Two Forms of Judgment

In the first chapter of Varieties of Religious Experience, James draws a distinction between two forms of judgment: existential and spiritual.

He defines existential judgment as an account of material causation. It's the kind of explanations that scientists aspire to, and they're based on the belief that if only we can break a thing down into its parts and see how these parts work together, we can understand and manipulate the world. Existential judgment is the source of all mechanics. It's an account of how things occur: how oxytocin contributes to interpersonal connection, how dopamine motivates us, how endorphins make us happy.

Spiritual judgment, meanwhile, is an account of value. It's a judgment of what is good and what is bad. It's the form of judgment that we exercise when we decide the best way to live, the best way to work, the best way to govern.

James uses this division of forms of judgment to distinguish between two ways of looking at religious records, like the Bible. Existential judgment of the Bible is the historical task of working out its origins in the particular histories and peoples of ancient Israel. This task tends towards to diminish its spiritual value for people, who begin to see that it is a product of its time and place. In this lens, it is difficult to maintain that the Bible is "true"--that it is actually an account of God and his communications to humanity.

But in another sense, James says we can see the Bible as true. Exercising spiritual judgment, we can hold that the Bible and similar texts are "a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their fate" and that they are therefore worthy of spiritual appraisal.

When I read this sentence, I was struck by the term "great-souled persons." What could it mean to be possessed of a great soul? And what differences could their be between the great-souled and everyone else. Answers to these questions depend on definitions of the terms. I take "great" to generally signify size, and I take "soul" to signify the total path and progress of internal life. Great-souled persons, then, are people whose inner life is immense.

And what are these people like? In the next section, James describes them as "individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather"--"creatures of exalted emotional sensibility"--people with "discordant inner life." And then he shares an account of George Fox, who once, a whim, ran through the streets of Lichfield, England screaming "Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield!"

What would it be like to see a man running down the streets screaming "wo" to your city? It would seem to me Biblical, by which I mean to say utterly mad.

Through this turn of reasoning, James invites us to reconsider madness, the people we take to be mad, the ideas we take to be mad: are these merely great-souled persons working out the crisis of their own fate?

This reminded me of Don Quixote of la Mancha, who is utterly and completely mad with the idea that he is a knight errant. Cervantes' classic is sometimes called "the Spanish Bible," and under a Jamesian interpretation, this makes complete sense. What better description of Don Quixote could be made than "the inner experience of a great-souled person working out the crisis of his fate?"

But how do we balance between existential and spiritual judgment? Despite the pull that characters like Don Quixote have on me, I remain addicted to the precision of thinkers like William James who carefully work their way from definitions to consequences of definitions to analysis of evidence through the lens of definitions. How do we pull value from texts like the Bible while remaining sensitive to their limitations as products of specific socio-historical environs?

The answer I've come to is never to succumb to either impulse: to take words, their meanings, and evidence seriously, and also to lapse into poetry. I think that spiritual and existential judgment must exist in conversation with each other in order to be meaningful, and I have no interest in communities that excoriate one for the sake of the other: whether that be Sam Harris denouncing religion as purely evil or Baptists maintaining that the bible is the one and only true account of the origins of our world. I aspire to some mixture of punctiliousness of James and the great-souled madness of Don Quixote.

From Particulars

In his preface to The Varieties of Religious Experience, James says that he believes "a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep." This struck me as concordant with my long-time skepticism of theory and preference for micro-historical accounts to large sweeping histories, but it carried a different valence for me now than it would have a few years ago.

I find my own anxieties tend towards the abstract. Worries about my own character, about the future, about what other people may think--these tend to be the content of my ruminations when I ruminate, and they're very rarely specific, more like vague, daunting notions--shadow creatures lurking in the background. In a way, anxiety is just the body's reaction to a sort of theorizing: generating abstract conceptions of who we are, what might happen to us, the contents of other people's minds. I've found that particulars to be an antidote to these abstractions, and especially particulars anchored in one's immediate environment.

For example, the practice of description has helped me soothe my mind quite a bit. When I'm walking down the street to and from work, or when I'm at work, or when I'm at home, if I find myself feeling anxious, I'll sometimes think or write verbal descriptions of the people and objects around me. This focus on the particulars around me has a soothing effect that has helped me to anchor myself quite a bit.

James is talking here about method for a study of religious experience, but I think that intellectual methods carry broader applications than formal inquiries. They are a mode of mind--a mental practice that shapes and reshapes the patterns of how we think in everyday circumstances. Education is a process of cultivating an entire mind, not merely acquiring a set of mind. Focus on particulars becomes a matter of fruitful habit the purpose of which is something more abstract than the particulars themselves: it's the wisdom James says this focus brings.

Varieties of Religious Experience

I've been intending to read William James' classic The Varieties of Religious Experience at least since the summer of 2014 when a YouTube lecture first introduced me to him. Recently, I read D.W. Pasulka's American Cosmic, and her exploration of UFOlogy from a religious studies perspective reignited my interest in reading James' investigation of individual encounters with "the divine." So I cracked it open this last week.

What drives my interest in James' work? First, I like William James. His prose is beautiful, and he thinks with precision. I've been very influenced by his pragmatic philosophy, and I'm interested in exploring his thought further. Second, my own encounters with the feeling of divine inspiration leave me eternally curious about this phenomenon. I wonder what he, especially, thinks about this. I hope it will help inform my own views on the matter. Third, I'm interested in the history of social sciences, and this is a vital text in the history of religious studies. It's an important piece of intellectual history.

I'm going to try to blog regular, small thoughts about my reading starting with this book in the hope that it will help me discover what I want my writing practice to become.

Writing Problems

I've run into some problems while trying to write posts about the things I'm reading.

1. I feel compelled to catch up

I read recently finished Don Quixote and The Qualified Self, and I feel compelled to write out my thoughts about these books before moving on to what I'm currently reading, The Varieties of Religious Experience. What's more, I have so many thoughts about TV series I've watched this year--The Umbrella Academy, Stranger Things, as well as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I've started at least 6 posts exploring these things, and it's just become too much.

2. I don't know what voice to write in

Sometimes the voice of my writing thickens with poetry, and sometimes it becomes boxy and academic. Other times, it seems oratorical and persuasive, and then suddenly it's journalistic or conversational. I'm not sure what voice to write in, and so I get stuck writing out my thoughts.

3. My perfectionism kicks in...

...and I labor fruitlessly over sentences and produce nothing.

So I need to change my approach. I'm going to forego catching up for now and leave what I've tried to write about the works I mentioned unfinished. I'll start over where I'm at in my reading. And instead of trying to write out entire essays, I'll try writing the thoughts that strike me.

My purpose here is to jump start the practice. I want to have a writing practice for all the reasons I explained in my last post, and I need to start small and let it take me where it will.

On Reading, Responsibly

I admit to despising Blinkist. It was during a mindless scrolling session on my Instagram feed that I first watched one of their promotions, which advertised the 15-minute summaries of non-fiction books that they sell to their audience. In the Blinkist consumption model of reading, "key insights" are packaged and "delivered" to the customer, ostensibly for reflection and learning during free time. "Despise" is a strong word, I guess, but I think it's the flipside of how strongly I wish reading could be so simple.

And I have this wish because I suffer book-thirst. When I wander down the aisles of bookstores or libraries, I'm caught between an excitement for the knowledge and stories tucked away in the tomes I peruse and a gnawing anxiety at the limits of time and capacity for reading. To make matters worse, the excitement often evaporates when I've actually sat down with a book. I find myself distracted by the page number, caught in that same distortion of time that happens when I watch the hands of a clock tick and tock but feel that minutes take hours to pass. I scroll past pages like thumbing through Instagram––mindless until caught by some isolated thought that I love or hate.

Blinkist offers a seductive shortcut. What if I could merely shove plastic plugs into my ears and, as I walk, cook, or clean, passively receive the essence of the books I long to devour? Such a stream of content would surely slake the thirst, it seems. Isn't sound a more effective medium than sight for efficiently delivering the information I long to consume? 

But there––that's exactly it––information is exactly the problem. We take "information" to be a neat package of facts to consume, but in his short, provocative history of that word, John Durham Peters suggests otherwise. Uncovering the origins of the term among disciples of Aristotle in the late Middle Ages, Peters reveals that to "inform" originally meant "to shape from within." 

Sitting with this definition changes the idea of information completely, and with it, my concept of what reading could be. Instead of an object that lives in writing, information can become the subjective process of in-formation––those changes that happen inside me as I respond to what I read.

What is this "book-thirst" I feel? The longer I live with it, the more convinced I become that it's not a lust for knowing facts but a longing for insight into the rich connections of thought, to apprehend the notions I encounter and sense what they change inside my mind. It's not just a longing to read––it's a longing to be in-formed. And the result of the process of in-formation is, I think, to respond.

The experience of reading transforms when response becomes the goal. The clock-ticking, page-scrolling mindless stream of consumptive reading evaporates. My pace slows; time disappears. My mind expands beyond the words on the page and encompasses the colorful panorama of thoughts and feelings they engender. Instead of a feed of symbols to scroll over, the book becomes a world to enter.

In-formation bridges the gap between the excitement to read and the anxiety of never being able to read enough. The problem of "information overload" vanishes once I exchange information––the weight of innumerable facts––for in-formation––the dance of exposure and response.

What are the "key insights" Blinkist promises to deliver? Supposedly, they are the insights that already reside in the book––the nuggets of thought that purportedly live in the text waiting to be delivered to my mind by the process of reading. But like in-formation, in-sight is not a prepackaged item. It's what happens to me when I, painstaking, scale the edifice of a book. 

An in-sight is the summit waiting at the end of a trail of thought. It's the sweat-earned vista that drives climbers to mountaintops. The landscape witnessed at the peak of in-sight is the rivers of me that bend into the book, the ridges and the hilltops of me that rise to meet its meaning, the fields and the meadows of me cast into relief by its height. A 15-minute summary of key insights is just a series of images in a feed––alienated, devoid of context, absent of experience, mindlessly thumbed past on a journey to nowhere.

Contra my own wish for simple reading, I seek edification. The book is an edifice another mind built, and by reading it, I seek to amble their thoughtways and edify myself thereby. Like all dances, reading in this way requires my full participation. And so my primary intention for the new life of this blog is to record my responses––that is, to read responsibly.

Catching Up

My life has changed so much since April of 2015. I decided it would be good to write out a brief narrative of those changes so that I can reference themes or events in future posts. So here goes:

I remember myself in April of 2015 riding high on the wings of a brand new hope after long feeling paralyzed. The low point had been the month previous. One morning on my drive to school in early March, I had to pull over to the side of the road because I felt too stunned to drive. But stunned by what? A powerful nothing pulled at me––what Solomon Andrew might call "the absence that is a presence"––what Emily Dickinson might call "an element of Blank." I sat there, my hands gripped on the wheel the whole time, my eyes staring forward without seeing, breathing slowly and deliberately against the weight pressing in at my chest. It took me well over an hour before I could continue on my way to school.

In retrospect, I call this the weight of empty vision. Our hopes and dreams of the future enlighten us. I don't mean in some vague, mystical sense––I mean that it's actually easier to walk when you (think you) know where you're going (and whether or not you end up in that place)––that lacking a clear vision of what you want from the future can become an absence that presents as heaviness and pulls you down.

Weeks later, just before April dawned, I received news that I'd been admitted to the University of Chicago for an MA program. Suddenly, my future brightened, and the fog inside cleared a bit. I aspired to use my year there to build the portfolio of research I would need to enter a PhD program in Chinese history and eventually become a professor of history.

But what can I say of what actually happened? From my vantage four years later, I don't think I ever really knew that I wanted to be a historian. I knew that learning about the human past inspired me, that I wanted to write, that I enjoyed conversation, but I didn't know what archival research entailed. I didn't know what questions would motivate my scholarship. I didn't understand academic politics. All I knew was that some institution far away had decided to fund my way out of Utah and into a new world.

And what a rich, enticing world it was! Filled with more people like me than I'd ever encountered––people who wanted to stay up all night talking about the riddles of human society and history, who wanted to explore the mysteries of the mind, who understood the root rage and anger that inspired me to critique the culture I came from. But my rage was often too much for me to sleep, and I learned to self-medicate my way to slumber.

After a blur of books, papers, seminars, music, and parties, it was suddenly August of 2016, and I was graduating successfully but had no idea what to do next. I wanted to pursue a PhD, but I couldn't even afford the application fees. In September, I decided to stay in Chicago and move in with friends, find a way to support myself, and try to make it eventually into a PhD program. But I had to borrow money from a friend just pay rent.

That was a dark winter. I struggled to undo the knots of self-medication that tied me to my bed, but I found myself accompanied once more by the Blank. Terrified, I tutored and freelanced and barely, barely squeezed by. I lost a friend to cancer. Another close friend moved away. But throughout it all, I had one close companion: a roommate who I could speak to in the language of my thoughts, who supported my faltering heart, who believed in me. If the story of my life in the last four years contains a hero, it's her. 

In the darkness of that winter, I found a passage from Nietzsche on self-discovery that informed my struggle: 

Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has elevated your soul, what has mastered it and at the same time delighted it? Place these venerated objects before you in a row, and perhaps they will yield for you, through their nature and their sequence, a law, the fundamental law of your true self. Compare these objects, see how one complements, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they form a stepladder upon which you have climbed up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not hidden deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you normally take to be yourself. 

What was the character of the soul that hung suspended above me? Who could I yet become? I contemplated my purpose in life over and over again that winter, and the further back I reached into my memory, the more firmly I believed that the law of my nature had always been to write. I began trying to draft novels in third grade. I've journaled consistently most of my life. I've written poems for as long as I've been able to write at all. So I began trying to jump-start my writing practice, but it felt like trying to start that old mower my family kept in our barn––like I was stuck yanking the pull cord of an engine unwilling to spin.

Slowly, though, everything else in my life improved. I started teaching for a few months in early 2017 and had a discretionary income again. Then a few months later, I was hired by a marketing research company and started making a real salary. I could finally go to the doctor, update my glasses prescription, buy new clothes. But it didn't last very long.

One morning in July of 2017, I woke up to discover the muscles of my hips bound so tight it felt like I was wearing a corset beneath my skin. I'd had chronic back pain since the age of eighteen, but I'd always been able to walk through it. That morning, I was completely stuck. I could barely move, let alone stand to walk. Luckily, though, I was still living with my hero. She rushed home to care for me.

After a week of being in bed, I could walk for a few days. Then it hit again, and I spent another week barely able to stand before my muscles softened enough to limp around. The doctor thought it was just a muscle spasm at first, but then my torso contorted, and both of my legs started firing with sciatica. Then my doctor thought it was ankylosing spondylitis, but I was presenting so many strange symptoms that my physical therapist was flummoxed. For two months, my insurance denied an MRI, and I was trapped hobbling through strikes of pain.

Slowly, my condition deteriorated until one day I could barely lift my legs, and another roommate brought me to the ER. An emergency MRI revealed that my two lowest discs had both herniated in two directions. Discs usually herniate in one direction, and the bidirectional herniation had caused all sorts of atypical symptoms, like the weird contortion of my torso and bilateral sciatica.

An emergency surgery was scheduled for the next day. I spent a total of 18 days in the hospital that month: first for surgery and recovery, and then for a second surgery to clear out an infection that developed in my spine and threatened my life. In the end, I had to have a PIC IV inserted into my arm so that for the next two months, I could inject powerful antibiotics into my blood each morning.

By January of 2018, I was back to working and leading a normal life. The experience of surgery and recovery inspired a new focus on health and fitness, and I started working with a personal trainer. My physical condition steadily improved, and my mental health improved along with it.

In September of 2018, I decided I wanted to make more gay friends. So I downloaded Grindr again, but I was explicit in my profile that I was just looking for friends. A guy named Zahid started talking to me. He'd just moved to Chicago from San Francisco, and he was looking to make friends, too. We met up one day and ended up spending the entire day together. And then we spent the next day together––and the next, and the next, and the next. Although we'd just been looking for friends, it was immediately apparent we'd discovered in each other something much more than that.

The whole experience was so delightful and surprising to me. I'd never dated before, and I'd resigned myself to just being single forever. Zahid woke me up from a broken record of internalized self-doubt and taught me the enlivening joy of simply loving and being loved. I ended up taking him home to visit my family for Christmas. They welcomed him with open arms, and he made special efforts to connect with them, too. It was better than I'd ever dreamed it could be. It left me feeling the happiest and wholest I think I've ever felt.

This year, my relationship with Zahid has continued to blossom. We recently moved in together in a lovely apartment in downtown Chicago. We live here with his dog, Toby, in a space filled with art and plants. He works as a software engineer, and I'm working as a design researcher. I'm enjoying my job, growing in my career, and my life feels the most settled it's ever been.

As my life has stabilized, I feel new energy and motivation to apply myself to reading and writing again. And that's why I'm restarting this blog.

There we go––all caught up :)

Back to blogging

It's been a little over four years since I last posted on this blog, and I've decided I want to start writing here again.

I miss regularly publishing on here. I think I stopped because the motivating forces behind my writing dissipated. I used this space to blog my way through a journey out of the closet and out of the LDS Church, but once I landed on my feet in Chicago away from the LDS community and interacting with people who had never known my closeted self, I didn't know what to write about. So I just stopped.

Well, I stopped writing here, at least. I've done a lot of journaling in notebooks, written a fair amount of poetry, tried my hand at fiction, and kept regular logs of stray thoughts that occur to me from time to time, but I haven't given any of them formal expression in a public way.

I've wanted to, though. I've tried to start a few different blogs, but it never goes anywhere. Eventually I've realized I don't need to start a new blog when I already have one that I'm not using. The themes and subjects may change, but there's something appealing about maintaining the public record I've already started.

After all, my purpose for blogging isn't to persuade, to inform, or to educate on a particular set of topics: it's to become. My philosophy of writing, in part, is this: that the practice of passing thoughts through the sieve of language refines, edifies, and elaborates who we are. It gives concrete form to the otherwise nebulous parts of ourselves that pass unformed through the open sky of the mind. Written expression forces such concentration that its practice causes discoveries we could never otherwise make in the distracted, flitting freedom of open contemplation. Writing is an anchor to the soul. I guess the practice of writing has itself become my deepest faith, really.

And of course, the hope implicit in a blog isn't just to write to me for myself: it's to engage with the thoughts of others. So I hope whatever I come up with in these pages ends up of interest and use to whoever stumbles on it.