Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Religious experience and the perception of value
- 2 Love, repentance, and the moral life
- 3 Finding and making value in the world
- 4 Emotional feeling: philosophical, psychological, and neurological perspectives
- 5 Emotional feeling and religious understanding
- 6 Representation in art and religion
- 7 The religious critique of feeling
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Emotional feeling and religious understanding
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Religious experience and the perception of value
- 2 Love, repentance, and the moral life
- 3 Finding and making value in the world
- 4 Emotional feeling: philosophical, psychological, and neurological perspectives
- 5 Emotional feeling and religious understanding
- 6 Representation in art and religion
- 7 The religious critique of feeling
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
When I call theological formulas secondary products, I mean that in a world in which no religious feeling had existed, I doubt whether any philosophic theology could ever have been framed. I doubt if dispassionate intellectual contemplation of the universe, apart from inner unhappiness and need of deliverance on the one hand and mystical Emotion on the other, would ever have resulted in religious philosophies such as we now possess. Men would have begun with animistic explanations of natural fact, and criticised these away into scientific ones, as they actually have done … But high-flying speculations like those of either dogmatic or idealistic theology, these they would have had no motive to venture on, feeling no need of commerce with such deities. These speculations must, it seems to me, be classed as over-beliefs, buildings-out performed by the intellect into directions of which feeling originally supplied the hint.
Here William James accords feeling a kind of priority over the findings of the discursive intellect. In this chapter, I would like to see how the four models of emotional feeling elaborated in Chapter 4 can be used to give further definition to James's proposal – by helping us to specify various respects in which feeling may indeed appear to come before religious understanding, as well as certain senses in which it appears to follow on behind.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Emotional Experience and Religious UnderstandingIntegrating Perception, Conception and Feeling, pp. 123 - 148Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005