The Varieties of Transcendence: Pragmatism and the Theory of Religion

INTRODUCTION

Hermann Deuser, Hans Joas, Matthias Jung, and Magnus Schlette

Whereas most of the eminent European thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century were a-religious or at least believed that modernization would necessarily lead to secularization, the American history of ideas took a different route. Particularly, the philosophy of pragmatism represents this specifically American approach to the viability of the sacred or the ideal under the new conditions of rapid industrialization and urbanization. The question that at least the first generation of American pragmatists struggled with is: How can you defend a religious stance toward the world if you not only don’t want to take a detour around the sciences but actually accept Darwinism and the expanding knowledge in experimental psychology as well as in historical and comparative inquiries about the origins and development of religious cultures? Besides all the differences between the individual thinkers, their approach to answering this question is similar: the appropriate reaction to the pressures of modern knowledge on religious traditions and beliefs is not the secularization but the individualization of religious worldviews. Of course, developments in American religious history and those related to European inner-directed religiousness and piety—from Pietism to Schleiermacher—had already pointed in this direction, but the concepts of religious individualization developed in pragmatism are far more radical.

The measure for religious well-being is neither the degree of the individual’s compliance with the symbolic meanings embodied in institutions nor her adherence to traditions about how to be faithful in her convictions and actions. Instead, it is the extent to which religious experience and its articulation contribute to the coherence of personal life. Religiousness is principally characterized by its optional status as a means of self-understanding in a pluralistic universe of various cultural perspectives on reality, and its quality is judged by its contribution to solve problems in the process of individual self-realization. Pragmatists share concepts of individual growth, Bildung, and self-realization, which are founded in the exchange between the human organism and its environment, and take place in usually recalcitrant surroundings compared to our desires and intentions. In this manner, self-realization is internally integrated with the complementary aspect of decentration right from the start. Pragmatists also share the conviction that reality is misunderstood if we merely conceive it as the counterpart of a nonpersonal observational perspective. Reality is not fixed but happens through personal, though socially shared and coordinated, commitment to the concrete challenges of life. This implies a rejection of the fact-value dichotomy in favor of a triangulation of ego, alter ego, and world in terms of an interrelation of the actual and the ideal, the factual and the possible. In this context, having religion—borrowing Schleiermacher’s phrase—means as much as being aware of a higher order as the other of our partial, fragmented intentions and actions, an order that we experience through our striving for probation in the world. It is essential to this awareness that it raises the feeling of being borne by dimensions of our reality, which transcend instant matters and present undertakings. All pragmatists share a concept of transcendence. How this is to be understood marks the difference, though.

James and Dewey take the most contrasting positions of what—save the severe differences with regard to contents—may still be understood as articulations of a common pragmatist denominator. James defends a supernaturalistic interpretation of transcendence; Dewey restricts himself to a reconceptualization of transcendence in terms that are compatible with his full-fledged naturalism. Common to both is the conviction, in James’s words, that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.¹ Unlike James, Dewey does not connect the idea of an unseen order with a metaphysical reality, though, but with the imaginative anticipation of the realization of our highest moral ideals and precisely in this sense with our self-realization as moral beings. This anticipation, according to Dewey, is legitimately called religious because it changes our attitude toward the world and thereby the quality of reality as it is generated in the exchange between man and world. This dispositional change does not pertain to individual acts of volition, but it concerns their phenomenal quality—conceived as the organic plenitude of our being,² as he writes in A Common Faith—with structural affinity to well-known formulations of Wittgenstein about the sense of security at the core of the religious stance or to Heidegger’s interpretation of the Vollzugssinn as the central characteristic of religion.

Despite the importance of the concept of experience for his philosophy of religion, James’s thinking lacks a reflection on what it means to articulate an experience. Furthermore, critical voices have pointed to the lack of community-related dimensions of religious experience in James’s philosophy. The philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce promise a more appropriate debate on questions of the intrinsic symbolicity of religious experience and generally the importance of common experience for the development of religiousness. Particularly, Royce offers points of contact for systematic amendments and corrections of James’s concept of experience. Royce, who was on cordial terms with James for decades, criticized that James’s paradigm for his concept of religious experience consisted of ecstatic experiences of outstanding religious individuals or virtuosi, and in his later works he developed an ingenious theory of Christianity as a universal community of interpretation, strongly influenced by Peirce’s semiotics. In this theory, the individual experience stands in a reciprocal relation to the collective conscience of a community, and it is being symbolically developed and emotionally deepened in this relation. For Royce in his essential book The Problem of Christianity, the outcome of this is a theoretical accentuation of the concept of the Church, which contradicts the notorious cliché, according to which pragmatist philosophy of religion is individualistic in terms of an absence of appropriate reflection on the importance of community and communal practice for the significance of religious orientation: the Church, rather than the person of the founder, ought to be viewed as the central idea of Christianity.³

The collection of chapters presented here deals with the various connections between Peirce’s, James’s, Royce’s, and Dewey’s reflections on religion and on their relevance for a philosophical theory of religion in our time. Its primary focus is threefold. First, the pragmatist’s sensitivity to the ongoing processes to individualize and naturalize human self-understanding comes into view. Second, the volume stresses the pragmatist’s subtle consciousness of the fact that the human being is interpretation all the way down,⁴ which implies an irreversible insight into the semiotic significance of transcendence; we may call this double awareness features of modern intellectual integrity in dealing with our ultimate concerns in life. Third, the volume lays emphasis on the fact that the semiotic turn in pragmatist theory of religion is accompanied by a growing appreciation of the integral relationship between the individual religious consciousness and the community-based symbolic frameworks of its articulation. Of course, not all of these focus points are equally present in each of the following contributions, but together they form a unique picture of what is at stake in contemporary philosophy of religion by returning to the theoretical innovations of classical pragmatism.

The anthology opens with Christoph Seibert’s chapter, Pragmatic Methodology in the Philosophy of Religion: Perspectives of Classical American Pragmatism. Seibert, a professor of systematic theology at the University of Hamburg in Germany, starts his argumentation with an explanation of methodical activity as a procedure by which ends will be realized in ways of controlled conduct as a form of responsible self-determination. He suggests that the act of thinking, and particularly of thinking about religion, fulfills the criteria of a methodical activity. But according to Seibert, it is important to keep in mind that thinking about religion never starts from a neutral point of view, and this also holds true for philosophical thinking about the phenomena of religious life, which are—at least to some degree—rooted in the history of the situational experiences of the person who thinks. Finally, to the extent that thinking about religion is based in life, religious life articulates itself in self-reflective thinking. Therefore, religion has to be understood as a form of rational and creative activity that is oriented toward ideas internal to our self-understanding in daily life. Seibert acknowledges religious articulations as an integral part of rationally forming one’s own life into a coherent whole that reflects the first-order experiences being made in its course. According to Seibert, separating life and thought, experience and reflection, the real and the ideal would be inappropriate. They stand in correlation to one another. On the basis of his argumentation, which mainly refers to Jamesian and Deweyan trains of thought, pragmatic methodology in the philosophy of religion has to be located within a continuum of an actor’s first-person self-reflection that reaches from the implicit rationale of his way of living to the most elaborate forms of theology.

What that means under the conditions of life’s fundamental finitude is the central question Sami Pihlström deals with in his contribution Insomnia on a Moral Holiday: On the Moral Luck, Reward, and Punishment of a Jamesian ‘Sick Soul.’ Pihlström, who is director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and teaches philosophy of religion at the University of Helsinki, points out that James has clearly thought through the consequences of our finite nature. Following James’s concept of a sick soul, he examines ethically acceptable religious outlooks by drawing attention to evil, suffering, melancholy, and tragedy. For Pihlström, these are features of life that come irresistibly into view if we accept that our life is, at the same time, both beyond our control and subject to our responsibility and rational activity. Pihlström argues for the cultivation of a practical attitude toward life that resists our striving to take moral holidays and is aware of the fragility of goodness (Martha Nussbaum). Insight into the condition humaine implies that we must be continuously aware of potentially ethically demanding situations, no matter how safe we might feel at the time. Pihlström calls for a perspective on life that neither explains the sufferings away nor indulges in expectations of a final reconciliation: We will never be able to fully overcome evil and suffering; yet we must always, melioristically, try. This attitude requires a concept of transcendence that allows for the essential contingency of life and its threads to our seeking for meaningfulness and harmony. Pihlström reminds us that James’s rejection of the neo-Hegelian-style Absolute was based on his respect for the human condition.

Christian Polke, postdoctoral research assistant in theology at the University of Hamburg, continues this line of thought in his chapter, Expressive Theism: Personalism, Pragmatism, and Religion, which compares William James’s concept of theism with the work of Edgar Sheffield Brightman, the philosophical head of the Boston Personalists. Polke interprets James’s pragmatism and Brightman’s personalism as related reactions to the challenges of naturalism and historicism in an intellectual situation that had been shaped by evolutionary thinking both in science and the humanities. Following Polke, James and Brightman are aware of modernity’s challenges to theology and philosophy of religion by proposing similar strands of finite theism and rejecting both classical and modern versions of an almighty Absolute. For both, the concept of a finite but personal God who is friendly to us and to our ideals and who supports and strengthens the human struggle against evil meets the experiences of human vulnerability and fallibility and the uncertainty of historical progress more appropriately than concepts of the Absolute. Therefore, according to Polke, James’s and Brightman’s theism feed into a pluralistic and melioristic metaphysics of contingency. Polke suggests the term of expressive theism for James’s and Brightman’s contributions to the philosophy of religion, thereby stressing the practical embedding and the expressive dimension of defending a personal concept of God. He understands their theism as second-order thinking about what is experienced in a religious situation for which prayer is a crucial indicator.

James and Brightman develop theistic worldviews that cope with the attacks of science and historicism on metaphysics. Dewey’s critical stance toward traditional thinking is even more radical in questioning the foundations of positive religion altogether. But Boston University–based professor of philosophy Victor Kestenbaum argues that those scholars who cannot find any acknowledgment of transcendence in Dewey’s writings anymore are wrong. In his chapter, titled Ontological Faith in Dewey’s Religious Idealism, he opposes the standard opinion of Dewey as a head-to-toes naturalist thinker with an at-most-marginal slant toward the topic of religion and presents him on the contrary as a phenomenologically respectful thinker philosophizing at the limits of—and perhaps beyond—a naturalist mode. Borrowing John Findlay’s concept of intentional inexistence, he stresses that Dewey shared James’s awe for an unseen order, one in which the crossings of the ideal and the actual are uncertain, ambiguous, and even occasionally mysterious. These ideal meanings may have a strong impact on our daily orientation in life, although the work of building them into the world is both contingent and turbulent. Dewey’s concept of faith, according to Kestenbaum, is a form of religious idealism because of its confidence in the transfigurative potential of faith-held ideals. It is ontological because these ideals are lights within which intentional objects of consciousness and natural objects of the world meet, sometimes through struggle and sometimes through grace. Dewey’s theory of religious experience is an unusual pragmatist conception, because it demands from us the willingness to work for ideals in a world where in the end what is unseen decides what happens in the seen.

But even if awe for an unseen order is granted key relevance to Dewey’s theory of religion, this does not seem enough to meet the self-understanding of those believers who belong to a positive religion. The title of Matthias Jung’s chapter, Qualitative Experience and Naturalized Religion: An Inner Tension in Dewey’s Thought?, dampens the expectation that Dewey has found the definitive solution to the problem of relating the validity claims of religious and naturalistic worldviews. Jung argues that according to Dewey’s concept of experience, situational, unifying pervasive qualities are the starting point for the symbolic articulation of meaning, which reaches from the significance of single actions and events to the interpretive dimension of all-encompassing outlooks on life. Some of these articulations entail truth claims, and particularly the different worldviews imply ontological commitments, which may strongly contradict one another. Following Dewey’s concept of experience, these commitments are internal to conceptual frameworks, which we develop to make sense of the qualitative meaningfulness directly lived through. Therefore, naturalism and the various religious perspectives on life cannot be played off against one another; they are likewise comprehensive interpretations of reality. But contrary to the impact of his theory of experience, Dewey’s argumentation in A Common Faith seems to tacitly presuppose that uncovering the interpretive character of theism effectively debunks it. Here, the naturalist’s stance does not present itself as one option among others of coming to terms with the meaningfulness of experience by its symbolic articulation but as a kind of master narrative. This inconsistency, according to Jung, has to do with logical ambiguities in Dewey’s thinking about the relation between the concepts of meaning and truth.

Kestenbaum’s presentation of Dewey as a thinker philosophizing at the limits of a natural mode and Jung’s emphasis on the limitations of Dewey’s naturalist worldview both focus on the tension between naturalism and religion. Wayne Proudfoot, a philosopher of religion at Columbia University, proposes that at least a form of naturalistic thinking is actually central to pragmatism and is an important part of its contribution to the understanding of religion. It need not pose a threat of reduction but rather can help to illumine religious concepts and ways of living. In his chapter, Pragmatism, Naturalism, and Genealogy in the Study of Religion, he distinguishes between (1) naturalistic accounts of beliefs and practices as products of humans regarded as natural creatures and (2) the naturalizing of concepts, beliefs, and practices in a way that assumes them to be naturally given and occludes their social and historical origins and development. Proudfoot takes the naturalistic stance in the former sense to be a common characteristic of pragmatist thinking. He turns it against forms of naturalistic thinking that either reduce the understanding of human affairs to science-based explanations of empirical data or regard religious concepts and experiences as given in a way that precludes or discourages inquiry into the historical and cultural contexts that have given rise to them. In this regard, Proudfoot discerns a structural affinity between scientific naturalism and other forms of foundationalism. A properly naturalistic account of human affairs, and particularly of religious attitudes, actions, and beliefs, consists in historicizing what has previously been naturalized. This project, Proudfoot writes, meets the concept of inquiry central to pragmatism and Peirce’s pragmatic criterion of meaning, which was applied to matters of religion by James and radicalized by Dewey. According to Proudfoot, Dewey’s philosophical approach to religion shares some features with Nietzsche’s genealogical method, though without Nietzsche’s more thoroughgoing inquiry into the social and historical formation of religious beliefs and practices.

Following Jung and Proudfoot, it seems difficult to imagine that a way might lead from Dewey’s philosophy of religion to an acknowledgment of theistic faith. However, in his chapter, " ‘How you understand … can only be shown by how you live’: Putnam’s Reconsideration of Dewey’s Common Faith," Magnus Schlette claims that neopragmatist philosopher Hilary Putnam has chosen to go this way. According to Schlette, Putnam sought a solution to the conflict between his science-based naturalism and his experiences and convictions as a practicing Jew. The development of his thinking leads him from John Dewey’s strict rejection of supernaturalism over a reassessment of religious language in the light of Wittgenstein’s late works to the concept of a personal God informed by Martin Buber’s I and Thou. Indeed, according to Schlette, Putnam is aware of the ambivalence in Dewey’s work that Jung stressed in his chapter. He clearly sees Dewey’s shortcomings in conceptualizing theistic faith, but he is also convinced that these shortcomings may be overcome without denying naturalism. According to Putnam, a Deweyan-style naturalism is compatible with a personal concept of God. And from a different angle, Putnam contributes to the discussion of personalism, which Polke presented with reference to the works of James and Brightman. Schlette interprets Putnam’s efforts to combine a pragmatist-style naturalism with faith in a personal God as an authentic expression of the cross pressures (Charles Taylor) between theism and naturalism in modernity.

The following chapters shift the thematic perspective on pragmatist philosophy of religion from the challenges of contingency to semiotics as the key tool to conceptualizing the significance of transcendence. Michael L. Raposa’s contribution offers a brief history of theosemiotic. According to the theosemiotic perspective, the world is perfused with signs, as Raposa, professor of religion studies at Lehigh University, briefly introduces his central concept, thereby leaning on a formulation of Charles Sanders Peirce. For Peirce, a sign mediates between object and interpretant, bringing them into relation, an explicitly semiotic relation in which the latter comes to signify the former. Each interpretant is thus a sign with some previous sign as its immediate object while also referring in a mediated fashion to what that previous sign signifies. The concept of the interpretant allows Peirce to understand the whole of human behavior as consisting of various forms of interpretation, thus participating in an infinitely ongoing process of semiosis. The religious dimension of this process becomes clear if one considers that according to theosemiotic, everything in creation is related to every other thing while also being linked to the divine source of all that exists, in an essential order. Raposa shows that Peirce’s semiotic concept of the world as a complex web of significant relations has predecessors in the middle and the early modern ages; he focuses particularly on the philosophies of Duns Scotus and John Poinsot.

Whereas Raposa localizes Peirce in the history of semiotic thinking, Gesche Linde’s chapter, ‘Man’s highest developments are social’: The Individual and the Social in Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion, concentrates on the way semiotics serve Peirce to found religion in interrelations between individual and community. The most basic account of this interrelation, as Linde, lecturer in theology at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, shows, is Peirce’s concept of perception. Peirce understands perception as the semiotic process that leads from a percept to a perceptual judgment, thereby impregnating sensual immediateness with semantic value. And for Peirce, as Linde shows, it is perception through which religion originates in the individual. The perception thesis offers him manifold explanatory force to come to terms with religion. And the perceived, unlike the revealed, is potentially accessible to everyone, as Linde points out: Perception offers a path to consensus; for Peirce, religious experience has an intrinsically social character. But Linde also stresses the intrinsic epistemological problems of the perception thesis and introduces Peirce’s concept of abduction as a means of solving these problems. Abduction in his later works becomes his key concept to understanding the origin of ideas, which again connect the individual with the community: The utmost generalization of an idea requires that it transcend the mind of the individual, and come to govern a whole community, while the community, again, deepens the self-understanding of the individual.

Vincent Colapietro, liberal arts research professor at Pennsylvania State University in the Departments of Philosophy and African American Studies, concentrates in his contribution, The Dissenting Voice of Charles Peirce: Individuality, Community, and Transfiguration, on the Bildungsgeschichte of the individual self. He focuses on the way in which Peirce takes the individual self to be a hypothesis that is forced upon the human organism by the need of making sense of the inevitable conflicts between the human animal’s own impulses or drives, on the one hand, and the inhibitions and testimony of others, on the other side. According to Colapietro, Peirce’s reconstruction of the development from immediate to differentiated consciousness is, at least remotely, akin to the kinds of transitions or transformations of consciousness traced by G. W. F. Hegel. He discusses this development in terms of an interrelation of functional and teleological unity. The human animal is by its constitution a functionally unified agent but becomes a personal agent by the incorporation of norms and ideals. Such teleological unity culminates in a transfiguration of our duties, carried out with a mindfulness of how they might contribute to the ever elusive realization of an actual community of mutual solicitude. Religion, conceived as a set of inherently communal practices, is, on Peirce’s account, the primary medium of this transfiguration: [r]eligion names, for this pragmatist, "a form of community (an ecclesia), the task of which is ‘to draw together the whole body of believers in the law of love into sympathetic unity of consciousness.’ " Thus, the narrow life of the individual self is expanded and rests in the collective unity of a church (or ecclesia). While Colapietro also touches upon the impact of this theory for the institutionalization of religion, he makes it clear that the standard opinion, according to which pragmatism offers a highly individualistic concept of religion, cannot be upheld without substantial modifications. This is all the more the case if the philosophy of Josiah Royce is counted in the pragmatist tradition. The following contributions by Hans Joas and Ludwig Nagl aim to enrich the view of pragmatist theory of religion by focusing on the interrelations between Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and Josiah Royce.

Hans Joas presents his chapter, Religious Experience and Its Interpretation: Reflections on James and Royce, as a building block to a systematic project: the double foundation of a pragmatist theory of religion in the empirical psychology of William James, on the one hand, and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, on the other. According to Joas, it belongs to the weaknesses of James’s theory of religion that it cannot account for processes articulating religious experience, because it lacks an appropriate concept of symbolic mediation between individual mental states and their intentional content. This calls for a connection of James’s theory of religion with Peircean semiotics. Against the backdrop of this systematic task of research, the late works of Josiah Royce, particularly The Sources of Religious Insight and The Problem of Christianity, become enormously important, as Joas argues, because they actually attempted such a connection already. Joas particularly focuses on Royce’s concept of the invisible church in the sense of a universal community of communication as a key to symbolic meaning and reasonableness of religious experience and insight. Joas examines Royce’s criticism of James and the potential as well as the limits of his attempt to synthesize James and Peirce. Far from simply playing out James against Royce, Joas also acknowledges the strengths of James in comparison with Royce’s philosophy of religion. With a certain similarity to the argumentations of Sami Pihlström and Christian Polke, he questions the idealistic dimension of Royce’s thinking that can be seen most clearly in his teleological conceptualization of history. His teleological worldview, says Joas, contradicts the irremediable precariousness of our existence and may not keep up with James’s subtle awareness of the contingency of individual existence and of history. Joas pleas for a synthesis of American pragmatism and German historicism to proceed in a direction of a pragmatist theory of religion, which integrates the semiotic theory of self and community with a nonteleological understanding of history.

The Viennese professor of philosophy Ludwig Nagl, in his chapter, Avoiding the Dichotomy of ‘either the individual or the collectivity’: Josiah Royce on Community, and on James’s Concept of Religion, pays special attention to Royce’s account of the social depth structure of religion as opposed to the celebration of progressive individualization in modern society. Royce, according to Nagl, resituates pragmatism by conceptualizing human understanding as a community-related type of knowledge that leans on Peircian semiotics. All knowledge … is mediated by signs…. If this is stated explicitly, it yields … the idea of communally concretized, de-transcendentalized ‘selves’—of ‘I’s’, which, as sign-using, entail the community of a ‘we’ … The community relatedness that is internal to the use of signs founds a structural counterweight to the egocentrism of modern individualism: community is an internally differentiated (possible) field of interactive learning taking place in processes of mutual reinterpretation, which has the potential to counteract individualistic trends and to turn individuals into responsible agents. The core of this idea is the Beloved Community, a source of a transfiguring experience fueled by reciprocal loyalty that turns man the individual into man the community, as Royce formulates it in The Problem of Christianity. According to Nagl, this transfiguration does not entail a marginalization of the individual self but rather its sublation (Hegel’s Aufhebung) in a higher state. Nagl discusses how Royce’s concept of community not only relates to Peirce’s substantial insight but also borrows from the way Kant and Hegel have conceptualized the relation between the self and the other.

The last two contributions to the anthology widen the view from the social realm of the interrelation between the individual and the community to cosmological and metaphysical questions about an account of the Absolute in terms of a post-Kantian philosophy that is aware of the developments in science and epistemology. For both, Hermann Deuser and Robert Cummings Neville, Peirce’s semiotics meets the standard of a contemporarily defendable position in metaphysics, cosmology, and philosophical theology. The contribution of Hermann Deuser, under the title Pragmatic or Pragmatist/Pragmaticist Philosophy of Religion?, starts out with a sketch of philosophical pragmatism’s basic idea, which according to Deuser stems from a simple observation: people’s … ‘behavioral patterns’ are determined in a polar field between the ‘feeling of believing’ and the associated ‘actions.’ What disturbs this perfectly natural ability to judge and necessitates restabilizing is ‘doubt,’ being a kind of destructive feedback that initiates a process of inquiry. Pragmatism eliminates the strict mutual separation between science and life and belief and knowledge. Deuser focuses on the implications of the theory of knowledge that derive from this correlation of life, belief, and doubt, and its foundation in a practical encounter with reality. Accordingly, for Deuser, Peirce’s late philosophy of pragmaticism … does not begin by defending religious belief in opposition to empirical knowledge. Rather, on the basis of displaying the connection of the believer’s first-person perspective with the semiotically informed process of inquiry that discloses the features of reality, Deuser aims at introducing Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics as a praxis-bound cosmology.

Robert Cummings Neville’s chapter, Theory of Religion in a Pragmatic Philosophical Theology, concludes the anthology. A professor of philosophy, religion, and theology at Boston University, and dean emeritus of its School of Theology and of Marsh Chapel, Neville develops the idea that our existence is shaped by ultimate realities; our well-being depends on how to exist in the awareness of the human condition and on achieving consonance with the internal requirements of the ultimate realities. We need to lend life a form that may integrate its disparate components and acknowledge our obligation to the otherness of what gets roped into our own matters but exists on its own rights and with its own integrity. Religions are ways of cultivating our awareness of the ultimate realities, which get symbolized in a sacred canopy (Peter Berger), and articulating them with various degrees of impact on our daily life. To live a religious life is to take orientation from a sacred worldview by means of which the ultimate realities symbolized in the sacred canopy of that worldview bear upon other domains of life given orientation by the worldview. The members of modern societies are often confronted with the challenge of coming to terms with various secular and religious orientations alike in their immediate surroundings—be it other family members, colleagues, or friends—and particularly coming to terms with them religiously. The actual religious situation today, for which we need theological guidance, is one in which communities are multiple, changing, and often very difficult to find, such that they can be oriented by a sacred worldview. A pragmatic theory of religion, according to Neville, offers the conceptual foundations of the theological guidance that is required to live one’s life well in the face of the ultimate realities. Neville’s chapter serves as a brief but instructive introduction into his three-volume Philosophical Theology and, above all, as a stimulating outlook on how to connect symbol theory, ontology, epistemology, existential philosophy, and practical theology on the basis of a Peircean approach to semiotics.

NOTES

1. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 51.

2. John Dewey, A Common Faith, in The Later Works, vol. 9, ed. John Dewey (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 13.

3. Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1913), xxi.

4. Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 37.

PRAGMATIC METHODOLOGY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Perspectives of Classical American Pragmatism

Christoph Seibert

The task I would like to work on is a very broad one.¹ It can be looked at from various points of view. For example, it can be dealt with in the way of comparing a pragmatic-oriented philosophy of religion with other philosophical outlooks. It can be illumed in the light of the question which particular version of pragmatic thinking is more appropriate to religion as its subject matter. Finally, it can be approached by regarding some particulars of the methodological question bound to pragmatic thinking as such. In my argument, I will focus on the latter, drawing on the resources of classical pragmatism in a rather generalizing way, whereby neglecting the logical and ontological differences that surely exist between its major thinkers.² Since the complex of themes at hand is widespread, my argument must remain quite sketchy for the most part, unfortunately leaving a lot of details unnoticed. It will proceed in three steps: Starting with preliminary remarks concerning some of the premises my argument rests on, I will continue reflecting on the thought process in general, concluding with an elaboration of the process of thinking about religion in particular. In the course of this, I will present two guiding principles that are inevitable for developing more refined criteria, leading to a pragmatic theory of religion.

Preliminary Remarks

Since the following argument focuses on questions of methodology, it seems appropriate to begin with several considerations of the concept of methodology. Consisting of the two terms λόγος of μέθοδος, the latter can be generally specified as a controlled procedure gaining specific results certain ends can be reached from.³ It is worth noting that methodically met ends are not accomplished either in an arbitrary way or by pure chance but in the course of a controlled manner of activity. Hence, a method is an activity-guiding principle: It not only implies activity; it is rather rooted and embodied in a certain kind of activity that we are used to calling conduct. Thus, a method can be defined as a procedure by which ends will be realized in ways of controlled conduct. As a consequence, talking about the λόγος of a method means talking about the reasons or principles orientating the different modes our conduct can take. In the following line of thought, I will specify some aspects of this thesis relevant for my further argument.

First of all, I suggest speaking of controlled conduct if the determinations of the relations between means and ends, which are essential for this kind,⁴ do not appear to be accidentally given but evolve in the course of acts of responsible self-determination. And since such acts imply choices on our part, we might say that the links between means and ends are determined within the course of more or less creative and reflective choices. We can thus not merely speak of controlled, but of self-controlled conduct. In saying this, the prefix self fulfills an important function, signifying that some sort of reflexivity is constitutive for this kind of activity. Preserving this first result, we are able to move a step further by paying attention to the agents that conduct their life in this manner. It follows that as agents they must be beheld as being capable of