ウィリアム・ジェイムズの「臨床」の悪い翻訳実践としての医学的唯物論
On medical materialism by William James
On medical materialism by William James
12■ウィリアム・ジェイムズの「臨床」の悪い 翻訳実践としての医学的唯物論
William James says that
sometimes people who want to dismiss or belittle religious experience
use medical materialism as a way of "discrediting states of mind for
which [they] have an antipathy." [Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture I]
・医学的唯物論（medical materialism）の実例
"Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover."［桝田訳（上）：29］ (Source:http://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/james/toc.htm)
・医学的唯物論は、身体に基礎をおくという「共通性」という無謬論が、観念を身体に直結する説明のモードの単純性をもたらし、精神状態の多様性や個々人に おける独自性を説明することができず、説明の論理として破綻するのだ。
"According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our rapturer, and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they of religious or of non-religious content."［桝田訳（上）：30］ (Source:http://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/james/toc.htm)
"To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor's body at the time."［桝田訳（上）：30-31］ (Source:http://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/james/toc.htm)
・医学的唯物論（medical materialism）には、生理学的根拠がない
"It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of these its favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent."［桝田訳（上）：31］ (Source:http://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/james/toc.htm)
・基準としての直接明証性・哲学的分かりやすさ・道徳的有用性
"Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria."［桝田訳（上）：35］ (Source:http://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/james/toc.htm)
・狂気の効用＝正常の理解に役立つ
"Insane conditions have this advantage, that they isolate special factors of the mental life, and enable us to inspect them unmasked by their more usual surroundings. They play the part in mental anatomy which the scalpel and the microscope play in the anatomy of the body. To understand a thing rightly we need to see it both out of its environment and in it, and to have acquaintance with the whole range of its variations. "［桝田訳（上）：41］ (Source:http://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/james/toc.htm)
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