American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

William James began his Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh acutely conscious of his position as an American speaking to a European audience, a position that, as he observed in 1901, reversed the usual flow of academic scholarship. James would be pleased to note that the crosscurrents have continued, notably in Jeremy Carrette’s study of James’s relational metaphysics vis-à-vis religion. Carrette’s book attempts—successfully—“to read James through a pluralistic hermeneutic that seeks to include the fringes of our multidisciplinary consciousness and the excluded dimensions” (xvi). These “excluded dimensions” include anything obscured by the ways in which traditional disciplinary boundaries have been drawn. Part of the larger aim of Carrette’s project involves thinking through the relations of power that have carved up academic disciplines into manageable plots and segmented James into a psychologist-philosopher-pragmatist. Here is where the “hiddenness” of James’s religious imagination comes in: to the reader familiar with James’s classic and “most widely published text,”¹ Hidden Religious Imagination, Carrette’s title, may come as a bit of a surprise: religion was never a particularly “hidden” topic for James. In fact, the opposite is true—James sought to increase religion’s visibility and allow for the acceptability of religious belief to the modern scientifically informed consciousness. However, Carrette redeems the choice of title by convincingly arguing that the well-worn disciplinary paths that now traverse James in predictable ways often trample the original plurality of his thought, particularly where religion is concerned. Thus, for Carrette, “the hidden religious imagination of William James . . . is his metaphysics of relation because this provides the ground of how he deploys the category ‘religion’ in such varied ways” (18). It is precisely the variegated richness of James that Carrette seeks to recover in this study, first by outlining James’s theory of relations and then by proposing new or neglected relational readings of his own that unite poststructural theory and literary-historical insights, with particular attention to the French tradition and work of Charles Renouvier. [End Page 264]

Carrette devotes the first part of the book to describing James’s metaphysics of relation, which Carrette, following a trend in the secondary scholarship, loosely aligns with the problem of consciousness. Chapter 1 accordingly establishes the physiological basis of James’s epistemology, beginning with the essays from the years preceding the Principles of Psychology, James’s first major work, and then tracing James’s metaphors for consciousness throughout his entire corpus, grouping them into four discrete stages that correspond to different periods. Carrette’s range of examples is meant to illustrate that James’s understanding of relation is itself “dynamic rather than . . . static” (23). Chapter 2 elaborates on the character of consciousness for James by taking up the percept-concept debate, or sense perception vs. intellection. Although Carrette points out that for James, percept and concept are “coordinate” (i.e., are interlaced and flow in both directions), he argues that James emphasizes the percept as a corrective to the Platonic and Hegelian philosophical traditions that avoid “empirical” and “embodied” reality (59), as Renouvier before him had done. The percept stands partway between the body and thought, receiving input from both, so it is ideally placed for the kind of redress or disturbance Carrette proceeds to highlight. Carrette cleverly applies the notion of a “perceptual flux” or an “excess” constantly eluding conceptualization to the way attention to hitherto unnoticed relations may disrupt disciplinary status quos from within, just as percepts disrupt concepts for James: “To break the disciplinary habits of reading James’s thinking on religion is to appreciate how James’s relational world offers new options and how percepts break up his conceptual points of reference” (70). This stance fits well with Carrette’s commitment to poststructural aims, with a return to the importance of sensation and the body and a desire to highlight the dynamic dimensions and shifting relational contexts of James’s philosophical writings.

In the second half of...