James's Descriptive Primacy and the Ineffability of Religious Experience — Epoche B2
Ineffability Is a Datum, Not a Thesis: Reading James's Varieties The question William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902 [1] ) is built from other people's testimony. Conversion narratives, letters, mystics' reports and the case notes of the melancholic fill its pages, and James lets them run at length before he comments [2] . This has encouraged a reading on which the descriptive method is itself the argument: James piles up accounts [3] , declines to reduce them, and thereby shows that religious experience cannot be captured in concepts. On that reading, ineffability is the book's philosophical thesis, and the description exists to demonstrate it. I shall argue that this inverts the structure of the book. Ineffability in Varieties is a datum — a report of what subjects say about their own states, offered as one of four classificatory marks — and James is explicit that this is what it is. It carries no philosophical weight, and cannot, because a report about testimony cannot by itself establish anything about the limits of description. What carries the argument is the second mark, noetic quality, and the conclusion it supports is stated openly in Lecture XX and the Postscript. The question this essay asks is therefore where in Varieties the argument actually runs, and the answer bears directly on whether James is guilty of the charge most often laid against him. What James was doing, in his own terms James came to the Gifford Lectures as a psychologist. The Principles of Psychology (1890) had made him the leading American authority on the description of mental life, and the method of Varieties is the method of that book applied to a new class of states: collect first-person reports, sort them, look for what varies and what does not. The choice of material was not neutral, and James says so. In Lecture II he stipulates that religion, for his purposes, shall mean the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Institutional religion, theology and ecclesiastical practice are set aside by definition. Charles Taylor [4] , in his 2002 lectures on James, makes this the centre of his criticism: the definition rules out in advance the forms of religious life that are constitutively collective, so what James describes so scrupulously is a pre-selected slice. The point matters here because it shows that the descriptive method in Varieties is already carrying theoretical commitments. It was never the theory-free procedure the ineffability reading needs it to be. The four marks, and what the first one says In Lecture XVI James introduces four marks by which he identifies a state of mind as mystical. The first is ineffability, and the way he states it is decisive: The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. Read the grammar. The mark is not that such states are inexpressible; it is that the subject says they are, immediately and without prompting. James is describing a regularity in testimony, and using it, as he says, to classify. The word "handiest" gives the game away: he wants a criterion that is easy to apply, and reported inexpressibility is easy to apply because subjects volunteer it. This is not a small distinction. A regularity in what people say about their experiences is compatible with several explanations, including that the states are unusual, or that the vocabulary available for them is thin, or that the tradition the subject belongs to teaches that such states are beyond words. Nothing about the limits of language follows. James, in the same lectures, goes on to describe these states at considerable length, quoting reports that are detailed, comparative and often precise — behaviour that would make no sense if he took the reported inexpressibility to be literally true. The second mark is where the weight sits. Noetic quality is the claim that mystical states present themselves to those who have them as states of knowledge: insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect, carrying a sense of authority. That is a claim about the content and the phenomenal character of the state, and it is the premise James actually uses. The book does not decline to theorise The reading I am rejecting requires that James withhold conclusions. He does not. Lecture XX states a set of beliefs he takes the religious life to include — that the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its significance, that union with that higher universe is our true end, and that prayer or inner communion with it is a process in which real work is done. He then advances a hypothesis about the mechanism: the subconscious or subliminal region of the self is the door through which such experiences enter, and it is the hither side of whatever the "more" turns out to be on its farther side. In the Postscript he names his own position, calling it a piecemeal supernaturalism, and distinguishes it from the refined supernaturalism that keeps the ideal order safely out of causal contact with the world. His is the untidier option: he holds that religious experience makes a difference in the world of fact, which is precisely a claim open to evidence and to refutation. He also marks the boundary of what he has argued. The term is his own — over-belief — and it names the portion of his conviction that goes beyond what the evidence carries. Labelling a remainder as a remainder is the opposite of hiding it. Why the difference matters The standard philosophical objection to James is Wayne Proudfoot's, in Religious Experience (1985). Proudfoot argues that appeals to ineffability function as a protective strategy: the experience is placed beyond description, and therefore beyond explanation, w