An Introduction to The Varieties of Religious Experience

John Kaag opens with his guest, Bessel van der Kolk, who ran the first trials of Prozac for trauma, worked with Vietnam veterans his own age, and found in William James a mind that could take the complexity of a human being without reducing it to a formula.

Together they place James: a wealthy, argumentative household where Emerson came to dinner, years spent in bed, a career straddling anatomy at Harvard and his father's theology, and a set of lectures that set out to defend experience against philosophy as the real backbone of religious life. Van der Kolk hears in that the beginning of his own work: what is it like, from the inside, to be the person who seems crazy?

They end on the chapter about the unseen, and on the orders neither of them could see growing up: ideas, loyalties, community, sin.

Transcript

John Kaag: Hi, I'm John Kaag.

Bessel van der Kolk: And I'm Bessel van der Kolk.

John Kaag: And welcome to William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience on Rebind.

Hi there. Welcome to Rebind. My name's John Kaag. In my day job, I'm a professor of philosophy. I spent most of my intellectual life teaching high school students and college students the philosophy and life of William James. I'm the author of Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life, and also American Philosophy: A Love Story, which centers on the philosophy and work of William James, the founder of American pragmatism, but also the founder of empirical psychology, and sort of a mover and shaker in the philosophy of religion at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. I am so happy to be with you reading William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, and I'm especially happy because I have a special companion on this journey: Bessel van der Kolk, who, to be quite honest, is one of my intellectual heroes, the author, and bestselling author, of The Body Keeps the Score. Bessel, thanks so much for being with us.

Bessel van der Kolk: Good to be with you.

John Kaag: So tell us, or tell me, a little bit about yourself, about your background, about your research, and also how you came to William James.

Bessel van der Kolk: I went to medical school and studied psychiatry, and I was part of this very big revolution in psychiatry. At some point we discovered drugs and brain chemistry, and we thought that was going to give us all the answers we needed. So my early work was with teachers by seniors who were trying to unravel the mysteries of the human brain and chemicals, et cetera, et cetera. I did the first trials of Prozac and Zoloft for trauma, and then slowly something started to evolve from that. I was very intrigued with trauma, in that I worked with Vietnam veterans who were exactly my age, guys who were athletic, competent people, and something had happened to them, and they were frozen and they were explosive. And really you saw in the way they moved their bodies that something had been altered there. What I love about William James is his willingness to take the complexity of the universe, the complexity of who we are as human beings, and the complexity of the world that we live in, which no single formula will ever be able to capture.

John Kaag: What I really love about James is he was once described as an adorable genius, and I think that really describes him, because he had this capacious and very wide mind that could go anywhere. Let's go back and sort of think about who James was and where he came from. He was born in 1842, dies in 1910. Can you tell us a little bit about his sort of early years and how they might have shaped his later thought?

Bessel van der Kolk: He lived in a different time, huh? There were no telephones. There were no airplanes, there were no TVs. And so in the James household, people always talked about things, and because there was no entertainment, people had a lot of guests over, including Emerson, who would come over. And a lot of people whose names you get to know from history books were regular guests at the house, because they enjoyed human company and they loved to argue. And so it comes from that arguing, let's look at this, that really James came from. He had infinite resources, but like so many wealthy people I know, he was pretty screwed up.

John Kaag: He certainly was. And I find there's oftentimes people who grow up with infinite wealth don't have the sort of pressure to have to do things. And so it was okay for him to lie in bed for a bunch of years. For most of us, we couldn't do that, because we'd starve.

Bessel van der Kolk: He had money. He could. So there was also this capacity to indulge himself in his messed-upness. But something came out of that, and it's really quite intriguing how he definitely went through dark nights of the soul. And it's really important to see William James in the context of the world changing, and that the world in the nineties up to the 19th century is a religious world that's organized by ideology and human notions. And then Darwinism comes in and says it all happens from natural selection, a very slow and extremely complex process. And that is beginning to enter into psychology. It is not God who ordained this or God who created this, but that we are evolutionary creatures, and we have grown, slowly adapted ourselves, to live in communities with other people.

John Kaag: It seems like James in the 1870s and 1880s was sort of forced to straddle two worlds. On the one hand, he was expected to be scientific, and he taught anatomy at Harvard. He was very aware of physiology. His first appointment, I think, was in anatomy.

Bessel van der Kolk: Yep.

John Kaag: And on the one hand, he's really steeped in the biological sciences, in Darwin, but at the same time there's this kind of Henry James Senior theological, spiritual bent that will, I think, come through in The Varieties of Religious Experience. But I'm wondering if you can speak to that sort of divide at the end of the 19th century between science and religion, and the relationship between those disciplines.

Bessel van der Kolk: At that time, people really started to get interested in how the human mind works. James gets into, which I think is very profound, and then said, on a day-to-day basis, human life is quite tragic. There's always illness. Everybody we know is going to die. We are going to die. We are going to lose everybody who we love to death, and how do we deal with this? And he says the way we deal with it is through religion, through learning, finding some sort of understanding of the universe where we are just small parts of a lasting order of the universe, but we are part of this universe that is much bigger than we are. And so that is what religion is to him. And he gives us the sense of, my existence is relatively insignificant compared to the overall complexity of the world outside of myself.

John Kaag: So let's turn to the Varieties. The Varieties of Religious Experience was originally a set of lectures, the Gifford Lectures, given in 1901 and 1902. And the topic is natural theology. And Lord Gifford established these lectures primarily to encourage the disciplines that he thought would give knowledge of God. And I think it's interesting, because James's approach through the lectures is really to think about religious experience. Not to make any broad or general claims about theology or God, but to really think about experience. Can you sort of speak to that concentration, or that focus?

Bessel van der Kolk: Well, of course, enormously courageous to take on that subject. How can you say things about religion without offending half of the world at all times? And so James concentrated on what is the religious experience like, and what do people experience inside, not the God or the outside things, but very much what is the experience? And he says, rightly so, that most of us don't think about it this way, is that religion is actually what gives us our power to go on with our lives, in a way. And that we all adopt some sort of meaning-maker system that allows us to fit into a larger whole. And so he talks about the religious experience and what the religious experience looks like. And what he divides up is the individual experience of feeling saved, feeling met by God and being part of that, having mystical experiences, as the individual experience. And also the institutional situation is, really, some people get fed some knowledge, it gives them a sense of consolation, but they don't own it. And he's interested in their own religious experience. And what he runs into is people who are rather weird.

John Kaag: Right. Saint Teresa of Ávila, who is one of my favorite saints when I teach in Spain, a pretty weird woman. And Saint Francis is a pretty weird guy. And he seems to want to respect that weird experience.

Bessel van der Kolk: He does. And that's the beauty of it. In terms of my own personal relationship to that, you know, I'm a child of the sixties, so I took LSD in college, and then I come to attend on this psychiatric ward, and I come to the first stage, there's a group for schizophrenics, and they're all talking gibberish. And I go, oh my God, these people are speaking my language. So James's attitude, like, these people are crazy, but these people have lived in a different reality. And that is a very important reality to understand.

John Kaag: So it strikes me that your description about the priority and emphasis on experience resonates so closely with James's own comments about what he sets out as the objective for the Varieties. He says, "The problem I have set out is a hard one: to defend experience against philosophy as being the real backbone of the world's religious life." And it seems like this priority on subjective experience, over against ideology or the just-so stories that we say about experience, seems to be very much in parallel with what you're saying.

Bessel van der Kolk: Very central. That's how I got into trauma. The people did things that didn't make any sense and were quite objectionable, oftentimes unpleasant. And I was really forced, and had a good training program to help me to do that, to say, what is their experience like that makes them so angry? What is their experience that makes them so frozen? How about the internal worlds? And then you start having kids, and I have a three-month-old baby I'm holding, what is this? What does this world look like? My daughter-in-law asked me last year, I have a four-year-old grandson, said, "Will you please stop calling your grandson the little stoner?" So I can understand that you might not like that, but this kid is living in a completely different reality. And I'm sorry that someday he'll just be a perfectly normal kid with things like everybody else. But in the meantime, he is living in a very different world, and I'm really curious how he is going to put it together to become a functioning human being. And that is the sort of question that James is interested in: how do people put it together? And that spirit has been lost in psychology and psychiatry, where we look at people's superficial symptoms and say, you're screwed up and you're not screwed up. And James says, well, Teresa of Ávila, pretty weird person, but she has some very profound experiences that all of us may have to some lesser degree. And Saint Paul, you could just see he was the epileptic on the road to Damascus. And in the meantime, he founded Christianity as the predominant religion in the world. So you cannot reduce things to these medical abnormalities and explain people through that.

John Kaag: He also doesn't seem to want us to necessarily emulate these figures, but he does at the same time make certain suggestions that our life might be better if we are open to certain religious and spiritual possibilities. And what strikes me as a similarity between your work on trauma and James's work on religious experience is that it's clear to me, in both of your works, that you have a belief that life, and human life, can get better. And it seems to me that even as we're working through the Varieties, and as we're beginning, we should sort of have that in mind.

Bessel van der Kolk: What's really nice about reading James is you can just look for the high points. And there are enough high points through the first chapters.

John Kaag: What he's trying to do, I think, in the first three chapters, is sort of figure out the scope of his discussion. And for me, what's important comes in chapter two, when he sort of defines for himself and for his audience what religion is. And I'm just gonna pull out that passage, and then we can talk about it a little bit. He says, "Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us 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."

Bessel van der Kolk: We need to have a sense of purpose, a sense of why we're doing what we're doing. And life, objectively, is quite random. You know, you may die at any moment. Somebody who you love may go away, and things will happen to you, but you are going to be there, left with all the glory and pain of your life. And how do you sit together and see yourself as somebody who has a life to live in the context of the people around you? And the way that you actually end up, your spirituality at that point determines what your priorities are, determines how you see the world, determines what you want to spend time on.

John Kaag: I think about chapter three in the Varieties, where James begins to talk about the unseen, and the reality of the unseen. And when I first read this, I think I might have been an undergrad, and I read it and I thought, the unseen, is he talking about ghosts? What's he talking about here? But the more I read it as I grow older, the more important I think that this chapter potentially could be. I'm wondering if you could say something to that.

Bessel van der Kolk: It's a space in between, the glue that keeps together, that we get to make sense of the world. Even though, when you look at it objectively, it's quite random. If you look at our lives from an anthropological point of view, if you're a Martian, you go like, why the hell do people do that? But we create systems that give a sense of purpose and meaning, and without it, we feel lost. And that's, of course, James's double. Also, the nature of psychiatric illness is when you lose that capacity. If nothing makes sense anymore, if you see no room for yourself in the context of other human beings. At the core of mental illness is this breakdown of, I belong here and I have a purpose in this life.

John Kaag: I think a little bit about this unseen order. As I was growing up, I grew up not in a particularly religious context.

Bessel van der Kolk: You certainly did, and I'd love to hear a little bit about it.

John Kaag: But I thought that the most important things in life were part of the seen order. In other words, everything that I could see, touch, make sense of completely, and have very concretely. And James, in chapter three, is saying, no, no, no, no, no. What's really important is the unseen order. And it took me a long time to understand that that was the realm of ideas. That was the realm of loyalties. That was the realm of spirits. That was the realm of community. And I really think that this lecture's very valuable. And I have a bunch of questions for you. I want to sort of ask you, what was your upbringing like when it came to the unseen order? I know it's difficult, but could you say something about the unseen order from your own experience, and what was James's experience with the unseen order?

Bessel van der Kolk: Well, in James's case, clearly he had a lot of trouble with it. He spent a lot of time in bed and in sanatoriums. And actually, he never resolved that mind-body issue in his life. He kept being physically ill when he shouldn't have been ill before. So some unseen things kept stirring him up. And then he says at one point, the most important discovery is the discovery of the unconscious. And luckily he doesn't attribute it to Freud, because Freud was not the person who invented the unconscious. And he said that it's these unconscious things that live inside of us that really propel us forward and make us do the things that we do, but we cannot see them and we cannot measure them. In my own religious experience, I grew up with a lot of unseen things, like sin and evil and being bad, and the Dutch make a big deal out of it. Northern European, religious, Protestant, they tend to be more focused on the negative, what's wrong with you? And, he says, interesting, Latin cultures are more into, Christ died for your sins. And so it's okay to sin, because somebody took care of it for you. Which is very different from the religion I was brought up in.

John Kaag: I mean, that's a very different relationship to the unseen order.

Bessel van der Kolk: That's right. But both are unseen. Did Christ die for your sins, so it's okay for you to be a flawed human being? It's such a very big deal, whether that's true or not.

John Kaag: I mean, I think about how this would've struck James's audience, in part. And I think it would've been somewhat controversial in certain ways, because James is pushing back against institutional religion in certain ways.

Bessel van der Kolk: Yep. Definitely against dogma.

John Kaag: But I think for a modern reader, and for our readers of this Rebind, I think that it really resonates in a lot of ways, and reorients at least this reader to an unseen order that I might have overlooked. So thank you so much for this discussion.

Bessel van der Kolk: No, thank you, but it's very, very important, and indeed our culture doesn't pay attention to it. But our motivations, where do our impulses come from? And of course my book, The Body Keeps the Score, really tries to go to the same position of, where do these strange impulses come from? And that we actually know some things today that we didn't know in the time of William James.

John Kaag: Exactly. Exactly. I see the sort of correspondence between your work and James very clearly. So I think we're going to be friends.

Bessel van der Kolk: I think so too.

John Kaag: And you're gonna be a great companion for this Rebind. So thanks for the conversation.