Ep. 345: William James on Religious Experience (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Learn about the big books in continental philosophy with my new fall class. Please visit partiallyexaminelife.com class for details. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our Questions for episode 345 are something like what is religion and how should philosophers study it? We read William James, the Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, lectures 1, 2, 3 and 20. More information about this book in the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer with the bugaboo of morbid origin still scandalizing my piety in Madison, Wisconsin,

0:50 Seth: this is Seth Paskin able to afford to overlook the innumerable failures and self deceptions in Austin, Texas, this is Wes

0:59 Wes: Alwan ready to get sthenic S T H E N I C In Cambridge, Massachusetts, are we ready to get sthenic?

1:08 Seth: Wes is the hype man for this episode.

1:12 Dylan: And this is Dylan Casey denying that exceptional and eccentric only apply to those who pursue a religious life in Muskegon, Michigan.

1:20 Mark: Traveling man this has been on our list for a long damn time and I had read it. I signed up for Stephen Phillips, one of our past guests, his philosophy of religion course in grad school and this was what was on the syllabus for the first week. I read this on my own and I dropped out of the class because I felt like I just wanted to read this. So that was my memory was that it was something that you could shove this whole 500 page book or I don't remember how much of it I actually read at the time in a week. That is a small number of ideas per page. Although William James was always fun to read and the entire book was available as a Librivox. So I did listen to the whole thing. But then when, you know, going back and taking notes on the especially in these first three chapters, I've found quite a bit more than I thought to dive into any past experiences.

2:09 Wes: He's a great writer. I hadn't looked at this book before. I've always wanted to read wasn't quite what I expected. I didn't expect it to be an apologetics, but I think in a sense it is a kind of religious apologetics, at least in general. Not Christian necessarily, but obviously there's an interesting psychology to religion in this book. There's a thesis that involves the subconscious which is quite interesting. But he's also trying to vindicate religion against what we might call scientism so that I Did not expect that.

2:46 Dylan: I never read it before. I'd heard of it, of course, and James is a great writer, but I found. I hope we talk a little bit. There's. I don't know if it's laconic or what the word is about the way in which. It's just the enormity of the quotes. I have my own theory about, like, why he has these multiple page quotes in there. And there's a kind of just extensiveness of it, which I feel like there would be very long lectures to sit through. It felt like it could have been a little bit more compressed. I was also a little bit surprised, like as Wes was, or the particular form of the apologetics. So it'll be good to get to hit more in depth on that.

3:30 Wes: Yeah, I read this kind of curious about what you would think because it combines something that, as far as I know, you're very fond of. Pragmatism was something that, as far as I know, although I don't think I know a lot, I expected you to be not so fond of, which is religion, but maybe I'm just putting that on you. And that's not actually the case.

3:51 Mark: We had read the Will to Believe. We had talked about one of the first things when Dylan was on this podcast, was talking about his essay the Will to believe, which is 1896. So, you know, five years or so before he was giving these lectures.

4:04 Dylan: Yeah, Well, I think it'll be interesting to talk about because I think that this theme of sort of defending the personal experience in the face of the overarching abstract processing of the world through science is sort of where he sits. His point at it and my own objections to religion, they sort of sit in between where he decides to make his inquiry, like he. Between institutional effects and the political effects of religion versus the personal effects of it. Worth talking about.

4:38 Seth: Yeah, that's a good point, Dylan. I feel similarly. I didn't know what I was expecting, and the idea, the vibe of it becoming almost like scientific or taxonomic inquiry, taking the phenomena of religious experience. And then initially your sense is that there's, you know, he's sort of doing a psychology of religious experience. But in the conclusion and the chapter on philosophy, I think he brings the hammer down like it's quite interesting and potent. Not that he's defending or damning religious experience in any way, shape or form, just establishing kind of firm boundary between that personal experience and the attempt to universalize it and where the struggle is there.

That was really fascinating. And yes, he's a Wonderful writer, but I would never have sat through all these lectures to get to the punchline and the philosophy and the conclusion. I'm glad it's written down because. Oh boy, flowery 19th century language.

5:44 Wes: Well, I like his language a lot. It is, although a bit flowery. Not as flowery as his brothers. It's even more complicated and flowery. But the footnotes and long quotations, yes, they certainly take a toll. And there are footnote notes that span pages and quotations that span pages. Which in and of itself might not be bad except that they are describing the personal religious experiences of other human beings. And that does. Actually, however sympathetic I am to his theses, the. The actual exposition of those experiences leaves me cold. I'm one of those cold people that he describes.

Has trouble getting into that, stepping into the subjective standpoint of that kind of experience. Even though in a way I understand it because philosophy and literature, you know, are kind of serve that meaning making function for me. So I understand it a bit. But when people are talking about hallucinations and spirits and voices and the glory of God and all of those things, that. That's where it's interesting because it's, in a way, it's evidence. And James wants to think of it as a kind of evidence. Right. This is like an empirical inquiry and he's going to give us lots and lots of data, but the data, in a way it would be better data if one can really get into that sthenic mode I call it, you know, as he calls it, if one could inhabit that enthusiastic frame of mind.

Otherwise it's not only foreign, it's boring, frankly.

7:17 Dylan: Yeah.

7:18 Wes: From an external point of view, the religious experience, for the individual, experiencing is the greatest thing in the world from an external standpoint, can be incredibly tedious.

7:29 Dylan: Yes. I mean, there's the quote in the middle of it that the scientist who understands what it means to be drunk doesn't know what it's like to be drunk. So you can have the scientific account of drunkenness, which doesn't reveal very much about drunkenness. And I think what you just described, the distinction between what it feels like and the experience of it, and then the watching of the experience or the observing of it, I think that's a huge deal. And I mean, it's one way of talking about the personal and the fact that it would, you know, if you know, everything from, you know, being the sober person at a drunken party or going to a Pentecostal revival and being the one who's not speaking in tongues to any other Thing where you're watching people be connected to and have to something and experiencing something to which you are not connected at all. Yeah.

8:24 Wes: It's kind of like saying over and over again, well, you really kind of had to be there. I can tell you the tale. Let me tell you this. What someone said, this incredible joke or this funny thing that happened. Well, I guess I'm not doing a good job. You really had to be there.

8:38 Mark: So his thesis is that even though religion is a mass phenomenon, most of us live it secondhand. So I see this as a variation of Kierkegaard criticizing the average Protestant. Or we've seen other thinkers that are sort of getting down on the they. That's Heidegger's term that most people are just going through the motions. It becomes a sociological thing. Right. If you want to ask, why do religions flourish? What makes one catch on somewhere rather than another? Those are really interesting questions. Right. The God delusion. We read a number of things associated with that.

But according to James, like, we wouldn't have this exactly if there weren't positive individual experiences that the founders of religion, people who were geniuses, who were, pushed religion forward in a certain way, Whether it be, you know, a Martin Luther, the various saints that he talks about. We need to look at these extreme cases if we want to see, like, well, what is going on in their psychology, that then we can look for it ourselves in some much more muted form. The basic components of what they're going through is something that's probably accessible to everyone, just like emotions are accessible to everyone.

And he emphasizes, like, religious feeling. Well, it's just feeling that's attached to a religious object. Right. It's. You've had times where you're really stoked about something. What was the word you just used, Wes? Then I avoided putting that in my notes. I just glossed over it.

10:11 Wes: I love it. I love that word.

10:13 Mark: I mean, I'm certainly familiar, you know, whether it be just various times he talks about falling in love, he talks about drunkenness, he talks about a number of related sort of things where, you know, for instance, one of the phenomena he wants to point to is it is possible for someone's personality to suddenly change. Right. That they just. They've been a drunkard and suddenly they have some experience that then they just never drink again. Like, that's not the norm. Most people, you know, there are no. I'm an alcoholic forever, and I can forever, you know, might lapse into this.

But at least he's claiming you could deny this and he has an explanation that, you know, sir, your unconscious has been readying yourself for this. It might even be just that you were raised religious. And suddenly he tells a story of, like, a guy. He's saying his prayers and his brother is like, do you still do that? And he just realized, like, oh, I'm just doing this completely out of habit. So he just, like, makes this complete jump in his attitude, his religious attitude. Anyway, this is the kind of stuff that he is trying to focus on of what these individuals.

So I don't think it's a matter of, oh, these are all just, like, extreme weirdos. And I don't feel any of this. So this whole book means nothing to me. He says, like, I'm pointing out the grotesqueries so that we can then figure out, okay, how does this actually relate to the common case?

11:30 Dylan: But he's also taking seriously the notion that these experiences that people are having are authentic personal experiences. So that's one of the ways in which it's providing evidence separate from. He talks about different kinds of judgment. Like, you know, one of the things that he spends a lot of time trying to present and then undermine or discount is a version of discounting religious experience, of saying it's sort of evolutionary. It was a stepping stone on us to, you know, collectively becoming more sophisticated beings.

12:05 Wes: It's a leftover. Right. A leftover atavism or vestigial.

12:10 Dylan: Yeah, but part of his claim in looking at this, and one of the reasons why he includes all this detail in it, is trying to. Is, you know, well, just taking seriously the testimonial. Personal experience is revealing something about inner life that needs to be interpreted. Yes, that's what he's doing in Varieties of Religious Experience is doing some interpretation and some form of synthesis about what it means, but it doesn't mean taking it seriously.

12:39 Wes: Yeah. So he's giving us lived experience, something a lot of people talk about.

12:44 Dylan: Yep.

12:45 Wes: But they don't really act. And one of my favorite things, as you guys know, but a lot of people don't. They talk to talk, but they don't walk the walk. We get a lot of testimony here. So it's about the religion on the one hand, but it's also about a mode of explanation and justification, which is maybe only quasi scientific because it's focusing on individual experience and not on the public. Not on the objective, quote unquote, not on the theoretical. He wants to vindicate the individual and the personal and the feeling, the affective.

13:21 Dylan: A.

13:22 Wes: With an A affective over and against the theoretical and the theological religion for him is going to be primarily about the former, not the latter, the latter sort of built out on top of individual personal religious experience. But that form of explanation and justification is a bit of a problem. And that's what I was trying to point to by joking around about how boring it is for someone like me. It's a problem, right. Just because it. Psychoanalysis has the same sort of problem. It's the, you know, well, you really had to be there. You cannot doing a double blind study.

This is a particular relationship between a particular therapist and a particular patient. And how do you establish causality? And a theoretical model that's, you know, if you're not doing something that's repeatable and third person and objective. So it's a very similar problem. It creates a very unique mode of justification that he's involved in here. And that's part of what I thought was surprising. Very interesting, but surprising.

14:25 Mark: Yeah. This chapter on mysticism that we did not officially sign, and it was mostly anecdotes, testimonials, and I found, like, this is why I like to do it as an audiobook. Double speed, of course, is you could just tune out during some of these things, like, just let it go. I mean, I, I resisted actually fast forwarding over some of it because, like, oh, it's going to be more of this. But I would then get very attentive when he would start actually saying something analytical about it. And it makes it very easy to sort of go through these long chapters and find, okay, here are the.

The four paragraphs where he's saying something really definite. And so in this mysticism chapter, he says, page 417, the mystical feeling of enlargement, union and emancipation has no specific intellectual content whatever of its own. It is capable of forming matrimonial alliances with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies provided only they can find a place in their framework for its particular emotional mood. So when you're saying, like, we're looking for evidence, you know, the. We're taking these serious. As testimonials as evidence.

Well, it's not evidence that there is a God or that Jesus has a beard. I saw Jesus's beard. Like, it is literally indescribable. He says that a lot of texts about mysticism are basically like songs. They're poems, you know, the Rumi or what, you know, these various Eastern poets or Sufi poets or various mystical traditions. Yeah, because there's just nothing that you could actually say about the indescribable mysticism

15:55 Wes: kind of gets us to the kernel of it. And even though we didn't read that chapter, which is appropriate given its content, just let it wash over us. He does talk about that kernel on the conclusions of the section of the book. And the kernel is kind of stripped of what he calls over beliefs, which are those specific beliefs of in related to theology or to religious practice. Who's your particular God and what are your particular rituals? What particular mythology do you have? Those are over beliefs. And he thinks there's a shared core of to those different religions. And when he says he wants to tell us what religious experience is at its core, it's something shared by all those different religions and it doesn't require you to have one over belief or another.

16:48 Dylan: Yeah, I mean this is where he's classifying, he's doing a kind of taxonomy and the analysis. This is why it could have been many pages shorter. Right. As he could have been giving examples rather than effectively doing the lived experience exposition that then, you know, he's saying, well, this is sort of like putting the data in the thesis rather than the summary of the data and the thesis.

17:13 Mark: Another thing he thinks is common, you know, that we're going to get out of this is this interaction between this optimism, this enthusiasm. Right. This is what he thinks that religion really adds to us, adds to our lives, but sort of for that to be fully leavened, for it to be fully realized. He talks about the once born as people that just they see the world and they're okay with it and they can just describe it. But then there are the twice born which are people that they recognize the rotten core of the world. And this is existentialism. The fact that we are all going to die, the fact that there is evil.

We read about this in the Brothers Karamazov, you know that there are. You just, you can't. The kind of nice once born positive way would be these ways of dealing with the problem of evil, of oh, evil is just sort of cracks in being, it's not a real thing. He brings up Spinoza as an example of this. But people that actually take evil seriously and focus on it and think that there's some sort of sacrifice, there's something needed to be able to overcome that. Hopefully then they get beyond that such that they are the fullest kind of religion, James says is a religion that involves some kind of salvation, that you recognize the evil and yet you somehow emotionally can get past that.

For whatever your rationalization, God has saved me. You know, there is something about the universe that's on my side. Despite all the horribleness that's in it, it never gets fully just written off. There's always a sort of. This is a core of sadness in it. But how can we be a deep human being as opposed to merely an analytical post industrial cog in the machine? How can we fully live is to face the sorrow of the world and yet be able somehow to overcome that?

19:03 Wes: Yeah. He says that evil is actually essential. It's essential to the concept of religious experience.

19:08 Dylan: Yes.

19:09 Wes: So religious happiness, he says, is no mere feeling of escape. You consent to outward evils, right, to misfortunes as. And that consent is kind of a form of self sacrifice, but inwardly, you know it to be permanently overcome. He gives us example of a picture of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck and says, you know, ultimately the world is richer for having the devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon the neck of the fiend. So we need a negative or tragic principle. And it's for that reason that the incorporation of that moment, right, it's transcended in a way, but it's preserved. And its preservation is what makes religious consciousness so emotionally rich.

19:59 Dylan: The way you just described it, Wes, it made me want to qualify it in terms of that this is the way in which those who experience religious or susceptible to religious experience. That's how it works, you know, and he certainly claims that this is a feature of human consciousness. I didn't quite appreciate that he would go as far as say that everybody is animated by a need for religious life, religious experience, for their completeness or something like that.

20:34 Wes: He says something things in the conclusion about its being this very important biological function, a kind of power. We'll talk more about that, I think as well.

20:49 Seth: Just gonna tag onto what Wes said. It's not necessarily a negative in the strong sense. I mean, it can be interpreted that way. But he later on says there's just. The religious sensibility is the sense that there's something wrong. And the way I would characterize it in all of the years that we've been doing this podcast and all the different times we've come across is right. A really good word is that there's something lacking human existence. The religious sentiment is the sentiment of desire for something that's missing in what would be our everyday sensible experience, to not be satisfied with our everyday sensible experience.

And there's, as he points out, a million ways to cash that out. And the reason I want to say, I want to use terms like Lack and desire and all that is because, you know, ultimately concomitant on the recognition of the, the lack is this desire to go reach out. So the religious sentiment involves a recognition and then also a draw towards addressing that thing.

21:56 Wes: Yeah, he kind of spells this out. I think it's PDF page 5 14, but it's in the conclusions and there's an intellectual content section. Right. So he gives us, in the conclusion, he'll give us like what's the emotional nucleus of religious experience? And then he'll try to say, well, what's the. If we really boil down the intellectual content of religious experience, what is it that we find? And he'll say it's a kind of two step process. There's an uneasiness and then there's a solution. Seth, is just what you were saying. There's something wrong about us as we naturally are, and then we can be saved from that by making this connection to something higher.

22:39 Dylan: What's, what's interesting about this is that part of the first of all, it's a way of satisfying the personal. So this lack of, and I don't know if it's exactly the same kind of lack that you get in existentialism, but it's a lack that's deeply personal. It's something about the way in which my access to the world and the way in which it's affecting me and my sort of my access to change it, my access to be affected by it. And that's in contradistinction to the abstractions that are part of sort of reason and looking out in the world objectively and taking into account other people and having that provide me access into the world and the distance that you get from that abstraction.

So, you know, recognizing the power of science, for instance, there becomes a coldness of that because as an example of something that's not personal enough. But I think you would also put into that grouping things that weren't nearly as objective but just were separate from us, you know, other institutions or other people, other groups of people who are presenting experiences to us that are just distinct, they're not as personal. But then the solution ends up being the connection to something bigger than us, something more than us, something outside of us that grounds us, fulfills that lack.

So in a funny way it's another abstraction, but now it's a deeply, deeply personal one. It's one where like mainlined into in the way that quintessential examples are founders of religions, for him, people who have primary personal ecstatic experiences that connect them to the world. Those are the paragons of religious life. Not members of a congregation, not the deacon at the church. Those aren't paragons of religious life, they're diminished versions of it. The paragons are the prophets and the founders who are mainlining the abstract into their personal.

24:46 Mark: I don't know if I like that. Mainlining the abstract. In this chapter, lecture three, on the reality of the unseen, he distinguishes between things that obviously we perceive and we react to how we could just react to ideas. So, you know, something like God's love or something like that, or God, you know, if we've never actually experienced it. But then there are these, you know, when you're saying these mystical experiences, that is not an abstract. Well, I guess this is a question because I was saying before, like you have this experience of something, you think it's something like just present before you.

And he's, that's the way he describes that people act as if they are right in the presence of this thing, but then they connect because you can't actually put it into words necessarily. You connect it with these pre existent ideas that you have, which I guess that's what we do, even with perception. Right. I'm perceiving this thing in front of me and I associate with the universal book, I associate with you. You know, we have all these meanings and things that are attached to this. So I think he might think that, you know, we're not doing something fundamentally different, you know, just because we're connecting it with.

I mean, I guess if it's really like the Trinity. Can you experience the Trinity, you know, as all three, or is it just God's love, which might be an abstraction if somebody just tells you about it, but if you think you've actually felt it would be different.

26:03 Wes: He tries to give an account in this lecture of how it is we might be connected to these unseen objects in a way that is not just completely hokey and delusional.

26:15 Dylan: Yeah.

26:15 Wes: And he says, well, look, we are already connected to these unseen objects, these realm of abstractions, and we can be just as responsive to the abstract as we can to concrete, individual, sensible experiences and sensible objects. And in fact, in line with Kant and others, our sensory experience is theory laden. And so our abstractions, we need abstractions in order even to comprehend the concrete. And then he gives a brief account of Plato and the idea that we can come to worship the abstract per se. Right. And he gives the example of Plato's ladder of beauty where you go from beautiful bodies to beautiful souls.

To the ocean of beauty or encountering beauty itself. He associates that with Emerson, who he calls a Platonizing writer. So what we get out of all that is we get a sense that invisible things can be present. That they are in a way quasi sensible realities, that they. We can almost experience them in this hallucinatory way. So they can be just as real to us as sense objects. And from that point he moves into this is around page 78 9. He starts giving him accounts of actual hallucinations, people's experience of hallucination. But the point is in religion we get this a kind of quasi sensible reality.

And this is really important because religious objects are in a way supposed to be public, like gods and things like that, if you think about the over beliefs. But on the other hand, they somehow oddly. And they're invisible. So they're connected to the abstract, but for some reason they're oddly connected to the subjective and individual personal. So how they do that I think involves this trick of invisible presence.

28:15 Mark: What do you guys think of this that you. Did you buy this?

28:19 Dylan: The unseen, the reality of the unseen.

28:21 Mark: I get the. When he's just talking as descriptive like some people can react to the unseen. In fact, I'm up in defense of democracy or what? You know, whenever you're like doing a political protest, you're reacting to the abstract, to the unseen. What do you think about these everyday things as compared to.

28:41 Dylan: I don't know.

28:42 Mark: I recall in our faith episode there was maybe it was Plantinga or one of the other 15 authors that we read for that episode was talking about how for some people just everything they see around, like, oh, I just see a flower and I see it as God's gift. That's my conceptual scheme. And so it just gets reinforced all the time. And that was supposed to be. I think the author there was arguing that oh, this is just a natural way that people can. There's nothing essentially inferior about that person's scheme of perception than yours. But I do see it as inferior. I do see it as theory laden in an objectionable way. That is not the case with like oh, we're here to fight for democracy. Or that is a book. I have seen books before. There's an abstract concept book. It just seems like a completely different thing.

29:29 Wes: Conceptual schemes should not be that happy. First of all, that's really annoying.

29:34 Dylan: I see the point that you're talking about and I can get on board with the ranking of those. The unseen that I think of most in religion are things that are claimed to be seen but are unseen by everybody else. So having access, like the auras around somebody or seeing spirits or God comes and talks to you as a person. And those aren't in parallel, abstract things. They don't have a matching abstract partner like justice. So on the one hand, I have justice that I'm fighting for. On the other hand, this flower manifests God's will. Or the circle of life is really God's implementation of his love or something like that. Right. You know, those are sort of equivalent concepts, the scene of spirits. Those are like equivalence to sense experience. They're saying that I have access to the unseen by everybody else because I am connected to other senses or my senses are connected in that way.

30:38 Wes: Yeah. We should reiterate, just to remind the listeners that he moves back and forth between the more exaggerated form of religious experience where someone would literally be having a hallucination or talking to God or, I don't know, seeing a burning bush or whatever happens. But for most of us who are religious, it's not. Doesn't rise to that level. But it does involve a quote unquote, feeling of objective presence. Yes, I think he thinks that.

31:07 Seth: Yes.

31:07 Wes: Or maybe he doesn't. Well, that's a little bit of a question for me. But there's some kind of. So.

31:12 Dylan: But.

31:12 Wes: But at the very least, there's some much more muted religious experience that an ordinary person can have that doesn't rise to the level of hallucination, but still involves this relationship to be invisible.

31:23 Dylan: The presence is the word that permeates this part of the discussion. Right. So there's the sensory part that you feel it, but it's diffuse in the sense of it being a presence. It isn't as articulated as the ones that we consider more hallucinatory.

31:39 Wes: I mean, he does pick as his examples hallucinations, quote unquote, but that are not visual. I think for this section, where it's just the sense of a presence of someone and they're not necessarily religious, it starts out that way. You know, it's religious when it's in company accompanied by joy and knowledge and the close presence of a mighty person, let's say that's the way he puts it. But yeah, this is, again, it's just a way of getting at the broader psychology through something more exaggerated.

32:04 Seth: Well, remember that we're talking about this notion that these experiences are subjective. And ultimately, at the end of the book, we'll end up with irreducible subjectivity. But what distinguishes, like a true hallucination, which is 100% subjective, from the type of experience we're describing is what Dylan said, a presence of something external or objective. So there's an element in the experience of something outside of ourselves. And it's critical that we note it's wrapped up in this. Subjectivity is a critical piece in this, not just from the psychological aspect, but philosophically. So there's a consciousness of something other than consciousness, but it's not itself sensible in the way that we normally account for it. So you got to think of that taxonomy that includes intentionality, subject object distinction and so forth.

33:05 Wes: I think he calls it quasi sensible. So. So it's important because it. Right. It can't just be a relation, an abstract relationship to a philosophical idea of God can't be. Oh, you proved God to me. Cosmological argument or whatever, ontological argument. Okay, I get it. He must exist, and then I have an unseen abstract entity to which I am now related intellectually. That's not it, he wants to say, in the distinctively religious sphere of experience. I'm looking on PDF, page 82. Many persons possess the objects of their belief not merely in the form of.

No, sorry, not in the form of mere conceptions which their intellect accepts as true, but rather in the form of quasi sensible realities directly apprehended. So again, this is an important part of the psychology of this. It involves the invisible and in a sense involves the abstract. But it's a. It's a sense of presence, as if it were something concrete almost. And that links up to the very personal quality of the experience. It's personal in the sense of if we're having a relationship to God as an abstract philosophical idea, that's. Or so he's an entity.

But our relationship is philosophical and abstract in a way that's supposed to be like a public object. And there's nothing personal, it's objective. There's nothing personal about that relationship. But as soon as we get these quasi sensible realities, we get the possibility of feeling, which becomes really important.

34:43 Dylan: This brings me back to earlier in the book, in the first chapter, where he's making the distinctions between what qualifies as religious experience that he wants to talk about and what doesn't. And so he immediately separates off what he calls the personal from the institutional. He's going to say, I'm not going to talk about religion as an institution. I'm going to talk about the everything is going to be personal experience. And this is a little bit controversial, but that's what I'm going to do. And then he spends quite a bit of time talking about things that people would maybe call quasi religious or spiritual or experiences that are not rational.

And often people. He cites examples of people that would use religious language or point to saying, well, X is like a religion to them, meaning that they're super dedicated to it, for instance. And he wants to separate those out. He wants to say that those aren't it. So I'm thinking of things like aesthetic experiences or general experiences of wonder. Like you'd go out into nature and you would have a kind of general sense of awe or awesomeness for the reasons that Wes was just citing. I don't think that he wants to not consider those religious experiences because they're not sufficiently personal in the sense of presence.

So in that way, James is really restricting or categorizing religious experience into something that has to do with, roughly speaking, experience of God or God or effect of God. Because of that particular form of personal experience, which I found in the end, I was a little bit sort of like, well, you know, there's like a whole class of what I would have normally called spiritual experience or the kinds of things that you, you just have. You have belief in or experiencing the world that isn't fundamentally or primarily quantitative. Right. That is personal.

But I'm content with not calling it religious. So maybe that's fine.

36:45 Mark: So personal. I mean, it's personal in that you are having experience. The question is, is if the presence that you're having an experience of is also a person in some sense. So he does talk about like Walt Whitman, extensively, as, as being an example of sort of a nature religion, that there's no explicit God. He also talks about Buddhism. He's aware that there are religions that you really would call religions that don't have a God per se. But if you think that nature itself, you know, has karma in it, it has. It will somehow reward the just and that it is on your side, then that's religious. So something like a personal God. I don't want to say personal God, but a personality.

37:31 Dylan: Yeah. Presence of something specific and tangible, I guess bigger than myself. That might be all of nature or something. So I think you're right, Mark, about that, but it's still, you guys. Correct me if I'm wrong, but he really does want his cordon off what I would call other kinds of non rational experiences that are not. That are more like feelings and personal. Like just the awe or wonder or the pleasure associated with seeing a sunset. Or maybe again like the personal experience of feeling like, wow, I'm connected with the world, because I figured something out, like I understand something like this would be like the rational, the power of. I get it. I have embraced something that I, I know now that I didn't know before, that's bigger than me. And that's a feeling that you have, that's an experience you have.

38:23 Seth: I think I agree with you, Dylan, that he would want to cordone off like what we would strictly classify as like aesthetic experiences from elicit and certainly things like an emotional response. There was a point and I didn't write it down, unfortunately. But he speaks specifically to how religion involves an emotional component. But it goes beyond that. There's more than just the emotional response.

38:50 Wes: So this starts on PDF, page 512.

38:54 Seth: You know, just think about it this way. And I'm trying to characterize what I heard Dylan saying. If you imagine let's have a religious and an aesthetic experience side by side, and the aesthetic experience doesn't necessarily begin in what we talked about at the beginning of the podcast in a lack. It can ultimately engender a similar sense of well being and connectedness like you describe. But the aesthetic experiences doesn't come from the same origin. I guess it can theoretically, like if you're doing some kind of wabi sabi situation where you have perfect imperfection or imperfect perfection, whatever it is.

But he's trying to at least characterize the religious experience in a way that if I say, oh, I went to see the pieta in the St. Michael's and I'm not Catholic, but I had this wonderful experience in front of the Pieta that would be aesthetic and not religious. But the experience of a devout Catholic who goes to see and they're seeing their experience of it is going to somehow connect them to their faith and to something, some grander idea. Whereas mine would be much more subjective. It would be somehow less objective, I think, than than theirs would be in the sense of bringing in something external.

We could argue that if I was romantic, but you get my point.

40:19 Wes: Yeah. So it's on 5:12 that he's going to give us an account of the feelings associated with religious experience and then he will move on to the intellectual content. I talked about this a little bit, but the feeling state is very vague. Right. It sounds like something that might not necessarily be religious. So for instance, he says it's the feelings involved in religious experience are a quote, sthenic affection, sthenic being, something like Nietzsche's overflowing, this overflowing of energy and cheer, aesthetic affection, an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, dynamogenic Order, Love that word as well.

Which like any tonic, freshens our vital powers and fluids. Sorry, emotion comes, temperamental melancholy. So this kind of cheerful emotion overcomes sadness, gives us endurance, gives us zest for life, a sense of meaning, enchantment, the glory of things. So he calls this a kind of faith state and says, yeah, this holds little intellectual content. And it historically, of course, it does get stamped onto these very specific over beliefs, these different creeds, different religious symbols, different religious practices and so on. But it need not be.

On the other hand, it's not that it doesn't have any intellectual content. There is a general framework for religious experience, for the intellectual content of religious experience. It doesn't. Isn't simply about those creeds, and I mentioned this before, but one of it is this whole. There's an uneasiness and then there's a solution, something's wrong with us. And then we solve the that wrongness. It's at the beginning of the conclusions chapter that he really kind of lays out the general cognitive content of religious belief. So he'll just straight up say religious.

Religious life is characterized by the following beliefs. The visible world is part of a spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance. Our true end is uni, union or harmony with this higher universe. And we do that through this process of prayer or inner communion. And that communion produces specific psychological and perhaps even material effects. He really hedges his bets there within the phenomenal world. So in other words, yes, there's vague feelings, but there are. I think he thinks there's very. There is intellectual content that makes it religious per se, as opposed to just some other feeling of the sublime or the aesthetic.

42:52 Dylan: Yes.

42:52 Mark: So I do want to get into in our second half some more of the details of his argument in the conclusion of what is it about the subjective that only religion can get at? Just based on what we've been saying so far because we do have a static experience. And I think seeing James as being in conversation with Nietzsche here, even though he's not a particularly careful Nietzsche reader, that I can say maybe he didn't have access to all the texts we did, or, you know, he just read a couple things. But is useful because Nietzsche is, you know, kind of has the same.

He doesn't like nihilism. Whereas James just says straightforwardly, like, if you don't have this religion at all, if you don't have this aesthetic feeling, then you suffer anhedonia, you have no motivation. It is not nihilism. Nihilism is where you fall. So he is Saying that religion is the unique answer. And he's not saying any particular religion. And it could even be, again, a godless religion. It could be a nature religion, Just something I think a lot of what you're calling spiritual. Dylan, he would classify. But definitely, it seems like we are probably all of the opinion that there are ways that you definitely not call religion that we could address this problem, that we could say we're not in favor of scientism and that everything that I believe must be directly connectable to something that was inexperienced.

You know, so this is the empiricism of Hume or Locke, somebody like that. That, of course, that the way that we live our lives humanistically, that why we read novels and not just science is because there are these larger scale, harder to define phenomena that we have to engage in if we're not going to become, again, these sort of children of the industrial revolution, automatons. So we were putting that in terms of a problem versus mystery for Marcel. Recently you've had several folks, but can you not, as Dylan was giving the example, just have a fascination with nature and see science in a religious way?

I think James does point at this, that he talks about how the atheists could have such a zeal about atheism that you'd call it a religious atheism, or that you could put the laws of nature as something to essentially worship. So those are all forms of religion, I guess. And he doesn't say that they're bad forms.

45:12 Dylan: Well, so I would draw a distinction. I think you're right, in the way you're characterizing James, and this is just an open question for me, is the extent to which like something like presence points to me to something like worship. And I would make the distinction, which I think that he discounts this kind of thing, which is maybe more like aesthetic experience, is what is enlivening about something that has the characteristic of being more than being outside of ourselves, being the source for things, and has the characteristic affecting us personally. And that's the one that I was curious about. Well, to me, it was just going to what he was considering, religious experience and how he classified it as opposed to other kinds of personal experience in the world. And the point to me was that not everything that's a personal experience is one that qualifies as religious experience to him.

46:10 Mark: All right, well, let's get into that more in part two, if you are a Partially Examined Life supporter, and you should see part two now or. Or soon, certainly within the next week in your feed, if not you can go to personalexaminelife.com support and sign up. Thanks, everybody.

46:27 Dylan: Thanks.