AtD/VL-related: The Varieties of Religious Experience

[alice wellintown]

OUR judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on
the feelings the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be
precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only
because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we
were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind
could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a
stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in
life more valuable or significant than any other.

Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat,
is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the
feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.

We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties
to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own
duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth.
But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with
which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in
their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the
stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the
significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so
far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other
persons' conditions or ideals.

Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more
intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of
friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life
significant for the other!—we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or
smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and
art. As you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon,
what sort of a judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior?


On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 7:52 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> When I first read Vineland, back in early 1990, I was kinda surprised to
> find the William James
> book title dropped on page 369, since it did not exactly seem necessary to
> bring over Jess's
> Emerson quote. I took this as a hint and, like perhaps the one or other of
> you too, read the
> book later on in the 1990s. [My experience with philosophical pragmatism in
> general is: Dewey,
> any time I try to read him, gives me narcoleptic seizures, but George
> Herbert Mead is a still
> underrated genius!] As the title already suggests, one of the basic
> thesisses of William James is that
> the religious needs of people do differ. They are not identical. In Jamesian
> terms (see the beginning
> of lecture XX) we can observe the Vineland scene as 'religious' insofar as
> there is a new taste for
> life, experienced as a gift plus manifested in forms of lyrical enchantment
> AND [James says: "or"]
> in gestalt of a call for seriousness and heroism. Right on, right on!
>
> In Pynchon's books one can find all kinds of religious bzw. magical
> practices; what interests me
> here is: Can you find other explicit refs to the Jamesian phenomenology of
> the religious mind?
>
> Maybe I did. Having started my regular AtD re-read, I had a good laugh last
> night. Please do note
> the last sentence!
>
> "An old aerostat hand by now, Pugnax had also learned, like the rest of the
> crew, to respond to 'calls
> of nature' by proceeding to the downwind side of the gondola, resulting in
> surprises among the surface populations below, but not often enough, or even
> notably enough, for anyone to begin to try to record, much less coordinate
> reports of, these lavatorial assaults from the sky. They entered rather the
> realm of folklore, superstition, or perhaps, if one does not mind stretching
> the definitions, the
> religious." (p. 5)
>
> This is, of course, (also) satirical, but my association machine spat out
> the Vineland ref at once. And then we should remember what William [Pugnax
> reads rather Henry] James tells us in lecture XIV (am
> back-translating, again, from the German edition, this time pp. 336-7):
>
> "WE cannot distinguish between natural and supernatural effects, nor
> recognize among the supernatural effects the ones coming from the grace of
> God in contrast to those being falsifications
> done by the devil."
>
> Personally I think that taking into account to piss down on people is less
> problematic than Benny
> Profane's wish to piss out the sun.
>
>
> Happy Sunday!
>
> Kai
>
>