Abstract
The scientific understanding of experiences classified as ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ has, like the science of psychology, a relatively short history. The first experimental laboratories of William James in the USA and Wilhelm Wundt in Germany in the 1870s set up the first attempts at the scientific measurement of experience and, as this work celebrates, it was William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience – his Gifford lectures of 1901 and 1902 – that established the ground for later psychological analysis of ‘religion’. What this rich and detailed work seeks to achieve is a bridging of the ground of William James’s foundational work with contemporary updates from ‘data-driven’ and ‘neuroscientific’ approaches, including insights from the authors’ own Varieties Survey, with 461 people, and the statistical ‘factor-analysis’ to isolate the ‘many variables’ reported into ‘fewer clusters’ (p. 157). In short, the authors believe that the ‘updated approach allows for better understanding of the varieties of spiritual experiences’ (p. 163).
The study is a complex – at times overly layered – weaving of William James’s thinking with the new scientific insights. Part I maps James and his approach, Part II updates these insights through contemporary new scientific studies of the various types of experience (spiritual, numinous, revelatory, synchronicity, mystical, aesthetic and paranormal), and Part III examines the various interpretations of the experiences, including assessments of the integration of experiences, their philosophical meaning, their transformative capacity, and their clinical value, with continued echoes of James’s thinking. The full force of Yaden and Newberg’s contributions can be seen in Part II, where their specialist knowledge on experimental psychology and neurobiology is more effectively articulated. The work concludes by underlining ‘the need’ to bring insights from James alongside the new research and acknowledging a final ‘epistemic humility’ (p. 390).
The ‘humility’ extends not only to any final epistemic assertion, but to their recognition that they are ‘not scholars of James’s life or his philosophical writings’ (p. 6), which demarcates the focus. Nonetheless, the authors attempt to establish a foundational base in James’s psychological work and this, at times, results in over-interpretation. This tension can be seen in their claims that James ‘would have’ agreed to the categorization of ‘spiritual’ experience as opposed to religious, been ‘happy’ with the scientific progress, and ‘approved’ the technological advances for the present study (pp. 41, 52, 90). These assumptions lose the nuances of James’s critical thinking and his searching questions about the very possibility of a science of religion in The Varieties. The very focus on ‘experience’ as a unit of scientific measurement is open to various Kantian concerns about the nature of the scientific object, and James’s earlier text The Principles of Psychology (1890) is aware of this fact. This complexity – the ‘contrasting perspectives’ in James – is noted only in passing (pp. 147, 163). Nonetheless, what is inspiring about Yaden and Newberg’s study is their legitimization and historical grounding of their work in terms of James’s Varieties, which establishes a series of concerns about science and religious/spiritual experience. In this respect, the book is a fascinating tribute to one of the founding figures of the psychology of religion and an appeal to link it to contemporary scientific research.
The book awkwardly shifts from being a study of the value of James’s foundational insights to a mapping of more recent work on experimental psychology and neurobiology. It can be read from both angles and its success depends on your commitment to one or the other. Following the subtitle ‘21st century research and perspectives’, we might suggest that, where it lacks a sharpness of ‘perspective’ (in its philosophical analysis and critical reading of terminology), it shines in updating a field of inquiry and outlining the new research. The work is extremely valuable for showing the insights from contemporary twenty-first-century scientific analysis from the early groundwork in James. However, James the philosopher is embedded in the psychological texts and is needed to clarify some of the assumptions about what this knowledge means in terms of understanding the world and our classifications of experience and consciousness. The Varieties echoes the earlier work, The Principles of Psychology, and anticipates the later work, A Pluralistic Universe. In this sense, much is lost in recognizing our wider debt to James. This work at least shows the continuing value of James and the importance of new scientific work on ‘religious experiences’, even as statistical reports and biological roots still rest on the instability of language in making the experience.