The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience: Chapter 6, Illusion or Varieties?

One of intriguing aspects of The Varieties of Religious Experience is the typology that James proposes and describes in the early chapters.  This typology will prove important for the direction of these essays and how we might approach a Freudian critique of religious faith.

The typology of religious experience proposed by James is a distinction he makes between the "healthy-minded" religious believer and the experience of the "sick soul."  In this essay we will compare the healthy-minded religious believer with Freud's description of religious consolation as described in The Future of an Illusion.  Although there are clear distinctions between Freud's formulation and James's description of the healthy-minded experience, we'll discover some key areas of agreement between Freud and James regarding the role of consolation in religious experience.

i.

In Lectures IV and V of The Varieties William James describes what he calls a religion of healthy-mindedness.  James begins the lectures with a discussion of the relationship between religion and happiness.  Obviously, the two are related.  Freud and Marx, as we have noted, approach this relationship cynically.  The "happiness" religion provides is illusory.  James, in contrast to these thinkers, is more willing to see positive aspects in the association between religion and happiness.  James also observes how many non-religious ideas or passions create happiness.  James gives the example of being in love or committed to a great cause.  In the grip of these passions the soul is filled with a transcendent happiness and euphoria that cannot be preoccupied with pain or even death.  Joy saturates the soul.  Religion is like this kind of love or passion and it is one of the greatest of human experiences.  Finally, James also notes that optimism tends to be an effective coping strategy in life.  The optimistic tend to take more risks and enjoy new adventures.  As a consequence, they succeed a great deal.  And, even if they fail, they bounce back very quickly.  Not a bad way to live if you can manage it.

This experience of joy, optimism and happiness is what predominates in the healthy-minded religious experience.  It is why James uses the word "healthy" as a descriptor.  The healthy-minded religious believer, either by force of will or personality, adopts a positive stance toward existence.  To quote some from James:

If, then, we give the name of healthy-mindedness to the tendency which looks on all things and sees that they are good, we find that we must distinguish between a more involuntary and a more voluntary or systematic way of being healthy-minded. In its involuntary variety, healthy-mindedness is a way of feeling happy about things immediately. In its systematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving things as good.

Systematic healthy-mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision...

The deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind...

This religion directs [a person] to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make much of them, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on occasion, by denying outright that they exist.

The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good...

Naturally, some of us recoil at this religious experience. We see a kind of superficiality and naivety about the healthy-minded religious experience. How, we might ask, is it possible to live continually in a happy state?  How can one ignore or deny the evil and painful aspects of existence? How could such a religious stance be truthful about life?

Before we answer those questions we need to note that James spends a great deal of time defending the healthy-minded experience. Much of Lectures IV and V document the vibrancy and well-being witnessed in the lives of the healthy-minded religious believers. Perhaps you know someone so consistently and unperturbedly happy and optimistic. In short, James is never one to snort at a slice of human experience that seems to work for so many people. Just because we can't understand it doesn't make us the experts.  In fact, James warns against sideline judgments from academic types such as myself:

The first thing to bear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clerico-academic-scientific type, the officially and conventionally "correct" type, "the deadly respectable" type, for which to ignore others is a besetting temptation) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves.

ii.

In The Future of an Illusion Freud contended that religious belief was an illusion, the function of which was to protect us from a crushing sense helplessness in the face of Nature, Fortune and Death.  For Freud, religious illusion was a form of immaturity, a failure of courage.  Rather than facing the facts bravely and as a mature adult, we cling to a wish rooted in childhood.  In short, for Freud it was time for religious believers to grow up:

...religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out their similar neurosis.

For Freud, this process of "growing up" means that we become "educated to reality."  We give up our religious illusions and learn to bear the heavy burdens of existence:

Thus I must contradict you when you go on to argue that men are completely unable to do without the consolation of the religious illusion, that without it they could not bear the troubles of life and cruelties of reality.  That is true, certainly, of the men into whom you have instilled the sweet--or bitter-sweet--poison from childhood onwards.  But what of the other men, who have been sensibly brought up?  Perhaps those who do not suffer from neurosis will need no intoxicant to deaden it.  They will, it is true, find themselves in a difficult situation.  They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe; they can no longer be the centre of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence.  They will be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable.  But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted.  Men cannot remain children forever; they must in the end go out into "hostile life." We may call this "education to reality." Need I confess to you that the sole purpose of my book is to point out the necessity for this forward step?

What we see in Freud's description of religious illusion is the refusal to face the difficult aspects of existence.  Interestingly, Freud's description mirrors James's description of the healthy-minded religious experience.  As James asserts, in a way that echos Freud, the healthy-minded believer "settle[s] his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make much of them, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on occasion, by denying outright that they exist."

This correspondence between Freud and James goes further.  Although James is much more willing to consider the positive aspects of the healthy-minded stance, and the healthy-minded experience has much to recommend it, James ultimately expresses concerns about the healthy-minded stance.  Interestingly, James expresses very Freudian concerns.  For example, although the healthy-minded might try to ignore evil and death this willful forgetting doesn't eliminate the reality of death.   The grim reaper is still there even if we pretend he's not: 

Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.

Further, by trying to "minimize evil" in our minds we fail to live life deeply and authentically:

Now in contrast with such healthy-minded views as these, if we treat them as a way of deliberately minimizing evil, stands a radically opposite view, a way of maximizing evil, if you please so to call it, based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world's meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart.

Thus, James recommends "turning our backs" on the healthy-minded experience.  We need to accept, along with Freud, that in facing pity, fear and helplessness (a word shared by both Freud and James) a more profound view of life becomes available:

Let us then resolutely turn our backs on the [healthy-minded] and their sky-blue optimistic gospel; let us not simply cry out, in spite of all appearances, "Hurrah for the Universe! -- God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world." Let us see rather whether pity, pain, and fear, and the sentiment of human helplessness may not open a profounder view and put into our hands a more complicated key to the meaning of the situation.

In the end, the healthy-minded stance seems like a patch job, a band-aid.  It cannot sustain us when true suffering overwhelms us:

The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

Consequently, James reaches a conclusion very similar to both Freud and Marx:

In some individuals optimism may become quasi-pathological. The capacity for even a transient sadness or a momentary humility seems cut off from them as by a kind of congenital anesthesia.

For Freud it was a narcotic.  For Marx, an opiate.  For James, an anesthetic.  

iii.

In sum, it is my contention that the description James gives of the healthy-minded religious experience is very similar to the account given by Freud in The Future of an Illusion.  Although James is much more willing to grant positive features to healthy-mindedness he does, in the end, make summary judgments that are Freudian in substance.  The healthy-minded experience is "quasi-pathological," an "anesthesia"; it fails to "open our eyes to the deepest levels of truth"; it is not "profound" enough to penetrate to life's "essence" because it "ignores," "forgets" and "minimizes evil." 

So Freud and James see eye to eye on this score.  But here is the important difference, a difference that will dominate our discussion from here on out.  Having described this religious experience Freud stopped.  He had, in his opinion, finished his work.  He had described the totality of the religious experience.  It was, as we've noted, an experience of wish and consolation.  Interestingly, James agrees with Freud on all this.  Only, and here's the critical issue, James goes on.  James's typology is only half done.  That is, in stark contrast to Freud, to describe religious experience as a form of narcotic or anesthetic is only, for James, describing a slice, one part of the religious experience.  Freud obviously thought his account was comprehensive.  James disagrees.  And within this disagreement lies the key to a response to Freud.  That is, if religious experience is bigger than Freud realized his characterization of religion-as-wish is limited and incomplete.  Freud failed to notice the varieties of religious experience.   

That is the essential disagreement.  On this issue the whole debate turns.  Is religion solely an illusion?  Or are their varieties of religious experience?