My holy text

The most important book I've read in the last 10 years

Recently I finished the little booklet Pragmatism by the great philosopher and psychologist William James. It’s a series of lectures on the philosophical tradition of pragmatism, delivered in Boston in 1907, three years before his death.

I’ve known that I was a pragmatist for a long time, but due to the waters I was swimming in, I never appreciated the radical implications of pragmatism outside the boundaries of science. I was opinionated about how pragmatism should be applied within the boundaries of science itself, but it stopped there. I did not understand how radically liberating Pragmatism truly is for your whole attitude toward reality—how it allows you to discard a soulless materialist description of the universe while remaining completely consistent with our scientific knowledge. How it allows you to stop asking whether God exists, and instead ask how real the Gods are. How it allows you to be neither a naïve monist nor a hard-nosed empiricist.

Pragmatism has ended up being the most important book I’ve read in a very long time. It is the book that comes the closest to being able to serve as my bible. I cannot summarize the contents of this book better than James’s last beautiful page:

I cannot start upon a whole theology at the end of this last lecture; but when I tell you that I have written a book on men's religious experience, which on the whole has been regarded as making for the reality of God, you will perhaps exempt my own pragmatism from the charge of being an atheistic system. I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangents to the wider life of things. But, just as many of the dog's and cat's ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs and cats have daily living proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own. You see that pragmatism can be called religious, if you allow that religion can be pluralistic or merely melioristic in type. But whether you will finally put up with that type of religion or not is a question that only you yourself can decide. Pragmatism has to postpone dogmatic answer, for we do not yet know certainly which type of religion is going to work best in the long run. The various overbeliefs of men, their several faith-ventures, are in fact what are needed to bring the evidence in. You will probably make your own ventures severally. If radically tough, the hurly-burly of the sensible facts of nature will be enough for you, and you will need no religion at all. If radically tender, you will take up with the more monistic form of religion: the pluralistic form, with its reliance on possibilities that are not necessities, will not seem to afford you security enough. But if you are neither tough nor tender in an extreme and radical sense, but mixed as most of us are, it may seem to you that the type of pluralistic and moralistic religion that I have offered is as good a religious synthesis as you are likely to find. Between the two extremes of crude naturalism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism on the other, you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require.

Pragmatistic theist. So that’s what I am.

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