The Varieties of Transcendence

Pragmatism and the Theory of Religion

Hans Joas, Matthias Jung, Magnus Schlette, Hermann Deuser

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780823267576
• eBook ISBN: 9780823267583
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Pragmatism in Philosophy

The Varieties of Transcendence traces American pragmatist thought on religion and its relevance for theorizing religion today. The volume establishes pragmatist concepts of religious individualization as powerful alternatives to the more common secularization discourse. In stressing the importance of Josiah Royce's work, it emphasizes religious individualism's compatibility with community. At the same time, by covering all of the major classical pragmatist theories of religion, it shows their kinship and common focus on the interrelation between the challenges of contingency and the semiotic significance of transcendence.

THE DISSENTING VOICE OF CHARLES PEIRCE

Individuality, Community, and Transfiguration

Vincent Colapietro

Introduction

I will begin by sketching in both very broad, quick strokes and also highly selective, salient details C. S. Peirce’s nuanced account of the individual self. Then, I will turn to the task of indicating the most important respects in which a religious life,1 as defined by him, is relevant to an adequate conception of individual selfhood. Finally, I will conclude by considering the complex relationship between traditional religions, such as Christianity, and the ongoing task of cultivating a genuinely critical sensibility. Even if one does not agree with Peirce’s claim that “like a plucked flower, [religion’s] destiny is to wilt and fade,” the candid observer cannot help seeing the historical record of traditional religions as a scene in which degeneration time and again calls for renewal. In this connection, the critique of idolatry, driving toward not only the institutionalized forms of religious practice but also the very idea of religion as a shared form of human life, merits the most serious consideration.

At the outset, however, it is imperative to recall that Peirce took community to be integral to religion. But, in reference to religion no less than science, participation in the life of a community is indispensable for fostering critical awareness of one’s finite, fallible, and indeed fallen individuality. The critical individual is first and foremost a social actor, one whose critical sensibility traces its roots to its entangled experience with other such actors. In particular, the critical function of religious consciousness, as such consciousness is conscientiously or deliberately cultivated by members of an ecclesia2 (a community of individuals called forth by historically resounding words, words worthy of the most painstaking preservation and the most charitable interpretation), will be stressed in this conclusion. Religion as an object of critique is, in no small measure, a necessary feature of the religious life, since religion in the form advocated by Peirce is first and foremost an instrument of critique, above all, self-criticism.3 Indeed, religion—specifically, Christianity or “the Buddhisto-Christian religion”4—is for him as much as anything else a resource for the critique of idolatry, one of the most destructive forms of the idolatrous stance being that of elevating one’s own religion to the status of the divine. The secular critiques of religious traditions are, in no small measure, quasi-immanent critiques tracing their roots to these traditions themselves.5 If we fail to hear, for example, Marx’s utterances as, in some respects, echoes of Isaiah’s words in that biblical author’s efforts to call his people back to their own ideals, have we not failed to hear them in their full resonance?6 Or if we fail to hear in Sigmund Freud’s elevation of Λόγος to the status of a god a continuation of the very tradition that, in the name of this god, he repudiates, have we not likewise failed to grasp his definitive affirmation in its full force?

The human animal is, for Peirce, a social being. This does not make any human being necessarily gregarious or even sociable. But, then, reticence and unsociability are intelligible attributes only in reference to social actors. That human beings are also religious animals bears upon both their sociality and reflexivity, both their inescapable locus in shared forms of life and their critical stance toward those forms. But the individual is not dissolved by the social functions it embodies or the social roles it plays. Despite appearances, the individual as such is integral to the drama of life, as depicted by Peirce. To stress the communal character of the individual does not entail eliminating the individuality of those singularly identifiable7 social actors bearing proper names such as “Charles Peirce” or “William James.” Especially given Peirce’s stress of the privative character of individual selfhood (“the individual man … is only a negation”), this, however, requires explication.

Peirce on Individuality

Peirce concludes “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” the second in the cognition series8 published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1868,9 by quoting Shakespeare’s lines from Measure by Measure spoken by Isabella: “Man, proud man, [Drest in a little brief authority].10 Most ignorant of what he is most assured, His glassy essence.”11 His anti-Cartesianism could not be more pointed: far from the individual self or consciousness being transparent to itself, it is opaque to a degree hardly realized by that individual; far from it being apodictically certain or functionally foundational, it is invincibly uncertain and (at most) heuristically secondary. This opacity results as much as anything from hubris (“man, proud man”). That is, it is at least as much a moral failing as a cognitive one. Indeed, the cognitive deficiency is rooted in moral failure.12

Peirce’s invocation of these lines from Shakespeare’s play are intended to underscore his own concluding words: “The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything about from his fellows and from what he and they are to be, is only a negation.”13 This depiction points back to one of the pivotal points in the first essay in the cognition series, Peirce’s answer to the question: “Whether we have an intuitive self-consciousness?”14 His answer is emphatic: we lack such intuitive self-consciousness. The human organism at an early stage of its experiential growth, but the human organism conceived precisely as an embodied agent surrounded by more mature human beings (especially ones solicitous for the safety of the child), discovers itself primarily in and through frustrations and failures, the often-infuriating inhibitions of its movements by overpowering others and the painful surprises resulting from its own actions.15 The very young organism can draw inferences long before it knows itself, and, indeed, it comes to know itself as the result of inference. The hypothesis of a locus of error and ignorance proves requisite to render intelligible the course of its experience.

Self-awareness is not given at the outset of a human life. It is rather attained in the course of experience, albeit at a rather early stage of human development. Self and self-consciousness are born twins, there being no self without reflexivity but there being more to the self than what that agent can ever know about itself. The individual self is, according to Peirce, a hypothesis forced upon the human organism. More fully, it is forced upon the individual by the otherwise irresolvable conflicts inevitably confronted by that organism in its struggles to gain a foothold in its actual world, its social world as much if not more than its immediate physical environment. The experience of this organism is so confusing as to be debilitating, so much so that the conception of a locus of error and ignorance is framed in order to make sense out of its experience. More than anything else, these confusions are the result of the inevitable conflicts between the human animal’s own impulses or drives, on the one side, and the inhibitions and testimony of others, on the other side. What might be described as a conflict of wills (though on the side of the infant the inchoate, blind impulses of the very young child hardly constitute a human will) is critical for the emergence of self-consciousness.16 The occasionally willful, oppositional self of the infant is, by the inherent drive of its own irresistible experience, brought to distinguish, however indistinctly and uncertainly at first, its individual consciousness from its immediate world, including above all the consciousnesses of others. The transition from an immediate consciousness completely immersed in the given world to a differentiated consciousness beginning to acquire the capacity to distinguish itself in variable ways from its immediate circumstances is, in at least its broad contours, akin to the kinds of transitions or transformations of consciousness traced by G. W. F. Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit and elsewhere. Accordingly, there is something altogether appropriate about an essay in which this transition is explained by Peirce in this way appearing in the journal founded by W. T. Harris.

As with Hegel, the power of the negative—the capacity of the organism to differentiate itself from others (e.g., the capacity of the individual embodied self to attain a consciousness of itself as such)—is creative,17 not simply negative or destructive. Even so, Peirce, at the conclusion of the article from which I have quoted at the outset of my exploration, stresses the negative: “The individual man … is only a negation.” There is, however, implicit in Peirce’s negative characterization of the individual self, precisely as an embodied agent conscious of its individuality or “separateness,” a positive portrait. It is certainly not insignificant that Peirce, here and in numerous other places, chose to cast the individual self in an extremely negative light.18 But it is illicit to take Peirce’s stance toward the self—the finite self in its irreducible singularity or secondness—as simply what it is depicted to be in such pronouncements as “the individual self is a mere negation.” For such selves envisioned in community with others, moreover, in reference to what they and the communities in and through which they realize their very individuality are to be in the later stages of their dramatic development, is anything but a mere negation. Such selves are concretely embodied loci of power and purpose,19 who by virtue of the effective integration of a staggeringly complex array of separately effective dispositions can exercise self-control to a remarkable degree. The self is, for Peirce, a locus of error and ignorance, but it is, no less, a locus of power and purpose.20 And this has direct bearing on Peirce’s philosophical stance toward the religious dimension of human existence. It may even be that, for him, nothing short of an explicitly religious conception of the self will provide us with a maximally adequate conception of that self. It is crucial to recall, for example, that scientific inquiry is described by Peirce as one of the most appropriate forms of religious worship. The devotion of the scientist to the discovery of truth has, at least in his judgment, a quality akin to the religious, if it is not simply an instance of the religious.21

Of course, the positive portrait of the individual self, conceived precisely as a locus of power and purpose (that from which efficacious exertions flow and also that to which a staggeringly wide range of animating purposes is ascribed), is more finely and fully detailed by Josiah Royce than Peirce. But, in the broad outlines of this ultimately teleological account, the substance of Peirce’s position significantly overlaps with Royce’s. This is especially true when we di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Pragmatic Methodology in the Philosophy of Religion: Perspectives of Classical American Pragmatism
• Insomnia on a Moral Holiday: On the Moral Luck, Reward, and Punishment of a Jamesian “Sick Soul”
• Expressive Theism: Personalism, Pragmatism, and Religion
• Ontological Faith in Dewey’s Religious Idealism
• Qualitative Experience and Naturalized Religion: An Inner Tension in Dewey’s Thought?
• Pragmatism, Naturalism, and Genealogy in the Study of Religion
• “… How you understand … can only be shown by how you live”: Putnam’s Reconsideration of Dewey’s Common Faith
• A Brief History of Theosemiotic: From Scotus through Peirce and Beyond
• “Man’s highest developments are social”: The Individual and the Social in Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion
• The Dissenting Voice of Charles Peirce: Individuality, Community, and Transfiguration
• Religious Experience and Its Interpretation: Reflections on James and Royce
• Avoiding the Dichotomy of “either the individual or the collectivity”: Josiah Royce on Community, and on James’s Concept of Religion
• Pragmatic or Pragmatist/Pragmaticist Philosophy of Religion?
• Theory of Religion in a Pragmatic Philosophical Theology
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index of Names
• Subject Index
• Series Page