World or Reality as “Fields”

This chapter utilizes William James' language as well as that of others to construct a “field” model, for which the primary purpose is to employ it in the development of a “self” open to the possibility of personal immortality. Since a key feature of both the self and the mode of immortality is their continuity with the experienced world or reality, it will be necessary first to present the distinguishing characteristics of this world, beginning with “fields” as the primary metaphor, in an effort to understand all reality. It must be stressed that there is no pretense of giving a mirror image of some outer “reality in itself” when reality or the world is described as a plurality of fields.

Introduction

This introductory chapter discusses how the emergence of Christianity out of the Hellenistic context moves the dialectic to a new stage. Very early on, the tension and outright conflict between reason and faith appear. This faith/reason dialectic has continued down to the present. Within the culture at large, there are two simple and clear positions: faith alone is sufficient; reason alone is sufficient. For most of Western history, however, the dominant views have made attempts to account for both. The chapter suggests that no formal expression of the relation between faith and reason can ever be permanent or definitive. At best these expressions can serve as guidelines, as regulative ideals.

Concluding Reflections

This concluding chapter explains how it appears that immortality belief and terminality belief have been present in varying degrees of explicitness and with shifting degrees of dominance from the dawn of human consciousness. It is interesting to note that in some of the earliest religious literature, it is death rather than immortal life which is seen as the destiny of human beings. The reality of death has taken on a much more terrifying dimension as the intimate continuity of human beings with nature has diminished, tribal and communal supports have lessened, and individual consciousness has acquired a more isolating identity. Death has become intensely personal, and a corresponding fading of belief in personal immortality has heightened the anxiety evoked by the encroachment of nothingness.

Immortality: A Pragmatic-Processive Model

This chapter offers a model of the cosmic process that would justify belief in immortality as attractive and as life-enhancing. In keeping with the experiential character and this-worldly focus of pragmatism, any acceptable model will have to offer possibilities for the enhancement and enrichment of life. Readers might be aided by mentally placing the term “this life” in quotation marks, because the nature and scope of human life are precisely what has been and will likely continue to be a matter of intense dispute among reflective human beings. The chapter shows that a crucial aspect of the dispute centers on what ought to be the relationship between the present and future characteristics of this life.

James: Self and God

This chapter analyzes how a plausible belief in personal immortality depends upon a self open to continuing existence beyond the spatial and temporal parameters of what is usually referred to as the “present life.” A key step in the direction of supporting this hypothesis has been taken through the establishment of a field-self that participates in and is constituted by a range of fields, some of which can be designated “wider” in relation to the identifying center of the individual self. The chapter describes these wider fields in terms of a superhuman consciousness or consciousnesses, delaying till now a more detailed specification of such wider consciousnesses.

James: Toward a Field-Self

This chapter explores how William James' doctrine of the self seemed to have developed through three stages. Beginning with a methodological dualism in his Principles of Psychology, James apparently moved to a “no-self” doctrine in the Essays on Radical Empiricism, and finally to the affirmation of a substantive self in A Pluralistic Universe. This three-stage view is basically sound and helpful as long as it is not understood as suggesting any clear, linear, and unequivocal development. The chapter then shows that throughout, James is much less clear and confident about his positive affirmations and solutions than he is in describing the problems and what he wishes to avoid.

Toward a Field Model of the Self

This chapter considers the suggestive irony of living in an age characterized by both an obsessive concern for the ego or individual self and a denial that there is any such reality. The first characteristic is manifest in the charges that contemporary experience is best described as narcissistic, or that the present generation is the “me” generation, or that the past is a hedonistic culture in which self-satisfaction is the dominant if not exclusive value. The chapter shows that the denials of the ego or the individual self come from the more intellectually sophisticated segments of the community, taking such various forms as Buddhist “no-self‘ doctrines and structuralist and deconstructionist movements.

Immortality: Hope or Hindrance?

This chapter talks about how, among the wider American population, the majority that claim to believe in immortality seem to consider that belief peripheral to faith and life. Whereas within the contemporary intellectual and cultural ambience, the most judicious response to the immortality question would appear to be silence. The question still touches too many open wounds, superficially covered over by intellectual and emotional band-aids, to allow people the luxury of total exclusion from their reflections. The fierce resurgence of uncritical religious emotivism, East and West, from the relatively benign to the positively destructive, from evangelicals and charismatics to theological terrorists and mind-destroying cults—such phenomena indicate the continued presence of a need for meaning that is not being met.

James: Full Self and Wider Fields

This chapter argues that the relation between the person and God must be such that a belief in personal immortality has experiential grounds—not grounds in the sense of offering a compelling necessity to infer immortality, but in the softer sense of being basically consistent with and open to such belief. In keeping with this experiential methodology, there must be some “justifying” evidence for the extrapolated belief in a divine—human relationship. The principal grounds for such extrapolated belief are found in the view of the self that emerges in James' later writings. The chapter draws mainly upon material from The Varieties of Religious Experience, Essays in Radical Empiricism, and A Pluralistic Universe, without dealing with important differences of concern and context among these works.

James: Personal Identity

This chapter looks at how William James, having had his say concerning the empirical self and its constituent selves (material, social, spiritual), declares that the decks are “cleared for the struggle with that pure principle of personal identity.” Throughout the Principles, James insists that he is concerned only with the psychological, not the metaphysical, dimensions of the various problems under consideration. Again and again, however, he merges the two, and later realized that they cannot be kept completely apart regardless of one's methodological intentions. The chapter suggests that the deeper thrust and significance of James' position on such specific questions as truth, self, and God can be grasped only by surfacing the metaphysical presuppositions that permeate his more particularized responses.