the full texture of human experience. What follows is an exploration and critical analysis of James’s finite theism. After briefly tracing the development of James’s concept of deity throughout his philosophical writings, I concentrate upon, and assess, the complex argument offered in A Pluralistic Universe. Along the way, the relevance of Henry James Sr., Richard Gale, and Alfred North Whitehead is brought into the discussion.
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Notes
- 1.
Richardson (2006), William James; In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, p. 229.
- 2.
Hadot (2002), What is Ancient Philosophy?, p. 270.
- 3.
James (1956), The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, pp. 180–183.
- 4.
James (1958), Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 396–397.
- 5.
This is not stated explicitly. Although it remains conceivable that the deity’s lack of omnipotence and omniscience in James’s mature thought might be self-imposed after all (an equivalent to the doctrine of the tzimtzum or God’s “contraction” in Lurianic Kabbalah), the fact that the deity is in active tension with other forces in the cosmos makes this highly unlikely.
- 6.
- 7.
See, for instance, James (1996a), “A World of Pure Experience,” found in Essays in Radical Empiricism.
- 8.
David Lamberth states: “Whereas on a first reading James’s distinction comes across as arbitrary, ascribable perhaps only to his psychological temperament, on a second reading one can see James drawing his distinctions according to a particular philosophy’s adequacy in accounting for the phenomenological concreteness of our actual, lived experience.” From Lamberth (1997), The Cambridge Companion to William James.
- 9.
James (1996b), A Pluralistic Universe, p. 23.
- 10.
Ibid, p. 26.
- 11.
Ibid, p. 34.
- 12.
Ibid, pp. 38–40.
- 13.
Ibid, p. 311.
- 14.
Gale also points out the difficulties of how one mind can be morally autonomous while being a part of another, broader consciousness. See Gale (1999), The Divided Self of William James, pp. 271 and 304.
- 15.
Ibid, p. 312. Gale of course reaffirms that this synthesis fails to solve the second aporia between the Ontological Relativism of the moral self and the non-relative reality claims of the mystics.
- 16.
James (1958), The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 318.
- 17.
See, for instance, Tillich (1957), Dynamics of Faith.
- 18.
See James (1958), The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 396.
- 19.
James (1956), The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, p. 61.
- 20.
Whitehead (1978), Process and Reality, p. 3.
- 21.
Ibid, p. XIV.
- 22.
Gale (1999), The Divided Self of William James, pp. 309–310. Gale also states that religious experiences can never become “working hypotheses” because they cannot be translated into full propositions (complete with a specific person, a time…etc). He further argues that moral agents require more than hypotheses upon which to base their actions. To fully assess Gale’s take on these important matters requires a study beyond the scope of the present essay.
- 23.
- 24.
See James (1958), Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 325–328.
- 25.
James (1978), “A Pluralistic Mystic” is found in Essays in Philosophy.
- 26.
For instance, John Cobb Jr. claims that Whitehead “accepts and adopts many of James’s key insights, and then goes on to develop them in rich and rigorous detail.” See Cobb (1993), Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy, p. 166.
- 27.
In Whitehead (1978), Process and Reality, Whitehead compares “the true method of discovery” to the movements of an airplane. When conducted properly, abstract thought both takes off, and lands, in the particulars of experience (p. 5). In James (1996c), Some Problems of Philosophy, James states that “Perception prompts our thought, and thought in turn enriches our perception” (p. 108).
- 28.
James (1885), Introduction to The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James, p. 19.
- 29.
Ibid, p. 115.
- 30.
Ibid, p. 116.
- 31.
The metaphysics of James Sr. is not a “bald monism,” states William, “yet it makes of God the one and only active principle; and that is practically all that monism demands.”
- 32.
James (1956), The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, p. 3.
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Weidenbaum, J. (2013). William James’s Argument for a Finite Theism. In: Diller, J., Kasher, A. (eds) Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5219-1_27
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