Monday, August 10, 2009

The Varieties of Religious Experience - William James

Here are my thoughts on William James's book on religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

James’s method assumes that “a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep”. The book, in turn, is full of examples of religious experience from a variety of sources. His discussion of religion does not centre on the dogmas of established religions, but on “the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct.” He is concerned primarily with the visionaries whose passionate and novel experiences were the seeds of their religion’s growth; as well as the personal and subjective experiences of other religiously devout people, without spending much time on the various religious institutions and their creeds. In light of this special emphasis on the individual and his subjective experiences, religion is something subtly different for James than it is in normal conversation. It consists of “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.”

In the opening chapter, Religion and Neurology, James addresses what he called “medical materialism”. This is the supposition that mental states are caused by biological phenomena. Often this relationship will be raised to dismiss the truth of religious experiences. “Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic,” writes James. There’s definitely something to this argument. If it can be shown that a religious experience, or any kind of mental state, owes its cause to some physical occurrence it would be reasonable to doubt the truth of the subjective experience. James’s response is inspired. If something like medical materialism (the dependence of mental states on some physical correlate) is true, then why stop at mental states of a spiritual nature? “Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see ‘the liver’ determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul.” Every single one of our thoughts is conditioned by some physical, or biological, occurrence, so we’re left with one of two options: we can discard all our beliefs and consider every mental state untrue, or we can free ourselves from this test of truth. A certain state of mind is true, James argues, because there is “an immediate delight in them; or else it is because we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life.” I’ll get back to this counter-intuitive point a little later.

We should address a particularly refreshing point in the book. When James writes of the “divine” which forms the basis of the religious experience he is not limiting the term to systems of thought that assume the existence of either a supernatural realm or a God. Buddhism, for one, does not presuppose the existence of God and, yet, for James its members count as the religiously devout, connected, as they are, to something they consider divine. In James’s framework, one can worship nothing but abstract moral laws and still find themselves in the grips of something reminiscent of religious feeling. “We must therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these godless or quasi-godless creeds ‘religions’; and accordingly when in our definition of religion we speak of the individual’s relation to ‘what he considers the divine,’ we must interpret the term ‘divine’ very broadly, as denoting any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not.” And also: “In Christian saintliness this power is always personified as God; but abstract moral ideals, civic or patriotic utopias, or inner visions of holiness or right may also be felt as the true lords and enlargers of our life”.

In the chapter The Reality of the Unseen, James argues that both abstract ideas – like the conceptual nouns of ‘goodness’, ‘beauty’, ‘strength’, ‘justice’, etc. - and concrete facts are as inextricably tied to one another as are rules of grammar and discrete words. Without the one, the others would be fundamentally senseless. This, James believes, proves that the “unseen” exists. Though intangible and experientially unverifiable, they are as present as any concrete object. I’ll quote James at length here: “The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims…in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance…Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all our facts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of. They give its ‘nature,’ as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we know is ‘what’ it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification and conception.”

James’s real project is to figure out whether an individual’s sense of connection to this unseen and divine abstract realm has any practical worth to the individual. Setting aside the unfortunately common practice of petitional prayer (the act of asking God to either give you something or to help see you through troubled times), James asks how prayer of a wider sense may ennoble man. In short, real prayer, or the practice of putting oneself into an active relationship with something larger than the particulars of life – to abstract principles, for instance – improves a person in some distinct ways. The typical desires, inhibitions, and pettiness fall out of consideration when one’s mind is on something as large as either religious or abstract ideals. “The sweetest delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the moment they offer themselves as checks to a cause by which our high indignations are elicited,” James writes. In yet another beautiful turn of phrase, such checks are “Severed like cobwebs, broken like bubbles in the sun”. As one’s sense of scope and sense of what’s importance broadens, so does his asceticism. He becomes less concerned with his own comfort and welfare - if it distracts from an ideal held. And he becomes inclined towards tenderness for humanity. Whether one considers more conventional objects, like God, or something like a set of moral ideals as warranting their devotion, the effects are the same. “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,” James writes. Of course, the practical implication of genuine tenderness for humanity is a preparedness to fight (both metaphorically and literally) those who choose to win victories, however fleeting, at the expense of others. So let’s not confuse tenderness and compassion with weakness of will.

Around this point of the book, I still felt that James had not dealt adequately enough with the question of whether or not the beliefs of such religiously and ethically inclined individuals are actually true! His argument is as follows. The attempt to put religious belief on the foundation of logical argument is a waste of time. It will do nothing but confirm the beliefs of the faithful and prove empty, disingenuous, and cold to those who are not so inclined. It gets wrong a basic fact about the human condition: “the logical reason of man operates in this field of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or in politics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life, in which our passions or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand.”

Ultimately, the existence, or truth, of religion and other abstract ideas lies in its practical use. If he is changed for the better by his new beliefs, as far as we know those beliefs correspond to some facts of the world – or the universe. Let me explain a little further. James is what philosophers call a pragmatist. For them, a belief is like a plan of action. A person has a belief insofar as that thought informs the way he behaves in the world. Consequently we can tease out the meaning of a belief by looking at how one would behave if the belief were held. If belief is so disconnected from our lives, from action, completely disembodied and wingless, then it is, functionally at least, meaningless. James’s argument, from what I can tell, is as follows: it’s as if religion were true because, from our experiences of people who are genuinely involved in it, their belief in it seems to cause some identifiable effects in them. And because the effects are real, the belief must be meaningful and, hence, true. This pragmatic argument for the existence of the divine realm may seem a little unconvincing. I’m not entirely sure I’m convinced myself. I will say that the book is worth the time and effort and, hopefully with some maturation, I’ll be able to tackle it again more effectively. Perhaps by then I will have changed from what I am - an irreligious person without a connection to, or even a coherent belief in, the divine - to something very different. As James puts it in one of his many beautiful sentences: "Even late in life some thaw, some release may take place, some bolt be shot back in the barrenest breast, and the man's hard heart may soften and break into religious feeling."