Towards Metaphysics of Religious Diversity: a Jamesian

Towards Metaphysics of Religious Diversity: A Jamesian

Investigation

Christian Polke

Georg-August-University of Goettingen

What kind of diversity? Which kind of metaphysics?

I start with some personal remarks: Since last year I am a member of our diversity committee in my faculty in Goettingen. Whereas in former times it was mainly the duty of such commissions to be mainly aware of gender problems and thereby to help installing affirmative actions in direction of gender equality, it is now no less part of our daily tasks to sensitize for questions of all kind of diversity, including different cultural and ethnic backgrounds and of course issues of disability access. But why am I telling you that? Because during the last 12 months I start to think about the concept of “diversity” which is used or better is underlying all different programs we are organizing. What is its inner meaning? And, moreover, why do we usually value diversity in an affirmative way, not only in “diversity policies”, but within our schools and universities, not forget in international business companies?

The term “diversity” is originally taken from biology. In that area, biodiversity means variety of species within a genus. According to the United Nations Environment Programme

(UNEP), biodiversity is typically measured by the variation of genetic type, species, and even on the general level of our ecosystem. Following this description, the maintenance of biodiversity becomes more and more a central task for our contemporary age. However,

1 already the transmission of our key term “diversity” from the world of non-human animals and living beings to the world of humans is at first glance in no sense plausible because as a species the homo sapiens sapiens does not show any longer a variation of either, its genetic type or its physiology. Therefore, one can only metaphorically speak of human diversity, at least when it comes to biological conditions. Nevertheless, the term has been successfully introduced not only into contemporary debates on cultural politics but even more into legislation. If one now is – like me – invited to speak on religious diversity, one faces the challenge first of all to clarify which kind of diversity we are talking about when we try to develop something like a metaphysics of religious diversity. At least, in my position as one of the diversity manager in our department, what is expected from me, has nothing to do with any kind of metaphysics. Thanks to God!

If we take, for example, the relevant literature on this topic, it fairly seems impossible to draw a clear distinction between what people call “religious diversity” and what is discussed under the term of “religious pluralism”. In his recent study on “Religious Diversity. Philosophical and Political Dimensions”, Roger Trigg deals with numerous aspects of our problem, i.e.

“Religious Freedom”, “Is Religion only Subjective?”, “Relativism and Religious Faith”,

“Religion and Truth” etc. However, throughout his argumentation it becomes in no way clear why we should use the term “religious diversity” instead of “religious plurality” or “religious pluralism”. And the same is true for most other influential writings on this topic. So I have no choice but to propose my own predefinition which is more narrow and more distinctive when it comes to plausible alternative key terms. For the following, I define “religious diversity” as the variety of individual and communal beliefs and faiths that properly includes questions of ultimate meaning and ultimate reality but is always referred to an individual´s own life- options. In contrast to “religious plurality” or “religious pluralism” I thereby emphasize the role of individual persons to hold on or to change their beliefs and faiths, or – what is even

2 more widespread – to vary different sets of religious convictions and thereby to create idiosyncrasies. That does not mean to underestimate the role of religious traditions and communal commitments. Moreover, it can easily be shown that without any religious social settings to which people can affiliate, religious beliefs can hardly occur or continue.

However, as for other social aspects, the concept of “religious diversity” is tighter bound to the ideas of religious freedom and – as we will see – of the individual person´s “Right to

Believe”. Thereby it remains true: “Beliefs matters. Specific ideas of what is true matter.

However inconvenient this may be, we cannot dismiss them all or pretend they are about something different”1 because then we no longer can speak of religious diversity. “If, on the other hand, we say that because there are so many competing views” – maybe so many as people exist2 – “they are probably all false, we are merely substituting another belief of our own about what is true.”3

Thus, even when we are dealing with religious diversity, metaphysical questions arise.

Moreover, strictly speaking, we are always dealing with religious diversities because there can be several different aspects of or angles within religious traditions and life-forms, within religious attitudes and temperaments that can function as a measurement criterion for which kind of diversity we are focussing on. And this may even be the easiest and almost convincing answer to another serious question, especially asked by our culturalist and

1 Roger Trigg, Religious Diversity. Philosophical and Political Dimensions, Cambridge University Press: New York 2014, p. 94. 2 However, there is some truth in this statement, even from a standpoint of religious absolutism as the following quote from the former Cardinal Ratzinger and later Pope Benedict XVI. illustrates: Asked by the interviewer “How many ways are there to God”, Ratzinger answered: “As many as there are people.” (cf. J. Ratzinger, Salt on Earth: The Church at the End of the Millenium. An Interview with Peter Seewald, Ignatius Press: San Francisco 1997, p. 171.) Of course, this statement does not include a variety of different religious truths beside (catholic) Christianity, but it refers to existential forms and ways of individual religious persons. Thus, there is an affirmative meaning of religious diversity regarding the individual way of each believer or non-believer, even for a conservative Catholic theologian. 3 Roger Trigg, Religious Diversity (fn. 1), 94.

3 postmodern friends: “Why at all looking for a metaphysics of religious diversity?” Because it is not once for all clear in what way religious diversity matters and to what extent these issues and their related phenomena have to be critically examined.

Now, regarding my other initial question (in the headline), “What kind of metaphysics?”, I can easily refer to my colleague Mikel Burley who persuasively distinguished in his paper

“two main kinds of enterprise”, namely “enquiry into diverse religious metaphysics” and

“enquiry into ultimate reality”4. Where the former type has been conceptualized in the works of John Hick, John B. Cobb, Jr. and others, the latter type is the one Burley prefers, and this for good reasons. Especially in the case of John Hick, the problems within his own concept of

“The Real in Itself”5 as the metaphysical entity that underlies his pluralistic hypothesis are more than obvious. Not only is his semi-Kantian background clearly rooted in theistic conceptions of the ultimate (but not in non-theistic, as for example Friedrich Hermanni has pointed out6), it also excludes polytheistic religious world-views and such of religious traditions that do not work with some “salvation hypothesis”. Moreover, Hick´s denial of any purposiveness of “the Real in Itself” makes his own theory to some extent self-contradictory, at least regarding his ethico-soteriological criterion for any normative valuation of different religious world-views. Nevertheless, in more recent years, other approaches to a metaphysics of ultimate reality have been developed that partly overcome the problems of religious pluralists, like Hick and also Perry Schmidt-Leukel. The most persuasive approach at least in my view comes from Robert C. Neville. In his three-volume Philosophical Theology he tries to combine a metaphysics of ultimate reality that deals with the one ontological ultimate (“the ontological act of creation”) and four other cosmological ultimates. Thereby his own

4 Cf. Mikel, Burley, The Metaphysics of Religious Diversity: Two Modes of Enquiry (draft for the ESPR Conference, August 2018, Prague), pp. 1-2. 5 Cf. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, Macmillan: Houndmills and London 1989, esp. Chap. 14 (pp. 233-251). 6 Cf. Friedrich Hermanni, Metaphysik. Versuche über letzte Fragen, Mohr Siebeck: Tübingen 2011, 191-214, esp. 201-2.

4 approach of comparative theology mostly refers to the so-called Axial-age-traditions.7

Though Neville, like Hick, in the end runs into dangers of monism, he can better than any other thinker (of this type of metaphysical enterprise) safeguard the plurality of different religious traditions by his strongly emphasis on concrete symbolic engagements. According to Neville, in no way can metaphysical enquiries into the plurality of religious world-views represent a substitute for a lived religious option bound to cultural traditions and life-forms.

So, he differs from Hick in the outreach of metaphysical critical inquiry. Only within the symbolic engagement with the ontological ultimate reality and the other four cosmological ultimates, religious truth can be grasped. The task of a metaphysically philosophical theology thereby is twofold: first, to develop on an abstract level a general hypothetic metaphysics of ultimate reality that helps to generate comparative views on different religious world-views, and secondly, to work out a normative criteriology for criticizing religious metaphysics from the background of critical insights of the ultimate nature (“ultimacy”) of reality in general

(“as rooted in the ontological act of creation”). The pen-ultimate character of religious worldviews and religion in itself therefore has to be reintroduced into religious attitudes and life-forms of any religious tradition.8 This is why Neville from his pragmatist and Tillichian background does not fall neither into religious cognitivism nor into a moralization of religious beliefs, both things Hick can be accused of.

However, in what follows I will neither discuss Neville´s concept of a Philosophical

Comparative theology nor will I focus on what Burley calls “diverse religious metaphysics”

7 Cf. Robert Cummings Neville, Ultimates. Philosophical Theology Vol. 1, State University of New York Press (SUNY): Albany 2013, esp. Part III (pp. 169-247) and Part IV, Chap. 13 (pp. 253-271). 8 Especially in Religion, the third volume of Philosophical Theology, Neville tries to expand his critical approach of the “Truth of Broken Symbols” to a normative evaluation of both, the normative claims of religions themselves and the normative task of self-limitation of each religious tradition as penultimate in comparison to the truth of ultimate reality. The latter concern is developed in the last part of that book, entitled: “Religiousless Religion”. Cf. Robert Cummings Neville, Religion. Philosophical Theology Vol. 3, State University of New York Press (SUNY): Albany 2015, pp. 247- 308.

5 though this type of metaphysical enquiry is more descriptive and can prevent us from both, over-simplifications and the typical “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (Whitehead9) by skipping the particular plurality of different metaphysics within one religious tradition. As for me I simply do not have enough expertise for this undertaking. Instead, I come back to my own predefinition of “religious diversity” and thereby I try to look for a kind of metaphysics starting from the individual person´s “Right to believe” as basic source of what we can call religious diversity. Thereby, I also want to extend the focus under which “religions” can be seen as diverse in highlighting more than Neville, Hick and also Burley do the non- propositional aspects of belief, especially the non-cognitive dimensions of religious faiths, i.e. practices, feelings and attitudes rooted in holistic world-views that do not immediately result out of propositional convictions. Finally, this more personal and not narrowly cognitivist metaphysics of religious diversity should neither be only descriptive nor should it be in a way normatively anti-pluralistic so that in its final words it would argue for a metaphysical monism, at least when it comes to its concept of grasped ultimate reality. For these three reasons, I will concentrate my own considerations in the following by discussing crucial insights of William James. James is within “the philosophy of religion – camp” perhaps the most prominent figure that besides his own sensitiveness to religious experience holds on (a) the Right of each individual to Belief, (b) the Varieties not only of religious experiences but also religious temperaments and general world-views, and finally (c) the task of a constructive set of ontological commitments that safeguard the insights of our pluralistic world from their final retraction in either metaphysical monism or orthodox theistic dualism, not to speak of materialism or reductionist naturalism.

9 Cf. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Harvard University Press: Cambridge (Ma.) 1978, 7.

The Right to Believe and Varieties of Religious Experiences within a

Pluralistic Universe: Re-constructing “Religious Diversity” in the Light of

William James

It has been widely recognized that it was William James who under the founding fathers of pragmatism was the most sensitive towards questions of “fate and future of religion” in modern times, especially in the face of Darwinism and scientific determinism.10 During his own life-span he was again and again struggling not only with his personal attitude towards faith and religion, but also with ways how to justify religious experiences and thus how to argue scientifically (in the widest sense of the word) for the reality of what is perceived and conceptualized as “unseen order” or “divine reality”. His only late formulated metaphysics of pluralism, radical empiricism, and meliorism – all terms that in some sense refer to the same set of suppositions – thereby not only tries to refuse modern materialisms, traditional orthodoxies, and different inclinations to (absolute) idealism. More constructively seen, it can also be understood as an affirmative attempt to a metaphysics of religious diversity in the

Age of increasing pluralism, not only in the field of religion. Though James was again and again criticized for his too individualistic approach and understanding of faith and religion, the same reasons can also be indicating why his considerations, especially in “The Will to

Believe, And Other Essays” (1890) and in “The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in

Human Nature” (1901/2) still seem contemporaneous. Charles Taylor has convincingly

10 Cf. Paul J. Croce, Science and Religion in the Era of William James. Vol I: Eclipse of Reason (1820-1880), The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, New Edition 1995. – See also the brilliant (intellectual) biography of James by Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Mariner Books: New York 2007. As for a very good and more recent introduction into James’ philosophy, see: James Campbell: Experiencing William James. Belief in a Pluralistic World, University of Virgina Press: Charlottesville/London 2017.

7 argued in both directions in his own reinterpretation of James`s classic.11 However, for my own attempt of re-reading James in the task of a constructive metaphysics of religious diversity, his methodological and normative individualism is very constructive because it helps sharpening the difference between a metaphysics of religious pluralism and a metaphysics of religious diversity. I will follow James in his own intellectual development.

Therefore, I go along the three stages to his mature philosophy of religion, starting with his famous essay collection “The Will to Believe” where he outlines the Right of religious faith as a personal living option (i). Then I will focus on his Gifford Lectures of “The Varieties of

Religious Experiences” from 1900 (published the two years after). Here my particular attention applies to his descriptive hermeneutics of what can be seen as different religious attitudes and temperaments (ii). Finally, his last own book, “A Pluralistic Universe” (1909) will show us why James`s final contribution to religious questions can be understood as a justification of religious diversity without giving up the task of truth claims even in the field of religious beliefs (iii).12

(i) The individual person´s “Right to Believe”

Already in his preface to “The Will to Believe” James describes his own concern in

“defending the legitimacy of religious faith” (6: 513). Hereby he always meant the religious faith of individual persons. Though he has been often called to be an “individualist”, it is for several reasons which cannot be explained here for reasons of space better to call him an

11 Cf. Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited, Harvard University Press: Cambridge (Ma.) 2002. 12 Only in taking these three steps in James´ own intellectual development together we get a sufficient overview on his philosophy of religion. See: Ruth Anna Putnam, William James on Religion, In: Hilary Putnam, Ruth Anna Putnam, Pragmatism as a Way of Life: The Lasting Legacy of William James and John Dewey, Harvard University Press: Cambridge (Ma.) 2017, pp. 248-260. 13 If not otherwise indiciated all quotations are from: The Works of William James, 17 Vols., Ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, Harvard University Press: Cambridge (Ma.) 1975-1988.

“personalist”14 or “pluralist”15. As a matter of fact, religious faith is always a faith of an individual person and thus any convincing argumentation in defending the legitimacy of religious hypothesis has taken this primordial fact into account. However, what is a religious hypothesis that constitutes religious faith as a personal attitude and a sentiment not only of our rational capacity but moreover of our personal feeling and behaviour? James argues very vaguely and openly: “What then do we now mean by the religious hypothesis? (…) religion says essentially two things. First she says that the best things are more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word. … The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true.” (6: 29-30) Now this by no mean indicates, as James emphasises in the whole context of the cited passage, that religion is in contrast to science or morality only a private affair that has nothing to do with reasoning or concrete experience.

Quite differently, for him, religion does refer like others truth and realities of other personal things, such as love, friendship, (political) loyalty etc. to the kind of human affairs which cannot be true without personal engagement (and even investment, so to speak). In all these cases rational justification is not enough because our “passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide on option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, “Do not decide, but leave the question open,” is itself a passional decision – just like deciding yes or no – and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.” (6: 11) This is also why the question to what extent a variety of religious hypotheses, faiths, and belief-convictions is

14 Cf. Sami Philström, “The Trail of the Human Serpent is over Everything“ Jamesian Perspectives on Mind, World, and Religion, University of America, Inc: Lanham (MD)/Plymoth (UK) 2008, esp. chap. 6: pp.177-212. See also my interpretation in: Christian Polke, Expressive Theism: Personalism, Pragmatism, and Religion. In: The Varieties of Transcendence. Pragmatism and the Theory of Religion, ed. by Hermann Deuser, Hans Joas, Matthias Jung, and Magnus Schlette, Fordham University Press: New York 2016, 54-72. 15 Also already in the introduction James insists on the fact: „Prima facie the world is a pluralism.“ (6: 6)

9 generally viable becomes crucial. James answers this question with his famous triad of what constitutes a living option: A living option as religious faith must be (1) living, (2) forced, and (3) momentous. By that, he is able to keep out the dangers of religious relativism, because though people during their life-time and different life-situations may have several religious options they never have all possible options in general. As James clearly illustrates this fact by giving the example in his essay: “If I say to you: “Be a theosophist or be a mahomedan,” it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say “Be an agnostic or be a Christian,” it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.” (Ibid.) Of course, this may no longer but only true for James´ own life-time of late 19th New England Boston bourgeois context. However, what this clearly illustrates is a twofold: First, religious diversity for each individual is in real always a limited affair. We all do not have an unlimited source of religious hypothesises who are not only trivial, avoidable, or almost “dead” because without any support from our socio-cultural contexts (environments). Secondly, the increase of religious and secular options in our contemporary societies – probably called religious pluralism – is in fact mainly an increase of maybe living religious and spiritual options for individual people. One of the consequences out of this is the apparently growth of religious idiosyncrasies which we become more and more aware of.

James´ existential approach to the pluralism of religious faith, or should we better say to religious diversity thereby includes some normative implications. In the preface of another of his famous essay collections from the 1890ies, Talks to Teachers on Psychology, James clearer than ever insists on the ethical dimension of his defence of religious faith-options:

“The practical consequence of such a philosophy”, i.e. the philosophy of pluralism or radical empiricism which deals with “real possibilities, real indeterminations, real beginning, real ends, real evil, real crises (…) a real God, and a real moral life, just as common sense

10 conceives these things” (6: 6), in fact is “the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality –– is, at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant.” (10: 4) Here James links the legitimacy of religious faith to the individual´s right of religious freedom and at the same time to political and moral tasks of mutual tolerance.16

For this reason, James already immediately after the essay collection was published conceded that a better name for its opening essay on the “Will to Believe” would have been “The Right to Believe”.17

(ii) The Varieties of religious experiences, attitudes and temperaments

James`s most extensive and profound study on religion is definitely his Varieties of Religious

Experience followed from his 1901-2 Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh. Thereby James was mostly concerned with the question what the inner essence of religious experiences in fact is; though he was not subscribing to any kind of essentialism as one can see for example in his denial of special religious feelings. By that James`s overall methodological claim is to describe and analyse various forms and contents of religious experiences and what they do with people who make them. His book and its thesis are still highly though of course controversially discussed today. Already his working-definition of religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as the they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (13:34) has resulted in complaints that this view is all too narrowly individualistic. Charles Taylor critically

16 The idea of tolerance as a central part of James´ thinking on democracy and pluralism has just recently been worked by Stephen Bush in his brilliant interpretation of James´ political philosophy. Cf. Stephen S. Bush, William James on Democratic Individuality, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge (UK) 2017, esp. chap. 6, pp. 132-152. 17 Cf. Richardson, William James (fn. 10), p. 361. James mentioned this regret for the first time in a letter to Sarah Whitman (cf. Corr. 8: 146 [= The Correspondence of William James. Ed. by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, University of Virgina Press: Carlottesville and London 2000.]). See also the small piece at the end of Some Problems of Philosophy (1910) entitled with: „Faith and the Right to Believe“ (7: 110-112)

11 comments are representative for many critics of James: “What James can´t seem to accommodate is the phenomenon of collective religious life which is not just the result of

(individual) religious connections, but which in some sense constitutes or is that connection.”18 But as Ruth Anna Putnam noticed: “this is too strong; James does not deny the phenomenon of collective life, but he sees it as a secondary phenomenon”19, or as I would put it: He, James, insists that also within the communal and ritual life of religious participants it is up to the latter to take over and appropriate personally the spiritual significance that is embodied in the former. Be it as it may, it is for two very reasons why James becomes interesting for our own task. First, because he insists on the individual person as the existential locus of both, religious experience and the “essence” of religion. Secondly, and maybe even more important, he emphasizes more than others do religion´s emotional and practical (acting) components. This is why he can speak of prayer as “inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine” as “the very soul and essence” (13: 365) of religion.

Thus, James`s twofold focus on the individual subject as religious person and on the more emotional and acting components of religion throws light on what (besides the varieties of different religious experiences) religious diversity in a more descriptive way can also mean. It has less to do only with different doctrines of the “divine things” (so-called “theologies”) than, for example, with different moods in which religious world-views consists, with a variety of religious emotional cultures and of course with very divergent spiritual disciplines and practices. This plurality of angle of view can explain why there may be – as in the case of classical and evangelical forms of Protestantism and several kinds of Buddhism – very sharp doctrinal differences, i.e. a high range of religious diversity, why at the same time both

18 Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today (fn. 11), p. 24. 19 Ruth Anna Putnam, Varieties of Experience and Pluralities of Perspective, In: Hilary Putnam, Ruth Anna Putnam, Pragmatism as a Way of Life (fn. 12), pp. 232-247, here: p. 238.

12 traditions and their adherents show a very close communality regarding what James called the religion of “morbid-mindedness”20. Because both take the problem of evil not only more serious than the “once-born characters”, they moreover insist that evil is truly real. So different ways of stating religious diversity can be given here: In one perspective the distinction line is more to what one can call in a not narrowly cognitive sense “religious optimism” versus “religious pessimism” or “meliorism”. In this sense, Buddhism and

(classical and evangelical) Protestantism belong to the “same camp” whereas Christian

Science and stoic Humanism to another. But when it comes up to doctrinal versions of ultimate reality the same two religious traditions which converge in their attitude highly differ from another point of view.

What we can learn from these observations by James is that there is a variety of different perspectives from which religious diversity can be described and analysed. Not only “beliefs” matter, but also “character” and even more different ritual practices. As result of this “Study in Human Nature”, as the subtitle of Varieties states, religious diversity is far less a matter of different distinctive beliefs than of different “general moods”, i.e. a set of “existential feelings” (M. Ratcliff) that generates a so-called “Weltanschauung” (world-view). In contrast to speaking of “comprehensive doctrines”21, as John Rawls later will do in his conceptual with conceptual (religious) pluralism, world-views in the just mentioned meaning of the word always consist in a triangular set of cognitive, evaluative (voluntary), and emotional components. They share a holistic and deeply existential structure, resting for most parts not on a primarily self-conscious thinking attitude but on religious practices as spiritual disciplines22.

20 See especially Lectures VI and VII (“The Sick Soul“) in the Varieties (cf. 13: 109-138) 21 Cf. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press: New York, 1993. 22 For a contemporary approach in sociology of religion which includes non-denominational and ideosycratic forms of religious life and personal spirituality (taken from the context of the US), see:

This is why the second important definition or “circumscription of the topic” of religion that

James give us is: “religion, whatever it is, is a man´s total reaction upon life … To get at them you must go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses. This sense of the world´s presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual temperament, makes as rather strenuous or carless … about life.” (13: 36-3723)

Religious diversity therefore can be described from a plurality of angles of view: religious convictions and doctrines, religious forms of life and institutions, or religious temperaments, world-views or religious practices. One other advantage of a pluralities of perspective is that one need not any longer subscribe to such problematic classification systems like “higher” and “primitive religions”, or “World Religions” and “ethnic religions” when it comes to the hermeneutical task of understanding religious diversity how it is lived by individuals though almost always in a communal way. In any way, the fruits of descriptive work for which

James in his Varieties was and still is highly praised lie in his hermeneutical sensibility to understand from “within” what is perceived in religious life by individual persons.24

(iii) A Pluralistic Universe – Outline for a metaphysics of (religious) pluralism

It would be a complete misreading of the Varieties if one ignores besides its descriptive parts the elements which lead to an outline of a metaphysics of pluralism. Of course one of James`s

Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America after the 1950ies, University of California Press: Los Angelos/Berkeley/London 1998, esp. chap. 4 and 7. 23 Note: Though James seems to presuppose with his definition that all people are in fact religious, he nevertheless is very sensitive to what I call with Ruth Putnam the pluralities of perspective, including secular one´s. Moreover, his definition leaves open possibilities to compare attitudes that seem to converge even though (from another point of view) they have to be sharply distinguished because of their either secular or religious nature. 24 One of the most important contributions to a philosophy of religion in the Jamesian tradition still is Wayne Proudfoots own masterpiece, Religious Experience (University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angelos 1985).

14 mains claim lies in the contribution to a “science of religion” which is both, non-reductionist and open for secular and religious forward interpretations. Though it is only in the famous conclusion where he explicitly formulates his own “over-belief”, one can already see an unfolding of basic components of his “piecemeal supernaturalism” throughout the descriptive parts of the book. Moreover, James has never – as many of his critics have wrongly assumed

– abandon the question of truth regarding religious experiences. In other words: he never confirmed simply to what was witnessed in the reports as a genuine reality per se. Instead, while on the one side, he was always convinced that any religious truth must have an existential index or focus, i.e. it has to refer to the individual person – “the uses of religion, its uses to the individual who has it, and the uses of the individual himself to the world, are the best arguments that truth is in it. We return to the empirical philosophy: the true is what works well, even though the qualification ‘on the whole’ may always have to be added

(13:361); on the other side he has always insist on a set of truth criteria for both, the philosopher of religion and the individual believer. In this regard “[i]mmediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria.”

(13: 23)25

Now what follows in the intellectual development of James after the Varieties has been published, is his concern on how to formulate a philosophical option that includes both, the descriptive and existential parts of his former writings into a metaphysical statement. Or, to put it in another way: For the rest of his life James was working on his final ontological statement about the world as a “pluralistic universe”, a universe as seen “after a social analogy” (16:367). Here, in his 1909 Hibbert Lectures, our reconstruction of what I call a

25 In Pragmatism, James takes up these three criteria by adding another one, namely the criterion by „common sense“. The latter is important for him to show why in real versions of materialism, abstract theism and of absolute idealism as world-views fails to reconstruct what is really going on in religious life-forms (cf. 1: 264-66).

Jamesian version of metaphysics of religious diversity finds its full expression.26 Again,

James is trying to defend his own version of a radical empiricism which is another term for pluralism, taken from another perspective. Whereas the latter is primarily taken to be ontological the former refer more to epistemological considerations.27 In contrast to both, monistic and theistic philosophies of the absolute, or we could also say: of the “Ultimate”, which at least all finally claims reality consists in an “all-form”, whether materialistically or spiritually, he, James, in contrast opts for a philosophical world-view of pluralism starting from the “each-form”. Pluralism therefore guarantees that our (everyday) experiences as well as our scientific and religious hypotheses about reality are not just simply seen as parts of an

“all-in-one”, but as distinctive parts of the universe we are living in and which can but must not stand in contact with each other. To be diverse is the basic principle in a universe which represents not a total chaos, but also no all-inclusive “box” in which all elements are totally interrelated. They do not only constitute representatives of the same one reality. As James is showing in his lectures, from the pluralistic angle of view, “a distributive from of reality” is as logically and empirically sound as its counterpart, the collective form of a monistic universe. However, the consequences for our concepts and meanings of truth are important.

Because “the absolute sum-total of things may never be actually experienced or realized in that shape at all, and that a disseminated, distributed, or incompletely unified appearance is the only form that reality may yet have achieved (4:25), truth can in no way be thought by only one actual mind. Of course, this seems problematic, not only for monotheistic religions but also for religious traditions which are characterized by some other kind of monistic

26 David C. Lamberth has convincingly argued that A Pluralistic Universe is to a large extent the fulfillment of a promise James made in his Varieties by showing that the drafts for the originally planned second philosophical course of James`s Gifford Lectures concur largely in what is outlined in the Hibbert Lectures. Cf. David C. Lamberth, William James and the metaphysics of experience, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge (UK) 1999, pp. 106-110.201.234 27 Or to be more precise: What James offers us in A Pluralistic Universe is his metaphysics of radical empiricism under the guiding ontological principle of plurality (cf. 4: 26).

16 world-view. Nevertheless, it seriously takes into account of what is going on in most lives of religious believers, be they monotheists or monists (i.e. Buddhists). However, even in his consequential plea for a “finite God” James does not fail into a retraction of the basic difference between human (mundane) and super-human (divine) realities. Moreover, because pluralism is sensitive to the reality of a variety of religious experiences by persons and throughout history, it does not lead to a “speculative ‘problem of evil’” as it does in the case of monisms of the “Absolute” or “Ultimate”. In his view (and I think he is correct in this) only the latter has to answer the existential question “why the perfection of the absolute should require just such particular hideous forms of life as darken the day for our human imaginations.” The reason why any monism28 tends to underestimate the problem and reality of evil is because its “absolute is represented as a being without environment, upon which nothing alien can be forced, and which has spontaneously chosen from within to give itself the spectacle of all that evil rather than a spectacle with less evil in it” (4: 57). James´s “finite

God” is different because she has “an environment” and works for better progress in the universe. As a temporal reality, he is like us a part of a “world-in-the-making”29. Both,

James´s radical empiricism and his pluralism not only interpenetrate, both inhere a meliorism understanding reality in general as a temporal process with many “each-forms” as actors and contributors. Already in Pragmatism, meliorism is for James the only reliable form of taking the salvation quality of religious traditions seriously. Though there are pessimists “who think the salvation of the world [is] impossible” (1: 137) and there maybe still too many naïve optimists who think salvation (or any other kind of inner-worldy flourishment30) as

28 Of course, materialism does not work with any concept of an Absolute as a being. However, that does not mean that the reality of evil would not remain a problem for materialists, at least in their practical way of life. 29 Cf. „What really exists is not things made but things in the making.“ (4: 117) 30 In speaking of salvation and of „inner-wordly flourisment“ I try to avoid too narrow definitions of religion because not all religious traditions or spiritualities rely on ideas of salvation. In this respect I follow Christian Smith´s recent proposal defining religion as „a compley of culturally prescribed

“inevitable” (Ibid.), religious life is best understood and grasped by seeing the universe as both, pluralistic and melioristic, i.e. with real triumphs and real losses. Then the world “may be saved, on condition that its parts shall do their best” (7: 73). By the way: Here we can see how a “common sense argument” taken together with a “moral argument” supports to what a philosophical (“ontological”) explanation of pluralism argues for as an equally reasonable concept of reality in contrast to monism.

In the end, one has to remember that James always speaks of a “pluralistic universe” and not of a chaotic “multiverse”. For him, his synechistic universe is more like a “federal republic”, knowing that temporality includes that if “a thing were once disconnected, it could never be connected again” (4: 146) at the same time. However, in such a universe, connectedness (or as he prefers “intimacy”) and disconnectedness are still both intermingled components of reality. By that, this metaphysical constellation works with an implicit but not predestined teleology. Like a federal republic, the universe in all his active parts can be seen as under the obligation to make the better parts “e pluribus unum”. In this respect, the diversity of religious options should try – at least for James – not only to discuss but to converge in their

“over-beliefs” making the world a better place for all humans and at the same time knowing that even in the case of success there will be parts remaining disconnected for several reasons. This is why James`s religious individualism may represent an apology for spiritual idiosyncrasies but by no means it is a plea for religious indifferentism.

Conclusion: Towards a Metaphysics of Religious Diversity – A modest

Framework

practices, based on premises about the existence and nature of superhuman powers, whether personal or impersonal, which seek to help practitioners gain access to and communicate or align themselves with these powers, in hopes of realizing human goods and avoiding things bad.“ (Christian Smith, Religion. What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters, Princeton Unviersity Press: Princeton 2017, p. 22; for Smith´s critique of the idea of salvation as a common feature of religion, ibid., p. 13-4.)

Of course, James for himself found radical empiricism as the “most encompassing philosophical position”31. Nevertheless, he has never claimed his own position once for all overtrumping every kind of monism or classical theism (or even materialism or atheism).

Otherwise his position would be furthermore self-contradictory because pluralism is not restricted to a plurality of “each-forms” in their partly “durcheinander” (4: 121) and their partly “order”, but it refers as well to different religious options, philosophical world-views, and metaphysical systems. “It follows from this that his view is open to the possibility of a plurality of … superhuman consciousness, thereby entertaining the potential of a very robust rendition of religious pluralism.”32

In this regard, nobody must subscribe neither to pragmatism nor to James´ own position of radical empiricism. For many it would be all too obvious that his position in A Pluralistic

Universe faces too many unsolved problems. Nevertheless, from a methodological point of view and also from his concern on how to make a metaphysics (of religious diversity) in a way explicit that takes pluralism really serious, James still can be a progressive thinker for us.

Therefore, my final remarks try to formulate of what I call a modest framework of structural components of metaphysics of religious diversity inspired by James. Thereby, I distinguish more descriptive sets of criteria from others which are more normative, though it should be clear no definite separation between these two dimensions can be given.33 I start with the descriptive aspects, or components:

First: In contrast to theories of religious pluralism, any metaphysics of religious diversity must face its existential locus, or focus, which are individual persons. Thereby, religious options are diverse not only because religious traditions are different but also because they

31 Lamberth, William James and the metaphysics (fn. 26), p. 208. 32 Ibid., p. 200. 33 Thus, even a descriptive metaphysics, say following the line of Peter Strawson (Individuals. An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, 1959), still operates with some normative claims.

19 occur within different time-moments within an individual life-span. This is why James for example was so interested in stories of conversion in his Varieties; stories in which former living options suddenly or gradually/by degree become more and more dead in spite of new

(arising) living options. Moreover, one must bear in mind that today religious diversity usually takes place already within individual biographies, though it also represents a basic characteristic of religious pluralism in our contemporary societies. Sociologists speak of

“cognitive contamination” (P.L. Berger34), thus one can also speak of a “spiritual contamination”.

Secondly, following James`s methodology in the Varieties, every metaphysics of religious diversity can only be constructive if it takes its own subject and material seriously. Therefore,

I follow Mikel Burley in favour of his type of metaphysical enquiry that starts by diverse religious traditions, symbol-systems, and doctrines. However, besides the more official documents in this respect one have to add as equally substantive material the more personal reports, individual biographies, and also sociological research on people´s often idiosyncratic spirituality. All of these resources represent the starting point of a hermeneutic of religious diversity that builds the very basis for and of any metaphysics of religious diversity.

Thirdly, the task of any metaphysics of religious diversity in a constructive manner is an affirmative or at least constructive ontological analysis of pluralism, not only as a political or cultural or religious phenomenon, but in a more general way. This is why I hesitate to classify either Hick´s or Neville´s positions (or other positions in that “camp”) under the heading of

34 Cf. Peter L. Berger, The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age, de Gruyter: Berlin/Boston 2014, pp. 2.5.32.

20 metaphysics of religious diversity at all.35 Not only because they work with a monistic concept of ultimate reality, but because of their readiness (at least in the end) to skip the massive diversities of each kind all too easily into their harmonic conceptions. In contrast, religious diversity is only one of many aspects or different modes of which diversity in sum exists. But it might be that it represents perhaps the more personal component of pluralism.

By taking all of these different kinds of diversity together and analysing them we finally arrive at the level of philosophical metaphysics.

Now each of these descriptive tasks of metaphysics of religious diversity includes some normative claims. (a) Taking the individual religious subjects as starting points on the one side reflects the right to believe or the political and moral claim for religious freedom. Here the philosophical and political dimensions of religious diversity overlap. On the other side in order to prevent religious diversity from religious indifferentism, even the individual idiosyncrasies have to be justified by showing that they are really “living options” or “living religious hypotheses” for the involved persons. (b) Regarding the hermeneutic openness and sensitivity not only for classical sources but also for individual biographies and spiritual practices it is important to distinguish different angles of view in describing the varieties of religious experience, religious beliefs, religious practices, and not to forget religious temperaments. Thereby we have more than James to be aware of different interpretative frameworks religious symbol-systems offer individuals for articulating (and thereby understanding) their own religious experiences36 and in practicing their religious life-forms.

35 What is missing in all of them is a general affirmative approach to pluralism as it is for example worked out in William E. Connolly´s writings, cf.: William E. Connolly, Pluralism, Duke University Press: Durham and London 2005. Connolly proposes a pluralistic ontology of reality in combining political, ethical and cosmological aspects of pluralism. 36 Though James was not really aware of how deeply his own hermeneutical approach, especially in the Varieties, depends on the Power or better the „Will to Interpret“ – to quote his friend and fellow colleague Josiah Royce, he nevertheless would affirm without articulating and thereby interpreting

Nevertheless, this hermeneutic pluralism then can provide the constructive work on a metaphysics of religious diversity which takes the form of a (c) “pluralistic robust realism.

That is, there may be (1) multiple ways of interrogating reality (that´s the “plural” part), which nevertheless (2) reveal truths independent of us, that is, truths that require us to revise and adjust our thinking to grasp them (and that´s the robust realist part), and where (3) all attempts fail to bring the different ways of interrogating reality into a single mode of questioning that yields a unified picture or theory (so they stay plural).”37

In the end, it should be clear, that every of these structural components – existential, descriptive, ontological, and (in all this) normative – can be conceptualized in many ways.

But even if one takes religious diversity as a matter of fact and as a matter of ontological components (of our universe) as serious as I have tried to in following James, truth-questions are in no way abandoned. Though it might be more persuasive not trying to conceptualize an ultimate reality as the basic ground for everything and instead defining the “divine” (as truth- operator) more as a regulative “goal”, there still remain better and worse, more coherent and more incoherent answers, ideas, interpretations, and concepts in question of what we exactly grasp (or fail by misunderstanding) in our religious lives. Religious interpretations do not stand per se alone in our task of grasping reality from different angles of view. Thus, they have to be balanced with our scientific, moral, and also our common-sense insights. Only then the Jamesian paraphrase of Matthew 7:16 remains applicable: “You shall recognize them by their fruit.”

what we have perceived we could never have made any particular (i.e. definite) experience (of whatsoever). 37 Cf. Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Taylor, Retrieving Realism, Harvard University Press: Cambridge (Ma.)/London 2015, p.154. – Note: Though James as a pragmatist denies the possibilty of an absolute truth or reality per se, he at the same time defends a robust realism in the sense that for him reality is not totally made by us. In fact we are part of the making of reality that permanently confronts us with our inconsistencies and also with novelties.

Living in contexts of all kinds of diversity then is like “[t]o live in a collage.” Thereby “one must in the first place render oneself capable of sorting out its elements, determining what they are (which usually involves determining where they come from and what they amounted to when they were there) and how, practically, they relate to one another, without at the same time blurring one´s own sense of one´s own location and one´s own identity within it.”38

Maybe it is time, even for any metaphysics of religious diversity, not to get too much captured by the idea of an “overlapping consensus” or even a more inclusive “over-belief”. It might happen that a more modest task also turns out be more useful in the face of contemporary challenges. Thereby, “I hope you feel that I am not speaking in any spirit of scepticism or uncertainty. A truth which, in the first instance, is a truth for us does not cease, because of this, to be very Truth and Life. What we learn daily through our love for our fellow-men, viz. that they are independent beings with standards of their own, we ought also to be able to learn through our love for mankind as a whole – that here too there exist autonomous civilizations with standards of their own. … This applies to the great world- religions, but it also applies to the various religious denominations, and to individuals in their intercourse with one another. In our earthly experience” – and this may be the final statement of any metaphysics of religious diversity which is open for the realities of the divine – “the

Divine life is not One, but Many. But to apprehend the One in the Many constitutes the special character of love”39; and, as I would add, a “principle of charity” (Davidson) we as philosophers of religion are so in need of.

38 Clifford Geertz, The Uses of Diversity. In: Available Light. Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, Princeton University Press: Princeton/Oxford 2000, p. 87. 39 Cf. Ernst Troeltsch, Christianity among World-Religions. In: Fünf Vorträge zu Religion und Geschichtsphilosophie für England und Schottland. Der Historismus und seine Überwindung (1924)/ Christian Thought. Its History and Application (1923), Kritische Gesamtausgabe Band 17, ed. by Gangolf Hübinger, de Gruyter: Berlin/New York 2006, p. 148.

Literature:

The individual volumes of The Works of William James (see fn. 13) used in the text:

1 Pragmatism [1975] 4 A Pluralistic Universe [1977] 6 The Will to Believe [1979] 7 Some Problems of Philosophy [1979] 10 Talks on Teachers on Psychology [1983] 13 The Varieties of Religious Experience [1985] 16 Manuscript Lectures [1988]