Contents

Michel Ferrari
Editorial Introduction   full text
Eugene Taylor
William James and Depth Psychology   abstract
Eleanor Rosch
How to Catch James’s Mystic Germ: Religious Experience, Buddhist Meditation and Psychology  abstract
G. William Barnard
The Varieties of Religious Experience: Reflections On Its Enduring Value  abstract
Jens Brockmeier
Ineffable Experience  abstract
Keith Oatley and Maja Djikic
Emotions and Transformation: Varieties of Experience of Identity abstract
Michel Ferrari
William James and the Denial of Death  abstract
Martin E. Marty
The Varieties of Contexts for Reappraising The Varieties . . . full text
Contributors

ABSTRACTS

Eugene Taylor

William James and Depth Psychology

William James is best known for his Pragmatism (1907), his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and his Principles of Psychology (1890), but little is known about his excursions into depth psychology, meaning a dynamic psychology of inner experience, despite the fact that he claimed in The Varieties that the subconscious was the primary avenue through which ultimately transforming mystical experiences occur. A survey of James’s evolving conceptions of consciousness thorough the stages of his career reveals that his theories about the subconscious emerged in the 1890s and became crystallized in his 1896 Lowell Lectures on Exceptional Mental States. While these lectures were never published, their content found a major place in various chapters in The Varieties, in addition to launching the so-called Boston School of Psychotherapy, experimental psychopathology at Harvard, and the popular era of psychotherapeutics that followed. As such, the Exceptional Mental States Lectures can be considered a bridge between the cognitive psychology in James’s Principles (1890) and his emphasis on the primacy of the mystical experience in The Varieties (1902). Finally, some of the more important implications of James’s metaphysics of pure experience are broached for current directions in neuroscience today, regarding just what constitutes an adequate science of consciousness in light of what James had to say about depth psychology.

Eugene Taylor (Saybrooke Institute and Harvard Medical School, 98 Clifton Street, Cambridge, MA 02140, USA)

Eleanor Rosch

How to Catch James’s Mystic Germ: Religious Experience, Buddhist Meditation and Psychology

Within The Varieties of Religious Experience lies the germ of a truly radical idea. It is that religious experience has something important and basic to contribute to the science of psychology. Yet now, a hundred years after the publication of James’s monumental work, the mainstream academic fields of psychology are no closer to considering, let alone implementing, this idea than they were in James’s day. Why? Surely one aspect of this is the way in which the categories and imagery of our society envisage an otherworldly religion and a naturalistic psychology which are on different planes of existence and cannot communicate with one other. I believe that the Eastern meditation traditions can bridge this divide and that had William James been as familiar with Eastern religions as he was with Christianity, he would have had a great deal more specifically to say about what religion had to offer science. The purpose of this paper is to look again at James’s material through the lens of Eastern, particularly Buddhist, thought and meditation. Ideally this will serve not only to provide a new perspective on James’s classic work but to show a new direction in which the study of religious experience can impact research in psychology and in the emerging cognitive sciences.

Eleanor Rosch (Department of Psychology, 3210 Tolman Hall #1650, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1650, USA)

G. William Barnard

The Varieties of Religious Experience: Reflections On Its Enduring Value

After one hundred years of new research, new ideas, new methodologies, is it really possible that The Varieties of Religious Experience still has something worthwhile to offer? Is it really possible to penetrate the early twentieth century prose and discover insights that can speak to a modern, even postmodern, audience? Yes. Without a doubt, yes. This text is an undeniable classic. The primary difficulty is not how to uncover the gems that are strewn throughout the text, but rather, how to choose which gems are the most brilliant, which most deserve close scrutiny in the context of this essay.
What follows are a few carefully delimited attempts to cull from this classic work several compelling Jamesian insights that clearly demonstrate the enduring value of the Varieties, that show how, if taken seriously, it continues to offer viable, and valuable, solutions to many of the dilemmas that are today troubling a wide variety of disciplines, particularly in the fields of religion, psychology, mysticism and consciousness studies.

G. William Barnard (Religious Studies Department, Southern Methodist University, PO Box 750202, Dallas, TX 75275-0202, USA)

Jens Brockmeier

Ineffable Experience

This essay offers a reading of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience that suggests considering religious experience as a cultural form and practice of ‘transcendent’ meaning construction. Following James, but also drawing on discussions in cultural psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, such meaning constructions are viewed as historically and culturally specific ways of transcending ordinary experience in an effort after ‘deeper’ meaning. While James’s project is seen in the tradition of Geisteswissenschaft, outlining a hermeneutic human science, it is argued that his investigations have not taken into account the complex relationship between experience and language. In line with an empiricist conception of experiences, James ignores the constructive function of language — and thus culture — in the constitution of both experiences and thought. The discussion of the problematic consequences of this neglect of language and cultural language games focuses on ‘ineffable experiences’, which are the chief characteristic of mystical states and thus, for James, at the centre of the religious experience.

Jens Brockmeier (New School University Graduate Faculty, Psychology Department, 80 Fifth Avenue New York, NY  10011, USA

Keith Oatley and Maja Djikic

Emotions and Transformation: Varieties of Experience of Identity

The Varieties of Religious Experience is an exploration of personal narratives about religious experience, but as one might gather from the epigraph to this article, James treats religion in an eccentric way. He takes religious experience to mean something close to the emotional experience of identity. His central question is how one might discover happiness within oneself and in one’s relations with others, or if such happiness seems far distant, how one might achieve a change that will accomplish a new identity.

A hundred years after James’s great work, religion may be a subject to which fewer people in the academy turn, but emotions, identity and self-transformation are matters of lively interest. In this article, therefore, we consider some of the autobiographical accounts that James presented, along with some of his ideas of their significance. We offer some steps towards seeing how they may contribute to a twenty-first century psychology of emotions and transformation of the self.

Keith Oatley (Department of Human Development & Applied Psychology, University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Canada M5S 1V6)

Maja Djikic (Department of Human Development & Applied Psychology, University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Canada M5S 1V6)

Michel Ferrari

William James and the Denial of Death

William James is dead. We will all die. Religion, through its promise of continued existence in the afterlife, is what many turn to in the face of this difficult truth. Belief in the afterlife became increasingly important to William James. He publicly defended his support of personal immortality in his Ingersoll Lecture on Human Immortality, which addresses two widespread objections to immortality: (1) The brain generates consciousness and mental life so when the brain dies these can’t continue (James replies that the brain may serve a transmissive function) and (2) the immortality of all biological beings would create too many immortal souls (James replies there is no ‘law of conservation’ for consciousness). His empirical evidence for an afterlife included psychic experiences and altered states of consciousness. Today, some scientific research examines ‘past-life experiences’, and even some who believe that the brain does generate consciousness continue to hope for an afterlife. The hope now lies with technology. Believers in strong AI hope to build a new machine-body into which we could upload our consciousness; other scientists hope that technology can one day keep us alive forever, or even bring us back from the dead. Ironically, technology has made near-death experiences more common, a type of religious experience that would certainly have fascinated James. Finally, people like James have achieved a certain form of life after death through their writings and photographs. James’s words and pictures call him back from the dead to speak to us still, and invite us to live a fuller life.

Michel Ferrari (Department of Human Development & Applied Psychology, University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Canada M5S 1V6)

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