In the same way that Owen Flanagan wants to naturalize Buddhism by stripping its hocus-pocus, William James focused his attention on personal religious experience rather than the "smells and bells" of traditional institutions. As biographer Robert Richardson puts it, "much of what one usually thinks of as religion James rejects at the start". James says he has no interest in the, "ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation and retain by habit." James says he wants to confine himself to "personal religions pure and simple" and say as little as possible about systematic theology or institutional history. The latter are second-hand religions, but he wants to look at the original article. As one might imagine, Richardson says, "James continues to be attacked by church leaders and systematic theologians for his failure to start where they start." James's biographer tells us that this approach to the psychology of religion was a "radical departure, more radical even than that of Friedrich Schleiermacher."
Because James opposed what he called "medical materialism", I suspect that he would be a bit skeptical about neurology as a starting point. This is the view that the value and validity of religious experience can be undermined by classifying the experience as a product of hysteria, fever or by pointing to the mystic's disordered colon. "In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to anyone to try to refute opinions by showing up their author's neurotic constitution," James says. "It should be no otherwise with religious opinions." I think the idea here is that medical materialism does not seek to explain religious experience so much as it seeks to explain it away. This does not mean he is opposed to scientific inquiry, of course, but to reductionism. On the other hand, I'm sure he'd be thrilled and amazed by the kind of brain imaging technology we presently enjoy. At least one scholar thinks that James and Flanagan would get along quite well.
In her abstract to Bridging Science and Religion: "The More" and "The Less" in William James and Owen Flanagan, author Ann Taves says,"there is a kinship between Owen Flanagan's The Really Hard Problem
Unlike Flanagan, the term "Buddhism" doesn't appear in any of James's book titles, but more than a century ago Kitaro Nishida, "Japan's foremost modern philosopher", recognized some very Buddhist ideas in James's radical empiricism, especially James's notion of "pure experience". Joel Krueger's paper, The Varieties of Pure Experience: William James and Kitaro Nishida on Consciousness and Embodiment," explains some of those connections.
David Scott wrote a nice piece that distinguishes the Buddhism that James saw in his own work from the Buddhism that others find in it. In "William James and Buddhism: American Pragmatism and the Orient", Scott goes so far as to claim that the Buddha himself was, like James, a pragmatist and a radical empiricist. His case includes some discussion of John Dewey as well. As "dmf" mentioned recently, there is an interesting paper on Dewey's Zen. The author makes a case that Dewey's emphasis on primordial experience is not some mushy-minded relativism but rather essential "if our thought is to be grounded and transformative".
There is no shortage of this kind of material, but I want to highlight one more example. In "The Strange Attraction of Sciousness: William James on Consciousness" Andrew Bailey sketches out William James’ account of consciousness. Bailey says this account, "has been quite influential in the back-rooms of the recent philosophical and scientific study of consciousness. Daniel Dennett has cited James approvingly," he says, "while Owen Flanagan parades James’ robust notion of a phenomenological stream of consciousness" and "several of the papers in the proceedings of the first major interdisciplinary conference on consciousness ('Toward a Science of Consciousness,' at Tucson in 1994) take James’ doctrines as a central starting point. As work in the burgeoning field of ‘consciousness studies’ reaches fever pitch, James’ thoughts in this area have increased in importance and influence correspondingly."
-Dave Buchanan
Bruce Adam says
March 16, 2012 at 3:21 pmWould it be within the podcast’s brief to do an episode on “The Varieties of Religious Experience” ?. Lot’s of good material for discussion .
I was surprised to discover it was placed second in the top hundred non-fiction books of last century. Please give it some thought.
dmf says
March 16, 2012 at 3:58 pmif there aren’t any spirits involved why not talk in terms of human-being, or if you’re some version of a pantheist why not make that explicit?
http://williamjamesstudies.org/7.1/gale.pdf
David Buchanan says
March 16, 2012 at 6:32 pmMy use of the word “spirituality” in the title of this blog post was not meant to imply the existence of “spirits” but rather a reference to a common sentiment and an allusion to Ann Taves’ abstract. As she sees it, James and Flanagan are both working in a territory that she calls “spiritual but not religious” (as quoted in the post above).
I’d be happy to make my own views explicit, dmf. (I wish everybody would be open about that sort of thing.) Pantheism? No, i think that would almost always imply an element of supernaturalism so, personally, I like that notion only as a metaphor. Panexperientalism is a view I find attractive, however, and that’s very similar. (The view that every thing is aware on some level.) But that view is not terribly relevant to the claim that people have transformative experiences or that human consciousness sometime achieves extraordinary states. The idea here is simply that the psychological events can blow your mind or transform you life without being magic or supernatural. The idea, I think, is just that training your brain and growing your mind is real and natural and not a matter of faith or the kind of thing that only pays in afterlife.
dmf says
March 16, 2012 at 8:29 pmgotcha, I wasn’t sure if you were describing a bit of psychology or prescribing spirituality, Taves has often blurred that line and many find rather explicit deist/pantheist views in James so it’s good to be clear about what we are talking about.
you might want to check out:
http://fora.tv/2009/04/30/Mastering_Attention_to_Transform_Experience
C.-Derick-Varn says
March 20, 2012 at 12:03 pmI am interested in this one as it seems clear that Donald Lopez has written about how this is a mystification as well as proponents on this naturalization like that of Stephen Batchelor.
David Buchanan says
March 20, 2012 at 3:44 pmI took a quick look at Lopez and it occurred to me that at least one very important distinction should be drawn. As with any religion, Buddhism comes in many flavors AND the are popular (usually literalistic) forms are much different than the more philosophical esoteric forms. The folk religions and traditions are almost always wrapped up in supernaturalism while the esoteric core of all the world’s great religions point to some kind of mystical experience. That category of experience is the focus of James’s “Varieties” and the central goal of Buddhist meditation. So, basically, I think what we’re talking about here is enlightenment understood as a natural, psychological event.
“Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: Plotinus, Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others. They share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided. Zen,
which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of dividedness can be overcome by meditation. The Native American Church argues that peyote can force-feed a mystic understanding upon those who were normally resistant to it,…” (Robert Pirsig in LILA)