Mordecai Kaplan as Spiritual Pragmatist

Spiritual pragmatism is a phrase I thought I invented. I wanted to have a phrase that captured William James' approach to religion that distinguished it from the strictly humanistic or post modern pragmatists. After coining it and using it for awhile, I subsequently "googled" the phrase and found, to my disappointment, that it is used(albeit not extensively) and worse still, it usually mean something quite different from what I am after. It is used by authors to describe either 1)the particular opiate the author is peddling-- the new age meets commerical America or 2)what the author, a "real" religious person, is opposed to(see 1). Naturally, I agree with the #2 folks, which means I should probably find a better phrase than spiritual pragmatism.

Nevertheless, I find the best way to read Kaplan is through the lens William James, a pragmatist who held the door open for faith. In my view, Kaplan's legacy is not a set of theological conclusions, but rather a spirit --one that recommends itself(at least to me) as a way of conducting conversations about matters often called "theological." Evidently, Kaplan studied and was influenced by both James and Dewey. It is my hope that we can build upon the Jamesian legacy in Kaplan.

William James and Mordecai Kaplan came out of the same intellectual universe, hoping to mediate Darwinism for an intellectual audience in a way that would keep the door open for faith. Their twin enemies were orthodoxy on the one hand and secularism on the other.

In Varieties, James is not attempting a theological argument to prove anything in particular about God. In fact, of the whole history of such arguments he notes that “If you have a God already whom you believe in, these arguments confirm you. If you are atheist, they fail to set you right.”

James had no use for the reductionist materialsm, the agressive scientism of his day.(For a contemporary best-selling example, see Richard Dawkins.)In James' era, the materialist claim took the form of reducing religious experience to pathology. Long before contemporary neuroscience, the theory was suggested that St. Paul, Dostoevsky and others who reported intense religious experiences in fact were suffering from a medical condition. James' response was clear.

Immediate luminousness….philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us here below.

James is far more sober than much contemporary spirituality in his insistence on evaluating religious experience by results. “If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.” James revels in accounts of a great variety of human experiences of the divine, but he also suggests evaluating religious experience by its fruits for life, or as he put it, “By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.”
In the end religious experience must meet the test.

In other words, James and Kaplan share a commitment to experience as the basis and pragmatism as the judge. Although Kaplan is often called a rationalist, in fact, that does not seem quite right. He did not want Judaism to live up to rational truth. He saw it not as a form of truth but as a form of life. And his deepest interest was not, finally, philosophical abstractions but rather, experience.

James is so helpful to us because he is more consistant than Kaplan. Whatever experiences you may have about the ultimate nature of things still leave you poised on a knife blade. Faith is a choice No research will prove or disprove God. But a pragmatist philosophical stance toward that experience can leave the door open. Jeffrey Stout defined philosophical pragmatism as “never having to say you are certain.”

Reading Kaplan through the lens of James, we can focus on the moments in Kaplan’s work where he abandons his claim to be rational and adopts a what I call a spiritual pragmatic tone, in the spirit of James. At certain points, Kaplan clearly states that he does not really expect his claims to be accepted, except through faith.

Kaplan ultimately bases his ideas of soul, morals and hope not on assertions but on experience, experience that he chooses to interpret in a certain way and toward a particular goal. He is not, in fact, interested in dissolving the idea of God into high-sounding ethics and spiritual values. Kaplan’s purpose in writing "definitions of God" is to help people focus on spiritual experiences in their own lives. Even more important than naming something God is what happens next. As James put it, you must "set it(the word God, for example) at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.

Both James and Kaplan wanted to hold on to the “plus” element in life, the possibility of faith, and for much the same reason, although it took two different forms. In James’ case, he saw that religious experience provided important energy for healing. James was impressed with the possibility of the soul being born again. In Kaplan’s case it was the Jewish people that was the sick soul in need of rebirth. He wanted to harness religious faith for “Without religion the energies of the Jewish people are bound to be those of fear, with it those of hope.”

Students of Kaplan today frequently note that he spoke with clarity and depth about the condition of the Jewish people but insufficiently honored the inner world of the individual, precisely the focus of James’ interest. Some suggest that Reconstructionism is now seeking to redress the imbalance—to give the individual and his or her inner life its due. Another way of putting it: Reconstructionism had attended to philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness but needed more work on immediate luminosity. This is why James seems so helpful to me.