Our Sense of Time

I’m reading again a book which was completed in 1899. At least I presume that was the year because the book, William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, was first presented in 1900 as the second Gifford Lecture given at Edinburgh. By 1900, I learned today, the Eiffel Tower in Paris had already been in place for a decade. It was opened to the public on March 31, 1889—and since Google is featuring the tower today, now everybody knows. A hundred and twenty-six years ago! Did William James ever go up to see Paris from that height? My own reaction was a slight startle of surprise. That long ago? Somehow what I was reading—and Varieties is one of several books I’m reading in parallel from that time—does not smoothly integrate with this monument of technological self-assertion. At the same time, reading writings from that period had also struck me with the modernity of the views I was absorbing. All times, ultimately, reflect all aspects of a society, not merely its thought or its technology. And this coincidence in time, for me, is one of the proofs of that.

Just to stay with wondrous constructs, the Chartres Cathedral was completed in 1220. Looking for significant figures in that time, I come up with Hildegard of Bingen (who died while it was being built but 31 years before its completion), Francis of Assisi  (who died six years after the cathedral was done), and Roger Bacon (who was a boy of six the year when Chartres was finished). It all sort of fits, you might say.

Existential and Spiritual Judgement

The question, What are the religious propensities? and the question, What is their philosophic significance? are two entirely different orders of question from the logical point of view; and, as a failure to recognize this fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insist upon the point a little….

In recent books on logic, the distinction is made between two orders of inquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? how did it come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second, What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once here? The answer to the one question is given in an existential judgement or proposition. The answer to the other is a proposition of value, what the Germans call a Werturteil, or what we may, if we like, denominate a spiritual judgement. Neither judgement can be deduced immediately from the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations, and the mind combines them only by making them first separately, and then adding them together.

     [William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 1]

I read this paragraph the first time ever on my first day in college—while waiting for the opening ceremony of our Freshman year to begin. I understood it, no doubt about it, but not the way I do now. Here is the methodological answer to many puzzles that involve matter and mind, body and soul, and so on. There is experience, and who can deny it. Then there is a judgement made of its meaning. And the “examined life” is a fusion of these two.