Spiritual & existential judgments

In the opening pages of The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James discusses the difference between spiritual judgements and existential ones. He explains that existential judgements are concerned with the nature of things and their origins, whereas spiritual judgements are concerned with the meaning and significance of these things, once they’ve come about. For example, maybe you’ve had a stressful encounter with someone, which gets you thinking: “This person always seems to think the worst of people. I wonder what happened in their childhood that made them that way?” According to James, this is an existential question because it’s trying to get to the bottom of this person’s distressing behavior. How did they learn this behavior? What’s their origin story? These kinds of questions root the meaning of the present in the circumstances of the past. When it comes to spirituality, on the other hand, the most important questions are not, “Why is that person that way? Or, “Why am I the way I am?” But rather, “What’s going on inside me right now? How do I feel about it? And how should I act on these feelings? What do I want to become?” I’d always been inclined to view spirituality as something that led people to get lost in a mystical realm that disconnects them from their day-to-day reality. And this is one reason why I found James’ perspective on spirituality so surprising and refreshing. He insists that spiritual questions are focused on what you’re experiencing right now and why these experiences matter to you. Put another way, spirituality is about being radically present, for yourself and for others. What happened in the past is not irrelevant, and all of the macro-structural forces that impinge on your life circumstances are also not irrelevant. But our inner lives are not just byproducts of the structural and past-oriented narratives that we use to organize our understanding of the world. Spiritual questions train us to use our personal struggles to face up to the indeterminacy of the present moment, which is always overflowing with more possibilities than we are able to imagine or anticipate… Philip Kretsedemas https://open.substack.com/pub/celineleboeuf/p/the-social-sciences-and-spirituality?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios