He had an almost visceral distatste for systematisers, abstract philosophy and theology that trills its febrile flutters in a nugatory neurotic manner that may indeed be the sign of a deeper but different sickness of soul. What is their deduction of metaphysical attributes but a shuffling and matching of pedantic dictionary-adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs, something that might be worked out from the mere word "God" by one of those logical machines of wood and brass which recent ingenuity has contrived as well as by a man of flesh and blood.
They have the trail of the serpent over them. One feels that in the theologians' hands, they are only a set of titles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of synonyms; verbality has stepped into the place of vision, professionalism into that of life. Instead of bread we have a stone; instead of a fish, a serpent. Did such a conglomeration of abstract terms give really the gist of our knowledge of the deity, schools of theology might indeed continue to flourish, but religion, vital religion, would have taken its flight from this world.
What keeps religion going is something else than abstract definitions and systems of concatenated adjectives, and something different from faculties of theology and their professors. All these things are after-effects, secondary accretions upon those phenomena of vital conversation with the unseen divine, of which I have shown you so many instances, renewing themselves in saelig;cula saelig;culorum in the lives of humble private men. May 27, Paul Cockeram rated it it was amazing. Most people seem to think this book is important for the light it sheds on religion, or perhaps as an advancement in the field of religious studies.
However, I would argue that this book's real significance lies in James' respect for our conscious experiences of things as the origin of real truth, insight, and significance. James is one of those rare thinkers who values the subjective more highly than the objective: Only those readers who are ready to think and to learn need apply here. These days, most people have adopted a rationalist mindset that values definite facts above all things, that uplifts truths derived strictly from material phenomena.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience , James declares his allegiance to the truth as it is experienced, and he argues persuasively that the truth as it is experienced by singular, subjective human beings like you and I ends up being more significant, and having a greater impact on life as it is actually lived, than "universal" scientific truths. He investigates religious experiences as they were felt and encountered by the individuals who had them. His primary method for this is to review many, many first-hand accounts of religious experiences, looking for commonalities and patterns between the accounts.
A consummate analyst, James identifies several of these commonalities and patterns, and he organizes a series of lectures around them. Each lecture investigates a different aspect of religious experience, such as "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness," "Conversion," "Saintliness," and "Mysticism. The whole time, James honors the feelings experienced by these people. He analyzes and discusses these feelings with a probing intellect and a sympathetic sensibility. James understands fully that "Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an account of itself.
It allows that its results are mysteries and enigmas, declines to justify them rationally, and on occasion is willing that they should even pass for paradoxical and absurd. James happily tours where science fears to tread. It helps that James is a good writer and an insightful psychoanalyst.
While reading this book, I repeatedly had the feeling that James was discussing experiences I'd had privately, without ever reporting to anyone, and that James understood those experiences better than I who had lived them. Like all great literature, this book opens us to the shared experiences that unite so many human beings across time and space. James treats even the most extreme emotional states with an even-handed finesse, a literary grace that honors the furor of the moment while laying bare what sense the intellect can make of it.
Consider his description of anger: Those looking to understand religion generally will learn plenty about why so many religions tend toward strictness, or withdrawing from pleasure, or asceticism; why the newly converted behave that way; why some people seem to walk through life intoxicated by Jesus, smiling their way from sunrise to sunset, and frowning only when someone dwells upon sickness or uses bad language; why saints behave that way, and what it takes to be a saint; why mystical experiences mean everything to the mystic and almost nothing to anyone else, and what that has to do with a good, stiff drink.
Lest potential readers fear that James is trying to convert atheists into the faithful, let me be clear that James is studying how people experience religion, not arguing that we need to experience it. His attitude seems to be that, for anyone who feels, who travels an ongoing interior emotional landscape, sooner or later an experience will arise that human culture has traditionally named "religious," whether we prefer to use that label or not. The experience, not the label, is what's important. And I would bet that every reader will identify with many of the experiences James discusses.
To varying degrees, every reader will find himself or herself reflected in James' pages. And every reader stands to learn how these experiences, which so often feel remote and isolated from the other humans surrounding us, actually connect to the vaster experience, to the infinite. James gives us reassurance that we're not alone in these experiences; he gives us a vocabulary to discuss them; he gives us insights into how we can better understand and contextualize these experiences.
A recent Pew poll asked people to name their religious faith or affiliation. The results showed that the fastest-growing segment of the faithful in the USA are "nones," or people who don't adhere to any of the major religious faiths.
However, the same polling data show that the majority of people refer to themselves as "spiritual" if not religious. We have not stopped needing a spiritual ground on which to experience our lives. Furthermore, some people will drift from the "none" category to a major religion, and then back to "none. That makes James' project valuable to our age, for James takes the trouble to explain what is valuable in religion without giving us the feeling that he's selling something, or trying to force a moral code upon us.
James only wants to give us insights into religion itself, and how religion has been experienced on a private, emotional level at various times throughout history. He wants us to understand why religion has been with humans throughout history and will in all likelihood be with us throughout time. The Return to James: Being derived from public lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience is neither a particularly deep nor demanding book. It is, however, both beautifully written and clearly expressed--hallmarks of James' style.
Informally unsystematic, the painless effort of going through it will likely present the reader with useful insights, apt examples and challenging arguments. I was particularly challenged by the idea that some people, what he calls healthy souls, are constitutionally happy. Being to t Being derived from public lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience is neither a particularly deep nor demanding book.
Being to that point habituated to thinking of myself as unhappy, James' simple observations caused me to think more deeply of the reasons for my habit of unhappiness without prejudgement and helped me begin to break the habit. Although the language is beautiful, I never really got a understanding of what the author was trying to prove. There was slight mention of other belief systems Islam, Sufi-ism, and Hinduism, had small cameos.
Even the more interesting Protestant s "I fear that my general philosophic position received so scant a statement as to hardly be intelligible" That about sums up this text for me. Even the more interesting Protestant sects like the Quakers, Anabaptists, Christian Scientists, and Mormons did not get much ink. So, if you are looking for a survey of different religious beliefs like the title implies, you should look elsewhere.
Instead you get kind of a description of different emotional elements that the author supposes are common to all religious experience. He speaks of Healthy-mindedness, which sort of relates to modern new age and heuristic practices, but he is speaking in the 's so his examples are of New England style transcendentalism like Emerson or Whitman. He talks about the quest to find yourself and the powerful conversion experiences that can happen when you do.
Then Asceticism or "Saintliness" and Mysticism are explored. Remember, all of these things are covered with very old-fashioned terms and references making the modern reader wince, so the book sounds better than it actually is. Finally he comes to his conclusions and his suggestion for a science of religion that will find the truths that exist in religiosity in all of its forms and discard the introduced falsehoods. A fine sentiment it is, too bad he didn't spend more time elaborating on that and less time on excessive quotations from questionable sources like letters from an anonymous friend.
This is the second straight non-fiction clunker I have read that was published in the 's or early 's. I got to thinking that all old non-fiction must be bad. It is all filled with overly flowering prose, bad references, excessive quotations of bad references, and a lack of any strong point or theory behind the writing good narrative, but for what?
Bad non-fiction is just bad non-fiction regardless of the date of publication.
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Now that is not to say that William James is a poor writer, because there are beautiful passages here. It is just that modern readers kind of expect a strong statement of a hypothesis and then a gallant effort at backing it up with credible sources and not the meandering beautiful meandering and weak sources you get. View all 7 comments. It's impressive how well this book has withstood the passage of time.
More than a century after its publication, it continues, on the whole, to feel extremely fresh and insightful, compared with the works of some other psychologists whom I could name. Unlike the dogmatic theoretic architectonics that would increasingly dominate the field of psychology in the twentieth century, James subscribed to an empirical pragmatism that is quite It's impressive how well this book has withstood the passage of time. Unlike the dogmatic theoretic architectonics that would increasingly dominate the field of psychology in the twentieth century, James subscribed to an empirical pragmatism that is quite current.
On the basis of his minimal overt theoretical commitments, he uses this book as an opportunity to reflect systematically on the nature and import of religious experience in its various expressions, in the service of beginning to lay the foundation for a theoretical science of religion, by which we may empirically examine the roll religion plays in people's lives.
He has thus unapologetically advanced his model of religion as primarily a matter of individual experience, and these two words, of course, carry an enormous amount of baggage. Religion is for James, first and foremost, a system of sentiments and beliefs operating in counterplay with various kinds of experience, including prayer, conversion, and, most importantly, rare mystical experiences of ineffable union with the absolute, howsoever that may be conceived.
It is without a doubt the book's primary limitation that he sticks to that model, which works very well with the liberal Protestant theology and Transcendentalist philosophy which saturated his zeitgeist, but the farther we travel out from that center, the less universal his model of religion may seem. There's a case to made that it is applicable to many forms of Buddhism and some Hindu philosophies such as Advaita Vedanta, but by the time we get to Confucianism, his focus on the individual relationship with the divine starts to lose touch. And when we leave the high civilizations behind and apply his model to the Tlingit, the Navajo, the Mayans, or the Hawaiians, we're on very shaky ground indeed.
What endures is a thorough and thoughtful of examination of the religious traditions that were nearest to hand, and a still-valuable analysis of their basic patterns of expression. That may form the basis, at least, of more diverse comparative work. Some modern readers may be put off at times by its grand style and the sometimes-homilistic tone of the book, but they may do so at their peril, as it's easy to mistakenly infer a certain intellectual complacency that is regularly contradicted by the sophistication of his analysis.
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James's book remains a classic in the field of the psychology of religion, and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. I still haven't read this cover to cover but it's a work of art. As a student I targeted the section on drunkenness -- a lyrical description I haven't seen bettered. But don't trust my memory. I was a drunken student. View all 3 comments. Jul 02, Andrew added it Shelves: Soooooo ridiculously ahead of his time. He manages to anticipate more or less the entirety of 20th Century philosophy, both analytic and continental.
In fact, he's one of the few thinkers I've encountered Freud, Marx, Beauvoir, Deleuze, Spinoza, and Said being a few others whose intellect is strikingly original enough to pierce through the reader's own perspective. View all 8 comments. Feb 25, Jon Boorstin rated it it was amazing Shelves: This from one of the inventors of modern psychology.
Looking at religious experience not in a proscriptive way, but descriptively -- how great religious thinkers think. It embraces the breadth of our experience, and encourages us to follow our own peculiar combination of quests and impulses. May 19, Feliks rated it really liked it Shelves: Lame Goodreads tells me I'm "reading this for the 2nd time". My 'to read' shelf is simply part of my 'read' shelves because I don't want Amazon monitoring my upcoming reading choices. Goodreads has really gone to the dogs with all these newfangled tracking options. Stop adding bells-and-whistles to everything!
Anyway so, this is my first time reading William James or any of the James family and it's a superb book. Falling aptly in line with my recursive taste for cereb Lame Goodreads tells me I'm "reading this for the 2nd time". James' peers--his fellow-scholars--the male readers--contemporary to William James in his own era--my goodness, what a world that must have been. Imagine living in a culture where writing of this high calibre was a commonplace. Studious and humble; is James in this work; earnest but at the same time, measured.
He launches himself at a formidable topic in this survey of the religious mindset and what I admire about his style most besides the blazing erudition on display is his extreme politeness in the treatment of subject matter which to some, might be inflammatory.
But James will have none of it. He goes out of his way to prevent such sensitivity, in advance. He is gentle and tender at every turn; giving each possible point-of-view fair consideration in succession, as he isolates the target of his wonderful scrutiny. Nevertheless, this is not easy reading; I would not guess that most will find it so. It is rife with quoted passages from clerics, cardinals, saints; theologians; doctors of the church. The book deals in exhaustive fashion with the history of Christian thought, but James also treats spirituality in general down throughout the ages as found throughout global culture.
Imans, ju-ju-men, Talmudists, prophets, seers, ascetics, mystics, and shamans all have their say in James' compenduium, as dictated by the various points he wishes to make. Even adverse philosophers and atheists have their appearance on his stage. Overall, James has a wonderfully crisp, lucid and clarifying power of thought.
A towering achievement of intellectualism. Highly recommended if beautiful language and rational methodology makes you marvel. This is the kind of book which shows up clumsy moderns like Richard Dawkins for the piddlers they are. A classic from a very important thinker, as fresh today as when it was written. Although the book has some limitations, such as emphasis on Christianity relative to other religions, one could echo the Bible in saying the world could not contain all the books that might be written on the subject.
James examines a wide range of particulars and boils them down to general facts and some hypotheses, concluding that at the very least, conversion experiences "even for a short time show a human being wh A classic from a very important thinker, as fresh today as when it was written. James examines a wide range of particulars and boils them down to general facts and some hypotheses, concluding that at the very least, conversion experiences "even for a short time show a human being what the high-water mark of his spiritual capacity is" p. Religion tells us that "there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand," a humility of the spirit as Richard Feynman called it, and that "we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers," whatever they be p.
He believes science is mistaken in discounting the subjective in favor of the objective in human experience. That approach leaves us my words, not his feeling empty: Lectures XIV and XV are as satisfying as anything I've ever read, and that's the part I'd recommend before deciding to digest the whole enchilada. Four stars because it's not for the casual reader, but still indispensable, one of the nonfiction greats.
I tried reading this book about 35 years ago and gave up in despair. The lack of distinct between philosophy and psychology at the time James wrote the book led to bad philosophy and unsubstantiated psychology. There's still a great deal of both around. This time around, I decided to read the book for what it is, an historical document which looks back on an interesting period of changing concepts in psychology.
Once again, I am giving up in despair. There are simply too many words that take I tried reading this book about 35 years ago and gave up in despair.
The Varieties of Religious Experience - Wikisource, the free online library
There are simply too many words that take the reader nowhere. The book is based on a series of lectures given by James to university students in Scotland. The lectures must have been painful to sit through. I simply have run out of patience, classic or no classic. I shall have to accept this gap in my education. Sep 20, Gary rated it did not like it. The book is an incredibly dangerous approach to understanding a topic.
All of the stories are about the individuals feelings arising from intense sensations from within the individual. All of the various testimonials concerning people's feelings excruciatingly detailed in this book add nothing to my understanding about the divine. Because something makes me feel good or helps me deal with the world or accept my live on this blue dot I inhabit is not a reason for believing in it.
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I do everything in my power to not believe in false things and to limit my beliefs to justified true beliefs. James does not understand Hegel to a first approximation when he characterizes him as a mystic. Hegel is not a mystic. There are two things that he could have learned from Hegel but clearly did not. All of the testimonials presented in this book suffer from not accepting that realization. Hegel also knows that humans differ from all other creatures because we have second order volition and only children and narcissist lack that capability.
That segues into why this book is so flawed. This book used the same approach for religion as I did for narcissism. In the end, the narcissist is not capable of seeing the other as a human being and therefore cannot see himself in relationship to others as a human and lacks the basic characteristic of being human. My imaginary book on narcissism would add nothing but anecdotal curiosities on an interesting topic and with testimonials from narcissists on how it works for them pragmatically, but the untold story is that narcissism belongs in the DSM V as a behavioral problem without an exception for belonging to a large group of other people having that same narcissistic belief.
Given his reputation as a thinker and writer, this is a disappointing book on substance and style. James delves into the wide variety of transcendent the "Reality of the Unseen" experiences and provides many anecdotal accounts to illustrate them. Given James' background in psychology, and the likely influence of Darwinian theory on philosophical pragmatism "Truth" is what best works , it is surprising that James accepts these accounts at face value without questioning whether other underlying Given his reputation as a thinker and writer, this is a disappointing book on substance and style.
Given James' background in psychology, and the likely influence of Darwinian theory on philosophical pragmatism "Truth" is what best works , it is surprising that James accepts these accounts at face value without questioning whether other underlying factors may be at work. Does the transcendent exist, or do we create it because of internal need? Is it the transcendent that is experienced, or is it the product of our extended, ontological imagination?
Is religious devotion an allegiance to an alpha archetype figure that is an extension of our allegiance to our earth-based leaders? Why is self-sacrifice and asceticism anything other than displaying one's extreme devotion to the alpha protective, all-powerful leader and thus, an assurance of one's place in eternity? James doesn't ask these questions. In fact, he goes the other way and argues that those who do not have transcendent experiences have some version of a "world sick soul.
While he has a point with the Stoics, the Epicureans perhaps figured out how to enjoy this life, healthily, without the transcendent, saintly, mystical trappings that James argues constitute a healthy soul. James does not budge on this point. Secular man in his view does not touch the experiences of the twice born. The twice born have certain, higher-level characteristics, including a feeling of compassion and love for life that the earth-bound do not have.
Yet, given the problems on this earth, it is valid to question whether the single minded, meditative, cloistered devotion to the "one" is selfishness e. Compassion for or with God may very well be a different species than compassion for our species, or all species, on this earth. James appears to be fair, it's not so clear to put himself in the twice-born enlightened category. He believes in "refined and universalistic supernaturalism" and here he covers all the bases.
On the style issue, a better book would have been to focus on these types of questions and issues rather than his many well-turned sentences. While we know from this book that James knows German, Latin, Greek and French, more than a few key points were lost because there was no translation. Over and over again, James apologizes for having to be so brief, yet more brevity may have offered more focus and clarity.
May 26, Theo Logos rated it liked it Shelves: I first read this book in my early twenties. I was a young man fleeing the rigid, fundamentalist evangelicalism I had been raised in, and searching for a more rational expression of faith. I was greatly impressed with this book at that time, and in that condition, so when I added it here on Goodreads that memory of how it had impressed me moved me to rate it five stars.
On this my second reading of William James' great work, I approached it as a man in later middle age who has been a functional I first read this book in my early twenties. On this my second reading of William James' great work, I approached it as a man in later middle age who has been a functional agnostic atheist for thirty years.
I found his approach to religion far less profound and far more scattered and garbled than in my original reading. Indeed, in his final summation chapter, he presented more of a word stew than any truly coherent philosophy of religion.
The Varieties of Religious Experience
He was apparently aware of this shortcoming, and blaming it on necessary brevity, added a postscript to clarify. I did not find it a successful clarification. Thus my three star rating for my second reading. Still, the book is beautifully written, contains much valuable information on various religious states, and its chapters on mysticism and philosophy are worth reading by themselves.
Were I not comparing and contrasting this experience of the book with the one my younger self had, I might have given it four stars. Aug 02, Jana Light rated it really liked it Shelves: I go back and forth on giving this book 4 stars or 5. I thought it was excellent considering where the field of psychology was at the time, but I was disappointed in how James's analysis stayed in the realm of the subjective and anechdotal.
Of course, religious experience is radically individual and subjective, so it makes sense that much of his work would discuss individual experiences as such. However, I felt that in the first half he relied too strongly on autobiographical passages to prove h I go back and forth on giving this book 4 stars or 5. However, I felt that in the first half he relied too strongly on autobiographical passages to prove his points, and most of those points seemed to be simply "people experience religion in many different ways.
The second half was much more interesting, as James started to analyze the value of different kinds of religious experience. I thought his insight into saintliness and the mystical temperament were the most thought-provoking. It was there that I could see glimmers of the future science of psychology. Soon after its publication, Varieties entered the Western canon of psychology and philosophy and has remained in print for over a century. James later developed his philosophy of pragmatism. There are many overlapping ideas in Varieties and his book, Pragmatism.
James was most interested in direct religious experiences. Theology and the organizational aspects of religion were of secondary interest. He believed that religious experiences were simply human experiences: Religious trance is trance. He believed that religious experiences can have "morbid origins" [4] in brain pathology and can be irrational but nevertheless are largely positive. Unlike the bad ideas that people have under the influence of a high fever, after a religious experience the ideas and insights usually remain and are often valued for the rest of the person's life.
James had relatively little interest in the legitimacy or illegitimacy of religious experiences. Further, despite James' examples being almost exclusively drawn from Christianity , he did not mean to limit his ideas to any single religion. Religious experiences are something that people sometimes have under certain conditions. In James' description, these conditions are likely to be psychological or pharmaceutical rather than cultural. James believed that the origins of a religion shed little light upon its value. There is a distinction between an existential judgment a judgment on "constitution, origin, and history" and a proposition of value a judgment on "importance, meaning, or significance".
For example, if the founder of the Quaker religion , George Fox , had been a hereditary degenerate, the Quaker religion could yet be "a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a return to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever known in England. Furthermore, the potentially dubious psychological origins of religious beliefs apply just as well to non-religious beliefs:. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see "the liver " determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul.
James criticized scientists for ignoring unseen aspects of the universe. Science studies some of reality, but not all of it:. Vague impressions of something indefinable have no place in the rationalistic system Nevertheless, if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it.
To purchase, visit your preferred ebook provider. The Varieties of Religious Experience William James Edited by Matthew Bradley Oxford World's Classics The most critically up-to-date and inclusive edition of this classic survey of religious belief, embracing the interdisciplinary nature of a work that fuses philosophy, psychology, religion, and literary studies, and emphasizing its wide appeal. James's work is more relevant than ever in its consideration of the effect of religious ideas on daily life, and atheists who attack religion with 'religious zeal'.
Introduction stresses the book's significance in the relationship between religion and culture, instituting a new approach to religious belief, discusses its ideas and their contemporary interest, as well as contextualizing the book within James's biographical, intellectual, and literary background. Explanatory notes identify key figures and contexts, and provides links with James's other work. Includes a completely updated index, expanded and corrected from the original index provided by Joyce in The Water-Babies Charles Kingsley.
God and Moral Obligation C.