©The Rev. Sarah C. Stewart
William James’ biographer begins with the story of James in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Plagued by insomnia, he was awake just before five in the morning when the quake hit. He rode out the 48-second quake on his bed, and then went to find his wife, who was unhurt. Once he realized they were both safe, James ran out into the street. He spent the rest of the day talking to everyone he could about their experience of the earthquake: where they had been, what it was like for them, what they had seen and felt.
This is no surprise from the man who is the best known proponent of a philosophical approach called “pragmatism.” Pragmatism, and in particular the writings of William James, is one of my favorite theological and philosophical approaches. Pragmatism says, at its core, what matters is what we do–that belief will be shown through action. It says that the test of any belief is its consequent actions. It says that there is not one unified truth, but as many ways of experiencing the world as there are human beings. This is what I love about Unitarian Universalism. Our beliefs can be quite diverse, and our actions can still converge around the love within our fellowship community and the good we can do in the world.
At the core of pragmatism is the concept that our beliefs are shown through our actions. The issue of who believes what often takes center stage in our divided world. We believes that our beliefs divide us. But what do we believe, really? Take the example of two women interviewed in Pennsylvania, during the last presidential election, about whether or not they supported then-Senator Obama.
One woman looked right at the camera, and said with complete conviction that she thought Obama was an incarnation of the devil and would be terrible for America. She turned to her neighbor and said, “Don’t you agree?” And the neighbor looked at the camera and said no, she was going to wait and see what his policies were, and she might vote for him. The interviewer thanked them, and the women went back into their houses. We can imagine that the two women went on about their day and watched themselves on the evening news (Doherty).
Now the woman who believed that Obama was the devil stated her belief with every indication of really believing it. She was asked what she thought and she said it; there was no indication that she was lying or playing a joke. But in some sense, she must not really have believed it. If you believed that Satan himself was going to be incarnate in the president of the United States, it would not be all right with you for your neighbor to disagree with you on that matter. It would be a matter of the gravest concern, a matter that might prompt you to take whatever action you could to change the outcome.
Imagine that you are upstairs in your house at night and you become convinced that a strange person has entered your home downstairs. Maybe this person is a burglar; at any rate, you know they’re not supposed to be there. The nature of this belief would cause you to take immediate action. You might try to confront the person or scare them off. You might call the police. You might hide in the closet. Whatever your response, it would come as a result of an overwhelming belief that something was not as it should be. The belief that something was wrong in your house would have become real to the point of requiring action. Pragmatism is the philosophy which says that the test of our beliefs is the action we will take. Pragmatism would say that while the first woman in the interview is considering the possibility that Obama might be an incarnation of the devil, she doesn’t quite believe it yet, or she would be acting on it.
As I said, pragmatism was made most widely known by philosopher and psychologist William James, brother to the novelist Henry James and diarist Alice James. The word was coined by Charles Sanders Peirce and the ideas were explored by other friends of theirs, including George Santayana, whose poem we heard earlier. William James was a pioneer in the field of psychology in the late 19th century, and is also well known as a writer of philosophical and theological works. He pioneered the idea of a “stream of consciousness,” a flow of our ideas which was a more accurate way of understanding our minds than thinking that “mind” was a static thing. He believed that what we call our “mind” came to exist through the constant stream of experiences which make up our lives.
James arrived at his conclusions about the nature of belief and experience through his absolute commitment to the theory of evolution. He was interested in philosophy, theology and psychology that arose from the experiences of human beings. A creature’s experience in the world would select for adaptations and fit the creature for that world. When James looked at the animal kingdom, he saw that some creatures in it had consciousness and some did not. Therefore, James thought, consciousness must be an adaptive solution. We are not automata, with an observing consciousness along for the ride. And we are not divinely endowed to lord it over creation. The process of evolution has provided us with a faculty which can consider our experiences and options in time and make decisions which are not merely driven by sense experience. Each person’s consciousness is the hallmark of their free will to respond to the universe in the way that is right for them.
The freedom of this appeal to experience is bound, on the other side, by the limits of achieving a universal vision of reality. If each person interacts with the world in her or his own way, then it is hard, as an individual, to say anything conclusive about the nature of the universe itself. Many philosophies of James’ time were concerned with trying to explain life, the universe and everything. James was concerned with building a philosophy outward from the individual and collective human experience. And he was not going to leave out any experience, because everything that we perceive is part of what it means to be human.
In a way, our beliefs become our biography. What we believe becomes who we are. William James believed that part of what our mind does for us is help us select the stimuli in the world to which we wish to pay to pay attention. Animals with less consciousness, James believed, were required to pay attention to stimuli regarding food, shelter and safety. These things are still important to humans, but with the tool of consciousness, we can choose to pay attention to other things too. Even homeless people may create art, in other words, because having a mind allows people to choose to pay attention to beauty over shelter.
This concept of mind also suggests that our minds are an organ of our functioning, like other organs in our body. And our minds can function more or less well, just like other organs. Sometimes, the organ of our minds does not work as well as we wish it did. All of us have either experienced serious depression or known someone who has. I can think of a friend of mine who watched her marriage fall apart because she did not have the capacity, at that time, to take the steps necessary to improve her situation. It was as though she had a broken leg, and the thing she needed to do to heal was to hike a mountain.
Rather than see depression as a failure of the person, we can see it as a difficulty with the organ of the mind. A therapist can even use consciousness as a tool in treating depression, by helping someone see the depression as something external to themselves. Even choosing to get help is often ambivalent. Therapists may use therapies which identify “the depression” as something external to the patient. Theory of change–pre-contemplation, contemplation, change, backsliding are part of the process.
William James believed that experience formed the core of human existence. He was interested in building up a philosophy of the human mind which was based on experience. When he considered experience, however, he did not exempt anything. In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, James notes the real power and of conversion and mystical experiences. He discusses many kinds of conversion: conversion to religious belief; conversion away from religious belief to atheism; and conversion from drunkenness to sobriety are just a few. He notes that people can go to sleep one night believing one thing and wake up the next morning believing something different–even something, in the case of sobriety, which they may have been contemplating for some time. The founders of Alcoholics Anonymous were in fact inspired by The Varieties of Religious Experience to form Alcoholics Anonymous, which relies on the experience of conversion to bring people to sobriety.
The building up of experience in oneself, which finally results in a conversion, is another way of looking at the evolution of ideas. Just as James believed that consciousness, or mind, had evolved in humans as a trait selected for the survival of the species, he believed that ideas evolved in us as competing efforts until one idea was selected as the one upon which we would act. He went so far as to say that the action itself selected the idea; in other words, it is when we get out of bed that we have the idea, “I will get out of bed now,” rather than the idea, “I will stay under the covers where it is warm.”
The moment the alcoholic decides to stop drinking is the moment at which the idea to not drink truly emerges; every moment before when she has thought to herself, “I really need to stop drinking” while pouring another drink, the idea of not drinking was not yet fully present. It was one of several competing ideas, but the idea to drink was still winning. The idea to seek treatment for depression is also a thought that may have had to prepare itself before becoming real. Psychologists encourage patients to see the all the stages of change, including the contemplation that goes on before making the change, and the backsliding that can occur later, as being integral to the change itself. The end result did not emerge out of nowhere, but was built up as a result of our experience with the world. All the experience which went into the change was part of the change, and we could not necessarily have changed without it.
William James’ father was obsessed with the reality and presence of God. He belonged to the Swedenborgian movement, a religious gathering that sought to move away from the traditional forms of religion and get at the mystical truth. After his father died when James was in his late thirties, he wrote, “[Religion] is not the one thing needful, as [Father] said. But it is needful with the rest (Richardson 233).” To return to conversions, James noticed that people experienced real conversion both to and away from religious faith. He sought to explain this by naming that source of religious faith the “More.”
Most experiences, James believed, came to us through the world of our senses. But we could not discount the experiences of mystics and dreamers, even experiences stemming from intoxicants or what we might call mental illness. James was out to build up a philosophy based on human experience, and he was determined to include all human experience. He called this source of experience that seemed to be outside the sensory world the “More.” He was open to the possibility that it was divine, or that it was some untapped part of our own brains, some sense we had not yet learned to name. But James insisted that we could not ignore the More, which was the source of religion, art, mystical experiences and conversion.
James’ philosophy is one of my favorites because he makes room for everybody. He insists on no dogma, but only on the test of action that comes from sincere belief. It does not matter to me whether a person labels their belief Christian or Jewish, or theist or humanist, although all those words signify rich traditions worth celebrating. What matters to me is what you will do, as the poet says, with your one wild and precious life.
Sources
Many thanks to Carolyn Stevenson for her helpful insights into clinical depression.
Doherty, Alex and Clive Hamilton. “God, Sex and the Left (Part 1).” New Left Project. 9 Nov. 2011. Accessed 22 Dec. 2012.
Richardson, Robert D. William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.