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.