| This dissertation reappraises the place and role of religion and religious experience in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and John Dewey. Placing Emerson at the head of the family tree, I hope to show the pragmatic possibilities of Emerson's thought. Central to my reading of Emerson is a discussion of the role the religious or moral sentiment plays in converting the individual into her will, as insight and affection are directed toward the future and its possibilities. While most read self-reliance as a call for individualism, I argue that self-reliance is the application of the moral sentiment to the source of existence Emerson calls the Over-soul. James provides a pragmatic philosophy, based on his radical empiricism, which demands a pluralistic approach to truth(s). His reconception of experience moves it beyond the traditional atomistic British empiricism, appreciating it as the material of reality, and the right content of substance of philosophy. His description of the fringes of experience provides the necessary foundation on which James builds his conception of belief and his pluralistic philosophy. James, like Emerson, imagines the wider self of the individual, and directs his philosophy, understood both as a movement and a method, toward the meliorism and holism which follow from such a portrait. Like Emerson, James is forward-looking and anti-dogmatic. He sees in his radical empiricism the only helpful alternative to an absolutism which requires adherence to fixed, a priori principles. Dewey enters the fray, steeped in pragmatism, and directs the tradition toward a more naturalized appreciation of belief. The first consequence of Dewey's naturalization of belief is the adaptation of the pragmatic rule of looking forward to determine the meaning and consequences of an idea. Fixed ends, like fixed meanings are symptomatic of the rationalistic, monistic philosophies which Dewey and James find so repugnant. Dewey moves the discussion of religious experience beyond description, and toward an uncovering of the function of certain types of experience at the heart of democratic culture. |
