The Putnam-Rorty Debate and the Pragmatist Revival

What Richard Rorty Taught Me

The Thinker

"Probably the most violent and aggressive act that any person can do to other persons is to invade their minds with ideas and twists of meaning which disturb the comforting security of things known and faith kept. Yet this is what I, as a teacher, am required to do."

R. W. Packer, "Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Dramatic Presentation" in Teaching in the Universities: No One Way, McGill-Queens University Press, 1974.

What Adolf Grunbaum Taught Me

As an undergraduate Philosophy and Classics major at the University of Pittsburgh in the late 1970's-early 1980's, I had the good fortune to take an honors seminar with Adolf Grunbaum on religion and science. Professor Grunbaum taught me many things in that seminar, not the least of which was how to read Freud both critically and appreciatively.

But the lesson that has been the most consistently useful to me in the decades since I took that class is one about the nature of scholarship: that it is a disciplined way of making sense of the world. Discipline involves asceticism--or, resistance to temptation. The scholar is one who resists the temptation to make claims about the world that lack adequate evidentiary warrant.

Of course, such an assertion requires further elaboration, for what constitutes evidentiary warrant for any given claim is subject to scholarly argument and dispute; and even where there is general agreement among scholars as to what constitutes evidence, there is still plenty of room to argue about what constitutes evidentiary adequacy. Grunbaum taught me to be sensitive to all of these vagaries of scholarship and many more besides.

In the end, scholarship involves the cultivation of habits of circumspection and reticence. Circumspection and reticence are the soul of scholarly tact.

The William James Problem

Throughout his writings, William James makes the (irrefutable) observation that faith is an ordinary part of human cognitive function. No one operates in the world on the basis of complete information. Instead, human beings rely heavily upon present sense data, past experience, reason and "common sense," in order to make judgments about how to proceed with their daily lives. Acting on the basis of this amalgam of information and interpretation involves assumptions about the reliability of all of its elements--in a word, "faith." For James, faith is very much a practical matter.

To this point, there is nothing problematic about James's thinking in this regard: he accurately describes ordinary human cognition and its attendant behaviors. An accurate description of cognitive behavior, however, is not the same thing as an epistemological justification of any given proposition. But James may be said to send mixed messages to students of religion who seek to move beyond the description of faith-in-action to a justification of that faith per se. One can always justify a particular instance of faith as an ordinary human response to a given situation--as one possible response among many. But that is a very limited notion of justification. It does not entitle one to conclude that faith as such is necessarily justified--only that it is practical. And yet this is precisely what many readers of James's writings on the psychology of religion claim that his thinking has authorized them to conclude. Is such a claim warranted? The answer may depend on what portion of James's work one reads (e.g., The Will To Believe may support this claim).

It is for this reason that I am often chary about the use of William James in the academic study of religion. I call this subtle slip from description to justification the "William James Problem" and, I am afraid, it is not a problem that we will be rid of any time soon.

Sacred Time, Sacred Space

Despite the fact that human beings often report experiencing "the sacred" or the Divine "break through" mundane time and space, such reports cannot be taken at face value. Human beings make time and space for that which they consider Divine or sacred. And there is no way to distinguish the construction of such time or space from the "event" which is said to occupy it.

The history of religions is the history of human subjectivity and its interpretation. It is through such interpretations that subjective experience is turned "inside out" as it were: made public via performances (verbal, physical). The residuum of these performances, where preserved, become artifacts--evidence of human activity, most certainly, but evidence of extra-human activity? This is something one can neither rule in or out.

The honest historian of religions cannot sing the old hymn "Glory, glory/Somebody touched me/Must have been the finger of the Lord" with any real conviction. She is denied the "first naivete," and Paul Ricoeur's "second naivete" isn't naivete at all: it is a consciously creative act, like midrash.

Religion is spilled poetry. It is a prayer-rug woven with impassioned intelligence, with "heart-sense," and put to daily use.

As the Romantics understood, "supernaturalism" is only natural.

From Spinoza Through Friedrich Schlegel To Wallace Stevens

In his "Talk On Mythology" (1799-1800), Friedrich Schlegel attempted to address the difficulty that the "modern poet" faces now that the scientific imagination has replaced the mythological one of "the ancients." This problem is analogous to that which faces the modern religious imagination: with the miraculous no longer credible, what is one to believe? It is a problem peculiar to Protestantism because of its emphasis upon belief, but all traditions are affected by this problem insofar as they depend upon the inculcated credulity of their adherents.

In response to the modern poet's dilemma, Schlegel proposed the invention of a new mythology developed from "that great phenomenon of our age," idealism. And yet, for Schlegel, it was an idealism that would give birth to "a new and infinite realism," one that "hover[ing] as it were over an idealistic ground, will emerge as poetry which indeed is to be based on the harmony of the ideal and real."

Interestingly, Schlegel considered Spinoza the great exemplar of this idealistically generated realism--most likely because, in his Tractatus, Spinoza looked to Nature as the ultimate source of the imagination, and he regarded the imagination as the stuff of prophecy.

This kind of Spinozistic/Romantic naturalism would inform the philosophy of George Santayana who would influence, in turn, the 20th century American poet, Wallace Stevens. Stevens would posit a tension between "the imagination" and "reality," and the "whole of Harmonium" that issued from it would, ultimately, fulfill Schlegel's prediction of a "new" [Modernist] mythology. Moreover, with Stevens we encounter an Alfarabian turn from metaphysics to rhetoric and from sui generis religion to spilled poetry.

[Quotations from Schlegel's Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms translated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, State College, Pa: The Pennsylvania State University Press (1968), pp. 81-88].