Ham said to krimel: William James wrote in a time when religion was dominant in man's thoughts, and he wanted to make philosophy as pragmatic (i.e., empirically-based) as science. Needless to say, he is not one of my favorite philosophers. About all he can say against belief in the absolute is that "practically, it is less beautiful [than rational], for in representing the deepest reality of the world as static and without a history, it loosens the world's hold upon our sympathies and leaves the soul of it foreign." ...
dmb butts in: As James saw it, the two great rivals in philosophy were rationalism and empiricism and philosophers line up on one side or the other because of their temperament rather than logic, evidence or facts. Its not that these are unimportant but neither side has an advantage and so temperament more or less becomes the deciding factor. In other words, he thought they were more or less equally valid in terms of knowable support but that the pictures they painted were very different and appealed to very different tastes, if you will. Absolutism in this case is Hegel or Bradley, the Idealists who thought that in the long run, all was right with God. James found this picture of reality to be morally disgusting. It too easily tolerates suffering, implicitly supports the status quo and otherwise makes man morally inert. He objected to determinisim for the same reasons. And the alienating aspect horrified him too. That's what he's talking about in this complaint. His own temperament demand s the opposite of an unsympathetic, foreign world. In fact, he describes his own metaphysics as the most intimate of all philosophies, one in which god and man are made of the same stuff, a monism like Pirsig's in which we are thoroughly embedded and engaged. "Probably the weightiest contribution to our feeling of the rationality of the universe which the notion of the absolute brings is the assurance that however disturbed the surface may be, at bottom all is well with the cosmos-central peace abiding at the heart of endless agitation. This conception is rational in many ways, beautiful aesthetically, beautiful intellectually (could we only follow it into detail), and beautiful morally, if the enjoyment of security can be accounted moral. Practically it is less beautiful; for, as we saw in our last lecture, in representing the deepest reality of the world as static and without a history, it loosens the world's hold upon our sympathies and leaves the soul of it foreign. Nevertheless it does give peace, and that kind of rationality is so paramountly demanded by men that to the end of time there will be absolutists, men who choose belief in a static eternal, rather than admit that the finite world of change and striving, even with a God as one of the strivers, is itself eternal." - William James "A Pluralistic Universe" Brighter days and happy new year to all. _________________________________________________________________ The best games are on Xbox 360. Click here for a special offer on an Xbox 360 Console. http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/wheretobuy/ Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
