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4 - William James's feeling of if

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Joan Richardson
Joan Richardson
Affiliation:
City University of New York
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Summary

I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

If aesthetics wants to rise above empty chatter, it must expose itself, stepping out into the open where there is no place to hide. This means aesthetics must give up that sense of security which it had borrowed from the sciences.

Adorno, Aesthetic

BUT CAN A HERMENEUTICS OF THE RELIGIOUS DO WITHOUT UNBALANCED THOUGHTS?

In New York City on a lecture tour in 1842, months after the death of his five-year-old son, Waldo, from scarlet fever, Emerson, between engagements, visiting Henry James Sr., then resident with his wife and infant son at Astor House, asked to be “taken upstairs” to see the babe, on whom he bestowed a blessing. The beneficence was realized. William James took on most seriously his role as his godfather's spiritual heir. The legacy was a true one in passing on the most valuable items from a past lived in a particular place to a future imagined, of if.

Type
Chapter
Information
A Natural History of Pragmatism
The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein
 , pp. 98 - 136
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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