While I do not think consciousness is an illusion, the claim ‘1. Consciousness is an illusion that produces evolutionary success and fitness’ needs to be taken seriously. Many of our institutionalized habits that started as individual belief may be rooted in a shared contingent history that emerges from both the cause and effects of culture and evolution on us and our practices. My sense of self, the unity of my consciousness, could be a helpful illusion. It gives me at least the sense of me owning my actions and my body. Such ownership gives rise to agency and perhaps moral responsibility. Intersubjectively, many persons possessing unity of consciousness might help in producing culture. Like religion that generates altruistic behavior amongst in-group tribes and then a more monotheistic God is a useful ideal for diverse tribes living together in cities to motivate other-regarding behavior, beliefs in minds and consciousness have pragmatic upshot even in a world of ontological naturalism or being eliminativists about either consciousness or religion. What’s more, the purposes and consequences of both consciousness and religion are the types of claims that occur to many who are inclined toward naturalism of some variety, so even I, who think that minds and the Divine are part of nature and espouse processive naturalism, must contend with the fact that I could very well be wrong.
The problem with pragmatism and phenomenology is that I cannot experience the world without seeing the unity of consciousness as given in my consciousness already. It’s episodic and not as permanent as Kant would have you believe, but the limitation of experience-based methods is clear. I cannot experience the imagined scenario of consciousness being an illusion, so I must tease out what it might mean logically from the way that I experience it. I am fine with simply saying, I experience myself as free, an agent, and aware of my own thought-objects. I could not tell you if I were truly unfree, determined, and living the life of an illusion, so I won’t bother worrying about it. I know this is a non-answer to many philosophers. For me, there’s no good practical consequence to entertaining the thought. Then again, what if I am wrong? What if I am wrong about the confidence of experience I give it and the methods that make it central to my own methods of philosophy? What if I am being a pragmatist in the wrong direction and the case can be made that ‘Consciousness is an illusion’ has more explanatory power and consequence than my quasi-Kantian answer of acting AS IF it doesn’t matter and that I am free, responsible, and an agent?
My book’s engagement with William James (William James’s Radically Empirical Philosophy of Religion under contract with Palgrave Macmillan) finds resonance with a letter he wrote to Henry W. Rankin on June 16, 1901. James writes in the second volume of The Letters of William James (1920) to Henry Ranking on June 16,
I believe myself to be (probably) permanently incapable of believing the Christian scheme of vicarious salvation, and wedded to a more continuously evolutionary mode of thought…The mother sea and fountain head of all religions lie in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense. All theologies and all ecclesiasticisms are secondary growths superimposed; and the experiences make such flexible combinations with the intellectual prepossessions of their subjects, that one may almost say that they have no proper intellectual deliverance of their own, but belong to a region deeper, and more vital and practical, than that which the intellect inhabits. For this they are also indestructible by intellectual arguments and criticisms. I attach the mystical or religious consciousness to the possession of a subliminal self, with a thin partition through which messages make irruption. We are thus made convincingly aware of the presence of a sphere of life larger and more powerful than our usual consciousness, with which the latter is nevertheless continuous. The impressions and impulsions and emotions and excitements which we thence receive help us to live, they found invincible assurance of a world beyond the sense, they melt our hearts and communicate significance and value to everything and make us happy. They do this for the individual who has them, and the other individuals follow him. Religion in this way is absolutely indestructible. Philosophy and theology give their conceptual interpretations of this experiential life. The farther margin of the subliminal field being unknown, it can be treated as by Transcendental Idealism, as an Absolute mind with a part of which coalesce, or by a Christian theology, as a distinct deity acting on us. Something, not our immediate self, does act on our life! So I seem doubtless to my audience to blowing hot and cold, explaining away Christianity, yet defending the more general basis from which I say it proceeds (149-150).
In this passage, James doesn’t so much as quit Christianity but say that it’s not for him. James sounds almost Emersonian like in refusing Christianity and he frames his meliorism as a response to vicarious salvation. A vicarious salvation is a salvation that comes about not through our own agency to improve the world, but in surrendering one’s will to the Divine. James, like me, cannot give up on the world we spend so much time in. To do so means to affirm a world beyond our ken to improve. If the world does not respond to our agency, then there’s no purpose to it for our efforts. A purposeless world be one where none of our efforts come to fruition. James’s meliorism describes the capacity of human agents to respond to the world and improve it under our own power. Our freedom is to experiment with how we relate to and attend to those relations. Religion helps motivate us to improve the world in the here-and-now. In so doing, James will never compromise a belief in our own efforts and so any relationship we have toward the divine is one of us and the Divine working together for a better union; it can never be a surrender for James at all, even if other people experience it as such.
James moves on in this letter to give the purpose of all religions. For James, those purposes are not validated from theology and what those in the church say since “All theologies and all ecclesiasticisms are secondary growths superimposed.” Written around the time of delivering his The Varieties of Religious Experience lectures in Edinburgh, James locates the purpose of all religions, as much as I do in a recent chapter inspired by the same thinking, lie “in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense.” In this wide sense, James means the affective dimension of the “subliminal self” that make up “prepossessions” of the subject. Religious thinking orients our capacities of “a region deeper, and more vital and practical, than that which the intellect inhabits.” This affective dimension has within the vital and practical dimensions of inward feeling, and yet this inward feeling is radiating outward in relations. Our feelings pinpoint what in existence we carve out to select and pay attention to in our conscious field. Intellect dwells here, as all cognition is formed out of this primordiality of feeling. This affective dimension of our relations grounds us in a way that opens the inward way of life of subjectivity to wrestle with finite existence. We feel our existence more than we can think our way out of it as some attempt foolishly with religious thought.
Out of this affective dimension, the primordiality of feeling makes up our religious and mystical consciousness. It’s here that we get what one purpose, if not the main impetus, of religious thought and praxis. Religions cultivate the self to experience a wider field of consciousness from which we are made “convincingly aware of the presence of a sphere of life larger and more powerful than our usual consciousness, with which the latter is nevertheless continuous.” The wider field of consciousness is the panpsychic thesis in James at work. All things have a for-itselfness, a way to be that shares also in being part, but not dissolved by being a part of wider consciousness. In this way, knowledge of the whole proceeds first by a reality of parts working to realize a greater harmony of the whole, but parts are not absorbed or dissolved by being in relation to a wider whole. The subliminal self is, then, a person in affective relation with this wider consciousness. It is an embrace of James’s weak panpsychism. What’s more, the boundaries of radical empiricism of knowing parts first and willing ourselves to believe in a greater whole without evidence, but faith of the will–all of this works with how I am positioning these factors in the book.
In addition, religion is always present because of how human beings are put together. We experience this affective dimension and we speculate that such experiences as the “impressions and impulsions and emotions and excitements which we thence receive help us to live.” Embracing Bergson’s assumption, all cognition is rooted in helping us navigate action, and that includes any element of the primordiality of felt consciousness before it is conceptualized into a category. James sees these impressions, impulsions, emotions, and excitements as all datum from which issue forth in our practical nature. They constitute the elements of religious experiences more generally, and they are geared toward helping us live. When these affective elements are present, we feel their power as “invincible assurance of a world beyond” the senses. In feeling the world, our hearts melt and we experience a world infused with purpose. These objects are not seen nor discovered but felt. In feeling, they are experienced such that our moral phenomenology of values and purpose rest in the invincible assurance of what we feel to be true, not what we know to be true. Since all we know must then come through our bodily and finite feeling, the relations that constitute our religious sense of significance blur into any phenomenology of value. Scheler and James come together on this point, and to a degree so does Levinas. The holiness of an-other is a rupture that comes from nowhere but on high.
In experiencing these affective elements, the subliminal self is in relation to all of these pre-cognitive elements that undergird even our conceptual categories. They highlight and accentuate the feeling objects of religious thought, and the persons who can articulate an order out of these pre-cognitive elements tend to be religious, and the religious impetus and sentiment manifest in the our lives. For this reason, James says “religion in this way is absolutely indestructible.” Persons will continually feel the “invisible assurance” that melts our hearts, “communicate significance and value to everything” and makes us happy. Anyone who experiences this affective dimension will continue to experience the elements that compose religious experience, and since an empiricist can only know the perceptual particulars of experience, we are always experiencing a gap between our sensory intake and the depth and capacity for inward feeling that takes objects from the margins of the subliminal field, the larger sphere of panpsychic life James affirms. In so doing, the gap is, then, posited as some philosophical or theological concept. It’s at this point that human beings make use of concepts to aid in how they reconstruct the significance of the world they can only feel but never see. In this way, one can easily affirm any number of religious ideas as the object of that which we feel, including Christianity, but the empirical gap in our knowledge and categories makes it impossible to prove any one single religious object of devotion. In this way, James is blowing hot and cold on Christianity. He is “explaining away Christianity” as he says but also articulating the ontological scaffolding of experience that “defends the more general basis from which [religious experience] proceeds.”
The Horizon and The Fringe 