Rationality is known to be rooted in human passions. In philosophy the passions are the instinctive, emotional, primitive drives in a human being (including, for example, lust, anger, aggression, and jealousy) which a human being must restrain, channel, develop and sublimate in order to be possessed of wisdom. The sentiment of rationality is the state of being at rest with our understanding of reality. This state of being at rest is a state of which our ideas enable us to think with perfect fluency. James says that the only way a person can recognize anything is by certain subjective marks or experiences. These marks include “a strong feeling of ease, peace, rest” and a “feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness.” James says that if he got these marks, then he is rational.
James say that all human feelings depend less on the positive than on the negative “feeling seems to depend for its physical condition on the discharge of nerve currents under rest impediment or resistance” for example we have feelings of distress and pain when we are not breathing freely and feelings of pleasure when we pass from a state of breathing with difficulty to breathing freely. In both cases all the feelings by which we evaluate the situation are based largely on the negative not on the positive. Same applies to thought, when a thought meets difficulties, we experience distress. So, a rational account is where you can think freely without feeling any distress from perplexity. James claimed that there are two ways to attain a unobstructed thought: 1- The theoretical way: we perceive the facts of the world as a bunch of different things, but our theoretical need is to reduce them to a single thing to fit them all into a single heading. Meaning to be parsimonious. 2- The passion of distinguishing: this is the passion to recognize facts as they come and not explaining them by illusory differences. James cites Spinoza as someone who takes the need for simplification to an extreme, and Hume as someone who takes the need to recognize distinct facts as they are to an extreme. A person must recognize both passions because both are legitimate needs for human reason for how we think through the world and how we explain reality. James criticized the idea of theoretical thinking because if you say that everything ultimately is just one thing, the human mind instinctively will want to contrast that one reality with something else. James says one way to achieve satisfaction is to strongly emphasize parsimony.
James them moves on to explain how a belief can become a fact. James explains that a certain kind of belief not based on evidence can be as rational as those that are based on evidence if they guide our thoughts in the world. If the belief is true, we won't find the evidence until we believe it. Truths cannot become true until our faith has made them. Faith means believing where doubt is theoretically possible and believing means being willing to act. Sometimes faith is entirely rational, and this is the type of faith that James is defending. James claims that science depends on faith and if science recognizes faith why may people not recognize faith in other spheres. A philosophy which is properly rational will enable us to act with the view towards the future and will make a direct appeal to those powers of human nature one of which is faith. James says that faith should not be banished because some instances of faith create their own verification; the evidence come after we choose to believe. The ultimate philosophy will always make room for faith.
Some quotes from the essay:
- A man's philosophic attitude is determined by the balance in him of these two cravings. No system of philosophy can hope to be universally accepted among men which grossly violates either need, or {67} entirely subordinates the one to the other.
- But suppose the goal attained. Suppose that at last we have a system unified in the sense that has been explained. Our world can now be conceived simply, and our mind enjoys the relief. Our universal concept has made the concrete chaos rational. But now I ask, can that which is the ground of rationality in all else be itself properly called rational?
- Is the world a simple brute actuality, an existence de facto about which the deepest thing that can be said is that it happens so to be or is the judgment of better or worse, of ought, as intimately pertinent to phenomena as the simple judgment is or is not?
- But the highest good can be achieved only by our getting our proper life; and that can come about only by help of a moral energy born of the faith that in some way or other we shall succeed in getting it if we try pertinaciously enough. This world is good, we must say, since it is what we make it,—and we shall make it good. How can we exclude from the cognition of a truth a faith which is involved in the creation of the truth?
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