Individualism in the Study of Religion

Here's a simple question: Why did William James take the approach that he did in Varieties of Religious Experience, an approach to that field marked by the individual experiences of believers in some higher power?

There is on one level the 'official' answer: the one that James gives. He told his lectures' audience that he has been invited to give lectures about religion, a wide-open mandate, and that in order to proceed he would have to select "out of the many meanings of the word [religion] ... the one meaning in which I wish to interest you particularly." The selection is presented as an arbitrary one, defining religion only "for the purpose of these lectures" as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine."

But no careful student of William James thinks that this is the whole answer. There are at least three not-at-all arbitrary reasons why James proceeded as he did.

First, because he was his father's son. He learned religion from Henry James Sr., the man who "wrote The Secret of Swedenborg and kept it." To a James, depth of religious experience would naturally have seemed coextensive with personal idiosyncrasies. More broadly, he was a product of the America that was also producing or had recently produced Joseph Smith, Dwight Moody, Mary Baker Eddy ... it was a time and place where highly individualized religious experience, pressing against the envelope of Protestant Christianity, was itself collectively valued.

Second, James wrote this way because James saw himself as a student of history, and the notions that (a) individuals matter in history, and (b) that individual action was in his day in danger of being lost in scholarly talk of aggregates and impersonal forces, was at or very near the heart of what all his scholarly endeavors were about. So when he had an opportunity to lecture about religion, it naturally became a exhibit in that broader case. Religion in its ecclesiastical form can of course be treated historically too, and when it does it can lend itself to interpretations that don't really need human names. Clericalism and Sectarianism and 'The Protestant Ethic' are all the sort of aggregating concepts of which James firmly disapproved. So he made the point that if you go beyond the forms to the human heart, forces and aggregates drop away in favor of "him who had it" where "it" is first-hand experience of the divine. Those who had "it" were accordingly often driven "into the wilderness ... where the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, St. Francis, George Fox, and so many others had to go."

Third, James looks to individual experiences for the essence of religion because he is a pragmatist. His pragmatism is of a sort that makes of truth itself a very individual product, a report on some one person's wrestling with the world, and of what has so far worked in that struggle, as the turn to a higher power works for those who have found sobriety through AA (a movement in part inspired by James).

For James, at base, everything in the present and future as well as in the past, is about individuals "in their solitude."

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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