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ladytetra777) wrote2024-06-03 06:28 pm
ladytetra777) wrote2024-06-03 06:28 pm
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The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture XVIII
The preceding lectures on saintliness, any value to be derived from it, and then mysticism move to increasingly more personal territory. The initial guiding questions of this lecture series are still in place, on what religious experiences are and what value they may contain, but the conclusion to mysticism is that its practice can lead to change that can be deemed positive through common sense and empirical methods. The religious experiences of mysticism have no full account outside of the person affected, and even if James finds commonalities among mystics, their appearance to non-mystics is rooted more in feeling than in objective truth. If neurology does not account for the content of the religious experience proper, and mysticism is not an objective means for making a value judgment that can be applied across religious experiences, then the next move is to turn to philosophy as another tool of analysis.
This is where James' guiding questions are built upon in an intellectual framework. Essentially, what is it about religion that remains after being filtered through the intellect (434, 444)? The answer: beliefs and practices, but here theology steps in as the organon of the intellect that James states "has to" find arguments to support the beliefs and practices of a given religion (436). James finds this to be a shortcoming of philosophy; philosophical traditions that favor one viewpoint crop up just as religious sects do. He discusses the argument by consensus (437), where the authority to declare the existence of a God is derived from the widespread belief of one.
Here, I think about cosmological arguments, formalized proofs that decree the existence of God can be established as if it were a mathematical law. St. Anselm of Canterbury states "God is that which nothing greater than can be conceived" in a proof that functions like a thought experiment. Essentially, whenever one reaches a hard wall as to what their mind is capable of formulating, we must accept that which is greater than that capacity is God, and the contrast between the limitations of the mind and, to borrow a term from Land, an Outsideness to that limitation, is for Anselm a proof of God. The second premise is that it is greater to exist in reality than not to, so Anselm concludes that God must exist, transposing the mental into reality. He states that this proof functions even for an atheist, as they are capable of thinking of a maximality, therefore God exists for them as that which is beyond the sum of of maximums they can cognize.
Yet, this pales in comparison to James' main point of this chapter: how useful is making an argument like this? "[H]ow does it assist me to plan my behavior, to know [this]" (446). His position is to attack scholastic theology, that dogma is dogma and its repetition fails to leap from the page to converting others to a given religion. He moves from this to talk about Idealism, discussing Kant, Hegel, and Caird, and while the systems devised by these thinkers are more robust, they still fall to the same issues as dogma. For example, Hegel is lambasted as nearly-unintelligible to read, rejected quite wholesale by his native Germany (454). Even if the Heglian project to formalize God as a philosophy of process whereby God exists as the Becoming in between all potentials, it is secondary to the experience of God proper (455).
My takeaway from this chapter is that philosophy functions as an intellectual organizing and cleaning tool as it stands in relation to religion. It aggregates ideas and arguments that build a rational foundation for the earthly ego-mind to navigate religion, but in practice it cannot derive value from a religious experience. The procedure is in fact reversed, and it establishes a dogma to which value is then assigned to religious experience without encompassing the fullness of the experience for James.
My opinion, however, is hesitant agreement with James. I can say that I "like" philosophy as a discipline, that I find Kant's description of the bounds of human reason to be interesting, that I find Land's characterization of objects outside of those bounds to effectively jeer at us as interesting, but in doing so I prove James right. All of my academic training becomes a hobby recognized by the academy, so the move to recover philosophy as a positive motivating force toward religious life is reactionary. I can take joy in having a hobby, but it is with a dour resignation I must concede. Stepping into the circle is no translation of the CCRU; perhaps this is why Land's character flipped after his flirtations with magick, formerly a staunch defender of feminism, presently a bigot, not a prophet in the religious sense, but a profit, to the people grifting off his ideas.
This is where James' guiding questions are built upon in an intellectual framework. Essentially, what is it about religion that remains after being filtered through the intellect (434, 444)? The answer: beliefs and practices, but here theology steps in as the organon of the intellect that James states "has to" find arguments to support the beliefs and practices of a given religion (436). James finds this to be a shortcoming of philosophy; philosophical traditions that favor one viewpoint crop up just as religious sects do. He discusses the argument by consensus (437), where the authority to declare the existence of a God is derived from the widespread belief of one.
Here, I think about cosmological arguments, formalized proofs that decree the existence of God can be established as if it were a mathematical law. St. Anselm of Canterbury states "God is that which nothing greater than can be conceived" in a proof that functions like a thought experiment. Essentially, whenever one reaches a hard wall as to what their mind is capable of formulating, we must accept that which is greater than that capacity is God, and the contrast between the limitations of the mind and, to borrow a term from Land, an Outsideness to that limitation, is for Anselm a proof of God. The second premise is that it is greater to exist in reality than not to, so Anselm concludes that God must exist, transposing the mental into reality. He states that this proof functions even for an atheist, as they are capable of thinking of a maximality, therefore God exists for them as that which is beyond the sum of of maximums they can cognize.
Yet, this pales in comparison to James' main point of this chapter: how useful is making an argument like this? "[H]ow does it assist me to plan my behavior, to know [this]" (446). His position is to attack scholastic theology, that dogma is dogma and its repetition fails to leap from the page to converting others to a given religion. He moves from this to talk about Idealism, discussing Kant, Hegel, and Caird, and while the systems devised by these thinkers are more robust, they still fall to the same issues as dogma. For example, Hegel is lambasted as nearly-unintelligible to read, rejected quite wholesale by his native Germany (454). Even if the Heglian project to formalize God as a philosophy of process whereby God exists as the Becoming in between all potentials, it is secondary to the experience of God proper (455).
My takeaway from this chapter is that philosophy functions as an intellectual organizing and cleaning tool as it stands in relation to religion. It aggregates ideas and arguments that build a rational foundation for the earthly ego-mind to navigate religion, but in practice it cannot derive value from a religious experience. The procedure is in fact reversed, and it establishes a dogma to which value is then assigned to religious experience without encompassing the fullness of the experience for James.
My opinion, however, is hesitant agreement with James. I can say that I "like" philosophy as a discipline, that I find Kant's description of the bounds of human reason to be interesting, that I find Land's characterization of objects outside of those bounds to effectively jeer at us as interesting, but in doing so I prove James right. All of my academic training becomes a hobby recognized by the academy, so the move to recover philosophy as a positive motivating force toward religious life is reactionary. I can take joy in having a hobby, but it is with a dour resignation I must concede. Stepping into the circle is no translation of the CCRU; perhaps this is why Land's character flipped after his flirtations with magick, formerly a staunch defender of feminism, presently a bigot, not a prophet in the religious sense, but a profit, to the people grifting off his ideas.