Defending experience against 'philosophy'

 

Feeling It Out

Alice Gregory’s article on the philosopher L. A. Paul and her circle of oddly amusing philosophers was itself amusing and instructive (“Note to Selves,” December 9th). A great deal of what passes for the pursuit of wisdom in academia these days is, indeed, esoteric, technical, and, finally, irrelevant. But it should be noted that Professor Paul is hardly a pioneer in asserting, however “hesitantly,” that “experience has a kind of value” and that philosophy ought to be less “detached from ordinary life.” William James and the pragmatists said it long ago. In 1900, James, immersed in preparing lectures that would become “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” described the “problem” he set himself as “to defend (against all the prejudices of my ‘class’) ‘experience’ against ‘philosophy’ as being the real backbone of the world’s religious life.”

Phil Oliver
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
Middle Tennessee State University
Nashville, Tenn.

The New Yorker 

For the record, though, my own experience remains the backbone of my atheistic humanism.