Transforming Obligation in William James

This chapter describes the connection between the obligation William James finds in the reflective life and the resultant personal transformation that provides access to the meaning of that obligation. The relation between obligation and transformation leads James to claim that the development of personal character is a proper aim of philosophical inquiry. The chapter develops this line of thought by following James’s treatment of conversion in Varieties. It shows that James uses his analysis of character and personal transformation to separate himself clearly from the traditional doctrine of religious conversion, and particularly from Jonathan Edwards. It concludes with an analysis and critique of James’s position against conversion and asks what this means for his work in transforming the obligation to the religious life.

Reconstructing Faith: Religious Overcoming in Dewey’s Pragmatism

This chapter follows the structure of the three essays that comprise John Dewey’s A Common Faith. The first section examines Dewey’s notion of the transformation to the religious attitude in “Religion versus the Religious.” The second section focuses on the content aspects of “Faith and Its Object” that make this critical advance possible. Dewey wants to stabilize the sources of authority in human practice to enhance the products and consciousness of intelligent control. The third section follows Dewey’s ascending polemic against the supernatural in “The Human Abode of the Religious Function.” Conversion completes Dewey’s thought here in the sense that the religious function is necessary to produce a material effect on practice that manifests intelligent control of the sources of authority in common life.

Dwelling in Absence: The Reflective Origin of Conversion

This chapter explores the absence that emerges in each account of the four philosophers in the previous chapters (i.e., Jonathan Edwards, C. S. Peirce, John Dewey, and William James). First, it describes the ways Peirce and Dewey discover the limits of their efforts toward philosophical transformation. They represent distinct methods of locating and handling this limit, and they both face the failure of reflection that is part and parcel with discovering truth. Second, it shows Edwards’s orientation toward the failure of transformation in his inquiry into the religious affections. This orientation toward failure, his failure, humanizes Edwards’s otherwise monstrous image. The last step is to bring these three thinkers together in terms of an American response to the limit of transformation in order to understand why conversion remains such a powerful and complicated feature of our religious and philosophical lives.

Habit, Habit Change, and Conversion in C. S. Peirce

This chapter begins by evaluating several avenues of connecting C. S. Peirce’s philosophical program and religious conversion. Next, it turns to an exposition of Peirce’s understanding of habit and habit change. This position of an ultimate habit change incorporates the conclusions of three essays in an argument for a holistic orientation of the thinker fully engaged in self-controlled inquiry. These include the change represented by personality and a belief in a personal creator in “The Law of Mind”; the argument for emulating agapistic inquiry in “Evolutionary Love”; and the belief and logical testing of the reality of God in “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God.” The chapter concludes with a criticism of Peirce’s habit change to a “super-order,” as he describes it, and examines several ways to advance Peirce’s approach to conversion.

The Philosophical Structure of Jonathan Edwards’s Religious Affections

This chapter aims to show the significance of the structure of conversion in Jonathan Edwards’s Religious Affections. The larger goal, however, has been to call attention to the centrality of conversion in Edwards’s larger philosophical and theological enterprise. In Religious Affections, Edwards examines the transforming effect of grace and reflective discovery. He finds conversion within his tradition, and his conclusions support the role of the Puritan pastors in this process. But he also expands the meaning of the discovery of divine reality with his understanding of the soul’s faculties and what would constitute a “spiritual” effect on those faculties.

The Evasion of Conversion in Recent American Philosophy

This chapter focuses on three contemporary philosophers who have contributed significantly to the development of pragmatism and American philosophy: Richard Rorty, Cornel West, and Robert Corrington. It argues that Rorty avoids the fundamental issue of personal transformation, which his own argument demands. West has attained the public notoriety of an intellectual with a program for transformation, drawing on Christian and philosophical resources for his sermonic challenge to culture. Conversion is central to West’s self-understanding, but it falls out of his programmatic speech. Corrington approaches philosophy from within the American perspective, but draws its thought up into the ongoing challenge of consciousness with itself. Transformation of human consciousness is the reality Corrington approaches from a platform of ecstatic naturalism.

Creative Transformation: The Work of Conversion

This chapter extends the critique of transformation in American philosophy by looking at conversion thematically. It argues that the American philosophers are convinced that a genuine transformation of the form, content, and character of habits and inquiry is possible in experience. The origin of this transformation transcends experience and complete conscious control, but this transcendence can be discovered only by approaching the limit of self-consciously controlled change. The remainder of this chapter contains, first, some considerations concerning the shared methods of approach to transformation, especially in light of the religious character of this discussion in the pragmatists; and second, a thematic account of the transformation that becomes conversion.