[MD] Spinning our Wheels, metaphorically speaking

[david buchanan]

Steve said:
While there are some interesting similarities between Pirsig and James, at some point DMB will have to put his secularism up against James's "The Will to Believe" and see what wins. I'd be interested to hear his thoughts on the article as a secularist and a Jamesian.


dmb says:

Man, you really don't pay much attention to the things I say to you. I used James's "Will To Believe" just the other day to explain that for James the "will" part only obtains where belief can not be decided on the basis of evidence. And theism does work for some people in the pragmatic sense of improving their everyday lives, as your friends in the 12-step program will attest to. I figure with a short-term memory like yours, you must be in a program. 

Also, I'll have you know that I am presently surrounded by books about religion and mysticism in James's work. If James's tolerance for theism was ever going to freak me out, it would have happened years ago. Pirsig and Dewey are more thoroughgoing atheists and that's pretty much where I sit too, but I've found that James's work on religion is totally fascinating. It'll be central in my thesis, thus all the books. 

He himself was not a theist, however. He felt that such a view was alienating. He said "the theistic conception ...leaves the human subject outside of the deepest reality in the universe". That's pretty much how he felt about the Absolute too. I think the alienation of theism is analogous to SOM and probably its mother too. As I see it, they are two versions of the same stark dualism. James almost says so a few sentences later. "This essential dualism of the theistic view has all sorts of collateral consequences. Man being an outsider and mere subject to God, not his intimate partner, a character of externality invades the field."



 		 	   		  
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