Abstract: Life is and has to be a moral struggle if we are not to collapse into the passivity of defeat; and this struggle in turn must reach out toward some religious aspirations or faith to sustain it. Such is William James's position, and he has consequently to be reckoned as a religious thinker. James's interest in religion is not an adventitious curiosity attached to his pragmatism; it is in fact central to his view of things, just as he believed the religious concern to be central to life itself. To attempt any critical judgment of him as a whole, we have to ask how well he has dealt with the phenomenon of religion. There is a peculiar paradox about any expression of the religious attitude. It seeks to express a subject matter that is perennial, and yet the mode of its expression must always be borrowed from its time and place. And indeed the more powerful its expression, the more likely it is to borrow all the coloration of time and place. Lacking these, it speaks to us only vacuously. The Varieties of Religious Experience improves as a classic with each rereading. A classic, it has been said, is a book capable of being reborn with each generation. The rebirth is nonetheless vital if it also provokes rebellion. In the case of religious experience there is the further peculiarity that we are dealing with what cannot ultimately be put into language. Any expression of it will therefore be alive to the extent that it provokes us to attempt our own halting and ineffectual effort to restate the unstatable. The Varieties lives with us in this provocative and appealing way. At the same time, one must
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot