Josiah Royce, William James, and the Social Renewal of the “Sick Soul”: Exploring the Communal Dimension of Religious Experience
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Methodology
3. Part One: Individual Experience in Varieties and Sources
3.1. Background and Respective Evaluations of Individual Experience
I do not believe James’ resulting philosophy of religion to be adequate. For as it stands it is indeed chaotic. But I am sure that it can only be amended by taking it up into a larger view, and not by rejecting it. The spirit triumphs, not by destroying the chaos that James describes, but by brooding upon the face of the deep until the light comes, and with light, order.14
Now James’ whole view of religious experience differs in many ways from mine. But just at the present point in our inquiry, where it is a question of what I should call the most elementary and intimate, but also the crudest and most capricious source of religious insight, namely, the “experience of the individual alone with the divine,” I feel my own account to be most dependent upon that of James and my own position to be most nearly in agreement with his.
3.2. The Shared Ground of the Phenomenological Account
For James, our sense of religious need is an experience which mysteriously wells up from the subliminal self, from the soundless depths of our own subconsciousness. James, therefore, conceives it probable that, through the subliminal or subconscious self, we are actually aroused to religious interest by spiritual beings whose level is higher than our own, and whose will, expressed to us through the vague but often intense sense of need which the religiously minded feel, does set for us an ideal task which is of greater worth than our natural desires, and which, when we can get into harmony with those powers through the aid of their subliminal influences, does give a new sense to life. Now, in contrast to such views regarding the origin of that deeper sense of need which is indeed the beginning of religion, I have to insist that the basis of the religious interest is something much less mysterious than James’ supposed workings of the “higher powers” through our subliminal selves and is also something much more universally human than is the opportunity to come under the influence of any one revelation.
4. Part Two: From Individual Experience to Social Experience
4.1. Royce’s Notion of Social Religious Experience
4.2. Conversion: Social Mediation and Social Renewal
5. Conclusions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Conflicts of Interest
1 | |
2 | |
3 | Ever the empiricist and religious explorer, James’ ultimate commitments were to his pragmatist philosophy. This judgment was sustained by James’ biographer, Robert D. Richardson: “James’s ambitions for pragmatism were breathtaking. When he compared the pragmatist movement to the Protestant Reformation, he was not being ironic. Just as he was launching the lectures in October 1906 [the Lowell Lectures on pragmatism], he wrote to Giovanni Amendola, one of Papini’s Italian pragmatists, ‘I think that pragmatism can be made—is not Papini tending to make it?—a sort of surrogate of religion, or if not that, it can combine with religious faith so as to be [a] surrogate for dogma.’ Saving his best shot for last, as he had in Edinburgh [at the Gifford Lectures, 1901–1902], he closed his pragmatism lectures by saying, ‘On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the wider sense of the word, it is true.’ This is not the Protestant God, not the Christian God, not monotheism.” (Richardson 2006, p. 488). |
4 | In their 25 years together as professors at Harvard, James and Royce fostered good relations even amidst disagreement. Royce assured James in a 1907 letter, “No criticism of mine is hostile…I prize everything that you say or do, whether I criticize it or not.” (Royce 1970, pp. 512–13). |
5 | |
6 | Royce’s account of the seven (non-exhaustive) proposed modes of religious experience start with James’ category of extraordinary individual experience before moving beyond the initial category in a kind of sublating march to the social, reason, the will, and dedicated loyalty, all of which are at last purified in atoning sorrow and the unity of the Spirit. |
7 | It is important to note that though Royce spoke of religious experience as James did, he elected to consider forms of religious experience as “sources of religious insight” rather than merely adopting the Jamesian vernacular of “religious experience.” This latter term avoids some of the implications of direct, spontaneous intuition, giving a greater place for reason and the various pathways that lead to knowledge. See Royce (2001b, pp. 5–6). |
8 | This article is not the first work to recognize the social perspective that develops from engagement with James’ thought. In his William James on Democratic Individuality, Stephen S. Bush addressed the strong political, moral, and religious responsibility connected to James’ individualism. As Bush pointed out, James believed that the best defense against the social contagions that lead to grave mistreatment and violence is the critical reflection of the individual. Thus, for James, salutary public service depends upon independent judgment and authentic personal self-expression. For an overview of the argument, see especially, Bush (2017, pp. 5–16). |
9 | To use the term “divine” is to carry forward James’ language of religious objects from Varieties. Royce spoke of the “supernatural” or “superhuman,” which can be treated as serving the same function in Sources as does James’ “divine” in Varieties. However, scratching beneath the surface, distance opens up between them. James clarified his term (somewhat) by explaining that the “divine” denotes “any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not” (James 1982, p. 34). As James unfolded his account of conversion, he presented an understanding of the divine as something “more” beyond the plane of ordinary experience and he argued for the mediation of this “more” through the subconscious mind. Royce disagreed with the idea of the chiefly subconscious mediation of religious realities. Still, even as Royce extended the potential modes of mediation, James’ indication of a deeper field of consciousness interacting with the human mind abided in his explication of the terms “supernatural” and “superhuman” in Sources, 257–72. See Royce’s basic statement of common intention with James in Sources, 27: “In portraying what he meant by ‘the divine,’ James emphasized, although in terms different from what I am using, the very features about the objects of religious experience which I have just been trying to characterize in my own way.” |
10 | To sketch their respective positions in their “Battle for the Absolute”: James disagreed with Royce’s absolute idealism, a conception of the universe in which individuals form a part of the greater whole of the All-Knowing Absolute Spirit. For James, Royce’s picture failed to account for the relative autonomy of individuals, necessarily subsuming individuals into a “block universe.” Royce worked to refute this charge; for his part, he confessed that he found James’ pluralistic cosmos just short of a picture of total chaos, lacking the relations that could explain how things hang together. |
11 | In the evaluation of early pragmatist philosophers, Royce and Peirce are often placed in one camp, while James and John Dewey are placed in another. Randall E. Auxier astutely observed that although all pragmatists agree that practice and practical questions serve as the measure for philosophy (and, accordingly, that action completes thought), these two parties disagree considerably on the relationship between action and thought. They each limit thought in different respects. As Auxier framed the matter, the radical–empirical pragmatism of James and Dewey tends to steer clear of the “abstractions of philosophers” in order to avoid a stale rationalism, while the idealistic pragmatism of Royce and Peirce restricts the scope of philosophy, treating phenomenology and semiotics as extra-philosophical activities. For Auxier, Royce and Peirce are ultimately more effective in arriving at ideals to guide conduct. See (Auxier 2013, pp. 110–23). |
12 | The Sources of Religious Experience constitutes part of a larger project for Royce as he developed a religious philosophy of loyalty from 1900 to 1913. Sources synthesizes themes that he had previously taken up in isolation. Royce commented, “[Sources] contains the whole sense of me in a brief compass,” in (Royce 1970). |
13 | This speech, a celebration of James’ life, was the Phi Betta Kappa Oration delivered by Royce in June 1911. He named James as the third great “representative American thinker,” alongside Ralph Waldo Emerson and Jonathan Edwards. See Josiah Royce, “William James and the Philosophy of Life,” in Royce (1911). |
14 | (Royce 1911, p. 25). Royce pays the compliment that, in Varieties, “[America’s] national religious life has found its manifold and characteristic expression.” |
15 | If Royce followed James in his effort to provide empirical foundations capable of validation without prior assent to specific propositions of faith, he also struck up a Jamesian posture. Though perhaps without the same inimitable Jamesian color, he adopted the style of the genial guide speaking unpretentiously to reasonable listeners. Royce encouraged his audience to assess for themselves the legitimacy of his conclusions. In each of these major decisions—the choice of loose rather than precise definitions, the choice of an empirical–experiential approach, and the choice of broad accessibility of presentation—Royce intended the same goal as James. Both hoped for the advance of a form of religious inquiry grounded upon human experience, possessed of the power to unify where previous methodologies only divided, and able to enliven the imagination of the contemporary listener. For Royce especially, there was something of an irony in the attempt to construct a broad and non-polemical definition while still depending heavily on Christian paradigms of salvation. See Royce (2001b, p. 41) for the shared vision of the unity of religions. |
16 | See James (1982, p. 7). In his criticism of mainstream churches, James was not only concerned with religious inspiration. He also worried about darker realities, fearing the unreflective conformity that leads to a level of mass moral irresponsibility and degradation of which few individuals are capable on their own. See James (1982, p. 338) for the full explanation. |
17 | (Royce 2001b, p. 34). He argued nearly identically in (Royce 2001a, p. 41), when he compared his view to James’: “All [religious] experience must be at least individual experience, but unless it is also social experience, and unless the whole religious community which is in question unites to share it, this experience is but as sounding brass, and as a tinkling cymbal”. |
18 | Despite his language of the “invisible church,” Royce did not limit participation within or comprehension of these realities to Christians. Nevertheless, his understanding emerged from an inherently Christian paradigm, inspired by the early Pauline communities (cf. Royce 2001b, pp. 278–80). |
19 | In Problem, in which Royce made his metaphysics more explicit, he endorsed a two-level understanding of reality—in which the alternation of the idea of the individual and the idea of the community, both of which constitute appropriate starting points for investigation—lend the richest interpretation of existence. As with Sources, the community emerges as the means of salvation. Here, the significance of the Pauline churches and the dynamic role of the Spirit therein (intentionally underdeveloped in Sources to support an interreligious understanding) becomes evident: “Man the community is the source of salvation…By man the community I mean man in the sense in which Paul conceived Christ’s beloved and universal Church to be a community,—man viewed as one conscious spiritual whole of life… And I say that this conscious spiritual community is the sole possessor of grace, and is the essential source of salvation of the individual” (Royce 2001a, pp. 218–19). |
20 | Charles Taylor observed that the “sick soul” can be characterized by three distinguishable forms of negative experience: religious melancholy, a kind of melancholy rooted in fearfulness, and an acute sense of personal sin. See Taylor (2002, pp. 34–35). |
21 | This portraiture so happens to be the area in which James is most in his element: the depiction of lasting states of mind as fashioned by the interaction of mobile, mutually entailing perceptions and emotions; the vivid dramatization of the inner life that blends detachment and sympathy, persuading the reader (or listener) not only of the gripping power of a state of mind but also toward a measure of identification with the subject’s processes and convictions. In James’ impressionistic portrayal of the anguished, bereft consciousness of the sick soul, he asked for his audience’s validation of this angsty everyman’s sense of lostness and alienation. |
22 | (James 1982, p. 162); James’ complete notion of the sick soul exposed another rift with Royce worth noting: James rejected all manner of theodicies, considering them to be unhelpful responses to the sick soul’s predicament. He took these rational philosophical explanations to be superficial, failing to appropriately meet the suffering of the human being. Royce, on the other hand, devoted significant attention to questions of theodicy. See James’ criticism of Royce in his Pragmatism: “But while Professors Royce and Bradley and a whole host of guileless thoroughfed thinkers are unveiling Reality and the Absolute and explaining away evil and pain, this is the condition of the only beings known to us anywhere in the universe with a developed consciousness of what the universe is” (James 2019, p. 24). |
23 | By appealing to the ministrations of the subconscious, James hoped to reach beyond theological explanations that depend exclusively on divine causality without appeal to additional sources of mediation. When compared with subsequent depth psychology, James’ subconscious remains a relatively primitive conception. It is a hazy, porous marginal zone that James did not anatomize precisely. It is not, for instance, the subconscious of Freud with its drives and complexes, nor the subconscious of Jung as the fount of “archetypes.” As James saw things, explanation by way of the subconscious bears the promise to open the field to scientific researchers. His theory proposed that the personal transformation of the converted person comes about through the inbreaking of stored subconscious contents into the conscious mind after a period of incubation. James attributed sudden conversions to a developed subconscious self and a permeable boundary between the conscious and subconscious mind. For a person with a harder shell, progress can only be gradual. James argued that this level of explanation does not preclude the influence of a deity in conversion, but rather suggests a means by which higher powers act on the individual. In his “Conclusions,” chapter, he connected the subconscious self with a greater, unseen realm. |
24 | I do not wish to engage the respective merits of their positions here. For a withering critique of James, see Lash (1988, pp. 71–83). |
25 | My argument here points to a distinction similar to Wayne Proudfoot’s distinction between description and explanation of religious experience. Proudfoot had a very different purpose, however. He was concerned about the construction of protective strategies that block the way of inquiry for apologetic reasons. Description and explanation feature as the two stages of Proudfoot’s preferred process of inquiry: first, a description that is consistent with the terms used by the subject of the experience; second, an explanation of the experience, which does not necessarily agree with the interpretation of the subject. See Proudfoot (1987, pp. 228–36). |
26 | This is a subject-centered view. Nicholas Lash’s critique applies. See Lash (1988, p. 112), in which Lash refers to the “Jamesian God as a function of previously specified human need.” |
27 | Consider that Royce’s socially alienated individual presents another face of James’ “sick soul,” translated from an interior to a social form of expression. |
28 | For more on Royce’s notion of salvation, see Stunkel (2017, p. 68). |
29 | It makes little difference whether we consider these social influences to be unconsciously registered and later brought to light, or rather consciously received and yet willfully ignored; the conclusion remains that social mediation guides the process of conversion. |
30 | See Thomas Merton’s famous “Fourth and Walnut” experience for an example of the mystical–esthetic appreciation of others: “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” (Merton 1966, pp. 153–54). |
31 | The Ideal–Need–Deliverer triad from Sources reflects his mature triadic form of logic, although he did not present this logic of relations philosophically until Problem. |
32 | Part 2 of Problem is devoted, in a large part, to explaining the philosophical advantages of a Roycean social metaphysics. |
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Ceragioli, M.A. Josiah Royce, William James, and the Social Renewal of the “Sick Soul”: Exploring the Communal Dimension of Religious Experience. Religions 2024, 15, 1045. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15091045
Ceragioli MA. Josiah Royce, William James, and the Social Renewal of the “Sick Soul”: Exploring the Communal Dimension of Religious Experience. Religions. 2024; 15(9):1045. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15091045
Chicago/Turabian StyleCeragioli, Michael Andrew. 2024. "Josiah Royce, William James, and the Social Renewal of the “Sick Soul”: Exploring the Communal Dimension of Religious Experience" Religions 15, no. 9: 1045. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15091045