From Melancholic Individual to Great Mind: A Study of William James's Pragmatic View of Individual Religion

Xiao Yonghong

Published in Chinese Journal of Sociology, 2024, Issue 3.

Abstract: At the end of the nineteenth century, the turn to personal religion initiated by William James profoundly influenced the reconstruction of the American civil religious tradition. This paper attempts to discuss James's unique approach to the reconstruction of moral life in modern society and its complex relationship with the American civil religious tradition in the light of the controversial intellectual history. James's study of personal religion begins with the dilemma of melancholic individuals, and by dissecting melancholy as an existential experience, he finds that behind the melancholic experience lies a concern for universal destiny and a quest to transcend the finiteness of the self, but this quest is unable to be transformed into active moral life because it rests in the negative view of the self and of the external world. In order to overcome this crisis of moral life, James establishes a connection between the spiritual problems of modern individual and the religious tradition of salvation, and then reinterprets the vital meanings and emotional power of the salvation experience to liberate the narrow personality in the light of faith's guidance for life. James suggests that it is the individual embodiment of the universal destiny of humankind by the individual who has had the experience of redemption that provides the mechanism for activating the sacredness of modern democracy, and that redemption brings with it a sympathetic understanding of the situation of fellow human beings, endowing the individual with the patience and resilience to strive for higher moral ideals. Thus, the abstract value base of civic religious traditions is transformed into embodied practice in social democracy. Articulating this reinvented tradition of sacredness helps us not only to overcome melancholy in moral life, but also to present the new dynamics of the American social democratic tradition, which implicates a sympathetic view of fellow's life significance.

Keywords: melancholic individual, sacredness, democracy, pragmatism, social theory