Self, God and Immortality
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Self, God and Immortality

A Jamesian Investigation

Eugene Fontinell

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Self, God and Immortality

A Jamesian Investigation

Eugene Fontinell

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About This Book

Can we who have been touched by the scientific, intellectual, and experimental revolutions of modern and contemporary times still believe with and degree of coherence and consistency that we as individual persons are immortal. Indeed, is there even good cause to hope that we are? In examining the present relationship of reason to faith, can we find justifying reasons for faith? These are the central questions in Self, God, and Immortality, a compelling exercise in philosophical theology. Drawing upon the works of William James and the principles of American Pragmatism, Eugene Fontinell extrapolates carefully from "data given in experience" to a model of the cosmic process open to the idea that individual identity may survive bodily dissolution. Presupposing that the possibility of personal immortality has been established in the first part, the second part of the essay is concerned with desirability. Here, Fontinell shows that, far from diverting attention and energies from the crucial tasks confronting us here and now, such belief can be energizing and life enhancing. The wider importance of Self, God, and Immortality lies in its pressing both immortality-believers and terminality-believers to explore both the metaphysical presuppositions and the lived consequences of their beliefs. It is the author's expressed hope that such explorations, rather than impeding, will stimulate co-operative efforts to create a richer and more humane community.Self, God and Immortality: A Jamesian Investigation is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

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Year
2018
ISBN
9780823283132
PART I
Personal Immortality: Possibility and Credibility
CHAPTER 1
World or Reality as “Fields”
Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.
I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals,
I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,
I hear all sound running together, combined, fused or following,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles, and that we call Being.
—Walt Whitman
“Song of Myself”
We know existence by participating in existence.
 Existence then is the primary datum. But this existence is not my own existence as an isolated self. If it were, then the existence of any Other would have to be proved, and it could not be proved. What is given is the existence of a world in which we participate.
—John Macmurray
Persons in Relation
Some years ago John J. McDermott suggested that it was “unfortunate that James did not stay with the language he utilized in preparing for his Psychological Seminary of 1895–1896. At that time, he resorted to the metaphor of ‘fields’ in order to account descriptively for the primal activity of the process of experience.”1 While I share McDermott’s view, my concern here is not primarily to explicate James’s metaphysics in terms of fields but to utilize his language as well as that of others to construct a “field” model, for which my primary purpose is to employ it in the development of a “self” open to the possibility of personal immortality. Since a key feature of both the self and the mode of immortality I wish to suggest is their continuity with the experienced world or reality, it will be necessary first to present the distinguishing characteristics of this world, beginning with “fields” as the primary metaphor, in an effort to understand all reality. It must be stressed that there is no pretense of giving a mirror image of some outer “reality in itself” when reality or the world is described as a plurality of fields. A pragmatic approach consciously employs its primary terms metaphorically, having as its chief aim the development of a metaphysical language that will serve to expand, deepen, and enrich human life through varied and diverse modes of participation in reality, rather than claiming that such language gives us a conceptual “picture” of a reality essentially independent of human experience.
Let me begin with a consideration of James’s notes for the Psychological Seminary, in which “fields” is employed as the central category.2 James considers three suppositions necessary “if 
 one wants to describe the process of experience in its simplest terms with the fewest assumptions.” Before looking at these suppositions, we should focus on the sentence just cited. As so often happens with James, his graceful style and felicitous expression mask the profound and complex question with which he is struggling. In this instance, of course, it is nothing less than the perennially simple and recurring question: “What is reality?” For James, this question, like all questions, must be answered in terms of experience, but that attempt immediately gives rise to the allied question, “What is experience?”
Now one might concede that such ponderous questions are the stock-in-trade of those usually genial but often peculiar beings called philosophers, but for those who live by “common sense,” they are of little concern. As I have already indicated, though few of us—even those involved in the philosophical game—are metaphysicians in the full sense of that term, we are all metaphysicians in the sense of thinking and acting within a set of ideas, principles, and assumptions. When James and other pragmatists suggest a language shift, then, they are not trying to refute “common sense” so much as they are trying to make us aware of ways of looking at reality that are obstacles to richer ways of living. While the concern of this essay is not with the technical specifics and the historical polemics in which the pragmatists were engaged, it is still important to note that they were attempting to bring forth ways of thinking that were in sharp conflict with many deeply ingrained perspectives and intellectual customs.
This is best illustrated, perhaps, by presenting James’s three “field” suppositions and indicating some of the notions to which they are opposed.
(1) “Fields” that “develop,” under the categories of continuity with each other—[categories such as]: sameness and otherness [of] things [or of] thought streams, fulfillment of one field’s meaning in another field’s content, “postulation” of one field by another, cognition of one field by another, etc.
From the first part of this supposition we learn that reality is pluralistic (“fields”), processive (“develop”), and continuous (“continuity”). If we add “relationality,” which is implied in the categories described, we have four distinctive features of the world within which I will develop my views on the self and immortality. For the moment it is sufficient to note that what is implicitly rejected by this field, or processive-relational, view is any reality that is unchanging or unrelated.
(2) But nothing postulated whose whatness is not of some nature given in fields—that is, not of field-stuff, datum-stuff, experience-stuff, content. No pure ego, for example, and no material substance.
In this supposition we have James’s radical rejection of all modes of essentialism, whether materialistic, idealistic, or dualistic. The fuller implications of this supposition will emerge as the character and role of fields is described, but it is already evident that to view reality as “fields” excludes any underlying substance having universal and unchanging essential characteristics.
(3) All the fields commonly supposed are incomplete, and point to a complement beyond their own content. The final content 
 is that of a plurality of fields, more or less ejective to each other, but still continuous in various ways.3
The importance of this supposition for my purposes cannot be exaggerated. It provides the ground for the recognition of individuals while avoiding any atomistic individualism or isolating egotism. While all fields are “incomplete” and continuous with others, they are not so continuous that reality is reduced to an undifferentiated monistic flux. “Plurality” is just as real as “continuity,” and when we add to these three suppositions James’s later notes that there is “around every field a wider field that supercedes it 
 (the truth of every moment thus lying beyond itself),” we are presented with a world that can be most succinctly described as “fields within fields within fields.
”4
“What have we gained,” James asks, by substituting fields “for stable things and changing ‘thoughts’?”
We certainly have gained no stability. The result is an almost maddening restlessness.
 But we have gained concreteness. That is, when asked what we mean by knowing, ego, physical thing, memory, etc., we can point to a definite portion of content with a nature definitely realized, and nothing is postulated whose nature is not fully given in experience-terms.
The goal of “concreteness”—fidelity to concrete experience—would appear to be simple and easy of realization, but it is deceptively so, as a diverse group of late modern and contemporary philosophers have attested. John Herman Randall, Jr., maintains that metaphysics can best be described as “the criticism of abstractions.” He further claims that this is
the metaphysical method of Bradley, Dewey, Whitehead; of the Hegel upon whom they all draw; of the continental post-Hegelians, criticizing the “intellectualism” of the Hegelian tradition in the light of “life” (the Lebensphilosophie of Nietzsche and Dilthey) or Existenz (Kierkegaard); of the phenomenologists, criticizing the formalism of the Neo-Kantians (Husserl), and of the existentialists (Heidegger, Jaspers, Tillich); of Bergson, opposing experienced durĂ©e to “The ‘t’ of physics,” and of William James opposing “immediate experience” to the empiricism of Mill; and of many other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophies of experience.5
Randall is not suggesting that the specific features of the views of such a variety of thinkers are identical or even always compatible. Whatever the differences, however, the importance of their converging emphasis upon the primacy of concrete experience and the rigorous reflection demanded for its apprehension should not be minimized. Throughout this essay, therefore, I will repeatedly stress the necessity of relating any speculations, extrapolations, or models to the experienced world within which we live, think, and act. What attracts me to James is his passionately relentless effort to be as faithful as possible to the range and varieties of experience. Something of this effort is expressed by Ralph Barton Perry:
Thus by the inclusion of experiences of tendency, meaning, and relatedness, by a recognition of the more elusive fringes, margins, and transitions that escape a coarser sensibility, or a naive practicality, or an unconsciously artificial analysis—by such inclusion, the field of immediately apprehended particularity becomes a continuum which is qualified to stand as the metaphysical reality. (TC, I:460)
Another important aspect of James’s emphasis upon and quest for concreteness is its strongly personalistic character. Many years ago, Robert Pollock stressed this relation between James’s concern for concrete reality and his celebration of personal activity:
Evidently, for James, pragmatism is an “attitude of orientation” by which man can achieve a vital contact with concrete reality and along innumerable paths, by aiming not simply at the abstract relation of the mere onlooker but at a relation that is personal, direct and immediate, and involving participation with one’s whole heart and being.
 James was endeavoring to take seriously the fact that reality does not address itself to abstract minds but to living persons inhabiting a real world, to whom it makes known something of its essential quality only as they go out to meet it through action. It is this concrete relation of man and his world, realized in action, which accounts for the fact that our power of affirmation outruns our knowledge, as when we feel or sense the truth before we know it. To James, therefore, pragmatism was a doctrine designed to enlighten the whole of human action and to give meaning to man’s irrepressible need to act.6
One final point concerning the centrality of concrete experience in the thought of James has to do with differentiating his view from narrow and excluding modes of empiricism. A text from Perry will suffice to underline the openness of James’s world: “This fluid, interpenetrating field of given existence, as James depicts it, embracing the insight of religious mysticism and of Bergsonian intuition, is far removed from the sensationalistic atomism of the discredited empiricists” (TC, I:461).
CHARACTERISTICS OF “FIELDS”
There is an inevitable circularity involved in discussing or analyzing any alleged “ultimate” category of reality. For example, if reality is best described in terms of “fields,” as is being suggested here, then it would seem that we must describe fields themselves in terms of “fields.” Since pragmatism does not aim at or believe possible any definitive conceptual description of reality, however, this circularity is neither vicious nor particularly unsettling. The aim of pragmatism is participation in, rather than abstract representation of, reality. Any circularity involved in the analysis of fields, therefore, must be judged on its ability to expand and enrich experience in both its explanatory and lived dimensions.
Bearing in mind that “field” is a metaphor and that images or concepts are employed in its analysis for the purposes of insight and utilization rather than definitive description, let me touch briefly upon the chief characteristics of a “field.” A field can be described as a processive-relational complex, but this term would be grossly misleading if we imagined that “things” called processes and “things” called relations have combined to make a field. Nor is it adequate to posit a plurality of processes that subsequently enter into relations such that fields result. Given the limitation of language and its inevitable tendency to reify and detemporalize reality, perhaps the best we can do is to express the constitution of fields dialectically. Hence, we must insist that processes are relational and relations are processive. There are no unrelated processes and no nonprocessive relations. The concrete reality (actually realities) is always a unity involving an ever-changing multiplicity. Depending on the specific field, these multiple “elements” will be variously named: for example, electrons, neutrons, and protons in the atomic field; molecules, cells, and genes in the organic field; planets in the solar field.
Now negatively speaking, this field view rejects any “ultimate” elements or atoms or particles understood as indivisible, impenetrable, unchangeable units. This does not, however, exclude all modes of metaphysical atomism. Whitehead, for example, maintains that “the ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism.
 But atomism does not exclude complexity and universal relativity. Each atom is a system of all things.”7 Whitehead’s label for these ultimate atoms is “actual entities,” which he describes as “drops of experience, complex and interdependent” (PR, 28).
The field metaphor that I am constructing must acknowledge a character of interdependence both “within” and among fields (I use quotation marks to call attention to the relative character of “withinness”). An adequate field theory, from my perspective, must allow for a multiplicity of distinct individuals while avoiding any enclosure or isolation of these individuals. As the James text with which we began indicates, fields are continuous with other fields; hence there are no absolute, definitive beginnings and endings of any individual field. Whitehead expresses something of this continuity: “When we consider the question with microscopic accuracy, there is no definite boundary to determine where the body begins and external nature ends.
 The body requires the environment in order to exist.”8 Of course, it must be quickly added that discreteness is just as real and fundamental as continuity. We cannot...

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