Rustle in the Bush

I’m going to be approaching some things I’ve been avoiding for quite a while. This is William James, and continuing to open myself to a religious/spiritual experience of life. (If this can even be found in experience).

This is in corroboration with the Dh Lawrence project I’m hoping to continue developing as a means towards a senior thesis.

Working From “The Varities of Religous Experience” by William James. Pub. by Longmans Green and co, 1929.

James says that he does not express his own philosophic conclusion because he undertook the project to describe

1. <Descriptive> Man’s Religious Appetites (Insofar as it isn’t religious studies or anthropology) as the description pf man’s religious impulses. SO, following a quasi-psychological path.
2. <Metaphysical> Their Satisfaction through Philosophy. This is all postponed because the wealth of psychological information was too great. He suggests heis brief remarks on (2) can be found on 5-11-519 and the ‘Postscript’ so there it is where I should begin.

Pages 511-519 found in Lecture XX, ‘Conclusions’:

“The ‘more’ as we call it, and the meaning of our ‘union’ with it, form the nucleus of our inquiry” (511). A classical problem here, echoes back to the beginning of philosophy, with Parmenides. James follows by saying that we can’t follow specific religion’s definitions of these ambiguous terms because it would be unfair to other religions. The ‘more’ isn’t simply Jehovah, and the ‘union’ is not Christ.

Ah! He reminds me of what I forgot. The approach is a science of religion so we will avoid these particular terms, and look at the ‘more’ through what psychologists know is real: as the subconscious. ” Apart from all religious considerations, there is actually and literally more life in our total soul than we are not at any time aware of” (511).

So we have, therefore, a scientific approach that the theologian lacks, yet we still have the notion of ‘subconscious’ (Which obviously is important to Deleuze/Lawrence) and the theologian’s idea that the religion come from an ‘outside’ movement of power. However this will necessarily not be God’s efficacy on a created world.

This is a precocious start though, over-belief begins in monistic interpretations that religion joins the absolute through unitary identity; it was ‘always’ the case that the finite Self joins with the Absolute self. This is the case in:

1. Mysticism
2. Vedantism (James was familiar with Swami Vivekanada who popularized Hinduism in America)
3. Transcendental idealism

James brings up the fact that all religious prophets reconcile these and brings up a notable problem in religious studies; The manifold of religions. They appear to cancel each other out. Yet it is precisely this over-belief that characterizes the strength of spirituality in a given religion.

So we should be tolerant towards over-beliefs because they are often the marks of the most developed spiritual intellects. However, among basic and generic facts “the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which the saving experience comes, a positive content of religious experience which, it seems to me, is literally and objectively true as far as it goes” (515). James says now that his own hypothesis on the limits of this extension of our personality is his own personal over-belief, and to take it with a grain of salt.

So, this ‘other dimension of existence’ can be called the supernatural or the mystic, whatever. If ideals come from this region, which they most often do, than we ‘belong’ to it in a more intimate sense than the visible world mediated by the faculty of understanding. However it is not merely ideal, it causes effects in the world. (516). It is an exercise of power, demonstrated exemplary through prayer (Not the Christian miracle sense; which is the same as the modern ‘manifestation’ craze in post-New-Age Tik Tok). Therefore, this unseen mystical world is real as well. James will call it God to show the causal agency of this reality and not just the medium of communication which the ‘saving experience’ provides. (516). As he says, “We and God have business with echoer”.

The business vernacular is very interesting in James. He calls the opening of ourselves to this reality ‘prayer’ and describes it as a transaction’. Interesting as well that it is business that w do with God. He says “In opening ourselves to his influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled” (517) and this is precisely the ringing of Nietzsche’s amor fate in the face of the death of God.

So the parts of the universe in which we find ourselves, “Take a turn genuinely for the worse or for the better in proportion as each one of us fulfills or evades God’s demands” (517). At face value, it appears as Spinoza’s description of the conatus.

So God effects us. However,

1. Men who believe
2. and Mystics who ‘know’

Are sure that there is another dimension, which is saved. Which is ideal and in which the immediate subjective experience of religion (The monisitic positions of Transcendental idealism, vendata, and base mysticism). This way we get a real hypothesis. The real hypothesis protects a scientific vision of religion. ” James confesses to an “over-belief” that ordinary consciousness is “only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist,” and these other realms of consciousness deliver meaningful experiences. Further, while the experiences of conscious and subconscious states generally remain discrete, sometimes they become continuous, and “higher energies filter in.” Finally, James says: “By being faithful in my poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true.”

Okay: Cool let’s look at the ‘Postscript’:

He says something true, that especially in this field all sentiments have been made and all thinkers would be pushed into naturalist or supernaturalist in this case of religion. James says he, like most thinkers, is a supernaturalist (Due to the necessity of religious experience through what’s described in the last paragraph.) However there are two kinds of supernaturalists

1. Crasser (Piecemeal Supernaturalism)
2. More Refined (Kantians) (Universalistic Supernaturalism)

1. Uses of theologians, and those Kant had already displaced (So Descartes, Aquinas, Leibniz). Admits of miracles and providence.

2. Most of his days philosophers he claims, are in the refined camp. He says they obey the Kantian direction enough, to disbar ideal entities (Noumeanon) from having causal efficacy on phenomenal events. For them the ideal world doesn’t effect causality like that. Their ideal world serves as positing the meaning of facts, i.e. the ultimate interpretation of facts.

US according to James, and this is why he doesn’t like it, succumbs too easily to naturalism, and therefore it doesn’t leave solid room for novelty.

Much of these considerations lean towards a preference for the idea of the immortality of a soul which protects individual souls/personalities into the supremely monotheist identity. James however, can identify this going beyond into degrees of unity, and not an Absolute synthesis. James will refer to this as a kind of polytheism.

He claims polytheism is and always will be the ‘true religion of the people’. James gives credit to this polytheist notion in religious studies and says more work needs to be done; the singular Absolute reconciliation is often the resort of a moralized response in which the salvation of the world is only possible through the abstract idea of total redemption. “For practical life at any rate, the chance of salvation is enough” (526).