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

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 345, part 2. We've been discussing William James, the varieties of religious experience. I think we've been focusing a lot on the conclusions. The final lecture 20 and I wanted to look at page 489 because I feel like this is a bad argument. It runs about a page and a half here. Let me just read some of it. 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. Yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed.

So the objective might be most of our experience. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at a given time we may be thinking of. The subjective part is the inner state in which thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous. The cosmic times and places, for example. Whereas the inner state may be the most fugitive and paltry activity of mind. Yet the cosmic objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess, but only point at outwardly. While the inner state is our very experience itself.

This reality and that of our experience are 1. A conscious field plus its object as felt or thought of, plus an attitude towards the object, plus the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs. Such a concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit. It is a solid bit as long as it lasts, not hollow, not a mere abstract element of experience such as the object is, when taken all at once, it is a full fact, even though it be an insignificant fact. It is of the kind to which all realities whatsoever must belong. The motor currents of the world run through the like of it.

It is on the line connecting real events with real events. That unsharable feeling which each one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny, as he privately feels that rolling out onto fortune's wheel may be disparaged for its egotism, maybe sneered at as unscientific, but is the one thing that fills up the measure of our concrete actuality. And any would be existent that should lack such a feeling. Or its analog would be a piece of reality only half made up. So the first half I completely buy. I mean, this is basically saying it's like the.

The Merleau-Ponty's primacy of perception argument. Or just Descartes, Right? We're always. There's always a subjective aspect. All of our knowledge of everything goes through the filter of our first person subjectivity. So we cannot just have a scientific point of view that treats that as, you know, like eliminative materialism or something that would somehow neglect and throw away there. But then to say that only religion, only the unsharable feeling which each one of us has, the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately feels it rolling out of fortune's wheel, the fact that that has anything to do, you know, these stories we tell about ourselves as individuals in the cosmic scheme with just that does not seem equivalent to me as the Cartesian first person perspective at all.

3:08 Wes: Well, yeah. So what is he describing there? I took it to be him describing what it's like to have a individual subjectivity rolling itself out through time. So in other words, we just take the sum of a person's experiences through their life. That sort of experiential vector which he so creatively describes as the rolling out of an individual destiny on fortune's wheel. What are you taking it to be above and beyond the Cartesian account?

3:40 Mark: Well, it's.

We make this jump to in the next paragraph. He says the axis of reality runs solely through the egotistic places. They're strung upon it like so many beads. Right. The religion does not neglect this. The individual's religion may be egotistic. Those private realities which it keeps in touch with may be narrow enough, but at any rate it remains infinitely less hollow and abstract as far as it goes. Any science which prides itself on taking no account of anything private at all.

4:06 Wes: Yeah, we saw this in our. One of our prior William James episodes where pragmatism kind of, as I said at that time, although I don't think anyone agree with me, but it teeters on the precipice between relativism and idealism, I think. So this is very suggestive of some form of, you know, I, it's. I don't think he's a relativist, obviously. So it's suggestive of idealism, which is not surprising because pragmatism has. Is the progeny of idealism in a sense, even if it rebels against it. German idealism, I mean, but yeah, how do we make sense of this?

4:40 Mark: What he's saying in this section, he uses the Having a printed bill of fare is equivalent to a solid meal. And later on, at some point he says, it's like if you were to take the word egg on the menu as being equivalent to having eaten an egg. And that's the distinction he's talking about. And Mark, when you say you don't buy it. I'm still wanting to clarify, what is it that you dislike that distinction of the objective being like the printed word and eating the egg as being like the subjective? Because James wants to say that's the difference between effectively objective, rational thought, declassifying it as the egg and talking about it and eating the egg.

5:26 Wes: Can I just elaborate on that a little bit before Mark responds? Just. Yeah, so the idea is that when we use concepts and language, that's like using the menu and it's just words, our experience, it's an important way of engaging with reality, and it's our way of engaging with, quote, unquote, objective reality. As soon as we get objective, we move into that mediated realm that philosophers have traditionally worried about for being mediated. It becomes an epistemological problem. But the reality as we know it is qualitative. It involves these qualia. It's personal, not impersonal. It's not the shared reality, let's say, of something more abstract. It is something purely personal and belongs to our, you know, to use one of James's phrases, stream of consciousness intimately.

6:18 Mark: Right.

By saying the axis of reality runs solely through the individual's consciousness. I mean, that's like Berkeley saying, it's an idealist move. It's like Berkeley saying, yeah, you can't imagine anything without also imagining that you are imagining it, that the consciousness is invariably tied to things. And that's just following Frege and others, the psychologistic fallacy of thinking that we can't actually talk about things, just talk about the things themselves. I need to talk about the fact that I am apprehending them so I could have a view of.

Not that science is the be all and end all of human experience. Of course, there are other things, literature and art and we talked about other, you know, paying attention to your own emotions from the. From the inner point of view. Like, these are all about having a full life. But do you need to posit things metaphysically that are outside the bounds of what public science can investigate?

7:19 Wes: Right, yeah.

7:20 Mark: These shared things, even if they're abstract things like justice or whatever, I understand it doesn't have to be physical, but they have to be things that somehow are related. Says the empiricist. You know, so he's arguing against this view. What does he call it, the survival theory, that religion is just an atavistic relapse into a mode of thought which humanity, in its more enlightened examples, has outgrown. You know, if you think it's just myth making you know, saying that in the sky, that thunderstorm there that's got Zeus throwing lightning bolts like that, that is just bullshit and we should just get rid of that and that that is the substance of what religion is.

And he's saying, oh, no, religion is not about the specific theory you have about Zeus and his lightning bolts. It's about you just relating to the universe as if it were a personality. And we should not see that as just primitive animism and get rid of it. This is actually a way that we have to deal with the world, not just psychologically, but metaphysically. Right. The axis of reality runs through the personal, subjective. If I look at what is the furniture of my world, what is the ontology? It's not just the things of natural science is also the things that my absolutely singular subjective consciousness posits.

Those are just part of my ontological furniture, and I can't ignore them.

8:47 Wes: Yeah, I don't want to get bogged down here because he just gives a hint of this, Right. And there are really kind of three flavors to the type of thing he's expressing. One of them, the psychological, about the. Our concrete subjective experience feeling more real than abstract concepts. 1 is a epistemological worry that if everything right and the world as we know it always runs through the mind, so it's mediated and you get an epistemological problem. The third is, Mark, what you're pointing to is an ontological problem where someone might say, well, actually, the world must be made of ideas because of this to be a thing.

It has to be, you know, strung through this egotistical place or something like that. But, yeah, I don't think he knows exactly where. This is a bit of a rhetorical flourish, and I don't think he has a fully formed ontology here. Like I said, I think it. It sidles up to idealism, but. But he would reject idealism. I don't think he knows where he is at this point.

9:43 Mark: Well, this is just. We were talking about the earlier chapter on the existence of the invisible. And so long as people are reacting to something that they posit as an existent for them, then it is an existence for them. Maybe not as they describe it, but, you know, that's just. It's. I think he doesn't have a full ontological theory because he's a pragmatist. And you can tell what entities someone believes in just based on what their actions presuppose that those entities. So ontology is a matter of positing through actions. Maybe you Know, he's not so concerned about like, what is the world actually in itself. Is there really a God out there? No, it's just, he says explicitly, like, how useful is walking around with the notion that a God is out there to you? He just thinks, you know.

10:36 Wes: Yeah, yes, but at the very end, right, he's, he'll say, he gives his own version of the ontological argument. So that which produces, this is a quote, that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself. That is Descartes version of the ontological argument. You could call, he's going to call it God because he's a Christian. Someone might have some different over belief, but we still have to have some over belief, he says. And I think, as you mentioned, Mark, so there is this unseen region, this is a section where he's giving what he calls his over beliefs.

And he admits others might disagree and that's okay, but for him there's another region. The sensible world is just a part of that region. We belong to that other unseen region in a more intimate way, in a way than the visible world. And, and it produces effects in the world. And so we know it's real because it produces effects in the world. What effects does it produce? Well, it makes us better people. It changes our personalities. When we commune with it, we undergo regenerative change in contact with it, which therefore it must be real. Which of course is a completely specious argument, just like the ontological argument is specious.

It's because we believe in those things that, yes, that it produces changes in us, but that doesn't mean those things really exist. Am I making any sense here? Is the analogy to Descartes clear? I, God, put a belief of God in my head. That's. So God must be real.

12:02 Mark: I guess I was.

12:03 Wes: My personality is changed by communing with a higher power. Therefore there must be a higher power.

12:08 Mark: I see it as a little more like it was carnap. I believe on ontology or Davidson, one of these folks. I think it was carnap that was just like arguments about ontology are just specious. Like does it really exist or not? It's just does the thing, the theoretical enterprise you're engaged in or whatever. Enterprise, let's take the word theoretical, presuppose or require the existence of these entities or not. If it does, then with respect to that activity, the entities exist. So you could make up whatever kind of activity you want and come up with a bunch of ontological claims that are specific to that domain. And that is How I'm reading that quote about that you just gave.

12:50 Wes: So this is on page five 20 PDF, page 522. So. So James, where James says, all right, let me tell you about my over beliefs. So he does, you know. Yeah, I'm not reading it the same way as you. I think because I don't think that point of view is coherent. I can't force make myself read it in that way. So I think it's just that collapses into relativism. So he seems to be making a lot of grand. And he says again, these are over beliefs. So really what he gets in his own over beliefs, I guess at the beginning of. At the end of five. No, this is on 5:23. Anyway.

13:23 Mark: Yeah, yeah, I think part of what you were quoting. Name it. The mystical reason or the supernatural reason, whichever you choose. As far as our ideal impulses originate in this region, and most of them do originate in it, we find them possessing us in a way which we cannot accurately articulately account. We belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world. For we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong.

13:48 Wes: Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in 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. Of conduct, I think, follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself. I don't think he sees that the irony of using the ontological argument there. But yes, he could defend himself here by saying, look, yes, I went into over belief domain.

We could go back and get more generic and we could just be talking about the unconscious or what he calls it, the subconscious. Let me back up to my psychological theory, which is really interesting and involves the subconscious. If you object to this, you can say, okay, I'm not saying God is real necessarily unless you share that over belief. I'm saying that this psychological phenomenon or faculty or whatever, the subconscious is real. And God, of course, is supposed to be what's on the thither side of the unconscious. The unconscious is hither and then God is thither and the two are somehow related.

But if you're only comfortable with the unconscious, I'll leave you there. He might say, but I don't buy that he's making some strong claims here.

15:03 Mark: Well, especially when he talks about his over beliefs. Right. It's pretty straight up Christian.

15:09 Wes: Yeah, yeah. We and God have business with each other. And in opening ourselves to his influence, our deepest destiny is fulfilled.

15:15 Mark: The unseen or mystical world is real because it produces effects on us. Because people, individuals have these private experiences, channels to the that which they cannot describe, and they come out changed. Therefore, because there's as much uniformity as there is in those private experience, we have to say that it is an opening to some objective shared realm. Is that what we want to say? So that the realm of the unseen is not just I've got my unseen, which is my unconscious, and you got your unseen, but anybody who has one of these ecstatic experiences, at the very least, maybe others beside that are actually, we can just say it's the unseen realm. Hey, you know, the unseen realm, you describe it different ways than I do because you can't put into words what we've experienced there. But it is real.

16:07 Wes: Upside down. Yeah.

16:09 Mark: What you're talking about is a kind of agreed upon proto ontology. And I guess I don't see him even worrying about that. Like, is he really worrying about that? We would have come to an agreement. Well, yeah, actually we all agree there's this unseen realm, because otherwise I think

that your change in conduct was just caused by nothing, was just caused by pure irrationality on your part. He wants to say that there is a, you know, a rationality in the larger sense in that it is a sensible reaction to something real.

16:41 Wes: Well, let me put it this way. So he says God is real since he produces real effects. That's page 524. So it's another reiteration of the ontological argument. And he's saying it's an over belief. But if we back up from the over belief, what do we get? Mark is suggesting that maybe we get a more generic ontological framework. It's still something real, even if you don't want to call it God. I was suggesting maybe it's just the unconscious or something psychological that's real in a sense, but it doesn't qualify as this ontologically grounded other realm. So I think it's unclear what, you know, he's hedging his bets here. He ought to have addressed this. He ought to have been more clear about what's going on here.

17:25 Mark: Yeah, I think you're right, Wes. I don't think the subconscious would qualify specifically because of its lack of objective distance. Not to bring that point back home again. And when he says we know God exists because God has an effect when he's invoking the ontological argument, you're Bringing in a notion of causality. And typically the causality is something that flows between. We don't talk about causality inside of it. In a closed system, an internal system, like you wouldn't talk about yourself causing your own thoughts. You have to propose another body to do it.

So this notion that there is this otherness which has a causal effect, and the causal effect is that it manifests as religious experiences in human beings across the world, it's enough for him to. Now he's making a leap in claiming that it's the shared. There's no basis for him to claim that we're all experiencing the same. He's implying that it's one thing that's over beliefed in different ways. Like that's the whole thrust of this essay, is that the structure of religious experience is the same, but the manifestation, the individual or specific manifestation of it is different across different cultures and so forth.

But he doesn't have any way that he demonstrates that. I don't think.

18:49 Wes: Let me just back up to the. The section that we're concentrating on with over beliefs. The section before that is actually on the subconscious. And it comes after the part where he gives us the general framework for the intellectual content of religion. Again, very general uneasiness plus solution. And then he says, okay, well, let's talk about the objective truth. Is it true? I've given you. You know, so I've talked about the psychology in terms of feelings, in terms of intellectual content. Let's worry about now about the objective truth. And he starts that section out by saying theologians will say that this more quote, unquote exists, the more is the.

What's beyond this particular world, some higher realm. And there's just. We act as if it exists, but there's speculative differences about how we treat the experience of. Or let me put it this way, religions generally agree that it, or all religions agree it exists. Where they disagree is their particular mode of getting into contact with that other world. In other words, specific religious rituals. But what he wants to do is he'll say, okay, now. Now we're on page 518. He says, let's leave over beliefs aside, like Christ. And I wanted to talk about this in quote, unquote, less particularized terms than over beliefs.

Let me talk about the subconscious itself. It's kind of a weird transition, right, to go from these beliefs about gods and divine entities. Suddenly we're talking about psychology again. We're talking about the subconscious self. He wants to talk about it, right? Because this is supposed to be the mediating term between the personal and the divine. This in a way becomes the mechanism via which we get in touch with the divine. And what's common between the divine and the subconscious is that our conscious awareness or conscious attention is just a very small part of our, quote, unquote, total soul.

So there's more life in our total soul than we are at any time aware of. And this fits very well with the idea that. Right. Of a transcendent realm, let's say that's always there, even though it's invisible. And then on page 519, he gives us a hypothesis. The more is quote is on its, quote, higher side. The subconscious continuation of our conscious life. So this higher realm is a subconscious continuation of consciousness. He has a lot more to say about that. But I'll leave that there. See what you guys think about this.

21:37 Mark: The conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come.

21:43 Wes: What page that's on still?

21:44 Mark: 595-225-22 is PDF 522.

21:48 Wes: Yeah, in italics.

21:50 Mark: You asked what we think about it. I think that the subconscious is that conduit for him to the thing that's more. It's the common feature of human beings and human existence. Because I think he would say that everybody has a subconscious life. It's part of being human. And that is the vector for us to connect with things bigger than us.

I want to connect this to lecture two, where he's sort of discriminating religion from other just philosophical points of view. That what was wrong with pure rationalism is the idea that when you're reacting rationally to something, you're reacting to specific things. What's sort of essential to the human condition is that we have a reaction to existing, to the world as a whole. Do we think that the world as a whole is a hell, a place of suffering from which we must flee? Do we think that it is fundamentally a helping, nurturing, homelike place?

So these are fundamentally, at least philosophical. But he then wants to say, as we discussed a little last time in part one, that a lot of these are religious. If the whole thing is, you know, your whole attitude toward the world could be, ah, who cares? All is vanity. Well, that would not be a religious specifically. That would be sort of a denial of, like, I don't have to have a whole, a concrete relationship to the world, because that's silly anyway. Like, it's a denial of the possibility of religion, whether or not you believe in God to take seriously that you should have a coherent, you know, that it's something that is below the level of the determinate.

It is a fundamental existential orientation. It uses largely the subconscious. By the determinate, I mean like you have specifically chosen a thing. Of course there's a relationship between your conscious choices and this mass of unconscious sort of how you as a whole person are aimed at. But this is why, you know, we can have things like those conversion experiences. We can have things that are not just a matter of. This is one of those great points of contact with Nietzsche that it is not a matter of, you know, you can't convince somebody that God exists by giving them these rational arguments like so much of yeah, our thinking is not a matter of conscious ratiocination, but is a matter of this thing shifting around in the unconscious in a way that you have to be ready to receive a particular argument or even an experience.

You have an experience of ecstasy. Unless something has been set up in you to interpret that according to a framework or to accept it as a message to you, then you're not going to get that right.

24:37 Wes: We have to have the intuition first. I mean that's the psychology of belief. But in this section he had said, I'm going to examine the objective truth now. And what we would have expected in that section is that, okay, I'm going to step back from my over beliefs and I will give you some general ontological framework. Yes, I know, okay, there's the God of Christianity and Judaism and Islam and many, many more religions and those are over beliefs and we're not going to come down on any of side of any of those. But I will say there is a higher power of some kind.

Right? So you give a generic sketch of what the ontological framework would be and. But instead of doing that, he moves to this question of the subconscious, which is really more about the mediating factor between personal experience and the divine, if there is such a thing. In other words, he's not going to really deliver on the question of the objective truth of either over beliefs or of some more general overarching framework, even though he seems to suggest that he is going to do that. So. But of course he can't. Mark, maybe I'm a little off topic from where you were you were going.

25:46 Mark: But Chris Tsunami was asking us in the Plotinus, have we studied the perennial philosophy? All the religions are really pointing at the same core truths. And you'd think that maybe James, as you've just seen, is going there, but he really doesn't, I don't think.

I feel like he's Trying to make room for religion and religious life in a kind of scientifically experienced universe without going too far out to tie it up in a bow. So when he talks about his own over beliefs, the distinct sense is that he's being very personal about that and giving that as an example, but he's not willing to go so far as to say, to tie it up with the rest of. Doesn't call it a religious science, but basically doing something like kind of an anthropology of all the different kinds of religious experience and then come to a conclusion about the unifying single thing that yes, I've identified religious experience. Here's what it is, here's what it tells me about the reality of the world. He doesn't want to go that far or he doesn't go that far. Maybe he. He would want to, but I don't know.

I think this was written at a time in history and maybe his personal inclinations were such that ESP was on the table, was the thing that like he'd seen evidence of and would probably be supported by future science. There was a lot of excitement about and that sort of went hand in hand with faith cures, you know, the mind over matter sort of things that he's just willing to admit that our science, we don't really know that much and we're not going to know that much. And there are all these other possibilities that if we see them frequently enough that we can say they're on the table. So the fact that we could be. Yeah. What is the unconscious open us to? Does it open us to ghosts? Does it open us to a whole unseen world? It seemed like that was a much more live scientific option for people in 1902.

27:49 Wes: Yeah. What is supposed to be the relationship between the unconscious and the divine? I don't think he's going to want to say it's a collective unconscious as with. There's something like that, as with Jung. And in general he doesn't like Hegel and he sees these sorts of fancy theological explanations as too abstract and too cold. So we're not going to get the world spirit or the absolute, something like that. So it's more about what's going on. Right. This, the fact we have an unconscious or non, what he calls the subconscious, what you might call the non conscious. Lots going on in our mind that we are not aware of at any given time. Not just because it's repressed in some Freudian way, but just because our attention is not on it. So there's this big, big kind of mental Penumbra. What does he call it in his psychology? He has a word for it anyway, but I'm going to call it a penumbra.

28:47 Mark: There was so much to listen to, I couldn't review his psychology episodes.

28:51 Wes: Yeah, there's this kind of big fuzzy penumbra to our little spotlight of experience. It contains so much. It is, it's this enormous thing that's there behind the little pinpoint that is the subjective cogito. So that is in a way a something larger, a. You know, it's a lower power. But in some ways one might see it as a higher power at least or see it as a means to communing with the, with a higher power. But I haven't worked out. So yeah, I'm faltering here because I haven't quite worked out what he's onto there and how the unconscious is supposed to help us.

29:30 Mark: I mean, you pointed us, in preparation for this was to the postscript where he talks about being classified as a supernaturalist and different types of supernaturalism. And I didn't process it well enough to be able to speak clearly to it. But you know, it ultimately seems, at least at this stage of his investigations when he was writing this, that there were a lot of open ended questions, or open questions, I should say, about exactly what you said. The relationship between God and the unconscious, the whether or not the communion with the transcendental was essentially communion was the same regardless of how it cashed out. Inexperience. You know, the question, the ontological status, so to speak, of the metaphysical status of things.

30:14 Wes: Yeah.

30:15 Mark: Which is what you would expect if you came at this from a scientific psychological perspective. Right. You would expect there's going to be an explanatory wall when you start with observed facts.

30:27 Wes: Yeah. So in the postscript he does say a little bit more about the subconscious. So he'll say on page PDF, page530. I asked just where the differences in fact which are due to God's existence come in. If asked just where the differences come in, I should have to say that in general I have no hypothesis to offer beyond what the phenomenon of quote unquote, prayerful communion, especially when certain kinds of incursion from the subconscious region take part in it immediately suggests so prayerful communion, certain kinds of incursion from the subconscious region.

So obviously there's a relationship between the subconscious and prayer worship. The appearance is that in this phenomenon something ideal, which in one sense is part of ourselves and in another sense is not ourselves, actually exerts and influences raises our center of personal energy and produces regenerative effects unattainable in other ways. So it's almost as if this subconscious territory both is us and isn't us. It sounds very Lacanian in some ways. Right. I don't know if you remember the Lacan, but for Lacan, in a way, the unconscious is kind of inscribed in the symbolic order, which is to say the social.

31:48 Mark: Well, but if we continue, if then there be a wider world of being than that of our everyday consciousness, if it is, there be forces whose effects on us are intermittent. If one facilitating condition of the effects be the openness of the subliminal door, we have the elements of a theory to which the phenomena of religious life lend, plausibly, lend plausibility. So this is the subconscious as the conduit to this wider world. He says, I am so impressed by the importance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesis that they so naturally suggest at these places, at least, I say it would seem as though transmundane energies, God, if you will, produce immediate effects with us within the natural world to which the rest of our experience belongs.

32:39 Wes: You know, I mean, one thing that occurred to me reading this, and it's partly also having to do with being reminded of Marcel and then reading some Levinas with Mark on Buber, is just this sense in which the subjective and the conscious obviously are built. We think of it as a mind body problem. Right. It's built out on top of matter. But if we were thinking in terms of a more, less specific ontology, you just say that the concept of a person runs really deep. You can think of it in metaphor of an iceberg, and consciousness kind of dips out over the water.

And then you have this enormous part that's under. Part of the iceberg that's underneath, and the whole person is the whole iceberg. And we can describe that again, what he's calling the subconscious in a materialistic, scientific way. Right. Freud hated religion. But one could also get very, very postmoderny or continental about it and think of it in terms of an ontology, a way in which we're rooted in a. You know, it's a foundation that. I don't know how to put it. So, yeah, the existence of the subconscious points to this other. This other realm in some way.

And subjectivity as we know it, consciousness as we know it is built. Built on top of it. But it's very suggestive when we begin to explore it.

34:05 Mark: I was just refreshing myself on James, on the unconscious. This is episode 180 where we hit his theory of mind. This is me reading from my own blog post here. An organism's activity basically involves various signals coming in through the senses going out to produce reactions. The chain can to a greater or lesser extent come into consciousness from a reflex to one that becomes a habit. Attention is the faculty that filters the confusion of the stream of experience into identifiable things. So I'm just, I'm seeing throughout here in his talk of the unconscious.

It's not that the unconscious is some fundamentally different part. It's just that we have various signals going around in our brains and our bodies all the time. And it's just a matter of like which one is vying for attention. That sort of comes out of the soup temporarily. And so he talks about like these changes of personality. He talks about the center of interest is a metaphor that he often uses. So I could have my center of interest in something that is not straight in the. I'm looking at food in front of me and it is eliciting a hunger response of reaching for the.

That would be a very immediate thing. It could have. You know, how the. The presence of the unseen something. The unconscious could be just something that there's been a lot of center of interest rate. It's been building itself as a habit. It's become something. As far as my phenomenal. I'm not aware. Oh, this is in my cerebellum. This is over there. Like, it's as if I have a mental space that stretches out to infinity as far as my own conscious awareness is goes. So that. Yeah, there's an open endedness built into like where my conscious could move to and what might be connected with it in some feedback loop of which I'm unaware.

So I could have some sort of unconscious connection to the weather or some, you know, completely objectively out there in the world thing. Yeah. So it seems very different than. I don't know. You tell me, Wes, if that's very different from say Lacan's view of how something can come up into the symbolic out of the real out of the unconscious or. You know, it's certainly different than Freud's view.

36:12 Wes: Yeah, I don't want to try to. I'm gonna try to explain that. I don't know. I could try and it would probably be quite confusing, but more confusing than

36:24 Mark: what I just said about James.

36:26 Wes: I'm. Yeah, I'm still trying to figure that out. I think we're, you know, we're struggling because we're on the.

36:31 Mark: Yeah.

36:31 Wes: You know, because it. In a Way it represents the fact that he's struggling. It's really interesting because he's trying to give a psychological account, which of course, an atheist could do. An atheist could say, look, here's the way the psych. The psychology works of it. It's because we have an unconscious or subconscious that we have these religious feelings. It doesn't mean anything's out there, blah, blah, blah. But he's, strangely enough, and. And maybe through his pragmatism, a little bit, trying to make a connection between the psychology and the reality of the object to which the psychology is joined. He's not being awfully clear about it. Maybe that's because, you know, it would. Maybe it's because he's unclear. It would just be. It'd be too easy to attack it if it were clear.

37:15 Mark: But.

37:15 Wes: So he's sort of at the. I think he's at the edge of his. Of the argument, so to speak, but also because it's at the edge of our comprehension.

37:23 Mark: To me, the core that he's trying to preserve is the validity, the authenticity, the utility of access to how the world is through personal experience that's embodied in religious experience. And that his apologetics, as you framed it, Wes, is to preserve that from a purely objective account that would discount those personal experiences into some kind of overarching theory about, like, well, that's just how we happen to classify stuff as subconscious beings. And this is the activities he does want to preserve, you know, the authenticity of that personal experience about an access into the world and the stuff we were reading more powerfully than I had remembered when I read it myself, is him preserving this notion that this more that's out there is sort of like a.

If it's not a distinct universe, it's connected to ours in ways that is more wider, possibly functioning differently than the experience than the one that we capture with our rational experience.

38:36 Wes: Yeah, we're connected to much more at any given time than what we are conscious of. But it's funny, Dylan, just in light of what you just said, the way he starts this is like, you want to know about religion. Let me talk to you about completely psychotic people. But I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Just because they're psychotic doesn't mean that there's not a grain of truth. It's not real. It's a funny way to start in apologetics, but that's what he does. And then he has to say, oh, you know, if you want to say that the fact that they're crazy means that religion is bosh. Well, you're just using an ad hominem. I'm just giving you exaggerated examples to try and illustrate the principles at work, even in the more mundane versions of religiousness.

39:16 Mark: Yeah, but what's interesting is that he's wanting to preserve the personal intangibility of this more in a more specific way than saying, look, we just don't know everything, that there's sort of an infinite source. I guess you go down that road when you get into idealism like that. There's an engine for ourselves that's bigger than us, that we are constantly feeding off of in our intellect, in our experience. It seems like the subconscious is actually getting to something much more specific and tangible. In his conclusion.

Yeah, it would have been really interesting to see this, him do this post Freud. And you can see the project, you can conceive of it this way, the inevitable march of science and technology and the onslaught of reason and rationality and urbanization versus, you know, I'm sure there's some element of, of that here, you know, versus naturalism because of his affinity, right, for Emerson and so on, that he's seeing a day when people will discount religion, the idea of God, because science and technology and all that stuff has, you know, sort of made it inessential or unnecessary or ruled out the possibility.

And we have historical faith versus reason kind of conversations. But he's also working in this world where you have this at this point, nascent field of psychology coming up. And so, you know, he wants to say, let's just acknowledge the fact of religious experience. Like, so I'm going to talk a lot about different examples from all these different writers and whatever, but there is a phenomenon that human beings experience that isn't explained by science and, and reason. And it's a fact of the world, it's a fact of psychology that we need to look into.

And what he ultimately ends up trying to do, and I think this is why this is, you know, dissatisfying to some extent. Right. Is he doesn't have the framework, he doesn't have enough a conception of psychology along with other tools to be able to do this. But he wants to be able to say something like the fact that these experiences exist indicates a human potential or a human possibility that is not something that's going to be captured in a scientific framework. And it's precisely because it's subjective and personal and individual and simultaneously shared, but not universalizable that it has this characteristic.

You know, so he, like you point, you made the point Wes is that ultimately does this pragmatic ontological argument from, you know, almost like a first cause kind of a thing that he wants to fight against. Something that ultimately we don't worry about nowadays. But he didn't really have, I don't think, the necessary concepts and mechanisms to do that at this point. And so it's ultimately unsatisfying the way that he ends up closing out the book.

I think it's not too difficult to figure out what he would say against Freud. There's so much stuff in chapter one against medical materialism and about trying to reduce religious emotions to the sexual life that I think most of the elements of what Freud would have to say about this are right in what he's addressing there. If, you know, not the specific combination that Freud comes up with.

I wasn't thinking specifically about those aspects of Freud. I was thinking if James had been working in a milieu where there was a much more developed notion of the subconscious and the unconscious and that sort of thing and its relationship to ego and so forth, I think he would have a richer articulation.

Yeah, I think his version might be closer to I. So I searched on reading this now, because we did Plotinus, and just searching for his one mention of Plotinus or at least one mention. This is page 411 in the text. In the vision of God, says Plotinus, what sees is not our reason, but something prior and superior to our reason. He who thus sees does not properly see, does not distinguish or imagine two things. He changes, he ceases to be himself, preserves nothing of himself. Absorbed in God, he makes but one with him, like the center of a circle coinciding with another center.

So I'm actually reading this as not just a description of mystical experience according to Plotinus or. But as compatible with James's view of the unconscious. Right. That we have our center of concern. We just have all these feedback loops running through us. And for all we know, maybe Plotinus, that it is literally true that the center of our concern can line up with the center with some sort of cosmic center that is not physically a part of our body. Or that, you know, reality transcends the puny fact of the biological separateness of my body from the rest of the universe.

Or something like that. Right. Return to the source. As we've been saying. To quote Zhuangzi.

44:32 Wes: So, Mark, when are you going to start believing again? Seems like you're on the path back to.

44:40 Mark: I don't see any reason to take this version of the unconscious that seriously. But I do like the idea. I don't know. I've just been. Since my father moved to town, I've been having to go to the Unitarian Church with him a bunch of times. And they're very into. We're not into the dogma. We're not even saying there is a God, there is Jesus, whatever. But just the going through the motions of trying to be spiritual and think spiritually connects with some higher part of yourself that maybe other, you know, Is it spiritual but not religious? Let's put it that way. I don't think there's any reason to just not make that a part of your life. It's just a matter of what you actually get out of it. I would not continue going to the church on my own.

Well, what you talk about, what you're relating, is a kind of cultivation of a disposition with respect to the world, that you're part of it, that there's something bigger than you or in different ways of accessing it. And that seems to me like the. That's the aspect of religious experience that I don't think that James. James wants to go further. What he talked about. He wants to go further than that, especially at the end, earlier in the book. I might have thought that that was good enough for him, but it doesn't. By the time you get to the end.

Yeah, he says Emersonian as the fundamental, you know, the beginning of the universe. Unitarian Church, as is a legitimate religion. But he also focuses on quotes from Emerson of like, yes, when you do something unjust, you'll definitely feel it like there is karma in the world. Which is not what I would think of as Emerson's primal primary.

46:25 Wes: Yeah, I didn't get a sense he'd be a fan of Unitarianism or Emerson.

46:30 Mark: I think so. I think he actually says he likes the idea of karma.

Yes.

Maybe in the postscript.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, he does.

Your personal relationship with the something with the something personal. Your own personal something.

Your own personal, something indescribable phenomenon. Your prayers, something that cares, Higher power.

Just get Johnny Cash to sing it, and then it'll be perfect.

46:59 Wes: All right.

47:00 Mark: Well, thanks, everybody, for listening. Thanks to all of you. I don't think we need to spend more time on this book, even though there's much more of it. But we hit all the stuff we want to hit. I pointed out a thing that maybe Wes and I can do in a close reads on saintliness. He talks about asceticism in a way that even mentions Nietzsche. He even criticizes Nietzsche by name. So that maybe is something to look forward to, but that's a mere detail. I think we got the story here.

I may be misremembering, but I believe this is a William James adjacent anecdote. A friend of my wife's is a librarian who is a librarian at Harvard, and they have different libraries in each one of the schools. There's like 30 or 40 libraries. Anyway, she knows that I'm a philosopher and so she introduced me to the library, the philosophy librarian at Harvard. And when I was visiting and he said, oh, hey, do you want to see the special collection or whatever, the little locked up case? I was like, sure. So he opened it up and what it is, is it's the individual copies of books that were owned by famous people that worked and includes their marginalia. So I saw William James's copy of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

48:21 Wes: Awesome.

48:21 Mark: That's great.

In German.

Wow.

With his notes in the side. And that was one of the great moments of my life. Like, it's. It's something nobody else appreciated, would even care about. But I was just. When you. And I was like, am I allowed to touch him? Should I wear gloves? And he's like, sure, go ahead. Then it's just like. It's just like, oh my God. Somebody. He was, you know, teaching here with this book 100 years ago and I was touching it and it's handwriting. It was like it blew my mind. And then I took a picture in front of Amartya Sen's office with my name next to his name plate.

So for a special on location episode of Close Reads, Wes, you can get us into there so we could just read the marginalia.

It's very cool. It's very cool. It's not unlike the. The actual philosophy library is not unlike the one at UT in terms of the size and the layout, you know, at the philosophy department.

Cool.

Anyway, for the next two episodes, we're going back to India with the Nyaya Sutra about knowledge and metaphysics. Folks should tell us what they want us to read about.

49:32 Wes: Pl partiallyexaminedlife.com Please rate the podcast.

49:36 Mark: Please buy the book.

Right? That's partialexaminedlife.com book. Please look at my class for this fall. Partiallyexaminedlife.com class.

49:44 Wes: Class.

49:45 Mark: Thanks, everybody. Good night.

Good night.