Rustle in the Bush

James is going to embark on a psychological examination of men’s religious impulses and attitudes, not a sociological look at religious institutions.

This means that he’s going to look at the most highly subjectively developed religious reflections, therefore religious classics and effective modern works.

James is going to make a difference between the two questions which are the descriptive and metaphysical ones I note at the start of this introductory blog for this arm of the project. These questions are

1. Descriptive: What are men’s religious appetites? What are the impulses that lend to religious considerations?
2. Metaphysical: What is their philosophic significance?

James says there is a logical difference which corresponds to these being:

1. Descriptive: Existential judgment/proposition -> “What is the nature of it?” “How did it come about?” What is its constitution, origin, and history?”
2. Metaphysical: The proposition of value (Werthurtheil): A spiritual judgment.

In religious questions, people like Strauss, historicist interpretations, and ‘Bible as literature’ represent this descriptive method. These considerations beg these questions: Of what use should a religious text, coming into existence, be a guide of life. In turn, this requires a spiritual judgment first.

He introduces these distinctions because people will take offense at existential judgments about religious objects of thought. He says this because of religious fervor and extremity. There are also generally passive observers who use matters of habit and tradition, a weaker creature not as worthy of study. We are looking for novelty in religious experiences/individuals.

These religious ‘geniuses’ are often subject to fantastic psychological experiences, like personality fevers, melancholy, visions, and extreme emotional sensibility. These help give them authority and influence. He cites the example of George Fox, who was a noble and notably magnanimous man, and was profoundly affected by manic behavior. We have to examine these pathologies.

“It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing, it would say; I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.” (9)

He quickly cites Spinoza “I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, planes, and of solids” meaning that the passions will be looked at by Spinoza in a similar way “He will look at all other natural things, since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature with the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that its three angles should be equal to two right angles.” James demonstrates that this appears at first to be damaging to the spiritual instincts, as being a reduction of highly impactful feelings we regard as facts.

James then pours on a lot of commentary on what he calls medical materialism, which he seeks to refute, as it is a reduction of religious sentiments to medical phenomena as their cause. This has nothing to do with the psychic life itself, it is merely a reductionist paradigm that removes sentiment from the content of religion at all; St. Paul was simply an epileptic; yogis are simply obsessive neurotics; even a genius mind is nothing but the ailment of the worried and poor soul. (I hate this fucking argument and people who give it credit. ‘Do you think Nietzsche’s madness rally just drove his genius until he couldn’t collapse??’ Like brother, shut the fuck up lmao, it’s a fight club- ass opinion).

A large part of this is that religious feelings come from sexual dysfunction, or coming from/to sexual failings. Also just another form of ‘dogmatism’ (What James calls medical materialism).

This is the end of the notes. The good thing about James is that he is relatively straightforward. These are basic considerations and I don’t feel the need to expand any further.