The Claims for Mysticism in The Varieties of Religious Experience

In his justly famous discussion of mystical experience, William James finally turns away from the descriptive task that otherwise dominates his treatment and attempts to assess the legitimacy of belief founded on such experiences. He asks, “Does it [mystical experience] furnish any warrant for the truth?”¹ Many of those who are interested in James have pointed out that he is very aware of his audience and constructs his remarks with specific reference to that audience.² That means that any commentator must be aware of the audience to which James is addressing himself. It is important therefore to remind the reader that The Varieties of Religious Experience is addressed to a philosophical audience. James understands himself, at least in the section that I am interested in, to be making an objective assessment of the evidence that he has compiled. In this light, I believe that it is legitimate to hold him to the highest standard of philosophical argumentation. In short, I take him to be assessing mystical experience, asking whether, when motivated by a desire to know the objective truth, that experience proves authoritative.³

Since James believes himself to have shown, by a careful and broad survey, that mystical experiences tend to be described as pantheistic, optimistic, and antinaturalistic, the question is whether mystical experiences provide evidence for the truth of pantheism, optimism, and antinaturalism (334). However, just here we run into our first problem.

James begins his discussion of mystical experiences by claiming that they are, among other things, ineffable, but if that is true, how can there be a convergence in the descriptions? James says, “The subject of it [mystical experience] immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given” (302). In fact, James adds, developing the analogy with feeling, “no one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling in what the quality . . . of it consists” (302). However, when he sets up the question of warrant he says that mystical experience is “on the whole pantheistic and optimistic, or at least the opposite of pessimistic. It is anti-materialistic and harmonizes best with twice-bornness and so-called other-worldly states of mind” (334). This claim is meant to summarize the descriptions of the various mystics that James has been surveying. But if such experiences are ineffable, how are we to take this claim? On the face of it, there is something clearly wrong. If descriptions of mystical experience converge on pantheism and optimism, to that extent the experiences are describable and so not ineffable. And insofar as they are ineffable there can be no convergence of description, and the very heart of James’s argument will be lost. As we shall see, the strength of James’s positive argument moves from convergence of description to objectivity, but the ineffability claim seems to undercut that. If the experiences can be described so that we can see that there is a strong similarity between them—optimistic, antinaturalistic, and so on—then they are obviously not ineffable; but if they are ineffable, then any claim to convergence must be called into question.

Is there some way out of this dilemma? Perhaps James means to say that mystical experiences are describable and accurately so, as far as the descriptions go, but such descriptions always fall short of the “full reality” of the experience itself. I am not at all sure what this might mean, but we can get some light on the subject by reviewing James’s own examples.⁴ He presents us with two. First, he claims that someone who has never experienced love cannot interpret the lover justly (302). But what does that mean? Will I not be able to correctly predict the lover’s behavior—his or her reactions—or will I not understand why he or she is behaving so strangely, when if I had been in love myself, I would? Will I not appreciate the situation in which my friend finds him- or herself? It is just not clear what is implied in the claim that an...