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The Varieties of Religious Experience
"I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. It would seem, therefore, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be to invite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities."
When William James went to the University of Edinburgh in 1901 to deliver a series of lectures on "natural religion," he defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." Considering religion, then, not as it is defined by--or takes place in--the churches, but as it is felt in everyday life, he undertook a project that, upon completion, stands not only as one of the most important texts on psychology ever written, not only as a vitally serious contemplation of spirituality, but for many critics one of the best works of nonfiction written in the 20th century. Reading The Varieties of Religious Experience, it is easy to see why. Applying his analytic clarity to religious accounts from a variety of sources, James elaborates a pluralistic framework in which "the divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions." It's an intellectual call for serious religious tolerance — indeed, respect — the vitality of which has not diminished through the subsequent decades.
When William James went to the University of Edinburgh in 1901 to deliver a series of lectures on "natural religion," he defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." Considering religion, then, not as it is defined by--or takes place in--the churches, but as it is felt in everyday life, he undertook a project that, upon completion, stands not only as one of the most important texts on psychology ever written, not only as a vitally serious contemplation of spirituality, but for many critics one of the best works of nonfiction written in the 20th century. Reading The Varieties of Religious Experience, it is easy to see why. Applying his analytic clarity to religious accounts from a variety of sources, James elaborates a pluralistic framework in which "the divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions." It's an intellectual call for serious religious tolerance — indeed, respect — the vitality of which has not diminished through the subsequent decades.
519 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1902
About the author
William James
350 books1,219 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labelled him the "Father of American psychology". Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, he is considered to be one of the greatest figures associated with the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of the functional psychology. He also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James' work has influenced intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty.
Born into a wealthy family, James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr and the brother of both the prominent novelist Henry James, and the diarist Alice James. James wrote widely on many topics, including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. Among his most influential books are Principles of Psychology, which was a groundbreaking text in the field of psychology, Essays in Radical Empiricism, an important text in philosophy, and The Varieties of Religious Experience, which investigated different forms of religious experience.
William James was born at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry James Sr., a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.
James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godson William James Sidis, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Macedonio Fernández, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud.
William James received an eclectic trans-Atlantic education, developing fluency in both German and French. Education in the James household encouraged cosmopolitanism. The family made two trips to Europe while William James was still a child, setting a pattern that resulted in thirteen more European journeys during his life. His early artistic bent led to an apprenticeship in the studio of William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island, but he switched in 1861 to scientific studies at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University.
In his early adulthood, James suffered from a variety of physical ailments, including those of the eyes, back, stomach, and skin. He was also tone deaf. He was subject to a variety of psychological symptoms which were diagnosed at the time as neurasthenia, and which included periods of depression during which he contemplated suicide for months on end. Two younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) and Robertson (Bob), fought in the Civil War. The other three siblings (William, Henry, and Alice James) all suffered from periods of invalidism.
He took up medical studies at Harvard Medical School in 1864. He took a break in the spring of 1865 to join naturalist Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition up the Amazon River, but aborted his trip after eight months, as he suffered bouts of severe seasickness and mild smallpox. His studies were interrupted once again due to illness in April 1867. He traveled to Germany in search of a cure and remained there until November 1868; at that time he was 26 years old. During this period, he
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labelled him the "Father of American psychology". Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, he is considered to be one of the greatest figures associated with the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of the functional psychology. He also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James' work has influenced intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty.
Born into a wealthy family, James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr and the brother of both the prominent novelist Henry James, and the diarist Alice James. James wrote widely on many topics, including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. Among his most influential books are Principles of Psychology, which was a groundbreaking text in the field of psychology, Essays in Radical Empiricism, an important text in philosophy, and The Varieties of Religious Experience, which investigated different forms of religious experience.
William James was born at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry James Sr., a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.
James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godson William James Sidis, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Macedonio Fernández, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud.
William James received an eclectic trans-Atlantic education, developing fluency in both German and French. Education in the James household encouraged cosmopolitanism. The family made two trips to Europe while William James was still a child, setting a pattern that resulted in thirteen more European journeys during his life. His early artistic bent led to an apprenticeship in the studio of William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island, but he switched in 1861 to scientific studies at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University.
In his early adulthood, James suffered from a variety of physical ailments, including those of the eyes, back, stomach, and skin. He was also tone deaf. He was subject to a variety of psychological symptoms which were diagnosed at the time as neurasthenia, and which included periods of depression during which he contemplated suicide for months on end. Two younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) and Robertson (Bob), fought in the Civil War. The other three siblings (William, Henry, and Alice James) all suffered from periods of invalidism.
He took up medical studies at Harvard Medical School in 1864. He took a break in the spring of 1865 to join naturalist Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition up the Amazon River, but aborted his trip after eight months, as he suffered bouts of severe seasickness and mild smallpox. His studies were interrupted once again due to illness in April 1867. He traveled to Germany in search of a cure and remained there until November 1868; at that time he was 26 years old. During this period, he
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May 23, 2013
I wanted to like this classic book, but I can't do it: too many things are wrong. A shame, because I completely approve of the idea. William James, writing around the end of the 19th century, sets out to take a cool look at how people experience religious feeling, basing his investigation on state-of-the-art psychological theory. What do we discover, and what do the findings tell us about the nature of religion? For the first two or three chapters, I enjoyed it and thought it was going in a good direction. James is evidently intelligent and well-read, and he's capable of writing excellent prose. Unfortunately, it rapidly started going off the rails in several ways.
First, the style. Yes, James is able to write wonderfully, but a lot of the time he seems to have lost all sense of self-criticism. Above all, he just won't cut anything: the book could comfortably have been shortened to half its length. Looking around, I see many editions which have far fewer pages, so I'm guessing that some editors have done just that. In the original version, which I read, he has endless, repetitious quotations, often stuffed into footnotes which can go on (literally) for two or three pages. It's worse than Infinite Jest, where at least the footnotes are intentionally annoying and often funny. These are anything but.
Next, the science. All well and good to say you'll use up-to-date psychological theory: but psychology at that time was barely a science at all, and it shows. The "scientific" explanations are in most cases not much more than hand-waving and fanciful ideas with Latin names. There are no experiments, no statistics, no falsifiable claims. It's just a mass of case studies, selected and reported according to criteria that are never in any way made clear. Just: oh, this is interesting, let's stick it in. When you cherry-pick your data this way, you can prove anything.
To be fair, James does have an informal plan for selecting his examples, but it's one that I feel very dubious about. He says he will focus on the most extreme examples of religious feeling, since it is in such cases that we will see it in its purest form. We are thus treated to hundreds of pages of quotations from born-again converts, saints and mystics. The greater part of these passages are tedious in the extreme: few of the people in question write well. And, more important, I am not at all sure I agree that religious feeling is best studied in these extreme cases. There's an analogy which suggested itself to me more than once. Imagine that most people never experienced sexual desire, and you wanted to investigate the minority who claimed that they knew it from their own experience. I would definitely not start by reading accounts of people who were into extreme BDSM; The Story of O is interesting in its perverse way, but it would probably give you all sorts of odd ideas about what sex was like. I hate to say this, but some of the saints James discusses rather reminded me of O.
At the end, I was surprised to see James unequivocally claiming that he thought religious feeling was a good thing, and that its object was some definite spiritual reality. I do wonder if he truly believed this. If he did, why pick such bizarre and unconvincing examples? I am quite capable of being moved by religious authors: for example, I love The Divine Comedy, Ash Wednesday, Jan Kjærstad's Jonas Wergeland trilogy, Flaubert's La tentation de saint Antoine and Selma Lagerlöf's Jerusalem, to name just a few. If James had actually wanted to convince his readers, I think he could have done better. He says himself that he was a person who never experienced religious feeling much at first hand; you often get the impression that he was rather sceptical about it. He is certainly quite willing to poke fun at many of the subjects he quotes.
All in all, then, an annoying and frustrating book. If you're interested in these matters, I'd instead recommend reading Gide's La porte étroite and L'immoraliste , and Smullyan's Planet Without Laughter . They're shorter, better written, and, in my humble opinion, considerably more insightful.
First, the style. Yes, James is able to write wonderfully, but a lot of the time he seems to have lost all sense of self-criticism. Above all, he just won't cut anything: the book could comfortably have been shortened to half its length. Looking around, I see many editions which have far fewer pages, so I'm guessing that some editors have done just that. In the original version, which I read, he has endless, repetitious quotations, often stuffed into footnotes which can go on (literally) for two or three pages. It's worse than Infinite Jest, where at least the footnotes are intentionally annoying and often funny. These are anything but.
Next, the science. All well and good to say you'll use up-to-date psychological theory: but psychology at that time was barely a science at all, and it shows. The "scientific" explanations are in most cases not much more than hand-waving and fanciful ideas with Latin names. There are no experiments, no statistics, no falsifiable claims. It's just a mass of case studies, selected and reported according to criteria that are never in any way made clear. Just: oh, this is interesting, let's stick it in. When you cherry-pick your data this way, you can prove anything.
To be fair, James does have an informal plan for selecting his examples, but it's one that I feel very dubious about. He says he will focus on the most extreme examples of religious feeling, since it is in such cases that we will see it in its purest form. We are thus treated to hundreds of pages of quotations from born-again converts, saints and mystics. The greater part of these passages are tedious in the extreme: few of the people in question write well. And, more important, I am not at all sure I agree that religious feeling is best studied in these extreme cases. There's an analogy which suggested itself to me more than once. Imagine that most people never experienced sexual desire, and you wanted to investigate the minority who claimed that they knew it from their own experience. I would definitely not start by reading accounts of people who were into extreme BDSM; The Story of O is interesting in its perverse way, but it would probably give you all sorts of odd ideas about what sex was like. I hate to say this, but some of the saints James discusses rather reminded me of O.
At the end, I was surprised to see James unequivocally claiming that he thought religious feeling was a good thing, and that its object was some definite spiritual reality. I do wonder if he truly believed this. If he did, why pick such bizarre and unconvincing examples? I am quite capable of being moved by religious authors: for example, I love The Divine Comedy, Ash Wednesday, Jan Kjærstad's Jonas Wergeland trilogy, Flaubert's La tentation de saint Antoine and Selma Lagerlöf's Jerusalem, to name just a few. If James had actually wanted to convince his readers, I think he could have done better. He says himself that he was a person who never experienced religious feeling much at first hand; you often get the impression that he was rather sceptical about it. He is certainly quite willing to poke fun at many of the subjects he quotes.
All in all, then, an annoying and frustrating book. If you're interested in these matters, I'd instead recommend reading Gide's La porte étroite and L'immoraliste , and Smullyan's Planet Without Laughter . They're shorter, better written, and, in my humble opinion, considerably more insightful.
Shelved as 'reviews-of-books-i-didnt-read'
February 9, 2016I had an unusually long conversation with my daughter Georgia (also now a Goodreader) once when she was seven years old (she's now 16 going on 17, just like in the song) and the matter of eschatology came up, so I asked her directly - well, what does happen when you die? So she laid out what she thinks happens, and I was so taken by the stuff she came out with that I wrote it down. As it's a variety of religious experience I thought it appropriate to include here.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE
Heaven has different parts to it. In one part there are monsters, but they're good. In another part they're like orcs but they're good. In the third part there are dinosaurs, and they're bad.
Jesus is not in heaven. He is above heaven. He was a normal man but he went on the cross and died and he became magic. He was alive again and turned into an angel. Now he can listen to anyone on the earth just by thinking of their name.
When people die they all go to heaven. It could be the good part or the bad part. When you die you turn into a zombie, but then quite quickly you turn into a skeleton and that's when you go to heaven. The
skeletons in heaven can't see the Earth at all, but to the good orcs Earth appears like the brightest star in the sky. But they have to look down to see it, because they are all upside down.
If you are cremated your ashes float up and turn into your soul. It goes up into a purple porthole. It meets a sorter who asks you what age you want to be and that's what you stay at from then on. In this world everything is slightly see-through. You only spend 1000 years here and then you go to the graveyard and sleep. But one day in each 10 years you come alive again. But this world is not heaven so jesus is not there. The bad people who die become good. For five years out of 1000 they are punished in a house sized prison cell by having to eat all the food they really hate and listen to all the music they really hate.
There is a feather of truth and a catch up course, but I can't remember what they are for.
People have gone into space in rockets but they haven't seen heaven because it is very small.
When animals die, if it's on concrete they fade away and become invisible. If it's on soil, they sink bit by bit into the earth and they become animal zombies. Our hamster Lucy became an animal zombie, but all animal zombies are good, not bad.
Note : don't blame me for any of this, I never allowed her to watch any zombie films intil she was 12! I don't know where she's got any of this stuff apart from orcs.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE
Heaven has different parts to it. In one part there are monsters, but they're good. In another part they're like orcs but they're good. In the third part there are dinosaurs, and they're bad.
Jesus is not in heaven. He is above heaven. He was a normal man but he went on the cross and died and he became magic. He was alive again and turned into an angel. Now he can listen to anyone on the earth just by thinking of their name.
When people die they all go to heaven. It could be the good part or the bad part. When you die you turn into a zombie, but then quite quickly you turn into a skeleton and that's when you go to heaven. The
skeletons in heaven can't see the Earth at all, but to the good orcs Earth appears like the brightest star in the sky. But they have to look down to see it, because they are all upside down.
If you are cremated your ashes float up and turn into your soul. It goes up into a purple porthole. It meets a sorter who asks you what age you want to be and that's what you stay at from then on. In this world everything is slightly see-through. You only spend 1000 years here and then you go to the graveyard and sleep. But one day in each 10 years you come alive again. But this world is not heaven so jesus is not there. The bad people who die become good. For five years out of 1000 they are punished in a house sized prison cell by having to eat all the food they really hate and listen to all the music they really hate.
There is a feather of truth and a catch up course, but I can't remember what they are for.
People have gone into space in rockets but they haven't seen heaven because it is very small.
When animals die, if it's on concrete they fade away and become invisible. If it's on soil, they sink bit by bit into the earth and they become animal zombies. Our hamster Lucy became an animal zombie, but all animal zombies are good, not bad.
Note : don't blame me for any of this, I never allowed her to watch any zombie films intil she was 12! I don't know where she's got any of this stuff apart from orcs.
December 30, 2015
“There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
The amazing thing about James is he can write with precision and humility about something so completely intrinsic and fraught with pit falls. Most writers run at the subject with some large bias of the mystical, the absolute. You have thousand of books written every year proclaiming their strain of Christianity, Judaism, Vegetarianism, Atheism, Mormonism, Buddhism, as being the only true and living way to view the divine AND the only mirror to view and judge ourselves. James is different. He artfully and carefully presents a measured approach to religion. He picks it apart with affection. He looks at it normatively and then he tries to look at each speck and piece through a value lens.
I think the magic is James isn't selling a belief. He isn't pimping a lifestyle. He is just curious and very very smart. And it isn't a clinical curiosity either (although his precision could be called clinical). It is a joyful curiosity. A drive to discover how we work and what really makes us tick. He wants to know and explain his hypothesis. God **ahem** bless William James. He wasn't just describing the transcendental condition of mankind, he was establishing and building a framework for others to follow for over 100 years.
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
The amazing thing about James is he can write with precision and humility about something so completely intrinsic and fraught with pit falls. Most writers run at the subject with some large bias of the mystical, the absolute. You have thousand of books written every year proclaiming their strain of Christianity, Judaism, Vegetarianism, Atheism, Mormonism, Buddhism, as being the only true and living way to view the divine AND the only mirror to view and judge ourselves. James is different. He artfully and carefully presents a measured approach to religion. He picks it apart with affection. He looks at it normatively and then he tries to look at each speck and piece through a value lens.
I think the magic is James isn't selling a belief. He isn't pimping a lifestyle. He is just curious and very very smart. And it isn't a clinical curiosity either (although his precision could be called clinical). It is a joyful curiosity. A drive to discover how we work and what really makes us tick. He wants to know and explain his hypothesis. God **ahem** bless William James. He wasn't just describing the transcendental condition of mankind, he was establishing and building a framework for others to follow for over 100 years.
December 4, 2013
Most people seem to think this book is important for the light it sheds on religion, or perhaps as an advancement in the field of religious studies. However, I would argue that this book's real significance lies in James' respect for our conscious experiences of things as the origin of real truth, insight, and significance. James is one of those rare thinkers who values the subjective more highly than the objective: "The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed." James' emphasis on conscious experience is a radical departure from the orthodoxy of our age, which is one reason that James' arguments in this book will challenge at least one fundamental belief of nearly every reader. Only those readers who are ready to think and to learn need apply here.
These days, most people have adopted a rationalist mindset that values definite facts above all things, that uplifts truths derived strictly from material phenomena. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James declares his allegiance to the truth as it is experienced, and he argues persuasively that the truth as it is experienced by singular, subjective human beings like you and I ends up being more significant, and having a greater impact on life as it is actually lived, than "universal" scientific truths. He investigates religious experiences as they were felt and encountered by the individuals who had them. His primary method for this is to review many, many first-hand accounts of religious experiences, looking for commonalities and patterns between the accounts. A consummate analyst, James identifies several of these commonalities and patterns, and he organizes a series of lectures around them. Each lecture investigates a different aspect of religious experience, such as "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness," "Conversion," "Saintliness," and "Mysticism." Each lecture takes readers through the various first-hand accounts of the religious experience being focused upon, and James goes on to make observations and quite persuasive arguments about what can be concluded from these experiences about the value, significance, and role of religion in human life. The whole time, James honors the feelings experienced by these people. He analyzes and discusses these feelings with a probing intellect and a sympathetic sensibility. James understands fully that "Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an account of itself. It allows that its results are mysteries and enigmas, declines to justify them rationally, and on occasion is willing that they should even pass for paradoxical and absurd." Despite these hazards, James explores the world of private, individualized feelings because he knows that is the world where most of us actually reside, day by day, and that is the world where religion is actually experienced. James happily tours where science fears to tread.
It helps that James is a good writer and an insightful psychoanalyst. While reading this book, I repeatedly had the feeling that James was discussing experiences I'd had privately, without ever reporting to anyone, and that James understood those experiences better than I who had lived them. Like all great literature, this book opens us to the shared experiences that unite so many human beings across time and space. James treats even the most extreme emotional states with an even-handed finesse, a literary grace that honors the furor of the moment while laying bare what sense the intellect can make of it. Consider his description of anger: "Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistably as anger does it. [...] The sweetest delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the moment they offer themselves. [...] Rather do we take a stern joy in the astringency and desolation, and what is called weakness of character seems in most cases to consist in the aptitude for these sacrificial moods, of which one's own inferior self and its pet softness must often be the targets and the victims." Who among us, at one time or another, hasn't destroyed something valuable or important in a fit of rage?
Those looking to understand religion generally will learn plenty about why so many religions tend toward strictness, or withdrawing from pleasure, or asceticism; why the newly converted behave that way; why some people seem to walk through life intoxicated by Jesus, smiling their way from sunrise to sunset, and frowning only when someone dwells upon sickness or uses bad language; why saints behave that way, and what it takes to be a saint; why mystical experiences mean everything to the mystic and almost nothing to anyone else, and what that has to do with a good, stiff drink.
Lest potential readers fear that James is trying to convert atheists into the faithful, let me be clear that James is studying how people experience religion, not arguing that we need to experience it. His attitude seems to be that, for anyone who feels, who travels an ongoing interior emotional landscape, sooner or later an experience will arise that human culture has traditionally named "religious," whether we prefer to use that label or not. The experience, not the label, is what's important. And I would bet that every reader will identify with many of the experiences James discusses. To varying degrees, every reader will find himself or herself reflected in James' pages. And every reader stands to learn how these experiences, which so often feel remote and isolated from the other humans surrounding us, actually connect to the vaster experience, to the infinite. James gives us reassurance that we're not alone in these experiences; he gives us a vocabulary to discuss them; he gives us insights into how we can better understand and contextualize these experiences.
A recent Pew poll asked people to name their religious faith or affiliation. The results showed that the fastest-growing segment of the faithful in the USA are "nones," or people who don't adhere to any of the major religious faiths. However, the same polling data show that the majority of people refer to themselves as "spiritual" if not religious. We have not stopped needing a spiritual ground on which to experience our lives. Furthermore, some people will drift from the "none" category to a major religion, and then back to "none." Our culture appears to be entering an age of flux, or perhaps crisis, when it comes to religion. That makes James' project valuable to our age, for James takes the trouble to explain what is valuable in religion without giving us the feeling that he's selling something, or trying to force a moral code upon us. James only wants to give us insights into religion itself, and how religion has been experienced on a private, emotional level at various times throughout history. He wants us to understand why religion has been with humans throughout history and will in all likelihood be with us throughout time.
These days, most people have adopted a rationalist mindset that values definite facts above all things, that uplifts truths derived strictly from material phenomena. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James declares his allegiance to the truth as it is experienced, and he argues persuasively that the truth as it is experienced by singular, subjective human beings like you and I ends up being more significant, and having a greater impact on life as it is actually lived, than "universal" scientific truths. He investigates religious experiences as they were felt and encountered by the individuals who had them. His primary method for this is to review many, many first-hand accounts of religious experiences, looking for commonalities and patterns between the accounts. A consummate analyst, James identifies several of these commonalities and patterns, and he organizes a series of lectures around them. Each lecture investigates a different aspect of religious experience, such as "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness," "Conversion," "Saintliness," and "Mysticism." Each lecture takes readers through the various first-hand accounts of the religious experience being focused upon, and James goes on to make observations and quite persuasive arguments about what can be concluded from these experiences about the value, significance, and role of religion in human life. The whole time, James honors the feelings experienced by these people. He analyzes and discusses these feelings with a probing intellect and a sympathetic sensibility. James understands fully that "Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an account of itself. It allows that its results are mysteries and enigmas, declines to justify them rationally, and on occasion is willing that they should even pass for paradoxical and absurd." Despite these hazards, James explores the world of private, individualized feelings because he knows that is the world where most of us actually reside, day by day, and that is the world where religion is actually experienced. James happily tours where science fears to tread.
It helps that James is a good writer and an insightful psychoanalyst. While reading this book, I repeatedly had the feeling that James was discussing experiences I'd had privately, without ever reporting to anyone, and that James understood those experiences better than I who had lived them. Like all great literature, this book opens us to the shared experiences that unite so many human beings across time and space. James treats even the most extreme emotional states with an even-handed finesse, a literary grace that honors the furor of the moment while laying bare what sense the intellect can make of it. Consider his description of anger: "Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistably as anger does it. [...] The sweetest delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the moment they offer themselves. [...] Rather do we take a stern joy in the astringency and desolation, and what is called weakness of character seems in most cases to consist in the aptitude for these sacrificial moods, of which one's own inferior self and its pet softness must often be the targets and the victims." Who among us, at one time or another, hasn't destroyed something valuable or important in a fit of rage?
Those looking to understand religion generally will learn plenty about why so many religions tend toward strictness, or withdrawing from pleasure, or asceticism; why the newly converted behave that way; why some people seem to walk through life intoxicated by Jesus, smiling their way from sunrise to sunset, and frowning only when someone dwells upon sickness or uses bad language; why saints behave that way, and what it takes to be a saint; why mystical experiences mean everything to the mystic and almost nothing to anyone else, and what that has to do with a good, stiff drink.
Lest potential readers fear that James is trying to convert atheists into the faithful, let me be clear that James is studying how people experience religion, not arguing that we need to experience it. His attitude seems to be that, for anyone who feels, who travels an ongoing interior emotional landscape, sooner or later an experience will arise that human culture has traditionally named "religious," whether we prefer to use that label or not. The experience, not the label, is what's important. And I would bet that every reader will identify with many of the experiences James discusses. To varying degrees, every reader will find himself or herself reflected in James' pages. And every reader stands to learn how these experiences, which so often feel remote and isolated from the other humans surrounding us, actually connect to the vaster experience, to the infinite. James gives us reassurance that we're not alone in these experiences; he gives us a vocabulary to discuss them; he gives us insights into how we can better understand and contextualize these experiences.
A recent Pew poll asked people to name their religious faith or affiliation. The results showed that the fastest-growing segment of the faithful in the USA are "nones," or people who don't adhere to any of the major religious faiths. However, the same polling data show that the majority of people refer to themselves as "spiritual" if not religious. We have not stopped needing a spiritual ground on which to experience our lives. Furthermore, some people will drift from the "none" category to a major religion, and then back to "none." Our culture appears to be entering an age of flux, or perhaps crisis, when it comes to religion. That makes James' project valuable to our age, for James takes the trouble to explain what is valuable in religion without giving us the feeling that he's selling something, or trying to force a moral code upon us. James only wants to give us insights into religion itself, and how religion has been experienced on a private, emotional level at various times throughout history. He wants us to understand why religion has been with humans throughout history and will in all likelihood be with us throughout time.
October 29, 2009
I have heard of this book for years and have meant to look into it for about as long – but earlier this year I read a book called Ghost Hunters William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death and that made me more curious about James and his philosophy. I had read some of his philosophy at University, but not really a lot.
I had no idea this would be quite so long. I also had no idea this was based on a series of twenty lectures he gave at the University of Edinburgh between 1901-02.
This isn’t quite what we would today expect from a book entitled Varieties of Religious Experience. This is a book that even finds Catholic systems of belief a bit ‘out-there’. The treatment of any non-Christian belief systems is, to be incredibly generous, cursory. However, my limited knowledge of these other belief systems is not much more extensive than James’ so, in taking this book for what it is, it was an interesting discussion.
Let’s cut to the chaise – after twenty lectures that must have lasted for at least an hour or so each I think the point he comes to is that prayer is the key religious activity and the main reason anyone would be religious. This is an interesting notion given the long route taken in getting here. Earlier he has said that rationalism is only able to account for a small part of our lives, (“Nevertheless, if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial.” And “This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it.”)
In confirmation of the second quote above he says, “proofs of God's existence drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, to-day does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the simple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for.” This is terribly interesting, particularly given that in a later lecture he makes a point of going over the things that must be true about God if God exists and one of the essentials is that God must be unchanging. Naturally, this says nothing about our notions of God – they can change with the wind and have no affect on the unchanging nature of God. It quickly becomes clear that James is not going to fall into the trap of seeking to provide a proof for the existence of God that would satisfy his mostly scientific audience.
James seems content to make religion of practical relevance to humanity and for this to be its main justification. The echoes of Kant are everywhere as are echoes of Aristotle, ‘If we were to ask the question: "What is human life's chief concern?" one of the answers we should receive would be: "It is happiness."’
Part of what he is doing here is to present the extremes of religious experience and then to see if these can be shown to have an ability to make our lives better. He constantly acknowledges that he will not please everyone with this method – that some will see the people he has chosen to display excessive religious feeling as being freaks and that other religious people will object that their more moderate religion is grotesquely exaggerated in the examples presented, but in the main I can see where he is coming from. He is wanting to show that religious experience is different from more secular experiences and to do that looking at the extreme examples of these experiences ought to show in greater relief the essence of these experiences.
He spends quite a lot of time discussing ‘mind-curers’ – people like the followers of Baker-Eddy of Christian Science fame. He also divides much of religion into those who are once born and those who are twice born. Those who have been born again do tend to pay for the compliment Bush gave in his belief and in his being an adherent. The mind-curers tend to have been twice born too and even likely to believe they have been resurrected in the flesh (something I might have believed to be a heresy and that the only one truly resurrected being Jesus). Anyway, there are many interesting bits along the way here – particularly about Methodism, which I knew virtually nothing. The idea that one must have a conversion experience, and therefore that these experiences are much more frequent among believers of Methodism than other Christian sects, was particularly interesting. You find what you are seeking after, seems to be a rather common 'religious' experience.
Some of the twice born see all evil as a lie and therefore reject its existence outright and pretend it simply isn’t there. This really corresponds to my view of the New Age movement and is presented here as being just as naïve as one would expect a psychologist of religion to approach such beliefs.
The long and far too detailed descriptions of sufferings for God’s sake were the sorts of things you might expect the Marquis De Sade to get off on. I mean, honestly. The tales of one of these loonies sleeping effectively on a bed of nails and making up increasingly horrible ways to torture himself even while asleep made that guy in The Da Vinci Code look like a complete wimp.
He does say some daft things – like “Mind-cure uses experiment of sorts and so is similar to science - uses science against science.” – oh yeah, right.
There are also sad reflections on what it is to be human, like “But take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure.”
There are some amusing stories of people being able to quit smoking by their belief in God (as someone who has quit smoking I can see how this might fit into the 'miraculous cure' category) – what I found most interesting in this was that in both cases he quoted the person who gave up smoking (or drinking) was due mostly to social pressure (in one case a sister burst into tears on seeing him drunk) applied after a conversion event and the quitting was therefore almost incidental to their belief in God. There was also a long section on cleanliness and dyeing cloth to hide dirt and how some religious people find that something quite repugnant. I found all of this utterly fascinating and amongst the most interesting parts of the book.
But then comes a long section on giving everything over to God and I found this section particularly distressing - the idea that to love God you must keep nothing for yourself is clearly appealing and I can see how, to a religious temperament, this idea would make lots of sense, but I also think the guiding maxim here should be 'moderation in all things'. There is an example given (and this book is virtually an endless series of examples) where a husband is at his wife’s death-bed holding her hand in his hand and knowing she does not have long to live, so he offers her hand to God and promises never to touch her again. Oh humanity – what sicknesses we are capable of. I had Nietzsche ringing in my ears at these parts about Christianity's rejection of life. This was even referred to as 'mortification' so the link to Nietzsche wasn't exactly a difficult leap to make.
Around the corner from where I live there is a school for the Our Lady of the Sacred Heart – I’m not totally sure if this is the same as the Sacred Heart Order, but if it is then it is no wonder such schools have always been associated with child abuse. As James quotes: “Of the founder of the Sacred Heart order, for example, we read that "Her love of pain and suffering was insatiable. . . . She said that she could cheerfully live till the day of judgment, provided she might always have matter for suffering for God; but that to live a single day without suffering would be intolerable.”
There are many interesting examples given of people choosing the life of true poverty and literally following Christ. The interesting thing here is that when they seek to reserve something for themselves – a penny in case they need to buy bread, for example - a voice comes to them saying, ‘Don’t you trust that I will provide?’ The point being that even if He doesn’t provide – there is a lesson in that too that He clearly wants you to learn, although, obviously, not the lesson an atheist might draw.
There are also fascinating discussions of comparisons of religious experiences and drug induced states of altered consciousness. The entire section on mysticism was very interesting.
But I need to end soon and haven’t spoken about his main conclusion that prayer is the key religious experience.
“The religious phenomenon … has shown itself to consist everywhere, and at all its stages, in the consciousness which individuals have of an intercourse between themselves and higher powers with which they feel themselves to be related. This intercourse is realized at the time as being both active and mutual. If it be not effective; if it be not a give and take relation; if nothing be really transacted while it lasts; if the world is in no whit different for its having taken place; then prayer, taken in this wide meaning of a sense that SOMETHING IS TRANSACTING, is of course a feeling of what is illusory, and religion must on the whole be classed, not simply as containing elements of delusion.”
His point becomes, I think, that whether or not religion is a delusion is ultimately not the right question, but rather, does this standing in communion with the absolute (a position that only religion can offer) allow us something otherwise missing and unobtainable by any other means of what it means to be human? His answer is an emphatic yes and this is his apology for religion.
My problem with prayer would be, if God existed, my infinite unworthiness to chat with Him and my complete unworthiness to ask Him to do something for me. There is a wonderful scene in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where Marvin (the paranoid android) says, “Brain the size of a planet and they ask me to open a door.” There was one guy discussed in this book who spent lots of his life asking God to help him do the most incredibly mundane things, to find his door keys for him or to hurry along friends who appeared to be running a bit late. That the infinite creator of everything could really give a stuff about where you left your door keys simply makes my head spin. And given most religious people would probably see asking such petty questions of God a bit stupid, it does beg the question of what question we could ask that wouldn't seem so to God? The problem is that all of our prayers must sound equally absurd to Him.
This was an interesting book and the first I’ve read on my new Kindle – all praise be to the Kindle…
I had no idea this would be quite so long. I also had no idea this was based on a series of twenty lectures he gave at the University of Edinburgh between 1901-02.
This isn’t quite what we would today expect from a book entitled Varieties of Religious Experience. This is a book that even finds Catholic systems of belief a bit ‘out-there’. The treatment of any non-Christian belief systems is, to be incredibly generous, cursory. However, my limited knowledge of these other belief systems is not much more extensive than James’ so, in taking this book for what it is, it was an interesting discussion.
Let’s cut to the chaise – after twenty lectures that must have lasted for at least an hour or so each I think the point he comes to is that prayer is the key religious activity and the main reason anyone would be religious. This is an interesting notion given the long route taken in getting here. Earlier he has said that rationalism is only able to account for a small part of our lives, (“Nevertheless, if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial.” And “This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it.”)
In confirmation of the second quote above he says, “proofs of God's existence drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, to-day does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the simple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for.” This is terribly interesting, particularly given that in a later lecture he makes a point of going over the things that must be true about God if God exists and one of the essentials is that God must be unchanging. Naturally, this says nothing about our notions of God – they can change with the wind and have no affect on the unchanging nature of God. It quickly becomes clear that James is not going to fall into the trap of seeking to provide a proof for the existence of God that would satisfy his mostly scientific audience.
James seems content to make religion of practical relevance to humanity and for this to be its main justification. The echoes of Kant are everywhere as are echoes of Aristotle, ‘If we were to ask the question: "What is human life's chief concern?" one of the answers we should receive would be: "It is happiness."’
Part of what he is doing here is to present the extremes of religious experience and then to see if these can be shown to have an ability to make our lives better. He constantly acknowledges that he will not please everyone with this method – that some will see the people he has chosen to display excessive religious feeling as being freaks and that other religious people will object that their more moderate religion is grotesquely exaggerated in the examples presented, but in the main I can see where he is coming from. He is wanting to show that religious experience is different from more secular experiences and to do that looking at the extreme examples of these experiences ought to show in greater relief the essence of these experiences.
He spends quite a lot of time discussing ‘mind-curers’ – people like the followers of Baker-Eddy of Christian Science fame. He also divides much of religion into those who are once born and those who are twice born. Those who have been born again do tend to pay for the compliment Bush gave in his belief and in his being an adherent. The mind-curers tend to have been twice born too and even likely to believe they have been resurrected in the flesh (something I might have believed to be a heresy and that the only one truly resurrected being Jesus). Anyway, there are many interesting bits along the way here – particularly about Methodism, which I knew virtually nothing. The idea that one must have a conversion experience, and therefore that these experiences are much more frequent among believers of Methodism than other Christian sects, was particularly interesting. You find what you are seeking after, seems to be a rather common 'religious' experience.
Some of the twice born see all evil as a lie and therefore reject its existence outright and pretend it simply isn’t there. This really corresponds to my view of the New Age movement and is presented here as being just as naïve as one would expect a psychologist of religion to approach such beliefs.
The long and far too detailed descriptions of sufferings for God’s sake were the sorts of things you might expect the Marquis De Sade to get off on. I mean, honestly. The tales of one of these loonies sleeping effectively on a bed of nails and making up increasingly horrible ways to torture himself even while asleep made that guy in The Da Vinci Code look like a complete wimp.
He does say some daft things – like “Mind-cure uses experiment of sorts and so is similar to science - uses science against science.” – oh yeah, right.
There are also sad reflections on what it is to be human, like “But take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure.”
There are some amusing stories of people being able to quit smoking by their belief in God (as someone who has quit smoking I can see how this might fit into the 'miraculous cure' category) – what I found most interesting in this was that in both cases he quoted the person who gave up smoking (or drinking) was due mostly to social pressure (in one case a sister burst into tears on seeing him drunk) applied after a conversion event and the quitting was therefore almost incidental to their belief in God. There was also a long section on cleanliness and dyeing cloth to hide dirt and how some religious people find that something quite repugnant. I found all of this utterly fascinating and amongst the most interesting parts of the book.
But then comes a long section on giving everything over to God and I found this section particularly distressing - the idea that to love God you must keep nothing for yourself is clearly appealing and I can see how, to a religious temperament, this idea would make lots of sense, but I also think the guiding maxim here should be 'moderation in all things'. There is an example given (and this book is virtually an endless series of examples) where a husband is at his wife’s death-bed holding her hand in his hand and knowing she does not have long to live, so he offers her hand to God and promises never to touch her again. Oh humanity – what sicknesses we are capable of. I had Nietzsche ringing in my ears at these parts about Christianity's rejection of life. This was even referred to as 'mortification' so the link to Nietzsche wasn't exactly a difficult leap to make.
Around the corner from where I live there is a school for the Our Lady of the Sacred Heart – I’m not totally sure if this is the same as the Sacred Heart Order, but if it is then it is no wonder such schools have always been associated with child abuse. As James quotes: “Of the founder of the Sacred Heart order, for example, we read that "Her love of pain and suffering was insatiable. . . . She said that she could cheerfully live till the day of judgment, provided she might always have matter for suffering for God; but that to live a single day without suffering would be intolerable.”
There are many interesting examples given of people choosing the life of true poverty and literally following Christ. The interesting thing here is that when they seek to reserve something for themselves – a penny in case they need to buy bread, for example - a voice comes to them saying, ‘Don’t you trust that I will provide?’ The point being that even if He doesn’t provide – there is a lesson in that too that He clearly wants you to learn, although, obviously, not the lesson an atheist might draw.
There are also fascinating discussions of comparisons of religious experiences and drug induced states of altered consciousness. The entire section on mysticism was very interesting.
But I need to end soon and haven’t spoken about his main conclusion that prayer is the key religious experience.
“The religious phenomenon … has shown itself to consist everywhere, and at all its stages, in the consciousness which individuals have of an intercourse between themselves and higher powers with which they feel themselves to be related. This intercourse is realized at the time as being both active and mutual. If it be not effective; if it be not a give and take relation; if nothing be really transacted while it lasts; if the world is in no whit different for its having taken place; then prayer, taken in this wide meaning of a sense that SOMETHING IS TRANSACTING, is of course a feeling of what is illusory, and religion must on the whole be classed, not simply as containing elements of delusion.”
His point becomes, I think, that whether or not religion is a delusion is ultimately not the right question, but rather, does this standing in communion with the absolute (a position that only religion can offer) allow us something otherwise missing and unobtainable by any other means of what it means to be human? His answer is an emphatic yes and this is his apology for religion.
My problem with prayer would be, if God existed, my infinite unworthiness to chat with Him and my complete unworthiness to ask Him to do something for me. There is a wonderful scene in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where Marvin (the paranoid android) says, “Brain the size of a planet and they ask me to open a door.” There was one guy discussed in this book who spent lots of his life asking God to help him do the most incredibly mundane things, to find his door keys for him or to hurry along friends who appeared to be running a bit late. That the infinite creator of everything could really give a stuff about where you left your door keys simply makes my head spin. And given most religious people would probably see asking such petty questions of God a bit stupid, it does beg the question of what question we could ask that wouldn't seem so to God? The problem is that all of our prayers must sound equally absurd to Him.
This was an interesting book and the first I’ve read on my new Kindle – all praise be to the Kindle…
June 19, 2020
بعد رحلة ممتعة وطويلة، انتهيت أخيرًا من كتاب (تنويعات التجربة الدينية)، لوليام جيمس. قرأته في ترجمته العربية الصادرة حديثًا لإسلام سعد وعلي رضا. والكتاب الحقيقة واحد من أهم الكتب في مجاله على الإطلاق، وتأخر ترجمته للعربية بشكل مُخجل، خاصة مع ثقله وأهميته.
في التنويعات، وليام جيمس، ولأول مرة، يستبعد الجوانب الثيولوجية والمؤسسات الدينية من محاولة البحث، ويُركز بشكل أساسي وحصري على التجربة الدينية نفسها التي يختبرها الإنسان. ولو بدا هذا المبحث معتادًا، فالفكرة إن وليام جيمس هو من بدأه. الكتاب صادر في عام 1902، واعتمد بالكامل على مجموعة من المحاضرات التي ألقاها جيمس في جامعة إدنبره. بعدها بحوالي 7 سنوات، سيصدر كتاب جيمس الأهم، البراجماتية.
كنت عرفت وليام جيمس سابقًا، وهو شقيق الروائي المشهور هنري جيمس، من زاوية علم النفس، تحديدًا كتابه الأهم (مباديء علم النفس) الصادر في 1890. الكتاب يعتبر من الكتب المؤسسة في مجال علم النفس، عالم ما قبل فرويد. وكثير من مؤرخي الطب يرون أن تصورات فرويد كانت مستحيلة بالكامل من دون كتابات وليام جيمس وملاحظاته ورصده للتجربة الإنسانية. مش بمعنى تأثير فرويد على جيمس، لأن الاثنين اختلفا في المفاهيم والأساليب والأفكار الأساسية، ولكن فيما يتعلق بأهمية جيمس، وما قدمه لهذا التخصص ككل في هذا الوقت المبكر. وإضافة إلى ذلك، فجيمس نفسه انتقد فرويد بوضوح في أكثر من موضع.
واحد من أهم اسهامات جيمس، بشكل مشترك مع عالم الفسيولوجيا كارل لانج، كانت في تطويرهما، بشكل منفصل، ما نعرفه الآن بنظرية جيمس لانج. التي ترى أن للعواطف أصولًا فسيولوجية واضحة، لا يمكن فصلها عن ظاهرة الشعور نفسه. وهي بالمناسبة نظرية تؤيدها كثير من الملاحظات الإكلينيكية المباشرة في الوقت الحالي. باختصار، ترى هذه النظرية أننا نرى الدب، فنهرب منه تلقائيًا، ثم نشعر بالخوف نتيجة لظهور الأعراض الجسدية. لا العكس. وبالتالي يصبح لإدراك الحالة الجسدية، ��الانتباه لها، دور حقيقي ومهم في التعامل مع الأعراض النفسية والمشاعر. يعني باختصار مفيش "شيء" اسمه خوف، بشكل حيادي منفصل عن ادراكه. وكل ذلك يحدث في طبيعة استقبال المخ البشري للمؤثرات الفسيولوجية وتأويلها في الدماغ.
كان من اللطيف إن الواحد يشوف بذور هذه الافكار في كتاب التنويعات، حتى وبشكل غير مباشر. واضح إن الراجل كان على قدر من تماسك الأفكار، إنه يقارب أفكاره من أماكن وتخصصات مختلفة، ويقدر في كل مرة يطلع بنتائج تستحق الانتباه لها.
الحقيقة إن الترجمة للعربية كانت في غاية الجمال، وباتقان قليل ما الواحد بيشوفه. ونتيجة ذلك كانت واضحة في المنتج النهائي.
في التنويعات، وليام جيمس، ولأول مرة، يستبعد الجوانب الثيولوجية والمؤسسات الدينية من محاولة البحث، ويُركز بشكل أساسي وحصري على التجربة الدينية نفسها التي يختبرها الإنسان. ولو بدا هذا المبحث معتادًا، فالفكرة إن وليام جيمس هو من بدأه. الكتاب صادر في عام 1902، واعتمد بالكامل على مجموعة من المحاضرات التي ألقاها جيمس في جامعة إدنبره. بعدها بحوالي 7 سنوات، سيصدر كتاب جيمس الأهم، البراجماتية.
كنت عرفت وليام جيمس سابقًا، وهو شقيق الروائي المشهور هنري جيمس، من زاوية علم النفس، تحديدًا كتابه الأهم (مباديء علم النفس) الصادر في 1890. الكتاب يعتبر من الكتب المؤسسة في مجال علم النفس، عالم ما قبل فرويد. وكثير من مؤرخي الطب يرون أن تصورات فرويد كانت مستحيلة بالكامل من دون كتابات وليام جيمس وملاحظاته ورصده للتجربة الإنسانية. مش بمعنى تأثير فرويد على جيمس، لأن الاثنين اختلفا في المفاهيم والأساليب والأفكار الأساسية، ولكن فيما يتعلق بأهمية جيمس، وما قدمه لهذا التخصص ككل في هذا الوقت المبكر. وإضافة إلى ذلك، فجيمس نفسه انتقد فرويد بوضوح في أكثر من موضع.
واحد من أهم اسهامات جيمس، بشكل مشترك مع عالم الفسيولوجيا كارل لانج، كانت في تطويرهما، بشكل منفصل، ما نعرفه الآن بنظرية جيمس لانج. التي ترى أن للعواطف أصولًا فسيولوجية واضحة، لا يمكن فصلها عن ظاهرة الشعور نفسه. وهي بالمناسبة نظرية تؤيدها كثير من الملاحظات الإكلينيكية المباشرة في الوقت الحالي. باختصار، ترى هذه النظرية أننا نرى الدب، فنهرب منه تلقائيًا، ثم نشعر بالخوف نتيجة لظهور الأعراض الجسدية. لا العكس. وبالتالي يصبح لإدراك الحالة الجسدية، ��الانتباه لها، دور حقيقي ومهم في التعامل مع الأعراض النفسية والمشاعر. يعني باختصار مفيش "شيء" اسمه خوف، بشكل حيادي منفصل عن ادراكه. وكل ذلك يحدث في طبيعة استقبال المخ البشري للمؤثرات الفسيولوجية وتأويلها في الدماغ.
كان من اللطيف إن الواحد يشوف بذور هذه الافكار في كتاب التنويعات، حتى وبشكل غير مباشر. واضح إن الراجل كان على قدر من تماسك الأفكار، إنه يقارب أفكاره من أماكن وتخصصات مختلفة، ويقدر في كل مرة يطلع بنتائج تستحق الانتباه لها.
الحقيقة إن الترجمة للعربية كانت في غاية الجمال، وباتقان قليل ما الواحد بيشوفه. ونتيجة ذلك كانت واضحة في المنتج النهائي.
April 8, 2021
This book is a compilation of twenty lectures delivered by William James at the University of Edinburg, Scotland between 1901 and 1902. William James is speaking as a psychologist in these lectures so his focus is on examples of human feelings and behavior in response to religious experiences. Much of the text consists of quoting from previously published accounts and his own data collection of these experiences. He connects these accounts with his own commentary and uses this range of examples to identify commonalities shared by different religious traditions.
This book does not address theology, dogma, and institutional history of religious organizations. William James’ method does not allow him to address the existence of God. However he acknowledges that most people who have religious experiences do so under the impression that there is an existence of a “higher power.” Some descriptive terms used to refer to religious experience that I noticed were the following: spiritual excitement, religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, and cosmic emotion.
Wikipedia has a summary of all the lectures, and I recommend reference to it for a more thorough description of the book’s contents. The things mentioned in this review are simply the several items that caught my attention.
William James makes a distinction between religion and philosophical systems because he argues that religion also has the presence of a positive sentiment that causes the adherent to gladly assents to it. (ref. Lecture II) Another way of describing this is that religion has an emotional dimension not found in moral systems, thus leading to the focus of these lectures which examine manifestations of these emotions.
However, not all of the manifestations of this emotion are very positive when judged from a modern perspective. Some of the reported behaviors of corporeal mortification (a.k.a self torture) to my mind are signs of morbid mental illness. But the author reminds the reader that these reports should be judged within the context of the culture and time they occurred.
Of course not all religious experience is demented. There are several lectures on saintliness and mysticism which tend to be more positive. James suggests that the merits of religious experiences can be judged by their fruits.
The following are some terms used by William James that caught my attention.
The following is an excerpt that addresses the commonalities of saintliness (a.k.a. spiritual excitement) found in various religions. It is also an example of the nature of James' writing.
Link to Spoiler No. 1:
Link to Spoiler No. 2:
This book does not address theology, dogma, and institutional history of religious organizations. William James’ method does not allow him to address the existence of God. However he acknowledges that most people who have religious experiences do so under the impression that there is an existence of a “higher power.” Some descriptive terms used to refer to religious experience that I noticed were the following: spiritual excitement, religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, and cosmic emotion.
Wikipedia has a summary of all the lectures, and I recommend reference to it for a more thorough description of the book’s contents. The things mentioned in this review are simply the several items that caught my attention.
William James makes a distinction between religion and philosophical systems because he argues that religion also has the presence of a positive sentiment that causes the adherent to gladly assents to it. (ref. Lecture II) Another way of describing this is that religion has an emotional dimension not found in moral systems, thus leading to the focus of these lectures which examine manifestations of these emotions.
However, not all of the manifestations of this emotion are very positive when judged from a modern perspective. Some of the reported behaviors of corporeal mortification (a.k.a self torture) to my mind are signs of morbid mental illness. But the author reminds the reader that these reports should be judged within the context of the culture and time they occurred.
Of course not all religious experience is demented. There are several lectures on saintliness and mysticism which tend to be more positive. James suggests that the merits of religious experiences can be judged by their fruits.
The following are some terms used by William James that caught my attention.
Healthy-minded religion—characterized by contentment untroubled by the existence of evil and confident of salvation.The book finishes with Conclusion and a Postscript which suggests commonalities among the varieties of religious experience. All religious experiences are a consequence of striving toward a relationship with a perceived higher power or system that transcends the physical world. This mental striving creates the variety of psychological symptoms examined and discussed by this book. The emotions thus generated include the full gamut of possibilities including happiness, sadness, fear, and anger.
Sick souled religion—considers evil to be unavoidable and an essential part of human existence and must be dealt with through a conversion experience.
Mind-cure movement—believes in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes and their efficacy of courage, hope, and trust.
Once-born religion—is an alternative term referencing healthy-minded religion that does not require a conversion experience.
Twice-born—is an alternative term referencing sick souled religion that requires a conversion experience.
The following is an excerpt that addresses the commonalities of saintliness (a.k.a. spiritual excitement) found in various religions. It is also an example of the nature of James' writing.
One might therefore be tempted to explain both the humility as to one's self and the charity towards others which characterize spiritual excitement, as results of the all-leveling character of theistic belief. But these affections are certainly not mere derivatives of theism. We find them in Stoicism, in Hinduism, and in Buddhism in the highest possible degree. They harmonize with paternal theism beautifully; but they harmonize with all reflection whatever upon the dependence of mankind on general causes; and we must, I think, consider them not subordinate but coördinate parts of that great complex excitement in the study of which we are engaged. Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, cosmic emotion, are all unifying states of mind, in which the sand and grit of the selfhood incline to disappear, and tenderness to rule. The best thing is to describe the condition integrally as a characteristic affection to which our nature is liable, a region in which we find ourselves at home, a sea in which we swim; but not to pretend to explain its parts by deriving them too cleverly from one another. Like love or fear, the faith-state is a natural psychic complex, and carries charity with it by organic consequence. Jubilation is an expansive affection, and all expansive affections are self-forgetful and kindly so long as they endure.This book may have merit as a record of the state of psychological studies at the beginning of the twentieth century for those interested in the subject. For others it’s a waste of time.
(from Lectures XI, XII, And XIII. Saintliness)
Link to Spoiler No. 1:
Link to Spoiler No. 2:
February 10, 2023
I have translated this book, into Arabic, with my dear friend/ brother Ali Reda.
Three years of systematic work, frustration and despair.
Finally, we made it!
I am looking forward to seeing it published soon.
Update:
The translation has been published, and it was well-received in the Middle East. It is our attempt to contribute to my culture in providing a significantly rich foundation for religious pluralism through asserting the centrality of individual religious experience.
This is a classical book that transcends its time of publication (in 1902) ... well, as classical books ought to be!
Read the translators' introduction in Arabic:
https://www.academia.edu/41906104/%D8...
Three years of systematic work, frustration and despair.
Finally, we made it!
I am looking forward to seeing it published soon.
Update:
The translation has been published, and it was well-received in the Middle East. It is our attempt to contribute to my culture in providing a significantly rich foundation for religious pluralism through asserting the centrality of individual religious experience.
This is a classical book that transcends its time of publication (in 1902) ... well, as classical books ought to be!
Read the translators' introduction in Arabic:
https://www.academia.edu/41906104/%D8...
March 5, 2021
You will not wait for me to remind you that William James is a great writer, a man in absolute possession of the art of expressing ideas. You will not wait for me to remind you that William James is a great professor, a scholar and an influencing thinker who contributed to founding an important school of thought. This I assume you already know.
Now these skills, and on the scale of which William James was in complete mastery of them, is what you need to treat a subject as difficult to grasp as the private and deep religious experience in its very varied form, across different system of religious thoughts, historical epochs, and the most intimate subjective ways of humans to think and feel about their existence. William James treats the subject in a very scientific sober method, but works entirely with examples of the most extreme forms of religious practices and feelings. It makes you get closer to some people, usually saints and ascetics, whom you always found as simply very far and distant, simply out of this world. It is indeed an invitation to understand these sorts of things, to clarify the mist surrounding them.
Now to what I think I learned from this book, and this is totally subjective and personal. As quit the religiously unorthodox modern skeptical person that I am, who happens to live among devout people (devout for all sorts of reasons, not necessarily because of honest religious feelings….), the book in this regard was a tolerance lesson for me, specially with its description of extreme religious behavior, and the way he puts different hypothesis to explain such behaviors, ideas and practices. I was so unable to understand some forms of devoutness, but now I think at least I can speculate in other ways about what drives people to do certain things which I may find absurd and meaningless.
Now these skills, and on the scale of which William James was in complete mastery of them, is what you need to treat a subject as difficult to grasp as the private and deep religious experience in its very varied form, across different system of religious thoughts, historical epochs, and the most intimate subjective ways of humans to think and feel about their existence. William James treats the subject in a very scientific sober method, but works entirely with examples of the most extreme forms of religious practices and feelings. It makes you get closer to some people, usually saints and ascetics, whom you always found as simply very far and distant, simply out of this world. It is indeed an invitation to understand these sorts of things, to clarify the mist surrounding them.
Now to what I think I learned from this book, and this is totally subjective and personal. As quit the religiously unorthodox modern skeptical person that I am, who happens to live among devout people (devout for all sorts of reasons, not necessarily because of honest religious feelings….), the book in this regard was a tolerance lesson for me, specially with its description of extreme religious behavior, and the way he puts different hypothesis to explain such behaviors, ideas and practices. I was so unable to understand some forms of devoutness, but now I think at least I can speculate in other ways about what drives people to do certain things which I may find absurd and meaningless.
March 2, 2021
190619 later later addition: reading chapter on James in The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism on american pragmatism, certainly inspires more reading of his work. does not directly mention much of this text, but reveals his and others, pierce, emerson, dewey, all influenced by, all noted, christianity as baseline to their attitudes, their ideas, of idealism embodied in empirical and abstract ideologies of truth, effect, value- so maybe i should pay more attention to this book...
171215 later addition: note to readers of this review, reason you might discount my judgement- i am not religious in any manner. friend just recently felt urge to correct my interpretation, say it is all about faith, of the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, but i could not follow the argument. i do not start, nor end, from any religious experience. so maybe my reading of this book is always already without grounds...
070415 first review: this is of its time, 1902, in that religious experiences in all varieties are christian, and designed, mostly, to confirm such usual monotheistic, modern, forms- not entirely avoiding catholicism but most revealing protestantism as generally practiced in the america of his time- including evangelical movements... this book reminds me not of religious texts, read or unread, but of durant's 'story of philosophy' which is almost as old (also a three)...
and the strategies j begins with are to 1) define terms, subject, 2) insist on reality of the unseen, and to do this, from the beginning j appeals to quotes, often long, of this and that person who undergoes these varied religious experiences. for me this does not convince more than any testimonials, but does offer actuality of these moments, conviction, efficacy, on those people. after these early chapters, he does use this technique less but never stops. at first, reading these claims is something to lightly read, later to skim, later yet to skip... but with 1) assured to himself, 2) is also vouchsafed...
i do not know what i expected- this follows the title: 'religious experiences', not philosophy, not theistic arguments, not coherence of this or that faith, not attempts to ground faith in logic but in affect, not what interests me much. so moving on, having established his subject is not to be confused with neurology, he does allow other 'altered states' (such as intoxication) as possible routes to the divine, j contrasts the healthy soul, the optimism of 'mind science', versus the sick soul, the pessimism of romans, greeks, a contrast of attitudes which will both lead to religion, the first of which reminds me too much of self-help and pop psychology texts, the next, in some examples of how life-changing conversions rescue this or that soul from destroying himself or herself, mentioning the 'twice-born' concept favoured by some ...
this 'conversion', which is given a few testimonials, seems to be a combination of uniting oneself body and soul, then uniting with some greater soul- the world, the fellows, the enemies even- and this is where j is clearest as psychologist: he lets his 'patients' speak, he reflects on the extremity some people go to, some beyond what seems 'objectively' healthy, but it is all on a spectrum of human behaviour, human qualities, from too much intellect and too little emotion to too much emotion and too little intellect... not surprisingly, j finds protestant expressions of faith most healthy, most socially beneficial, as he will decide the worth of religious experiences pragmatically, for individuals, for groups, though he does argue eventually there is an 'aesthetic' value in faith best shown by those colourful catholics...
j then tries to qualify saintliness, as first a sort of ideal behaviour, then as evidenced in certain saints- which in this case starts to sound almost how-to become a saint, rather than a naturally 'strong man', insisting mortification etc. is more diseased that devout, as the saint should be seen as a desired religious state, an aspiration, though not necessarily right for everyone. again j offers testimonials, offers pity at those unfortunates who never have such moments of faith, of clarity, of absolute belief... almost we are less than human...
j comes to mysticism, which foregrounds the most immediate problem with religious experience is the fact it is 'mystical' experience, it is of incommunicable nature- for me a general problem with religion as a whole. but not j, who is confident in naming essential qualities of all mystics, asceticism, absolutism, asocial, transcendental etc., and here he wanders afield to buddhism and hinduism, though he knows little of either, and these thoughts lead to a short chapter on philosophy. which i hoped to better grasp, but after dismissing kant, valourizing scot and english empiricists- j believes the only thing is to admit philosophy of religion by which we would come to understand all world religions... and while i can agree that the 'scientific' picture of the universe is not the personal, 'human' way of the world, i tend more towards phenomenology as a 'first science' of the self, rather than deciding science should work with pre-given religious testimony, cosmology, ontology...
this is the greatest problem i have with this historical document by j: i am not convinced that it is by human 'virtue' we have similar religious experiences that are thereby true, rather i believe it is by human 'vice' we have similar experiences that some call religious that are thereby false... or, as i am not committed against the the facts but the interpretations: simply mistaken... this book is of its era, perhaps in a philosophical way 'preaching to the choir', but i guess i will just continue not being religious in any way... this is a three. of its thought time, of its thought space, it is at the least an energetic, closely argued, example of an intellectual sort of faith...
note: if you do decide to read this text, i would suggest another edition, as this print is small, crowded, and not clearly different in text, footnotes, or quotes.
171215 later addition: note to readers of this review, reason you might discount my judgement- i am not religious in any manner. friend just recently felt urge to correct my interpretation, say it is all about faith, of the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, but i could not follow the argument. i do not start, nor end, from any religious experience. so maybe my reading of this book is always already without grounds...
070415 first review: this is of its time, 1902, in that religious experiences in all varieties are christian, and designed, mostly, to confirm such usual monotheistic, modern, forms- not entirely avoiding catholicism but most revealing protestantism as generally practiced in the america of his time- including evangelical movements... this book reminds me not of religious texts, read or unread, but of durant's 'story of philosophy' which is almost as old (also a three)...
and the strategies j begins with are to 1) define terms, subject, 2) insist on reality of the unseen, and to do this, from the beginning j appeals to quotes, often long, of this and that person who undergoes these varied religious experiences. for me this does not convince more than any testimonials, but does offer actuality of these moments, conviction, efficacy, on those people. after these early chapters, he does use this technique less but never stops. at first, reading these claims is something to lightly read, later to skim, later yet to skip... but with 1) assured to himself, 2) is also vouchsafed...
i do not know what i expected- this follows the title: 'religious experiences', not philosophy, not theistic arguments, not coherence of this or that faith, not attempts to ground faith in logic but in affect, not what interests me much. so moving on, having established his subject is not to be confused with neurology, he does allow other 'altered states' (such as intoxication) as possible routes to the divine, j contrasts the healthy soul, the optimism of 'mind science', versus the sick soul, the pessimism of romans, greeks, a contrast of attitudes which will both lead to religion, the first of which reminds me too much of self-help and pop psychology texts, the next, in some examples of how life-changing conversions rescue this or that soul from destroying himself or herself, mentioning the 'twice-born' concept favoured by some ...
this 'conversion', which is given a few testimonials, seems to be a combination of uniting oneself body and soul, then uniting with some greater soul- the world, the fellows, the enemies even- and this is where j is clearest as psychologist: he lets his 'patients' speak, he reflects on the extremity some people go to, some beyond what seems 'objectively' healthy, but it is all on a spectrum of human behaviour, human qualities, from too much intellect and too little emotion to too much emotion and too little intellect... not surprisingly, j finds protestant expressions of faith most healthy, most socially beneficial, as he will decide the worth of religious experiences pragmatically, for individuals, for groups, though he does argue eventually there is an 'aesthetic' value in faith best shown by those colourful catholics...
j then tries to qualify saintliness, as first a sort of ideal behaviour, then as evidenced in certain saints- which in this case starts to sound almost how-to become a saint, rather than a naturally 'strong man', insisting mortification etc. is more diseased that devout, as the saint should be seen as a desired religious state, an aspiration, though not necessarily right for everyone. again j offers testimonials, offers pity at those unfortunates who never have such moments of faith, of clarity, of absolute belief... almost we are less than human...
j comes to mysticism, which foregrounds the most immediate problem with religious experience is the fact it is 'mystical' experience, it is of incommunicable nature- for me a general problem with religion as a whole. but not j, who is confident in naming essential qualities of all mystics, asceticism, absolutism, asocial, transcendental etc., and here he wanders afield to buddhism and hinduism, though he knows little of either, and these thoughts lead to a short chapter on philosophy. which i hoped to better grasp, but after dismissing kant, valourizing scot and english empiricists- j believes the only thing is to admit philosophy of religion by which we would come to understand all world religions... and while i can agree that the 'scientific' picture of the universe is not the personal, 'human' way of the world, i tend more towards phenomenology as a 'first science' of the self, rather than deciding science should work with pre-given religious testimony, cosmology, ontology...
this is the greatest problem i have with this historical document by j: i am not convinced that it is by human 'virtue' we have similar religious experiences that are thereby true, rather i believe it is by human 'vice' we have similar experiences that some call religious that are thereby false... or, as i am not committed against the the facts but the interpretations: simply mistaken... this book is of its era, perhaps in a philosophical way 'preaching to the choir', but i guess i will just continue not being religious in any way... this is a three. of its thought time, of its thought space, it is at the least an energetic, closely argued, example of an intellectual sort of faith...
note: if you do decide to read this text, i would suggest another edition, as this print is small, crowded, and not clearly different in text, footnotes, or quotes.
November 5, 2022
William James' Great Study Of Religion
William James's classic "The Variety of Religious Experience" (1902) consists of the text of the twenty lectures he delivered as the Gifford Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 -- 1902. James took has his theme the exploration of "religious feelings and religious impulses."
In great detail, he studies how people who have had deep and, to them, convincing religious experiences describe these experiences and the meaning the experiences have for their lives. The book is, in fact, a wonderful mixture of psychology, description, and philosophy. The book is beautifully written, if dense, and needs to be pondered.
James is best-known as a pragmatist, but I found it helpful to approach the Varieties through phenomenology and personalism. Phenomenology was developed by the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl, a great admirer of James and his near-contemporary. It encouraged philosophers to develop understanding by looking to the things themselves rather than be seeing them in terms of rigid and imposed concepts. The Varieties takes a phenomenological approach in that it is in large part devoted to looking at religious activities, such as conversions, mysticism, saintly behavior, prayer, and seeing what they are and what they do without making commitments regarding the causes of the behavior. Thus, James rejects both reductionism (explaining religion in psychological terms as an allegedly aberrant behavior) and theological interpretations to concentrate on exploring the phenomena themselves.
James's book is also highly individualistic. In his second lecture he limits the scope of his inquiry by defining its object as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine". Several things should be noted about the task James sets himself. James has little to say about communal forms of religion -- the churches, synagogues, mosques, and other institutions in which many believers practice. Indeed James is frequently criticized for skewing the range of religious activity that needs to be addressed in understanding religion. James's inquiry is also highly personal. It focuses on the response of individual men and women in their private and intimate feelings. In his concluding lecture, James writes: "so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completes sense of the term." Shortly thereafter, he says "By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all."
With its focus on individual belief, James's book is pluralistic and shows an openness, which I find refreshing and modern, to many practices and creeds. James's approach has room for the traditional believer as well as for people, such as James himself, who have difficulty attaching themselves to a particular creed but who have a felt need for a spiritual life. Many people struggle and continue to struggle over this issue -- spirituality without an institution -- and they will feel comfortable with James. For myself, I found James's brief mentions of Buddhism, for one example, highly insightful. Although James disclaims knowledge of Buddhism he offers important comments on it in discussing meditation, pessimism, God (he acknowledges Buddhism as an atheistic religion) and karma. There are, however, many moments in this book when James's Protestant background and probably biases come through -- he sometimes is condescending to Catholic experience, and there is little treatment of Judaism in the Varieties.
The earlier chapters of the Varieties are philosophical in tone as James labors to define, explain and defend the nature of his inquiry. In the concluding chapters, James considers again philosophical and rationalistic approaches to religion and offers the briefest sketch of his own philosophy of religious and theological pluralism. The body of the book consists of long discussions of personal religious experiences from a variety of individuals and eras. James does bring a great deal of psychology to bear upon the descriptions, particularly when discussing the unconscious and in analyzing the different types of conversion experiences. The Varieties is best known for the distinction it draws between healthy-minded religion and the sick soul. The former James describes as "once-born" people who tend to see the universe as good throughout and in no need of redemption. (James gives an excellent discussion of Walt Whitman as a "once-born" type of religious believer.) The "sick soul" or twice-born person sees the need of understanding suffering and abandoning delusive behavior as necessary to spiritual redemption. James himself went through difficult and agonizing personal and religious experiences, but he finds value in both approaches and in their many variants. He truly offered a pluralistic approach to religion.
The Varieties wears its age remarkably well. The book does not aim to convert its readers. But it has a great deal to say of interest to both religiously inclined and secular people about the nature of the religious life. More importantly, I think the Varieties may help readers understand themselves and find their own paths to a rewarding life.
Robin Friedman
William James's classic "The Variety of Religious Experience" (1902) consists of the text of the twenty lectures he delivered as the Gifford Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 -- 1902. James took has his theme the exploration of "religious feelings and religious impulses."
In great detail, he studies how people who have had deep and, to them, convincing religious experiences describe these experiences and the meaning the experiences have for their lives. The book is, in fact, a wonderful mixture of psychology, description, and philosophy. The book is beautifully written, if dense, and needs to be pondered.
James is best-known as a pragmatist, but I found it helpful to approach the Varieties through phenomenology and personalism. Phenomenology was developed by the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl, a great admirer of James and his near-contemporary. It encouraged philosophers to develop understanding by looking to the things themselves rather than be seeing them in terms of rigid and imposed concepts. The Varieties takes a phenomenological approach in that it is in large part devoted to looking at religious activities, such as conversions, mysticism, saintly behavior, prayer, and seeing what they are and what they do without making commitments regarding the causes of the behavior. Thus, James rejects both reductionism (explaining religion in psychological terms as an allegedly aberrant behavior) and theological interpretations to concentrate on exploring the phenomena themselves.
James's book is also highly individualistic. In his second lecture he limits the scope of his inquiry by defining its object as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine". Several things should be noted about the task James sets himself. James has little to say about communal forms of religion -- the churches, synagogues, mosques, and other institutions in which many believers practice. Indeed James is frequently criticized for skewing the range of religious activity that needs to be addressed in understanding religion. James's inquiry is also highly personal. It focuses on the response of individual men and women in their private and intimate feelings. In his concluding lecture, James writes: "so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completes sense of the term." Shortly thereafter, he says "By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all."
With its focus on individual belief, James's book is pluralistic and shows an openness, which I find refreshing and modern, to many practices and creeds. James's approach has room for the traditional believer as well as for people, such as James himself, who have difficulty attaching themselves to a particular creed but who have a felt need for a spiritual life. Many people struggle and continue to struggle over this issue -- spirituality without an institution -- and they will feel comfortable with James. For myself, I found James's brief mentions of Buddhism, for one example, highly insightful. Although James disclaims knowledge of Buddhism he offers important comments on it in discussing meditation, pessimism, God (he acknowledges Buddhism as an atheistic religion) and karma. There are, however, many moments in this book when James's Protestant background and probably biases come through -- he sometimes is condescending to Catholic experience, and there is little treatment of Judaism in the Varieties.
The earlier chapters of the Varieties are philosophical in tone as James labors to define, explain and defend the nature of his inquiry. In the concluding chapters, James considers again philosophical and rationalistic approaches to religion and offers the briefest sketch of his own philosophy of religious and theological pluralism. The body of the book consists of long discussions of personal religious experiences from a variety of individuals and eras. James does bring a great deal of psychology to bear upon the descriptions, particularly when discussing the unconscious and in analyzing the different types of conversion experiences. The Varieties is best known for the distinction it draws between healthy-minded religion and the sick soul. The former James describes as "once-born" people who tend to see the universe as good throughout and in no need of redemption. (James gives an excellent discussion of Walt Whitman as a "once-born" type of religious believer.) The "sick soul" or twice-born person sees the need of understanding suffering and abandoning delusive behavior as necessary to spiritual redemption. James himself went through difficult and agonizing personal and religious experiences, but he finds value in both approaches and in their many variants. He truly offered a pluralistic approach to religion.
The Varieties wears its age remarkably well. The book does not aim to convert its readers. But it has a great deal to say of interest to both religiously inclined and secular people about the nature of the religious life. More importantly, I think the Varieties may help readers understand themselves and find their own paths to a rewarding life.
Robin Friedman
May 27, 2010
A classic of course, still potent and assured. I return to it for its look at the realism of the 'sick soul'. It comforts me.
It is not religion that is the concern here. Human emotions and feelings are the focus. How these influence a personality could as equally underlay their political orientation, their philosophical orientation, and they do in fact represent how a person actually is in the world: how they relate, how they feel, in short their character. There is an existential edge, of course: how do we go on, make meaning, find stable identities of ourselves and the world? To ignore religion and mysticism is not a problem, for anybody with a little knowledge will know that in all traditions the mystics have warned against confusing psychological states with religious insights or mystical openings, although that is not my interest here.
The main emphasis, and what concerns us all in our individual lives, is whether we feel good or bad. Let’s follow James and refer to the healthy minded against the ‘sick soul’, or just happy people and sad people. Rather than fleeting moods, these refer to long term characteristics of being in the world. All I propose to do is mainly quote from James, with minimal observation.
One interesting point to start involves the summary James gives of the contrast between happy and unhappy people’s reactions to the idea of evil. I’d point out that there is a huge problem with James’ writing in that he never considers the syntactical role of language in categorisation, in the way that our language itself is at the root of our emotional experience:
Arrived at this point, we can see how great an antagonism may naturally arise between the healthy-minded way of viewing life and the way that takes all this experience of evil as something essential. To this latter way, the morbid-minded way, as we might call it, healthy-mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the healthy-minded way, on the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased. With their grubbing in rat-holes instead of living in the light; with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery, there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath and cravers of a second birth. If religious intolerance and hanging and burning could again become the order of the day, there is little doubt that, however it may have been in the past, the healthy-minded would at present show themselves the least indulgent party of the two.
Happy people can be very stupid. His brother, William, in his novella, The Europeans, portrays in the character Felix a young fool who cannot imagine that anyone may judge the world differently from the parameters of his own sweet outlook.
. .happiness, like every other emotional state, has blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive weapon for self-protection against disturbance. When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in. He must ignore it; and to the bystander he may then seem perversely to shut his eyes to it and hush it up.
…
The deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind thus makes its entrance into philosophy. And once in, it is hard to trace its lawful bounds. Not only does the human instinct for happiness, bent on self-protection by ignoring, keep working in its favor, but higher inner ideals have weighty words to say. The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance. But it is impossible to carry on this discipline in the subjective sphere without zealously emphasizing the brighter and minimizing the darker aspects of the objective sphere of things at the same time. And thus our resolution not to indulge in misery, beginning at a comparatively small point within ourselves, may not stop until it has brought the entire frame of reality under a systematic conception optimistic enough to be congenial with its needs.
There is a problem for the rest of us in the company of stridently happy people. Their good fortune and contentment can feel like a form of bullying or contempt for those less happy. There’s a problem for the happy chappy too:
Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.
…
A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain. In the healthiest and most prosperous existence, how many links of illness, danger, and disaster are always interposed? Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz of life ceases at their touch as a piano-string stops sounding when the damper falls upon it.Of course the music can commence again;- and again and again,- at intervals. But with this the healthy-minded consciousness is left with an irremediable sense of precariousness. It is a bell with a crack; it draws its breath on sufferance and by an accident.
*
This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.
*
Stoic insensibility and Epicurean resignation were the farthest advance which the Greek mind made in that direction. The Epicurean said: "Seek not to be happy, but rather to escape unhappiness; strong happiness is always linked with pain; therefore hug the safe shore, and do not tempt the deeper raptures. Avoid disappointment by expecting little, and by aiming low; and above all do not fret." The Stoic said: "The only genuine good that life can yield a man is the free possession of his own soul; all other goods are lies." Each of these philosophies is in its degree a philosophy of despair in nature's boons. Trustful self-abandonment to the joys that freely offer has entirely departed from both Epicurean and Stoic; and what each proposes is a way of rescue from the resultant dust-and-ashes state of mind. The Epicurean still awaits results from economy of indulgence and damping of desire. The Stoic hopes for no results, and gives up natural good altogether. There is dignity in both these forms of resignation. They represent distinct stages in the sobering process which man's primitive intoxication with sense-happiness is sure to undergo. In the one the hot blood has grown cool, in the other it has become quite cold; and although I have spoken of them in the past tense, as if they were merely historic, yet Stoicism and Epicureanism will probably be to all time typical attitudes, marking a certain definite stage accomplished in the evolution of the world-sick soul
James outlines several distinct forms of unhappiness, melancholy or depression. There’s what we’d now call ahedonia, the relative incapacity to enjoy, feel pleasure; the sort of low spirit captured by a poet such as Cowper. There is (and this is fascinating in its similarity to the criteria used in determining modern day clinical depression), a “much worse form of it is positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to healthy life. Such anguish may partake of various characters, having sometimes more the quality of loathing; sometimes that of irritation and exasperation; or again of self-mistrust and self-despair; or of suspicion, anxiety, trepidation, fear. The patient may rebel or submit; may accuse himself, or accuse outside powers; and he may or he may not be tormented by the theoretical mystery of why he should so have to suffer.”
James gives several accounts of depressives near the edge of or just over the edge of sanity. I’ll quote in full his comments and extract from Tolstoy’s suicidal thoughts in My Confessions:
"I felt," says Tolstoy, "that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one way or another. It cannot be said exactly that I wished to kill myself, for the force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful, more general than any mere desire. It was a force like my old aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite direction. It was an aspiration of my whole being to get out of life.
"Behold me then, a man happy and in good health, hiding the rope in order not to hang myself to the rafters of the room where every night I went to sleep alone; behold me no longer going shooting, lest I should yield to the too easy temptation of putting an end to myself with my gun.
"I did not know what I wanted. I was afraid of life; I was driven to leave it; and in spite of that I still hoped something from it.
"All this took place at a time when so far as all my outer circumstances went, I ought to have been completely happy. I had a good wife who loved me and whom I loved; good children and a large property which was increasing with no pains taken on my part. I was more respected by my kinsfolk and acquaintance than I had ever been; I was loaded with praise by strangers; and without exaggeration I could believe my name already famous. Moreover I was neither insane nor ill. On the contrary, I possessed a physical and mental strength which I have rarely met in persons of my age. I could mow as well as the peasants, I could work with my brain eight hours uninterruptedly and feel no bad effects.
"And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my life. And I was surprised that I had not understood this from the very beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and stupid jest was being played upon me by some one. One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when one grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply.
"The oriental fable of the traveler surprised in the desert by a wild beast is very old.
"Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the traveler jumps into a well with no water in it; but at the bottom of this well he sees a dragon waiting with open mouth to devour him. And the unhappy man, not daring to go out lest he should be the prey of the beast, not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be devoured by the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild bush which grows out of one of the cracks of the well. His hands weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way to certain fate; but still he clings, and see two mice, one white, the other black, evenly moving round the bush to which he hangs, and gnawing off its roots
"The traveler sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish; but while thus hanging he looks about him and finds on the leaves of the bush some drops of honey. These he reaches with his tongue and licks them off with rapture.
"Thus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable dragon of death is waiting ready to tear me, and I cannot comprehend why I am thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey which formerly consoled me; but the honey pleases me no longer, and day and night the white mouse and the black mouse gnaw the branch to which I cling. I can see but one thing: the inevitable dragon and the mice -- I cannot turn my gaze away from them.
"This is no fable, but the literal incontestable truth which every one may understand. What will be the outcome of what I do to-day? Of what I shall do to-morrow? What will be the outcome of all my life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy?
"These questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid child to the wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human being. Without an answer to them, it is impossible, as I experienced, for life to go on.
" 'But perhaps,' I often said to myself, 'there may be something I have failed to notice or to comprehend. It is not possible that this condition of despair should be natural to mankind.' And I sought for an explanation in all the branches of knowledge acquired by men. I questioned painfully and protractedly and with no idle curiosity. I sought, not with indolence, but laboriously and obstinately for days and nights together. I sought like a man who is lost and seeks to save himself -- and I found nothing. I became convinced, moreover, that all those who before me had sought for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing which was leading me to despair -- the meaningless absurdity of life -- is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man."
To prove this point, Tolstoy quotes the Buddha, Solomon, and Schopenhauer. And he finds only four ways in which men of his own class and society are accustomed to meet the situation. Either mere animal blindness, sucking the honey without seeing the dragon or the mice -- "and from such a way," he says, "I can learn nothing, after what I now know;" or reflective epicureanism, snatching what it can while the day lasts -- which is only a more deliberate sort of stupefaction than the first; or manly suicide; or seeing the mice and dragon and yet weakly and plaintively clinging to the bush of life.
Suicide was naturally the consistent course dictated by the logical intellect. …
.. Yet," says Tolstoy, "whilst my intellect was working, something else in me was working too, and kept me from the deed -- a consciousness of life, as I may call it, which was like a force that obliged my mind to fix itself in another direction and draw me out of my situation of despair. . . . During the whole course of this year, when I almost unceasingly kept asking myself how to end the business, whether by the rope or by the bullet, during all that time, alongside of all those movements of my ideas and observations, my heart kept languishing with another pining emotion. I can call this by no other name than that of a thirst for God. This craving for God had nothing to do with the movement of my ideas -- in fact, it was the direct contrary of that movement -- but it came from my heart. It was like a feeling of dread that made me seem like an orphan and isolated in the midst of all these things that were so foreign. And this feeling of dread was mitigated by the hope of finding the assistance of some one.
Of this, James comments, “The only thing that need interest us now is the phenomenon of his absolute disenchantment with ordinary life, and the fact that the whole range of habitual values may, to a man as powerful and full of faculty as he was, come to appear so ghastly a mockery.” Such a state seems much more to fall into the discourses of existential reflection rather than narrower forms of psychology (and, of course, there exists today the notion of ‘existential psychology’). Sartre, Camus, of course, but also the Christian mystics, and the Buddhist outlook. With or without God or appeal to soul, for all of us, this is as near as you can get to a nineteenth century description of 21st century depression.
Lugubrious and depressive himself, James seems to me to conclude that the sick soul, the gloomy, is the ‘better’. It is more realistic, has a wider span, and this span includes happiness. I think that if one were to swallow distilled the wisdom from religious traditions, from the Greeks and Romans one would see a similar cultural transmission in our art and philosophy. Traditions from outside immediate influence show the same opportunity to outline not surface vehicles, myths and narratives as so much important but as representing deeper strains of the human condition.
I’ll end with something so easily missed. James, and perhaps he was a depressive himself, spontaneously found his experiences from the deeply human, as honest and authentic a grasp of what it means to be as possible (including his fallibility and inability to do more than try to address why and wherefore, who and what). He had an almost visceral distatste for systematisers, abstract philosophy and theology that trills its febrile flutters in a nugatory neurotic manner that may indeed be the sign of a deeper but different sickness of soul.
What is their deduction of metaphysical attributes but a shuffling and matching of pedantic dictionary-adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs, something that might be worked out from the mere word "God" by one of those logical machines of wood and brass which recent ingenuity has contrived as well as by a man of flesh and blood. They have the trail of the serpent over them. One feels that in the theologians' hands, they are only a set of titles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of synonyms; verbality has stepped into the place of vision, professionalism into that of life. Instead of bread we have a stone; instead of a fish, a serpent. Did such a conglomeration of abstract terms give really the gist of our knowledge of the deity, schools of theology might indeed continue to flourish, but religion, vital religion, would have taken its flight from this world. What keeps religion going is something else than abstract definitions and systems of concatenated adjectives, and something different from faculties of theology and their professors. All these things are after-effects, secondary accretions upon those phenomena of vital conversation with the unseen divine, of which I have shown you so many instances, renewing themselves in saelig;cula saelig;culorum in the lives of humble private men.
It is not religion that is the concern here. Human emotions and feelings are the focus. How these influence a personality could as equally underlay their political orientation, their philosophical orientation, and they do in fact represent how a person actually is in the world: how they relate, how they feel, in short their character. There is an existential edge, of course: how do we go on, make meaning, find stable identities of ourselves and the world? To ignore religion and mysticism is not a problem, for anybody with a little knowledge will know that in all traditions the mystics have warned against confusing psychological states with religious insights or mystical openings, although that is not my interest here.
The main emphasis, and what concerns us all in our individual lives, is whether we feel good or bad. Let’s follow James and refer to the healthy minded against the ‘sick soul’, or just happy people and sad people. Rather than fleeting moods, these refer to long term characteristics of being in the world. All I propose to do is mainly quote from James, with minimal observation.
One interesting point to start involves the summary James gives of the contrast between happy and unhappy people’s reactions to the idea of evil. I’d point out that there is a huge problem with James’ writing in that he never considers the syntactical role of language in categorisation, in the way that our language itself is at the root of our emotional experience:
Arrived at this point, we can see how great an antagonism may naturally arise between the healthy-minded way of viewing life and the way that takes all this experience of evil as something essential. To this latter way, the morbid-minded way, as we might call it, healthy-mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the healthy-minded way, on the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased. With their grubbing in rat-holes instead of living in the light; with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery, there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath and cravers of a second birth. If religious intolerance and hanging and burning could again become the order of the day, there is little doubt that, however it may have been in the past, the healthy-minded would at present show themselves the least indulgent party of the two.
Happy people can be very stupid. His brother, William, in his novella, The Europeans, portrays in the character Felix a young fool who cannot imagine that anyone may judge the world differently from the parameters of his own sweet outlook.
. .happiness, like every other emotional state, has blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive weapon for self-protection against disturbance. When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in. He must ignore it; and to the bystander he may then seem perversely to shut his eyes to it and hush it up.
…
The deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind thus makes its entrance into philosophy. And once in, it is hard to trace its lawful bounds. Not only does the human instinct for happiness, bent on self-protection by ignoring, keep working in its favor, but higher inner ideals have weighty words to say. The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance. But it is impossible to carry on this discipline in the subjective sphere without zealously emphasizing the brighter and minimizing the darker aspects of the objective sphere of things at the same time. And thus our resolution not to indulge in misery, beginning at a comparatively small point within ourselves, may not stop until it has brought the entire frame of reality under a systematic conception optimistic enough to be congenial with its needs.
There is a problem for the rest of us in the company of stridently happy people. Their good fortune and contentment can feel like a form of bullying or contempt for those less happy. There’s a problem for the happy chappy too:
Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.
…
A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain. In the healthiest and most prosperous existence, how many links of illness, danger, and disaster are always interposed? Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz of life ceases at their touch as a piano-string stops sounding when the damper falls upon it.Of course the music can commence again;- and again and again,- at intervals. But with this the healthy-minded consciousness is left with an irremediable sense of precariousness. It is a bell with a crack; it draws its breath on sufferance and by an accident.
*
This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.
*
Stoic insensibility and Epicurean resignation were the farthest advance which the Greek mind made in that direction. The Epicurean said: "Seek not to be happy, but rather to escape unhappiness; strong happiness is always linked with pain; therefore hug the safe shore, and do not tempt the deeper raptures. Avoid disappointment by expecting little, and by aiming low; and above all do not fret." The Stoic said: "The only genuine good that life can yield a man is the free possession of his own soul; all other goods are lies." Each of these philosophies is in its degree a philosophy of despair in nature's boons. Trustful self-abandonment to the joys that freely offer has entirely departed from both Epicurean and Stoic; and what each proposes is a way of rescue from the resultant dust-and-ashes state of mind. The Epicurean still awaits results from economy of indulgence and damping of desire. The Stoic hopes for no results, and gives up natural good altogether. There is dignity in both these forms of resignation. They represent distinct stages in the sobering process which man's primitive intoxication with sense-happiness is sure to undergo. In the one the hot blood has grown cool, in the other it has become quite cold; and although I have spoken of them in the past tense, as if they were merely historic, yet Stoicism and Epicureanism will probably be to all time typical attitudes, marking a certain definite stage accomplished in the evolution of the world-sick soul
James outlines several distinct forms of unhappiness, melancholy or depression. There’s what we’d now call ahedonia, the relative incapacity to enjoy, feel pleasure; the sort of low spirit captured by a poet such as Cowper. There is (and this is fascinating in its similarity to the criteria used in determining modern day clinical depression), a “much worse form of it is positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to healthy life. Such anguish may partake of various characters, having sometimes more the quality of loathing; sometimes that of irritation and exasperation; or again of self-mistrust and self-despair; or of suspicion, anxiety, trepidation, fear. The patient may rebel or submit; may accuse himself, or accuse outside powers; and he may or he may not be tormented by the theoretical mystery of why he should so have to suffer.”
James gives several accounts of depressives near the edge of or just over the edge of sanity. I’ll quote in full his comments and extract from Tolstoy’s suicidal thoughts in My Confessions:
"I felt," says Tolstoy, "that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one way or another. It cannot be said exactly that I wished to kill myself, for the force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful, more general than any mere desire. It was a force like my old aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite direction. It was an aspiration of my whole being to get out of life.
"Behold me then, a man happy and in good health, hiding the rope in order not to hang myself to the rafters of the room where every night I went to sleep alone; behold me no longer going shooting, lest I should yield to the too easy temptation of putting an end to myself with my gun.
"I did not know what I wanted. I was afraid of life; I was driven to leave it; and in spite of that I still hoped something from it.
"All this took place at a time when so far as all my outer circumstances went, I ought to have been completely happy. I had a good wife who loved me and whom I loved; good children and a large property which was increasing with no pains taken on my part. I was more respected by my kinsfolk and acquaintance than I had ever been; I was loaded with praise by strangers; and without exaggeration I could believe my name already famous. Moreover I was neither insane nor ill. On the contrary, I possessed a physical and mental strength which I have rarely met in persons of my age. I could mow as well as the peasants, I could work with my brain eight hours uninterruptedly and feel no bad effects.
"And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my life. And I was surprised that I had not understood this from the very beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and stupid jest was being played upon me by some one. One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when one grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply.
"The oriental fable of the traveler surprised in the desert by a wild beast is very old.
"Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the traveler jumps into a well with no water in it; but at the bottom of this well he sees a dragon waiting with open mouth to devour him. And the unhappy man, not daring to go out lest he should be the prey of the beast, not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be devoured by the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild bush which grows out of one of the cracks of the well. His hands weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way to certain fate; but still he clings, and see two mice, one white, the other black, evenly moving round the bush to which he hangs, and gnawing off its roots
"The traveler sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish; but while thus hanging he looks about him and finds on the leaves of the bush some drops of honey. These he reaches with his tongue and licks them off with rapture.
"Thus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable dragon of death is waiting ready to tear me, and I cannot comprehend why I am thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey which formerly consoled me; but the honey pleases me no longer, and day and night the white mouse and the black mouse gnaw the branch to which I cling. I can see but one thing: the inevitable dragon and the mice -- I cannot turn my gaze away from them.
"This is no fable, but the literal incontestable truth which every one may understand. What will be the outcome of what I do to-day? Of what I shall do to-morrow? What will be the outcome of all my life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy?
"These questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid child to the wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human being. Without an answer to them, it is impossible, as I experienced, for life to go on.
" 'But perhaps,' I often said to myself, 'there may be something I have failed to notice or to comprehend. It is not possible that this condition of despair should be natural to mankind.' And I sought for an explanation in all the branches of knowledge acquired by men. I questioned painfully and protractedly and with no idle curiosity. I sought, not with indolence, but laboriously and obstinately for days and nights together. I sought like a man who is lost and seeks to save himself -- and I found nothing. I became convinced, moreover, that all those who before me had sought for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing which was leading me to despair -- the meaningless absurdity of life -- is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man."
To prove this point, Tolstoy quotes the Buddha, Solomon, and Schopenhauer. And he finds only four ways in which men of his own class and society are accustomed to meet the situation. Either mere animal blindness, sucking the honey without seeing the dragon or the mice -- "and from such a way," he says, "I can learn nothing, after what I now know;" or reflective epicureanism, snatching what it can while the day lasts -- which is only a more deliberate sort of stupefaction than the first; or manly suicide; or seeing the mice and dragon and yet weakly and plaintively clinging to the bush of life.
Suicide was naturally the consistent course dictated by the logical intellect. …
.. Yet," says Tolstoy, "whilst my intellect was working, something else in me was working too, and kept me from the deed -- a consciousness of life, as I may call it, which was like a force that obliged my mind to fix itself in another direction and draw me out of my situation of despair. . . . During the whole course of this year, when I almost unceasingly kept asking myself how to end the business, whether by the rope or by the bullet, during all that time, alongside of all those movements of my ideas and observations, my heart kept languishing with another pining emotion. I can call this by no other name than that of a thirst for God. This craving for God had nothing to do with the movement of my ideas -- in fact, it was the direct contrary of that movement -- but it came from my heart. It was like a feeling of dread that made me seem like an orphan and isolated in the midst of all these things that were so foreign. And this feeling of dread was mitigated by the hope of finding the assistance of some one.
Of this, James comments, “The only thing that need interest us now is the phenomenon of his absolute disenchantment with ordinary life, and the fact that the whole range of habitual values may, to a man as powerful and full of faculty as he was, come to appear so ghastly a mockery.” Such a state seems much more to fall into the discourses of existential reflection rather than narrower forms of psychology (and, of course, there exists today the notion of ‘existential psychology’). Sartre, Camus, of course, but also the Christian mystics, and the Buddhist outlook. With or without God or appeal to soul, for all of us, this is as near as you can get to a nineteenth century description of 21st century depression.
Lugubrious and depressive himself, James seems to me to conclude that the sick soul, the gloomy, is the ‘better’. It is more realistic, has a wider span, and this span includes happiness. I think that if one were to swallow distilled the wisdom from religious traditions, from the Greeks and Romans one would see a similar cultural transmission in our art and philosophy. Traditions from outside immediate influence show the same opportunity to outline not surface vehicles, myths and narratives as so much important but as representing deeper strains of the human condition.
I’ll end with something so easily missed. James, and perhaps he was a depressive himself, spontaneously found his experiences from the deeply human, as honest and authentic a grasp of what it means to be as possible (including his fallibility and inability to do more than try to address why and wherefore, who and what). He had an almost visceral distatste for systematisers, abstract philosophy and theology that trills its febrile flutters in a nugatory neurotic manner that may indeed be the sign of a deeper but different sickness of soul.
What is their deduction of metaphysical attributes but a shuffling and matching of pedantic dictionary-adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs, something that might be worked out from the mere word "God" by one of those logical machines of wood and brass which recent ingenuity has contrived as well as by a man of flesh and blood. They have the trail of the serpent over them. One feels that in the theologians' hands, they are only a set of titles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of synonyms; verbality has stepped into the place of vision, professionalism into that of life. Instead of bread we have a stone; instead of a fish, a serpent. Did such a conglomeration of abstract terms give really the gist of our knowledge of the deity, schools of theology might indeed continue to flourish, but religion, vital religion, would have taken its flight from this world. What keeps religion going is something else than abstract definitions and systems of concatenated adjectives, and something different from faculties of theology and their professors. All these things are after-effects, secondary accretions upon those phenomena of vital conversation with the unseen divine, of which I have shown you so many instances, renewing themselves in saelig;cula saelig;culorum in the lives of humble private men.
February 23, 2009
"I fear that my general philosophic position received so scant a statement as to hardly be intelligible"
That about sums up this text for me. Although the language is beautiful, I never really got a understanding of what the author was trying to prove.
A more apt title for this book is probably "The Varieties of Anglo-American Protestant Religious Experience". There was slight mention of other belief systems (Islam, Sufi-ism, and Hinduism, had small cameos). Even the more interesting Protestant sects like the Quakers, Anabaptists, Christian Scientists, and Mormons did not get much ink. So, if you are looking for a survey of different religious beliefs like the title implies, you should look elsewhere. Instead you get kind of a description of different emotional elements that the author supposes are common to all religious experience. He speaks of Healthy-mindedness, which sort of relates to modern new age and heuristic practices, but he is speaking in the 1890's so his examples are of New England style transcendentalism like Emerson or Whitman. "The Sick Soul" deals with excessive negative dwelling on sin or hell-fire. He talks about the quest to find yourself and the powerful conversion experiences that can happen when you do. Then Asceticism (or "Saintliness") and Mysticism are explored. Remember, all of these things are covered with very old-fashioned terms and references making the modern reader wince, so the book sounds better than it actually is. Finally he comes to his conclusions and his suggestion for a science of religion that will find the truths that exist in religiosity in all of its forms and discard the introduced falsehoods. A fine sentiment it is, too bad he didn't spend more time elaborating on that and less time on excessive quotations from questionable sources like letters from an anonymous friend.
This is the second straight non-fiction clunker I have read that was published in the 1890's or early 1900's. I got to thinking that all old non-fiction must be bad. It is all filled with overly flowering prose, bad references, excessive quotations of bad references, and a lack of any strong point or theory behind the writing (good narrative, but for what?) Then I thought about how much I enjoyed "A History of the English Speaking People", or "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", or "A Study of History" and I banished those thoughts from my head. Bad non-fiction is just bad non-fiction regardless of the date of publication. Now that is not to say that William James is a poor writer, because there are beautiful passages here. It is just that modern readers kind of expect a strong statement of a hypothesis and then a gallant effort at backing it up with credible sources and not the meandering (beautiful meandering) and weak sources you get.
That about sums up this text for me. Although the language is beautiful, I never really got a understanding of what the author was trying to prove.
A more apt title for this book is probably "The Varieties of Anglo-American Protestant Religious Experience". There was slight mention of other belief systems (Islam, Sufi-ism, and Hinduism, had small cameos). Even the more interesting Protestant sects like the Quakers, Anabaptists, Christian Scientists, and Mormons did not get much ink. So, if you are looking for a survey of different religious beliefs like the title implies, you should look elsewhere. Instead you get kind of a description of different emotional elements that the author supposes are common to all religious experience. He speaks of Healthy-mindedness, which sort of relates to modern new age and heuristic practices, but he is speaking in the 1890's so his examples are of New England style transcendentalism like Emerson or Whitman. "The Sick Soul" deals with excessive negative dwelling on sin or hell-fire. He talks about the quest to find yourself and the powerful conversion experiences that can happen when you do. Then Asceticism (or "Saintliness") and Mysticism are explored. Remember, all of these things are covered with very old-fashioned terms and references making the modern reader wince, so the book sounds better than it actually is. Finally he comes to his conclusions and his suggestion for a science of religion that will find the truths that exist in religiosity in all of its forms and discard the introduced falsehoods. A fine sentiment it is, too bad he didn't spend more time elaborating on that and less time on excessive quotations from questionable sources like letters from an anonymous friend.
This is the second straight non-fiction clunker I have read that was published in the 1890's or early 1900's. I got to thinking that all old non-fiction must be bad. It is all filled with overly flowering prose, bad references, excessive quotations of bad references, and a lack of any strong point or theory behind the writing (good narrative, but for what?) Then I thought about how much I enjoyed "A History of the English Speaking People", or "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", or "A Study of History" and I banished those thoughts from my head. Bad non-fiction is just bad non-fiction regardless of the date of publication. Now that is not to say that William James is a poor writer, because there are beautiful passages here. It is just that modern readers kind of expect a strong statement of a hypothesis and then a gallant effort at backing it up with credible sources and not the meandering (beautiful meandering) and weak sources you get.
September 2, 2015
It's impressive how well this book has withstood the passage of time. More than a century after its publication, it continues, on the whole, to feel extremely fresh and insightful, compared with the works of some other psychologists whom I could name. Like ... people whose name rhymes with "Kroid." But I digress.
Unlike the dogmatic theoretic architectonics that would increasingly dominate the field of psychology in the twentieth century, James subscribed to an empirical pragmatism that is quite current. On the basis of his minimal overt theoretical commitments, he uses this book as an opportunity to reflect systematically on the nature and import of religious experience in its various expressions, in the service of beginning to lay the foundation for a theoretical science of religion, by which we may empirically examine the roll religion plays in people's lives.
He has thus unapologetically advanced his model of religion as primarily a matter of individual experience, and these two words, of course, carry an enormous amount of baggage. Religion is for James, first and foremost, a system of sentiments and beliefs operating in counterplay with various kinds of experience, including prayer, conversion, and, most importantly, rare mystical experiences of ineffable union with the absolute, howsoever that may be conceived.
It is without a doubt the book's primary limitation that he sticks to that model, which works very well with the liberal Protestant theology and Transcendentalist philosophy which saturated his zeitgeist, but the farther we travel out from that center, the less universal his model of religion may seem. There's a case to made that it is applicable to many forms of Buddhism and some Hindu philosophies such as Advaita Vedanta, but by the time we get to Confucianism, his focus on the individual relationship with the divine starts to lose touch. And when we leave the high civilizations behind and apply his model to the Tlingit, the Navajo, the Mayans, or the Hawaiians, we're on very shaky ground indeed.
What endures is a thorough and thoughtful of examination of the religious traditions that were nearest to hand, and a still-valuable analysis of their basic patterns of expression. That may form the basis, at least, of more diverse comparative work.
Some modern readers may be put off at times by its grand style and the sometimes-homilistic tone of the book, but they may do so at their peril, as it's easy to mistakenly infer a certain intellectual complacency that is regularly contradicted by the sophistication of his analysis. James's book remains a classic in the field of the psychology of religion, and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.
Unlike the dogmatic theoretic architectonics that would increasingly dominate the field of psychology in the twentieth century, James subscribed to an empirical pragmatism that is quite current. On the basis of his minimal overt theoretical commitments, he uses this book as an opportunity to reflect systematically on the nature and import of religious experience in its various expressions, in the service of beginning to lay the foundation for a theoretical science of religion, by which we may empirically examine the roll religion plays in people's lives.
He has thus unapologetically advanced his model of religion as primarily a matter of individual experience, and these two words, of course, carry an enormous amount of baggage. Religion is for James, first and foremost, a system of sentiments and beliefs operating in counterplay with various kinds of experience, including prayer, conversion, and, most importantly, rare mystical experiences of ineffable union with the absolute, howsoever that may be conceived.
It is without a doubt the book's primary limitation that he sticks to that model, which works very well with the liberal Protestant theology and Transcendentalist philosophy which saturated his zeitgeist, but the farther we travel out from that center, the less universal his model of religion may seem. There's a case to made that it is applicable to many forms of Buddhism and some Hindu philosophies such as Advaita Vedanta, but by the time we get to Confucianism, his focus on the individual relationship with the divine starts to lose touch. And when we leave the high civilizations behind and apply his model to the Tlingit, the Navajo, the Mayans, or the Hawaiians, we're on very shaky ground indeed.
What endures is a thorough and thoughtful of examination of the religious traditions that were nearest to hand, and a still-valuable analysis of their basic patterns of expression. That may form the basis, at least, of more diverse comparative work.
Some modern readers may be put off at times by its grand style and the sometimes-homilistic tone of the book, but they may do so at their peril, as it's easy to mistakenly infer a certain intellectual complacency that is regularly contradicted by the sophistication of his analysis. James's book remains a classic in the field of the psychology of religion, and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.
May 23, 2023
تنويعات التجربة الدينية
وليام جيمس
لا تأخذ الدين على هواك!
يبدو أن هذا تحذير مهم ومنطقي، ولكن في نهاية المطاف سنجد أن كل إنسان سيتعامل مع الدين من منظوره الشخصي. قد تجد أخوَة من نفس الأسرة، من ذات الديانة والمذهب وقد خضعوا لنفس التربية، ومع هذا كله قد نجد أساليبهم في التدين متباينة. فهذا يفكر في عقوبة الله وسخطه طوال الوقت، فيما الآخر يُمَني نفسه بالنعيم ويطمع بالعفو. هذا يهتم بالشعائر والطقوس وذاك يهتم بالروحانيات والإيمان القلبي. الأول يُكنّ البغض لمعتنقي الديانات الأخرى ويستشعر الفوقية تجاههم، والثاني يتعامل معهم من منطلق الرحمة والإحسان. هي تنويعات موجودة شئنا أم أبينا وبصرف النظر عن الصواب من الخطأ.
تجربة الفرد تحت المجهر
يهدف هذا الكتاب إلى وصف تنويعات التجربة الدينية على مستوى الفرد. لا نتحدث هنا أوجه عن الشبه والاختلافات بين الملل والمذاهب ولا نناق�� خصائصها كل على حدة. أنما المغزى هو نقل التجارب المختلفة لأفراد من شتى الديانات ما بين متخوف ومتأمل ومازوخي ومتصوف. في الغالب يعمد الكتاب إلى وصف الحالات دون تفنيدها حسب واقعيتها أو انتماءها لديانة معينة. لا شك أن تتوقع من هذه النبذة أن يعج الكتاب باللمحات النورانية وفي نفس الوقت ألّا يخلو من الشطحات. ثمة حكمة تحاكي الواقع وخيالات تشابه الهلوسة. ستجد كل شيء بين دفتي هذا المجلد.
مزيج فريد
على أن عمر هذا الكتاب يربو عن القرن، إلا أنك ستجد اقتباسات منه في العديد والعديد من الكتب المهتمة بعلم الأديان. يعتبر الكتاب فريداً من نوعه إذ يناقش تجربة الفرد الدينية بنبرة رصينة، لا تميل إلى التشكيك أو التصديق مع التمسك بالجدية طوال الوقت. أضف إلى ذلك أنه مزج عناصراً من علم النفس، الفلسفة والأدب. لعل الكتاب تجربة دينية بحد ذاته. المشكلة في أن القارئ غالباً ما سيدخل النص مدججاً بأحكامه وآراءه المسبقة، وعلى حسب تلك سيكون الحكم على ذاك.
الكثير من القليل
على الرغم من الهدف الموضح آنفاً، إلا أن الغالبية العظمى من التجارب الواردة في الكتاب كانت مستقاة من تجارب المسيحيين مع إلقاء لمحة سريعة على الصوفية في الإسلام وشذرات متفرقة عن البوذية وبالكاد شيء أو اثنين عن الهندوسية. لا شك أن الكتاب محكوم بزمنه حيث أن التمازج الحضاري والديني لم يكن على أوجه كما هو الآن. كما وجدت أن الكتاب أحياناً يسهب في ذكر التجربة أو يورد عدد منها في نفس السياق مما أثقل كاهل النص في بعض الأحيان.
ترجمة متأخرة متقدمة
شهرة هذا الكتاب لم يقابلها مبادرة سريعة لترجمته إلى العربية حتى وقت قريب عندما قرر مركز نهوض الاضطلاع بالمهمة. بمجلد أنيق وطباعة واضحة وترجمة لا يشق لها غبار، أصبح بإمكان القارئ العربي مطالعة هذا النص العريق. لا بد من الإشادة بعمل المترجمين إسلام سعد وعلي رضا إذا أنتجا نصاً عربياً واضحاً خالٍ من الركاكة وأضافا من الحواشي والشروحات ما ساعد على فهم الكتاب. يسعدني أن أرى ترجمة تجسد كفاءة صاحبها وحرصه على إنجاز عمل يشرف المترجم ويسعد القارئ.
كتاب مميز ومهم وإن كان ثقيلاً في مواضع كثيرة. ينبغي أن يكون القارئ مهتماً بالموضوع محل البحث وإلا فقد يتوقف في المنتصف.
وليام جيمس
لا تأخذ الدين على هواك!
يبدو أن هذا تحذير مهم ومنطقي، ولكن في نهاية المطاف سنجد أن كل إنسان سيتعامل مع الدين من منظوره الشخصي. قد تجد أخوَة من نفس الأسرة، من ذات الديانة والمذهب وقد خضعوا لنفس التربية، ومع هذا كله قد نجد أساليبهم في التدين متباينة. فهذا يفكر في عقوبة الله وسخطه طوال الوقت، فيما الآخر يُمَني نفسه بالنعيم ويطمع بالعفو. هذا يهتم بالشعائر والطقوس وذاك يهتم بالروحانيات والإيمان القلبي. الأول يُكنّ البغض لمعتنقي الديانات الأخرى ويستشعر الفوقية تجاههم، والثاني يتعامل معهم من منطلق الرحمة والإحسان. هي تنويعات موجودة شئنا أم أبينا وبصرف النظر عن الصواب من الخطأ.
تجربة الفرد تحت المجهر
يهدف هذا الكتاب إلى وصف تنويعات التجربة الدينية على مستوى الفرد. لا نتحدث هنا أوجه عن الشبه والاختلافات بين الملل والمذاهب ولا نناق�� خصائصها كل على حدة. أنما المغزى هو نقل التجارب المختلفة لأفراد من شتى الديانات ما بين متخوف ومتأمل ومازوخي ومتصوف. في الغالب يعمد الكتاب إلى وصف الحالات دون تفنيدها حسب واقعيتها أو انتماءها لديانة معينة. لا شك أن تتوقع من هذه النبذة أن يعج الكتاب باللمحات النورانية وفي نفس الوقت ألّا يخلو من الشطحات. ثمة حكمة تحاكي الواقع وخيالات تشابه الهلوسة. ستجد كل شيء بين دفتي هذا المجلد.
مزيج فريد
على أن عمر هذا الكتاب يربو عن القرن، إلا أنك ستجد اقتباسات منه في العديد والعديد من الكتب المهتمة بعلم الأديان. يعتبر الكتاب فريداً من نوعه إذ يناقش تجربة الفرد الدينية بنبرة رصينة، لا تميل إلى التشكيك أو التصديق مع التمسك بالجدية طوال الوقت. أضف إلى ذلك أنه مزج عناصراً من علم النفس، الفلسفة والأدب. لعل الكتاب تجربة دينية بحد ذاته. المشكلة في أن القارئ غالباً ما سيدخل النص مدججاً بأحكامه وآراءه المسبقة، وعلى حسب تلك سيكون الحكم على ذاك.
الكثير من القليل
على الرغم من الهدف الموضح آنفاً، إلا أن الغالبية العظمى من التجارب الواردة في الكتاب كانت مستقاة من تجارب المسيحيين مع إلقاء لمحة سريعة على الصوفية في الإسلام وشذرات متفرقة عن البوذية وبالكاد شيء أو اثنين عن الهندوسية. لا شك أن الكتاب محكوم بزمنه حيث أن التمازج الحضاري والديني لم يكن على أوجه كما هو الآن. كما وجدت أن الكتاب أحياناً يسهب في ذكر التجربة أو يورد عدد منها في نفس السياق مما أثقل كاهل النص في بعض الأحيان.
ترجمة متأخرة متقدمة
شهرة هذا الكتاب لم يقابلها مبادرة سريعة لترجمته إلى العربية حتى وقت قريب عندما قرر مركز نهوض الاضطلاع بالمهمة. بمجلد أنيق وطباعة واضحة وترجمة لا يشق لها غبار، أصبح بإمكان القارئ العربي مطالعة هذا النص العريق. لا بد من الإشادة بعمل المترجمين إسلام سعد وعلي رضا إذا أنتجا نصاً عربياً واضحاً خالٍ من الركاكة وأضافا من الحواشي والشروحات ما ساعد على فهم الكتاب. يسعدني أن أرى ترجمة تجسد كفاءة صاحبها وحرصه على إنجاز عمل يشرف المترجم ويسعد القارئ.
كتاب مميز ومهم وإن كان ثقيلاً في مواضع كثيرة. ينبغي أن يكون القارئ مهتماً بالموضوع محل البحث وإلا فقد يتوقف في المنتصف.
July 3, 2014
I tried reading this book about 35 years ago and gave up in despair. The lack of distinct between philosophy and psychology at the time James wrote the book led to bad philosophy and unsubstantiated psychology. ( There's still a great deal of both around. )
This time around, I decided to read the book for what it is, an historical document which looks back on an interesting period of changing concepts in psychology. Once again, I am giving up in despair.
There are simply too many words that take the reader nowhere. The book is based on a series of lectures given by James to university students in Scotland. The lectures must have been painful to sit through. I simply have run out of patience, classic or no classic. Life's too short. I shall have to accept this gap in my education.
This time around, I decided to read the book for what it is, an historical document which looks back on an interesting period of changing concepts in psychology. Once again, I am giving up in despair.
There are simply too many words that take the reader nowhere. The book is based on a series of lectures given by James to university students in Scotland. The lectures must have been painful to sit through. I simply have run out of patience, classic or no classic. Life's too short. I shall have to accept this gap in my education.
April 7, 2020
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901) is a lecture series that American philosopher and psychologist William James offered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901-1902. In these lectures, James explores the phenomenon of religion from a psychological perspective. That is, he describes how religious phenomena are objects of our mental life and he explains these phenomena in psychological terms.
This approach is, besides very fruitful, mind-bogglingly innovative. Mention religion and people immediately jump to questions of truth and matters of fact. And then the age old debate about whether religion is true or delusional starts. Not James. Right from the start, he distinguishes two central questions – which are usually mixed up in people’s common sense ideas:
(1) The existential question as to the origin and nature of religious phenomena.
(2) The spiritual question as to the meaning, importance and sense of religious phenomena.
The first is a scientific question, to be answered in terms of the appropriate level of explanation (in James’ case, the human psyche); the second is a normative question, to be answered in evaluative terms.
The book itself spans more than 500 pages, and it is too diverse in content, too wide in scope, and too riddled with illustrations and case studies to allow for a concise and reliable summary.
The nucleus of James’ psychological theory of religion seems to be fundamentally tied to metaphysics. That is, James distinguishes two extreme personality types: the idealist and the empiricist. The idealist is an optimist: he views the world as one big unified whole, meaningful in (only) these abstract generalities. For him, the universe is a warm home, enveloping us in a vast expanse of meaning. For him, particular experiences and facts are problems to be dissolved in mental concepts, which then allegedly have some ontological significance. For example, Hegel and his subsequent idealist tradition viewed the world as one Absolute Mind in which all particular subjects and objects are mere imperfect parts.
The empiricist, on the other hand, assumes the total opposite of all this. For him, it starts and ends with particular things, concrete experiences. That’s all there is. Our mind works on these particulars, abstracts from them, and constitutes general concepts – which have no ontological significance whatsoever. The empiricist is a pessimist. For him, everything is momentary, uncertain, for ever unreachable. For him the universe is a cold place.
What has all this to do with religion? Everything, James would claim. Typically these two types of personalities can be characterized as once-born and twice-born. The idealist is born and finds meaning and comfort in the way the universe is, according to him. The empiricist is born and merely experiences endless hunger for a home. He has to face up to the cold, hard reality.
The empiricist is the most interesting type of personality, since he has to make a choice. Does he somehow someway find a way to live in this cold, objective universe? He then becomes a tough person – the typical atheist who fulminates against his arch nemesis: the idealist with his human, all too human illusions. The empiricist prides himself on his realism, on his struggle to be able to cope with the things he misses most in the world, and consequently looks down on the religious or the idealist. Richard Dawkins is a contemporary empiricist who comes to mind.
This is all very well, James notes, but this doesn’t change the fact that a significant amount of people, even though they are themselves pessimistic empiricist, cannot overcome the human hunger for meaning. It is this category that James calls the twice-born: they have to re-birth themselves. That is, they have to find a meaningful universe after admitting the objectivity and realism of the universe. These people are ‘sick souls’ (James’ term) – their sickness is caused by the world, the universe is their virus.
The idealist and the empiricist, important as they are in the general conceptualization of the psychology of religion, are less interesting than the sick soul. They both turn dogmatic, the one the dogmatic believer, the other the dogmatic atheist. From a psychological point of view, the most interesting is to explore how sick souls cure themselves.
The word ‘cure’ is typical. When James was writing, America saw the rapid spread of the mind-cure movement. These were people who wanted to explore human nature’s tendency to seek meaning in life in times when religion seemed to be defeated by science and secular politics. They felt the modern worldview robbed humanity of its human nature, leaving only scientific objectivity and democratic technocracy as its viable alternatives.
James realizes his audience, European intelligentsia and elites, would look down on such a vulgar movement of the common people. Yet, between the lines in which James tries to explore these topics in a scientific and neutral way, you can read James’ full embrace of central concepts of the mind-cure movement (if not the movement itself).
To overcome the hesitations and revulsions of his audience, James chooses to cite endless examples of both ordinary persons as well as religious saints. With these, he wants to establish his key doctrine that mysticism is the most feasible position to take in the fight between idealists and empiricists. According to James, all sorts of personal experiences in the everyday lives of average people attest to the fact that there is more to this world than the sheer objective universe of science.
Again, religious testimonies and autobiographical accounts of religious innovators overflow with mystical experiences, which are used as arguments for their religious stance. There is more to this universe than the scientific world of symbolism and structuralism, and this is proven by all these personal mystical experiences that are unaccountable in realist as well as idealist terms.
The problem with this particular brand of experiences is their personal character. Both the idealist and the realist can reason with their own group and their enemies, since they use concepts and relations that are universally accessible. Learn the language of geometry and you can reason for or against the mathematical nature of the universe. The mystic has his own sword but when he uses it to defeat both his opponents with one stroke, he cuts himself as well. Mystical experiences are personal, by definition, and hence can never serve as arguments in human discourse. It is like Wittgenstein – a fervent mystic as well – would later claim: that which cannot be said, one should pass over in silence.
James recognizes the strength and the flaws of mysticism. For him, this is the key to undo science of religious dogmatism and undo religion of scientific scrutiny. Theology is done away with, and one is free to believe what he wants – he just needs to shut up and live with his personal beliefs. This, how platitudinous it might sound, is James’ central conclusion.
If the idealist can be characterized as tender, and the realist can be characterized as tough, the sick soul can be characterized as saintly. The saintly character is mystical.
It is interesting, as a last part of this review, to review James’ typology of mystical experiences. Our consciousness is not one, not a unity, it is a collection of different types of consciousness: we have a rational consciousness, and we have a mystical consciousness. Just like with any biological trait, these types vary between persons and in the person himself over his lifetime. In general, these types of conscious experiences offer us immanent glimpses into the fundamental unity of the universe: life and order is what they show us. These mystical experiences literally are a transformation of consciousness, we live through these experience, and these experience live through us. These experiences are the transcendence of worldly relations – they are the literal experience of the relation World-Me. Many religions, like Buddhism, Sufism, various strands of Christianity, and Hinduism are centred on the cultivation of these personal experiences.
Throughout the book, James has described how human beings differ in their psychological traits (their personality) and how these differences lead to different types of religious phenomena and experiences. He has spent most time exploring the sick soul, the saintly character, who is biologically strongest equipped with mystic consciousness. For James, it’s all about balance – we all have parts of all types of personality traits, it’s only in geniuses that one single trait dominates the rest of the traits, leading to unstable characters. The overly mystic is biologically so disposed, and, although he has been labelled differently through the ages (from prophet to enthusiast to insane), has the tendency to become fanatic. Someone like Joseph Smith Jr., the founder of Mormonism, comes to mind.
With all of these psychological theories, James has the weapon in his hands to eradicate both theology and metaphysical philosophy. He spends the final chapters of the (long) book in showing us the dogmatic delusional nature of these systems of thought, both springing from wish-thinking: we tend to objectify our concepts, leading to rigid systems of thought, while these concepts are mental constructs derived from physical experiences.
But James is not an attacker of religion, his ambitions lie in a different domain. He reveals he wants to found a science of religion, which studies religious phenomena through empirical facts, i.e. personal experiences. The goal of any science is to formulate laws and theories which describe and explain reality – this should be done for religion as well. He even admits the best a science can ever do is to approach reality, never fully grasp it.
But all of this leaves out one important aspect of James’ inquiry into religion: its usefulness. Scientifically studying religious phenomena as psychological entities is one thing, the meaning we ascribe to them (or not) is our own personal evaluation. How can we have any discourse about the meaning of religious experiences, especially their use? It is here that James offers his own epistemological theory of pragmatism. This perspective can both deal with deciding which theories of religion are true and which aren’t, as well as deal with questions of meaning: the individual has to ascribe his own meaning to his experiences. The line James draws here is rigid: since these experiences are personal, there is no one who can tell you you are right or wrong in ascribing whatsoever meaning to them – but neither can you tell others the same thing.
If you think this is a covert defence of science, the separation of science and religion serving a useful purpose to both – similar to Stephen J. Gould’s ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ – you are wrong. One of the brilliant and fascinating aspects of William James’s writings is that he doesn’t shy away from offering his own opinions and taking a stance. This is a welcome feat in a genre that usually is too cautious and obscure to my tastes. By now, James has admitted to be a sick soul himself, to long for meaning in a world of cold facts. He regrets he is not blessed with much of the mystical consciousness, but he recognizes the aptness of others in experiences these states of consciousness. For James, science – cosmic, universal and un-personal – is just religion – private, concrete, animistic – de-anthropomorphised. Science is empty, one-sided and a symbolic representation of reality, while religion is all about personal phenomena, i.e. full reality.
This last point is hard to understand without having read James’ Pluralistic Universe (1909), an obscure work in which he offers his own theory of reality: radical empiricism. It all boils down to this: the only real thing, the concrete fact, is a synthesis of: (1) a field of consciousness, (2) with its object as felt/thought, (3) with its attitude towards the object, and (4) with its sense of self to which the attitude belongs. In short: all that there is are empirical facts, which are themselves dynamic processes, always beginning and ending in continuous sequences – it only stops at death (presumably). (This worldview, by the way, very much similar to Henri Bergson’s process philosophy.)
I hope it now is clear that James, even though he is a scientist and a radical empiricist, is rather an eccentric when it comes to religion. Usually the empiricist would claim religion is non-empirical hence not real, while James does a 360 and reverses this to the fullest: for him experiences are all that there is, and religious experiences are one type of possible experiences, i.e. an important, intrinsic part of reality. The point where James differs with the common religious person is his rejection of theology and his definition of religion as a collection personal (mystical) experiences.
What’s the use of these experiences? Since they are products of biological traits, they have to serve some adaptive function – that is, if you accept Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection (which James did). For James, religion is a biological and psychological state of belief, as well as our personal codes and convictions, both springing from the ‘religious impulse’, i.e. the love of life, the hunger for more life. Religion causes both feelings of shortcoming and insufficiency (e.g. the Christian concept of sin) and feelings of hope, it offers us a solution: salvation. How? Through our realization that we are part of a bigger whole, with which we are one. All religion agree on this, they just differ on the type of union.
This review is, by now, already way too long, so I will not offer my own positions on the above points. Suffice to say I really appreciate James’ intellectual creativity and originality, his unique style of writing, his sharp criticisms of opponents and in general his ability to connect widely different fields of knowledge and offer a unique synthesis. The only downside, for me personally, is James’ own obscure and, at times, un-graspable stance on religion and reality. I simply don’t get his radical empiricism – I mean, I do get what he’s saying, I’m just baffled by the mess he leaves behind him...
This approach is, besides very fruitful, mind-bogglingly innovative. Mention religion and people immediately jump to questions of truth and matters of fact. And then the age old debate about whether religion is true or delusional starts. Not James. Right from the start, he distinguishes two central questions – which are usually mixed up in people’s common sense ideas:
(1) The existential question as to the origin and nature of religious phenomena.
(2) The spiritual question as to the meaning, importance and sense of religious phenomena.
The first is a scientific question, to be answered in terms of the appropriate level of explanation (in James’ case, the human psyche); the second is a normative question, to be answered in evaluative terms.
The book itself spans more than 500 pages, and it is too diverse in content, too wide in scope, and too riddled with illustrations and case studies to allow for a concise and reliable summary.
The nucleus of James’ psychological theory of religion seems to be fundamentally tied to metaphysics. That is, James distinguishes two extreme personality types: the idealist and the empiricist. The idealist is an optimist: he views the world as one big unified whole, meaningful in (only) these abstract generalities. For him, the universe is a warm home, enveloping us in a vast expanse of meaning. For him, particular experiences and facts are problems to be dissolved in mental concepts, which then allegedly have some ontological significance. For example, Hegel and his subsequent idealist tradition viewed the world as one Absolute Mind in which all particular subjects and objects are mere imperfect parts.
The empiricist, on the other hand, assumes the total opposite of all this. For him, it starts and ends with particular things, concrete experiences. That’s all there is. Our mind works on these particulars, abstracts from them, and constitutes general concepts – which have no ontological significance whatsoever. The empiricist is a pessimist. For him, everything is momentary, uncertain, for ever unreachable. For him the universe is a cold place.
What has all this to do with religion? Everything, James would claim. Typically these two types of personalities can be characterized as once-born and twice-born. The idealist is born and finds meaning and comfort in the way the universe is, according to him. The empiricist is born and merely experiences endless hunger for a home. He has to face up to the cold, hard reality.
The empiricist is the most interesting type of personality, since he has to make a choice. Does he somehow someway find a way to live in this cold, objective universe? He then becomes a tough person – the typical atheist who fulminates against his arch nemesis: the idealist with his human, all too human illusions. The empiricist prides himself on his realism, on his struggle to be able to cope with the things he misses most in the world, and consequently looks down on the religious or the idealist. Richard Dawkins is a contemporary empiricist who comes to mind.
This is all very well, James notes, but this doesn’t change the fact that a significant amount of people, even though they are themselves pessimistic empiricist, cannot overcome the human hunger for meaning. It is this category that James calls the twice-born: they have to re-birth themselves. That is, they have to find a meaningful universe after admitting the objectivity and realism of the universe. These people are ‘sick souls’ (James’ term) – their sickness is caused by the world, the universe is their virus.
The idealist and the empiricist, important as they are in the general conceptualization of the psychology of religion, are less interesting than the sick soul. They both turn dogmatic, the one the dogmatic believer, the other the dogmatic atheist. From a psychological point of view, the most interesting is to explore how sick souls cure themselves.
The word ‘cure’ is typical. When James was writing, America saw the rapid spread of the mind-cure movement. These were people who wanted to explore human nature’s tendency to seek meaning in life in times when religion seemed to be defeated by science and secular politics. They felt the modern worldview robbed humanity of its human nature, leaving only scientific objectivity and democratic technocracy as its viable alternatives.
James realizes his audience, European intelligentsia and elites, would look down on such a vulgar movement of the common people. Yet, between the lines in which James tries to explore these topics in a scientific and neutral way, you can read James’ full embrace of central concepts of the mind-cure movement (if not the movement itself).
To overcome the hesitations and revulsions of his audience, James chooses to cite endless examples of both ordinary persons as well as religious saints. With these, he wants to establish his key doctrine that mysticism is the most feasible position to take in the fight between idealists and empiricists. According to James, all sorts of personal experiences in the everyday lives of average people attest to the fact that there is more to this world than the sheer objective universe of science.
Again, religious testimonies and autobiographical accounts of religious innovators overflow with mystical experiences, which are used as arguments for their religious stance. There is more to this universe than the scientific world of symbolism and structuralism, and this is proven by all these personal mystical experiences that are unaccountable in realist as well as idealist terms.
The problem with this particular brand of experiences is their personal character. Both the idealist and the realist can reason with their own group and their enemies, since they use concepts and relations that are universally accessible. Learn the language of geometry and you can reason for or against the mathematical nature of the universe. The mystic has his own sword but when he uses it to defeat both his opponents with one stroke, he cuts himself as well. Mystical experiences are personal, by definition, and hence can never serve as arguments in human discourse. It is like Wittgenstein – a fervent mystic as well – would later claim: that which cannot be said, one should pass over in silence.
James recognizes the strength and the flaws of mysticism. For him, this is the key to undo science of religious dogmatism and undo religion of scientific scrutiny. Theology is done away with, and one is free to believe what he wants – he just needs to shut up and live with his personal beliefs. This, how platitudinous it might sound, is James’ central conclusion.
If the idealist can be characterized as tender, and the realist can be characterized as tough, the sick soul can be characterized as saintly. The saintly character is mystical.
It is interesting, as a last part of this review, to review James’ typology of mystical experiences. Our consciousness is not one, not a unity, it is a collection of different types of consciousness: we have a rational consciousness, and we have a mystical consciousness. Just like with any biological trait, these types vary between persons and in the person himself over his lifetime. In general, these types of conscious experiences offer us immanent glimpses into the fundamental unity of the universe: life and order is what they show us. These mystical experiences literally are a transformation of consciousness, we live through these experience, and these experience live through us. These experiences are the transcendence of worldly relations – they are the literal experience of the relation World-Me. Many religions, like Buddhism, Sufism, various strands of Christianity, and Hinduism are centred on the cultivation of these personal experiences.
Throughout the book, James has described how human beings differ in their psychological traits (their personality) and how these differences lead to different types of religious phenomena and experiences. He has spent most time exploring the sick soul, the saintly character, who is biologically strongest equipped with mystic consciousness. For James, it’s all about balance – we all have parts of all types of personality traits, it’s only in geniuses that one single trait dominates the rest of the traits, leading to unstable characters. The overly mystic is biologically so disposed, and, although he has been labelled differently through the ages (from prophet to enthusiast to insane), has the tendency to become fanatic. Someone like Joseph Smith Jr., the founder of Mormonism, comes to mind.
With all of these psychological theories, James has the weapon in his hands to eradicate both theology and metaphysical philosophy. He spends the final chapters of the (long) book in showing us the dogmatic delusional nature of these systems of thought, both springing from wish-thinking: we tend to objectify our concepts, leading to rigid systems of thought, while these concepts are mental constructs derived from physical experiences.
But James is not an attacker of religion, his ambitions lie in a different domain. He reveals he wants to found a science of religion, which studies religious phenomena through empirical facts, i.e. personal experiences. The goal of any science is to formulate laws and theories which describe and explain reality – this should be done for religion as well. He even admits the best a science can ever do is to approach reality, never fully grasp it.
But all of this leaves out one important aspect of James’ inquiry into religion: its usefulness. Scientifically studying religious phenomena as psychological entities is one thing, the meaning we ascribe to them (or not) is our own personal evaluation. How can we have any discourse about the meaning of religious experiences, especially their use? It is here that James offers his own epistemological theory of pragmatism. This perspective can both deal with deciding which theories of religion are true and which aren’t, as well as deal with questions of meaning: the individual has to ascribe his own meaning to his experiences. The line James draws here is rigid: since these experiences are personal, there is no one who can tell you you are right or wrong in ascribing whatsoever meaning to them – but neither can you tell others the same thing.
If you think this is a covert defence of science, the separation of science and religion serving a useful purpose to both – similar to Stephen J. Gould’s ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ – you are wrong. One of the brilliant and fascinating aspects of William James’s writings is that he doesn’t shy away from offering his own opinions and taking a stance. This is a welcome feat in a genre that usually is too cautious and obscure to my tastes. By now, James has admitted to be a sick soul himself, to long for meaning in a world of cold facts. He regrets he is not blessed with much of the mystical consciousness, but he recognizes the aptness of others in experiences these states of consciousness. For James, science – cosmic, universal and un-personal – is just religion – private, concrete, animistic – de-anthropomorphised. Science is empty, one-sided and a symbolic representation of reality, while religion is all about personal phenomena, i.e. full reality.
This last point is hard to understand without having read James’ Pluralistic Universe (1909), an obscure work in which he offers his own theory of reality: radical empiricism. It all boils down to this: the only real thing, the concrete fact, is a synthesis of: (1) a field of consciousness, (2) with its object as felt/thought, (3) with its attitude towards the object, and (4) with its sense of self to which the attitude belongs. In short: all that there is are empirical facts, which are themselves dynamic processes, always beginning and ending in continuous sequences – it only stops at death (presumably). (This worldview, by the way, very much similar to Henri Bergson’s process philosophy.)
I hope it now is clear that James, even though he is a scientist and a radical empiricist, is rather an eccentric when it comes to religion. Usually the empiricist would claim religion is non-empirical hence not real, while James does a 360 and reverses this to the fullest: for him experiences are all that there is, and religious experiences are one type of possible experiences, i.e. an important, intrinsic part of reality. The point where James differs with the common religious person is his rejection of theology and his definition of religion as a collection personal (mystical) experiences.
What’s the use of these experiences? Since they are products of biological traits, they have to serve some adaptive function – that is, if you accept Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection (which James did). For James, religion is a biological and psychological state of belief, as well as our personal codes and convictions, both springing from the ‘religious impulse’, i.e. the love of life, the hunger for more life. Religion causes both feelings of shortcoming and insufficiency (e.g. the Christian concept of sin) and feelings of hope, it offers us a solution: salvation. How? Through our realization that we are part of a bigger whole, with which we are one. All religion agree on this, they just differ on the type of union.
This review is, by now, already way too long, so I will not offer my own positions on the above points. Suffice to say I really appreciate James’ intellectual creativity and originality, his unique style of writing, his sharp criticisms of opponents and in general his ability to connect widely different fields of knowledge and offer a unique synthesis. The only downside, for me personally, is James’ own obscure and, at times, un-graspable stance on religion and reality. I simply don’t get his radical empiricism – I mean, I do get what he’s saying, I’m just baffled by the mess he leaves behind him...
December 17, 2013
Being derived from public lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience is neither a particularly deep nor demanding book. It is, however, both beautifully written and clearly expressed--hallmarks of James' style. Informally unsystematic, the painless effort of going through it will likely present the reader with useful insights, apt examples and challenging arguments.
I was particularly challenged by the idea that some people, what he calls healthy souls, are constitutionally happy. Being to that point habituated to thinking of myself as unhappy, James' simple observations caused me to think more deeply of the reasons for my habit of unhappiness without prejudgement and helped me begin to break the habit.
I was particularly challenged by the idea that some people, what he calls healthy souls, are constitutionally happy. Being to that point habituated to thinking of myself as unhappy, James' simple observations caused me to think more deeply of the reasons for my habit of unhappiness without prejudgement and helped me begin to break the habit.
December 30, 2014
Foreword to the Centenary Edition, by Micky James
Editors' Preface
Introduction: The Spiritual Roots of James's 'Varieties of Religious Experience'
Introduction: The Return to James: Psychology, Religion and the Amnesia of Neuroscience
Preface from the 1902 Edition
--The Varieties of Religious Experience
Index
Editors' Preface
Introduction: The Spiritual Roots of James's 'Varieties of Religious Experience'
Introduction: The Return to James: Psychology, Religion and the Amnesia of Neuroscience
Preface from the 1902 Edition
--The Varieties of Religious Experience
Index
Read
July 19, 2009Soooooo ridiculously ahead of his time. He manages to anticipate more or less the entirety of 20th Century philosophy, both analytic and continental. In fact, he's one of the few thinkers I've encountered (Freud, Marx, Beauvoir, Deleuze, Spinoza, and Said being a few others) whose intellect is strikingly original enough to pierce through the reader's own perspective. Also, in the present American popular-intellectual climate of religious/spiritual pabulum versus asshole scientism, it's hella refreshing to find a cogent viewpoint that manages to negate both of those.
April 14, 2014
I still haven't read this cover to cover but it's a work of art. As a student I targeted the section on drunkenness -- a lyrical description I haven't seen bettered. But don't trust my memory. I was a drunken student.
May 31, 2019
The classic value of this work I think relates to the way it frames the questions or the approach it gives to a (Western?) mind. For example, it's in the way that James tries to define how exactly we say what is "religious" and what is not. The fruits or results of a "religious" experience are part of it as are the passions goals and desires religion incites in the psyche. Yet at the same time it's almost as if part of the goal of his writing is to show how real yet how fleeting this area of reality becomes when we attempt to pin it down into dogma and psychological/scientific explanation. It's transcendent, science doesn't work to explain it but it does enter into life through the psyche so this will be the first point of scientific contact. There's value in his discarding of terminology in favor of symbolism and the universality of psychological experiences in the religious life as this too shows the absurdity of dogma and intolerance between religions and even the non-religious. The different terms and definitions we use for the same shared human experiences only create conflicts that shouldn't be there in the first place.
February 16, 2024
To try to make sense of the religious fanaticism that either inspires or serves as a pretext for so much of the violence and destruction we are watching at this moment, I turned to this book, which I had long intended to read. It has been a great pleasure to be in the company of such a rational, good-willed and articulate thinker for nearly 500 pages. I was interested in the subject matter, and amazed by many of the examples he quotes of extreme religious devotion (though the quoted passages are sometimes too tediously extensive), but most of all I was interested in his method. He was working out a way to think rationally about irrational, or supra-rational, experiences.
With a very courteous acknowledgement of "[a]n American philosopher of eminent originality, Mr. Charles Sanders Peirce," he adopts Peirce's name for the method, "pragmatism", and paraphrases Peirce's 1878 article laying out its principles. ("How to Make Our Ideas Clear", Popular Science Monthly, v. 12, pp. 286–302. Reprinted widely, including Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce).
I won't try to summarize the entire book here; summaries are readily available in Wikipedia and other 'net sources. James is not at all a conventional church-going believer, and confesses that he has no gift for any mystical experience at all. However, unlike such uncompromising atheists as Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, he respects the authentic (i.e., not play-acting) prophets and mystics as possessors of a kind of "truth," one which is irrefutably true for them: Santa Teresa, San Juan de la Cruz, George Fox, Joseph Smith, Luther, Gautama Buddha, Mohammed and many others, including Mary Baker Eddy. However, the felt truth of these experiences (visions of God, for example) does not mean they should be accepted as true by anyone who has not personally had them. "The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another," he writes in the 14th lecture, "The Value of Saintliness." (p. 303)
He separates the question of the source of religious vision, which may be anything from an epileptic fit (e.g., St. Paul) to herbal intoxication or simply deep inward reflection, from its "truth," by which he means something like its practical utility. He quotes extensive psychological research (in particular, the studies of a Dr. Starbuck in California) to affirm that "conversion" is an almost universal experience of adolescence, because it is psychologically necessary. By conversion he means a turning away from the chaotic and contradictory messages that assail every young person to find some "process of unification of the self" which always brings "a characteristic sort of relief; and never such extreme relief as when it is cast into the religious mould. Happiness! happiness! religion is only one of the ways in which men gain that gift." (p. 163)
That's because the conversion need not be toward religion. "The new birth may be away from religion into incredulity; or it may be from moral scrupulosity into freedom and license; or it may be produced by the irruption into the individual's life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, revenge, or patriotic demotion." (163-164) Whatever works for you. For many of us, and apparently for James himself, the "new birth" was into incredulity, i.e., non-believing in a deity. Although James retained some doubt (see his "Conclusions"). After all, his father was a noted Swedenborgian philosopher.
But James is concerned not only about the utility of religious experience for the individual believer, but also about its social utility, its consequences for human society generally. While his language is not entirely clear here, it appears that he does not accept as pragmatic "truth" the kinds of religious sentiment that he calls extreme "Devoutness." "When unbalanced, one of its vices is called Fanaticism. Fanaticism is only loyalty carried to a convulsive extreme. ... The Buddha and Mohammed and their companions and many Christian saints are incrusted with a heavy jewelry of anecdotes which are meant to be honorific, but are simply abgeschmackt and silly, and form a touching expression of man's misguided propensity to praise. ... An immediate consequence of this condition is jealousy for the deity's honor." (310-311) Which leads to such absurdities as the riots over Danish cartoons, or Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's placement of the 2.6-ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments in the state building.
I think James was right to respect the personal truth of serious religious believers, and equally right to insist that their truth need not be anybody else's and certainly should not be imposed on anyone. We all have "spiritual" needs, he thinks -- that is, we need some way to put together our otherwise fragmenting "self." (James' notion of "self" seems to anticipate Dennett's formulation of it as "the center of narrative gravity.") But we don't all need to do it the same way. A coherent atheism, or a "healthy-minded" optimism, or a born-again union with the One, are equally valid ways to achieve the "gift" of "happiness," or integration of the self. Whether they are equally good or not depends on their consequences, not only for ourselves individually but in our actions on behalf of others. Makes sense to me.
With a very courteous acknowledgement of "[a]n American philosopher of eminent originality, Mr. Charles Sanders Peirce," he adopts Peirce's name for the method, "pragmatism", and paraphrases Peirce's 1878 article laying out its principles. ("How to Make Our Ideas Clear", Popular Science Monthly, v. 12, pp. 286–302. Reprinted widely, including Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce).
I won't try to summarize the entire book here; summaries are readily available in Wikipedia and other 'net sources. James is not at all a conventional church-going believer, and confesses that he has no gift for any mystical experience at all. However, unlike such uncompromising atheists as Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, he respects the authentic (i.e., not play-acting) prophets and mystics as possessors of a kind of "truth," one which is irrefutably true for them: Santa Teresa, San Juan de la Cruz, George Fox, Joseph Smith, Luther, Gautama Buddha, Mohammed and many others, including Mary Baker Eddy. However, the felt truth of these experiences (visions of God, for example) does not mean they should be accepted as true by anyone who has not personally had them. "The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another," he writes in the 14th lecture, "The Value of Saintliness." (p. 303)
He separates the question of the source of religious vision, which may be anything from an epileptic fit (e.g., St. Paul) to herbal intoxication or simply deep inward reflection, from its "truth," by which he means something like its practical utility. He quotes extensive psychological research (in particular, the studies of a Dr. Starbuck in California) to affirm that "conversion" is an almost universal experience of adolescence, because it is psychologically necessary. By conversion he means a turning away from the chaotic and contradictory messages that assail every young person to find some "process of unification of the self" which always brings "a characteristic sort of relief; and never such extreme relief as when it is cast into the religious mould. Happiness! happiness! religion is only one of the ways in which men gain that gift." (p. 163)
That's because the conversion need not be toward religion. "The new birth may be away from religion into incredulity; or it may be from moral scrupulosity into freedom and license; or it may be produced by the irruption into the individual's life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, revenge, or patriotic demotion." (163-164) Whatever works for you. For many of us, and apparently for James himself, the "new birth" was into incredulity, i.e., non-believing in a deity. Although James retained some doubt (see his "Conclusions"). After all, his father was a noted Swedenborgian philosopher.
But James is concerned not only about the utility of religious experience for the individual believer, but also about its social utility, its consequences for human society generally. While his language is not entirely clear here, it appears that he does not accept as pragmatic "truth" the kinds of religious sentiment that he calls extreme "Devoutness." "When unbalanced, one of its vices is called Fanaticism. Fanaticism is only loyalty carried to a convulsive extreme. ... The Buddha and Mohammed and their companions and many Christian saints are incrusted with a heavy jewelry of anecdotes which are meant to be honorific, but are simply abgeschmackt and silly, and form a touching expression of man's misguided propensity to praise. ... An immediate consequence of this condition is jealousy for the deity's honor." (310-311) Which leads to such absurdities as the riots over Danish cartoons, or Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's placement of the 2.6-ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments in the state building.
I think James was right to respect the personal truth of serious religious believers, and equally right to insist that their truth need not be anybody else's and certainly should not be imposed on anyone. We all have "spiritual" needs, he thinks -- that is, we need some way to put together our otherwise fragmenting "self." (James' notion of "self" seems to anticipate Dennett's formulation of it as "the center of narrative gravity.") But we don't all need to do it the same way. A coherent atheism, or a "healthy-minded" optimism, or a born-again union with the One, are equally valid ways to achieve the "gift" of "happiness," or integration of the self. Whether they are equally good or not depends on their consequences, not only for ourselves individually but in our actions on behalf of others. Makes sense to me.
December 9, 2017
Testimonials belong inside a comic book and offer nothing but anecdotal curiosities for those who already believe without sufficient reason or for those who like to pretend to know things they don’t really know. This is clearly one of the worst books I’ve ever read and I can’t believe that I had such high esteem for the author before having read this.
The book is an incredibly dangerous approach to understanding a topic. Over a hundred different case studies of personal experiences are mentioned in detail with all of them dealing with an individual’s devotional, sacramental, or mortification relationship to the divine. All of the stories are about the individuals feelings arising from intense sensations from within the individual. Feelings are not things (I don’t usually shout, but I’m going to for the sake of emphasis: FEELINGS ARE NOT THINGS!). All of the various testimonials concerning people's feelings excruciatingly detailed in this book add nothing to my understanding about the divine.
Sufficient reasons for our beliefs proportional to the credulity of the statement under consideration are the only standard I’m currently aware of for determining my beliefs. Because something makes me feel good or helps me deal with the world or accept my live on this blue dot I inhabit is not a reason for believing in it. I do everything in my power to not believe in false things and to limit my beliefs to justified true beliefs.
James does not understand Hegel to a first approximation when he characterizes him as a mystic. Hegel is not a mystic. There are two things that he could have learned from Hegel but clearly did not. The great hidden joke within Hegel is that he knows what Peter O’Toole in the ‘Ruling Class’ knew when asked by the reporter why did he think he was God, he responded ‘because I finally realized that when I was praying to the divine, I only heard myself’. All of the testimonials presented in this book suffer from not accepting that realization. Hegel also knows that humans differ from all other creatures because we have second order volition and only children and narcissist lack that capability.
That segues into why this book is so flawed. Imagine, if I were to write a book on narcissists and their special abilities for their intuitive truths they possess, and I used James’ approach. I would have hundreds of testimonials from various people testifying to such statements as ‘I grab women inappropriately and they love it’, ‘only I can solve that problem for you’, ‘we need to torture people way more than we have in the past’, ‘I know how to fix that problem and I’m the world’s greatest negotiator and I have a big brain’, ‘you can’t trust brown people to act as judges because they aren’t like me’, ‘anything that disagrees with me comes from fake media’, ‘and ‘there is such a thing as alternative facts’, and so on. Every single one of those statements are true within the world view of at least one narcissist and helps him reaffirm his self centered egocentric world view and works for him in a ‘pragmatic’ framework, but does not comport to reality that exist outside of his mind.
This book used the same approach for religion as I did for narcissism. Yes, it’s possible that world view can work for the narcissist and maybe even one day he can become president of the US, but that doesn’t mean they possess intuitive truths worth possessing or that their world view is a sane one or I should give special consideration for their world view because it works for them. In the end, the narcissist is not capable of seeing the other as a human being and therefore cannot see himself in relationship to others as a human and lacks the basic characteristic of being human. My imaginary book on narcissism would add nothing but anecdotal curiosities on an interesting topic and with testimonials from narcissists on how it works for them pragmatically, but the untold story is that narcissism belongs in the DSM V as a behavioral problem without an exception for belonging to a large group of other people having that same narcissistic belief.
My overall point and distaste for this author’s book is that his methodology is flawed (and tedious), and one should not generalize anecdotal evidence outside of the framework under consideration and make conclusions based on people’s feelings as ones sole criterion. If I used the author’s methodology, I would conclude narcissism was a good thing, and it gives special insights into intuitive truths about the world and is defendable because it works for the narcissist who provided the testimonials. (The narcissist’s world view is skewed by their inability to have second order volitions and to be quite frank, I don’t want to be living such a lie even if it buys me that ‘pragmatic’ happiness but the price of not seeing the other as a human being is too high for me to pay).
The book is an incredibly dangerous approach to understanding a topic. Over a hundred different case studies of personal experiences are mentioned in detail with all of them dealing with an individual’s devotional, sacramental, or mortification relationship to the divine. All of the stories are about the individuals feelings arising from intense sensations from within the individual. Feelings are not things (I don’t usually shout, but I’m going to for the sake of emphasis: FEELINGS ARE NOT THINGS!). All of the various testimonials concerning people's feelings excruciatingly detailed in this book add nothing to my understanding about the divine.
Sufficient reasons for our beliefs proportional to the credulity of the statement under consideration are the only standard I’m currently aware of for determining my beliefs. Because something makes me feel good or helps me deal with the world or accept my live on this blue dot I inhabit is not a reason for believing in it. I do everything in my power to not believe in false things and to limit my beliefs to justified true beliefs.
James does not understand Hegel to a first approximation when he characterizes him as a mystic. Hegel is not a mystic. There are two things that he could have learned from Hegel but clearly did not. The great hidden joke within Hegel is that he knows what Peter O’Toole in the ‘Ruling Class’ knew when asked by the reporter why did he think he was God, he responded ‘because I finally realized that when I was praying to the divine, I only heard myself’. All of the testimonials presented in this book suffer from not accepting that realization. Hegel also knows that humans differ from all other creatures because we have second order volition and only children and narcissist lack that capability.
That segues into why this book is so flawed. Imagine, if I were to write a book on narcissists and their special abilities for their intuitive truths they possess, and I used James’ approach. I would have hundreds of testimonials from various people testifying to such statements as ‘I grab women inappropriately and they love it’, ‘only I can solve that problem for you’, ‘we need to torture people way more than we have in the past’, ‘I know how to fix that problem and I’m the world’s greatest negotiator and I have a big brain’, ‘you can’t trust brown people to act as judges because they aren’t like me’, ‘anything that disagrees with me comes from fake media’, ‘and ‘there is such a thing as alternative facts’, and so on. Every single one of those statements are true within the world view of at least one narcissist and helps him reaffirm his self centered egocentric world view and works for him in a ‘pragmatic’ framework, but does not comport to reality that exist outside of his mind.
This book used the same approach for religion as I did for narcissism. Yes, it’s possible that world view can work for the narcissist and maybe even one day he can become president of the US, but that doesn’t mean they possess intuitive truths worth possessing or that their world view is a sane one or I should give special consideration for their world view because it works for them. In the end, the narcissist is not capable of seeing the other as a human being and therefore cannot see himself in relationship to others as a human and lacks the basic characteristic of being human. My imaginary book on narcissism would add nothing but anecdotal curiosities on an interesting topic and with testimonials from narcissists on how it works for them pragmatically, but the untold story is that narcissism belongs in the DSM V as a behavioral problem without an exception for belonging to a large group of other people having that same narcissistic belief.
My overall point and distaste for this author’s book is that his methodology is flawed (and tedious), and one should not generalize anecdotal evidence outside of the framework under consideration and make conclusions based on people’s feelings as ones sole criterion. If I used the author’s methodology, I would conclude narcissism was a good thing, and it gives special insights into intuitive truths about the world and is defendable because it works for the narcissist who provided the testimonials. (The narcissist’s world view is skewed by their inability to have second order volitions and to be quite frank, I don’t want to be living such a lie even if it buys me that ‘pragmatic’ happiness but the price of not seeing the other as a human being is too high for me to pay).
June 5, 2020
'' وقوفنا على ممر جبلي فى وسط الثلوج الخطرة والضباب الذي يعمينا؛ فلا يصلنا عبره إلا لمحات من حين لآخر من المسارات التي قد تكون خادعة. وإذا توقفنا سنتجمد حتى الموت ، وإذا سلكنا الطريق الخطأ فسنقع ونلاقي حتفنا ممزقين إلى قطع ، وذلك لأننا بالتأكيد لا نعرف الطريق الصحيح من بين هذه الطرق. ماذا يجب أن نفعل؟ العمل من أجل الأفضل، والأمل فى الأفضل، وقبول كل ما يأتي. وإذا أنهى الموت كل شىء، فلن نجد طريقة أفضل لملاقاته "...
لافرق بين أن أكتب رأي عن محتوى كتاب ما وأن أصف أثره على نفسي..
فثمة كتب ترسل إليك رسالة واضحة للغاية بأنه لابد من إزاحة كل مشغولياتك وقراءتك الأخرى، وتجد نفسك فى غاية الكدر لحظة إغلاق الكتاب لشدة إرهاقك، ولا تتركك صوره وتشبيهاته لحظة نومك.. لاتدري إلا أن ثمة انقلاب جواني.. وهكذا فعل بي كتاب تنويعات التجربة الدينية.
أن تمر بمرحلة فى حياتك غاية الخطورة وتعي تماما بدينامية التغيير بداخلك، وتريد أن تحظى بأى إجابة!!
لم يقدم الكتاب لي إجابات وإلا ما جذبتني قراءته، ولكنه قام بتشريح المشاعر والأفكار التي كانت ولازالت تؤرقني، كأن الصفحات احتوت تلك الفوضى بداخلي وأعادت ببطء رهيب ترتيب عالمي الجواني دون أى سلطة أو وصاية..
حالة التشظي النفسي وتفصيلها، النفس السقيمة وما تحمله من ألم وكرب، التحول الديني والتجارب الدينية المتنوعة والتي وجدت تجربتي فى إحدى الصفحات هناك، التعددية الإنسانية وإدراك أن الحقيقة تنمو في داخل كل الخبرات المتناهية المحدودة..
من ثمارهم تعرفونهم..ياله من معيار للحقيقة!
تركني الكتاب فى حالة من القلق الوجودى، إلا أنه مد لي اليد لآحمل ذلك القلق على عاتقي( كما يقول تيلتش) هو وسائر الهموم اللانهائية كالموت وإيجاد المعنى.
لقد وقفت كما قيل على (جبل الرؤية) وهذا خطر لامحالة ومربك للغاية..
ممتنة كثيرا للمترجمين أ. إسلام سعد وأ. علي رضا على هذا السفر العظيم، وهذا المجهود الضخم فالترجمة بالفعل رائعة واستمتعت للغاية بها..
لافرق بين أن أكتب رأي عن محتوى كتاب ما وأن أصف أثره على نفسي..
فثمة كتب ترسل إليك رسالة واضحة للغاية بأنه لابد من إزاحة كل مشغولياتك وقراءتك الأخرى، وتجد نفسك فى غاية الكدر لحظة إغلاق الكتاب لشدة إرهاقك، ولا تتركك صوره وتشبيهاته لحظة نومك.. لاتدري إلا أن ثمة انقلاب جواني.. وهكذا فعل بي كتاب تنويعات التجربة الدينية.
أن تمر بمرحلة فى حياتك غاية الخطورة وتعي تماما بدينامية التغيير بداخلك، وتريد أن تحظى بأى إجابة!!
لم يقدم الكتاب لي إجابات وإلا ما جذبتني قراءته، ولكنه قام بتشريح المشاعر والأفكار التي كانت ولازالت تؤرقني، كأن الصفحات احتوت تلك الفوضى بداخلي وأعادت ببطء رهيب ترتيب عالمي الجواني دون أى سلطة أو وصاية..
حالة التشظي النفسي وتفصيلها، النفس السقيمة وما تحمله من ألم وكرب، التحول الديني والتجارب الدينية المتنوعة والتي وجدت تجربتي فى إحدى الصفحات هناك، التعددية الإنسانية وإدراك أن الحقيقة تنمو في داخل كل الخبرات المتناهية المحدودة..
من ثمارهم تعرفونهم..ياله من معيار للحقيقة!
تركني الكتاب فى حالة من القلق الوجودى، إلا أنه مد لي اليد لآحمل ذلك القلق على عاتقي( كما يقول تيلتش) هو وسائر الهموم اللانهائية كالموت وإيجاد المعنى.
لقد وقفت كما قيل على (جبل الرؤية) وهذا خطر لامحالة ومربك للغاية..
ممتنة كثيرا للمترجمين أ. إسلام سعد وأ. علي رضا على هذا السفر العظيم، وهذا المجهود الضخم فالترجمة بالفعل رائعة واستمتعت للغاية بها..
June 26, 2012
A classic from a very important thinker, as fresh today as when it was written. Although the book has some limitations, such as emphasis on Christianity relative to other religions, one could echo the Bible in saying the world could not contain all the books that might be written on the subject.
James examines a wide range of particulars and boils them down to general facts and some hypotheses, concluding that at the very least, conversion experiences "even for a short time show a human being what the high-water mark of his spiritual capacity is" (p. 257). Religion tells us that "there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand," a humility of the spirit as Richard Feynman called it, and that "we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers," whatever they be (p. 499).
He believes science is mistaken in discounting the subjective in favor of the objective in human experience. That approach leaves us (my words, not his) feeling empty:
...as when a hungry man dreams,
And look—he eats;
But he awakes, and his soul is still empty;
Or as when a thirsty man dreams,
And look—he drinks;
But he awakes, and indeed he is faint,
And his soul still craves...
(Isa. 29:8. See p. 491 in James's conclusion for the original thought.)
Lectures XIV and XV are as satisfying as anything I've ever read, and that's the part I'd recommend before deciding to digest the whole enchilada. Four stars because it's not for the casual reader, but still indispensable, one of the nonfiction greats.
James examines a wide range of particulars and boils them down to general facts and some hypotheses, concluding that at the very least, conversion experiences "even for a short time show a human being what the high-water mark of his spiritual capacity is" (p. 257). Religion tells us that "there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand," a humility of the spirit as Richard Feynman called it, and that "we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers," whatever they be (p. 499).
He believes science is mistaken in discounting the subjective in favor of the objective in human experience. That approach leaves us (my words, not his) feeling empty:
...as when a hungry man dreams,
And look—he eats;
But he awakes, and his soul is still empty;
Or as when a thirsty man dreams,
And look—he drinks;
But he awakes, and indeed he is faint,
And his soul still craves...
(Isa. 29:8. See p. 491 in James's conclusion for the original thought.)
Lectures XIV and XV are as satisfying as anything I've ever read, and that's the part I'd recommend before deciding to digest the whole enchilada. Four stars because it's not for the casual reader, but still indispensable, one of the nonfiction greats.
May 17, 2022
When I first read this book in my early twenties, I was a young man fleeing the rigid, fundamentalist evangelicalism of my childhood. I was searching for a more rational expression of faith, and was impressed with this book which seemed to offer just that. When I initially added it here on Goodreads I rated it 5 stars on the memory of that long ago impression.
On rereading William James work, I approached it as a man in later middle age and a longstanding agnostic atheist. I brought very different eyes to this reading. While I am still impressed with James' powerful and lyrical writing style, I am much lesser moved by his philosophical/religious conclusions. I found his approach to religion far less profound and far more scattered and garbled than in my original reading. Indeed, in his final summation chapter, he presented more of a word stew than any truly coherent philosophy of religion. He was apparently aware of this shortcoming, and blaming it on necessary brevity, added a postscript to clarify. I did not find it a successful clarification.
Still, the book is beautifully written It contains much valuable information on various religious states, The chapters on mysticism and philosophy are worth reading by themselves. Its reputation as a classic is earned.
On rereading William James work, I approached it as a man in later middle age and a longstanding agnostic atheist. I brought very different eyes to this reading. While I am still impressed with James' powerful and lyrical writing style, I am much lesser moved by his philosophical/religious conclusions. I found his approach to religion far less profound and far more scattered and garbled than in my original reading. Indeed, in his final summation chapter, he presented more of a word stew than any truly coherent philosophy of religion. He was apparently aware of this shortcoming, and blaming it on necessary brevity, added a postscript to clarify. I did not find it a successful clarification.
Still, the book is beautifully written It contains much valuable information on various religious states, The chapters on mysticism and philosophy are worth reading by themselves. Its reputation as a classic is earned.
June 4, 2021
I applaud this Great Man for overcoming suicidal depressive symptoms, and altering his views on destinies and fate, A very long but an impactful read. He kind of reminds me of Dr. Jung,
a scientific mind with a Spiritual/Religious tendency. He had to move past his fatalist beliefs and move to a more optimistic yet realistic review of the Universe.
A classic, that cannot be ingested in one reading. You may have to put it down, then pick it up,
then put it back down, then pick it up over a long period of time. That is OK.....
a scientific mind with a Spiritual/Religious tendency. He had to move past his fatalist beliefs and move to a more optimistic yet realistic review of the Universe.
A classic, that cannot be ingested in one reading. You may have to put it down, then pick it up,
then put it back down, then pick it up over a long period of time. That is OK.....
December 2, 2021
My husband actually owned this book before we got married and for all these years since it has languished on our bookshelves. I've always been curious about it and intended to read it. I decided that 2021 would finally be that year. It has taken me months, reading just a little bit at a time because that's all I could take before my eyes started to glaze over. To say that reading it was tedious would be a vast understatement.
The book was published in 1902 and was based on lectures that James gave in 1901-02 at the University of Edinburgh. No doubt the lectures were crafted for students of psychology at the university. They seem designed to emphasize the erudition of the lecturer who never uses one word when twenty will suffice and never uses a single syllable word if one with multiple syllables is available. The author also quotes extensively from other writers. Sometimes these quotes go on for pages, as do many of the footnotes. I think I am a fairly patient reader but my strong impulse here was to say, "Just get on with it! Say what you mean and let it stand. Stop beating around the bushes."
And yet I must report that this book was a best seller in its day. Apparently, excessive wordiness was just what the readers of the day wanted. The winter nights were long and sources of entertainment were limited. Of course, there's no way of knowing whether buyers of the book actually READ it or if it was a vanity purchase.
Now, as to the title of the book, in my opinion, it should have been The Varieties of Christian Experience because that's really all he discusses. Mentions of any other religious faiths are merely done in passing. The writer evidently wished to stick to the religious beliefs of which he had personal experience, but it does cause one to wonder just how much he really knew about those other faiths. It could be argued that the Christian experience is easily extrapolated to other systems of belief, but I'm not entirely sure that is true and it certainly is not supported by this text.
James' primary focus is even narrower than that. He makes the distinction between Catholic and Protestant forms of Christianity and, in his considered opinion, the Protestant form is superior. Thus, the Protestant experience seems to me to be what his book is really about.
The writer's plan for the book was to explore individual rather than group experiences of religion. The examples that he uses to illustrate his points are almost never of ordinary people for whom one might be able to have some fellow feeling; they are stories of mystics and saints and of extreme born-again converts, all of whose experiences seemed occasionally interesting but rather foreign to me. Are the extremes of experience truly the best way to discuss the subject? That's debatable, I think, but again, James was writing for the audience of his day, not for me, and evidently, that audience lapped it up.
James' conclusion is that religious feelings are a good thing, a force for good in society, even though he himself says that such feelings are not a part of his personal experience. Perhaps that explains in part why he chose such bizarre cases to support his arguments.
My conclusion about his book is that it is an extremely frustrating and annoying read. It could have been one-half its length and that probably would have made it a better book. I've seen raves about what a talented and insightful writer James was, but I did not find this particularly insightful or well-written. It may well have pleased the readers of the early twentieth century; this reader of the twenty-first century not so much.
The book was published in 1902 and was based on lectures that James gave in 1901-02 at the University of Edinburgh. No doubt the lectures were crafted for students of psychology at the university. They seem designed to emphasize the erudition of the lecturer who never uses one word when twenty will suffice and never uses a single syllable word if one with multiple syllables is available. The author also quotes extensively from other writers. Sometimes these quotes go on for pages, as do many of the footnotes. I think I am a fairly patient reader but my strong impulse here was to say, "Just get on with it! Say what you mean and let it stand. Stop beating around the bushes."
And yet I must report that this book was a best seller in its day. Apparently, excessive wordiness was just what the readers of the day wanted. The winter nights were long and sources of entertainment were limited. Of course, there's no way of knowing whether buyers of the book actually READ it or if it was a vanity purchase.
Now, as to the title of the book, in my opinion, it should have been The Varieties of Christian Experience because that's really all he discusses. Mentions of any other religious faiths are merely done in passing. The writer evidently wished to stick to the religious beliefs of which he had personal experience, but it does cause one to wonder just how much he really knew about those other faiths. It could be argued that the Christian experience is easily extrapolated to other systems of belief, but I'm not entirely sure that is true and it certainly is not supported by this text.
James' primary focus is even narrower than that. He makes the distinction between Catholic and Protestant forms of Christianity and, in his considered opinion, the Protestant form is superior. Thus, the Protestant experience seems to me to be what his book is really about.
The writer's plan for the book was to explore individual rather than group experiences of religion. The examples that he uses to illustrate his points are almost never of ordinary people for whom one might be able to have some fellow feeling; they are stories of mystics and saints and of extreme born-again converts, all of whose experiences seemed occasionally interesting but rather foreign to me. Are the extremes of experience truly the best way to discuss the subject? That's debatable, I think, but again, James was writing for the audience of his day, not for me, and evidently, that audience lapped it up.
James' conclusion is that religious feelings are a good thing, a force for good in society, even though he himself says that such feelings are not a part of his personal experience. Perhaps that explains in part why he chose such bizarre cases to support his arguments.
My conclusion about his book is that it is an extremely frustrating and annoying read. It could have been one-half its length and that probably would have made it a better book. I've seen raves about what a talented and insightful writer James was, but I did not find this particularly insightful or well-written. It may well have pleased the readers of the early twentieth century; this reader of the twenty-first century not so much.
May 20, 2020
When I think about the anhedonia that settled in me after entirely abandoning my religious upbringing and disregarding all things spiritual, I’m forced to think about what I really lost. William James would say that which was lost is the completeness of a human being, which is both body and spirit (union—or, in Sanskrit, yoga). It is all too easy (for an angsty teen like I was or otherwise) in our time to buy into the idea that science can dismiss religion, even though it can say very little about the non-material; and further, it’s even easier to dismiss it because of preposterous claims that vary one faith to the next. But this is to look at religion on its surface instead of prying into the deeper, more personal elements of it—to use our rational center (so dominant in our culture) instead of our feeling center. As James writes, “The theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and conduct as being the more constant elements.”
Does subjective truth exist? Quantum physics certainly seems to suggest as much. But instead of that question, the better one I’ve come to is this: are your ways of thinking and being useful to you in your life?
A philosophy professor of mine said on multiple occasions that no one can teach a philosophy of religion course without his own bias showing through. But William James transcends this by transcending philosophy. And instead of belaboring the point, I’ll end with one more lovely quote from James:
“The unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects upon this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change.”
Does subjective truth exist? Quantum physics certainly seems to suggest as much. But instead of that question, the better one I’ve come to is this: are your ways of thinking and being useful to you in your life?
A philosophy professor of mine said on multiple occasions that no one can teach a philosophy of religion course without his own bias showing through. But William James transcends this by transcending philosophy. And instead of belaboring the point, I’ll end with one more lovely quote from James:
“The unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects upon this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change.”
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