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Reading group: William James’s Varieties, from ‘Religion and Neurology’ to the mysticism lectures

Alistair Gow Fellow
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Mysticism & spiritualityAmericanPragmatismTeresa of Ávila#fruits-not-roots#mysticism#reading-group#varieties-of-religious-experience
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James gave the Gifford Lectures here in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, and they became The Varieties of Religious Experience. I have walked past the building for decades without reading the book, which seems a poor show for someone who spent his working life listening to people describe experiences he could not check.

It is out of copyright, so any edition will do. The lecture numbers are the same everywhere. My proposal, three weeks:

Week 1. Lecture I, "Religion and Neurology." James's attack on what he calls medical materialism: the habit of dismissing a state of mind by naming its bodily cause. And his alternative, judging such states by their fruits, not their roots.

Week 2. Lectures XVI and XVII, "Mysticism." The four marks of mystical states, his examples (Teresa of Ávila is quoted at length), and his conclusions about what authority these states have.

Week 3. Lecture XVIII, "Philosophy", briefly; then Lecture XX, "Conclusions", and the Postscript. Where James finally says what he himself believes, which is odder than people expect.

Post as you go. Doubters and believers equally welcome; James was both, depending on the page.

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6 replies

  1. Priya Raghavan

    Fellow

    Week 1. The argument against medical materialism is cleaner than I expected. If you discredit religious states because they have neurological causes, you have to discredit every state, including the scientist's conviction that his theory is true, since that has causes too. So origin cannot settle value.

    I agree, but I think James underestimates how much a modern account can say. In predictive processing terms, what you expect shapes what you perceive. A person primed by a tradition will, quite literally, perceive in its categories. That is Katz's constructivism in neural vocabulary, and it is more of a challenge to "fruits not roots" than plain materialism was.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Dana Whitfield

    Fellow

    Week 1, from a pragmatist who loves James: the fruits test is wonderful and also slippery. Who decides what counts as good fruit? James's saints are admired for charity, purity, equanimity. He chose the examples. A different collector, with different ideas of good fruit, would have found a different set of saints. I don't think that sinks the test, but it means "fruits" smuggle in an ethics that has to be argued for separately.

  3. Aoife Kilbride

    Fellow

    Week 2. James lists ineffability, a noetic quality, transiency and passivity, and then says the first two are enough to call a state mystical, while the last two are less sharply marked. I hadn't noticed that before. It means a long, actively cultivated state could still count.

    Teresa is quoted so generously that she almost takes over the lecture. What struck me is that James admires her and is also a bit exasperated by her, as if her richness of detail were evidence of something but he cannot say what.

    Helpful · 1
    1. Alistair Gow

      Fellow

      Week 2, the conclusions, which I found the most useful pages in the book. As I read them, James says three things. Mystical states, when well developed, are usually authoritative for those who have them. They give no authority to outsiders, who are not obliged to accept their revelations uncritically. And yet they break down the claim of ordinary rational consciousness to be the only kind there is.

      That seems about right to me. I believed people about their pain without being able to feel it, and I did not thereby acquire their pain as my knowledge.

      Helpful · 2
  4. Miriam Adler

    Fellow

    Week 3. The Postscript surprised me. James calls his own position "piecemeal supernaturalism": he thinks there is a wider reality, a "more", that actually makes a difference in particular events, not a God who acts only in general or not at all. He knows this will annoy both the theologians and the philosophers. Coming to it from Maimonides, I find it almost the reverse of the Guide: James wants a God who makes local differences and is uninterested in theology; Maimonides wants a God beyond all predicates and a careful theology of negation.

    Helpful · 3
  5. Martín Iriarte

    Fellow

    Week 3, a note from a reader of Freud. James proposes that the "hither side" of the more is the subconscious self, which is how a religious person's experience can be continuous with ordinary psychology without being reduced to it. He was writing just as Freud's psychoanalytic books were beginning to appear, and the two use "subconscious" or "unconscious" in quite different ways. James's version is roomier and more hospitable. I am not sure it is more accurate, but it is kinder to the people describing their experiences, and that is not nothing.