从忧郁个体到伟大心灵:威廉·詹姆斯实用主义的个体宗教观

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

19世纪末,威廉·詹姆斯开启的个体宗教转向深刻地影响了美国公民宗教传统的重建。本文尝试从思想史的争讼出发,讨论詹姆斯的宗教功能论重构现代社会道德生活的独特方法及其与美国公民宗教传统的复杂关联。詹姆斯的个体宗教研究从忧郁个体的问题入手,通过剖析作为一种生存体验的忧郁,在现代个体的心灵问题与救赎宗教传统之间建立了关联,并以重新诠释救赎经验来寻找能够解放狭隘人格的生命意蕴和情感力量。在詹姆斯看来,个体对人类普遍命运的具身化体认才是激活现代民主神圣性的机制。阐明这一重新创造的神圣性传统,不仅有助于我们在道德生活中检视现代忧郁个体的问题,而且有助于我们理解美国社会民主传统的新的动力学——在日常生活中关切同胞生活苦乐的道德实践。

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.