William James’s Hidden Religious Imagination: A Universe of Relations by Jeremy Carrette (review)
- William James’s Hidden Religious Imagination: A Universe of Relations by Jeremy Carrette
Jeremy Carrette is one of the most interesting contemporary scholars writing on James’s philosophy of religious experience. In the present volume the author expands and deepens the scope of his previous researches by investigating the epistemological and metaphysical dimensions of James’s work on religion. The resulting interpretation is an sophisticated and ambitious one: Carrette argues that most accounts of James’s writings on religion—and of his thought as a whole—have been vitiated by a “disciplinary closure” which conceals James’s unbroken effort to “sustain a conversation across the disciplinary spaces of philosophy, psychology and the study of religion” (xi). Contrary to this approach, Carrette claims how “a different relational imagination, one established with post-structural antennae, can shift the priorities in reading James on religion and hear a different voice. It can notice something previously marginalized or hidden” (15). According to Carrette, this interpretative shift would in fact allow us to appreciate the most distinctive and radical dimension of James’s pluralistic and functional approach to reflective thinking, driven by “an open attitude to knowledge, against what [James] sees as a series of closed attitudes to knowledge” (23).
Carrette lists a set of very ambitious aims for his book and identifies the success of his reconstructive efforts with the ability to “achieve the richness of James’s reading of religion, break some of the disciplinary constraints in previous readings, and show the dynamic and relational quality of knowledge behind James’s thinking” (xvii). The purpose of [End Page 313] such an operation is to “destabilize thought from the comfort zone that previously packaged James for the study of religion” (xxi). Approaching James’s thinking about religion “from the inner architecture of his thought on sensation and relations and his suppositions about the nature of reality” (23) will, Carrette argues, “reveal a very different William James, a more plural and dynamic James, a James who offers a nonessential reading of “religion” inside his relational imagination” (18). The appreciation of this hidden religious imagination would finally retrieve the neglected “plurality of thinking and varied contexts through which his thinking about “religion” emerges and transforms our understanding” (50).
The book, extremely rich and thoroughly researched, comprises an introduction, wherein the author sets forth the context and rationale of this novel approach to James on religion, followed by six chapters divided into two parts. Part I presents the philosophical machinery constituting the framework of James’s understanding of the very conditions of religion depicted as an “analytical category.” The second part articulates Carrette’s positive reading of James’s deployment of religion as a field of discourse, conduct, and practice as opposed to a body of doctrines. In each chapter the author investigates a series of neglected aspects of James’s work to which the book aims at drawing attention. In the conclusion Carrette puts James in dialogue with Foucault and other postmodern authors interested in the political and cultural dimension of religious experience.
In Part I Carrette articulates in broad strokes the metaphysics and epistemology of relations underlying James’s philosophy of religious experience. Chapter 1 stresses the centrality of relations and of relational thinking as the key theoretical frame of James’s philosophical temperament, and chapter 2 focuses on the details of the experiential and physiological philosophy grounding James’s engaged and anti-essentialist approach to the analytic category of religion. This preliminary work is of the utmost importance, as according to Carrette, overlooking or downplaying it makes James’s distinctive religious vision unintelligible.
In Part II Carrette incorporates this psychological-philosophical framework into James’s work on religion. In chapter 3 Carrette explores the interplay of James’s philosophical speculation, biographical details, and cultural milieu, focusing on his relationship with his father and his problematic religious-cultural inheritance. Carette seeks to show the deep influence of Henry Sr.’s Calvinist roots rather than his Swedenborgian ideas on James’s philosophical-religious thought, which is...
