Review Of The Varieties Of Religious Experience By William James
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: "The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. " James' emphasis on conscious experience is quite different from the orthodoxy of our age. These days, most people have adopted a rationalist mindset that values definite facts above all things, that uplifts truths derived strictly from material things. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James declares his allegiance to the truth as it is experienced, and he argues that the truth as it is experienced by singular 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 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. " Each lecture takes readers through the various first-hand accounts of the religious experience being focused upon, and James goes on to make observations and quite persuasive arguments about what can be concluded from these experiences about the value, significance, and role of religion in human life. The whole time, James honors the feelings experienced by these people. He analyzes and discusses these feelings with intellect and 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 explores the world of private feelings because he knows that is the world where most of us actually reside every day, and that is the world where religion is actually experienced.
