A Psychological Approach to The Philosophy of Saintliness

A Psychological Approach to The Philosophy of Saintliness:
The Work and Lives of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and James
Abstract: Philosophical characterisations of ‘the saint’ have been inexorably affected by the deep-seated psychologies of individual philosophers, to the extent that no subsequent philosophy of saintliness is complete without adequate consideration of these aspects. This thesis shall be demonstrated via a comparative investigation of the lives and philosophies of three of the great Philosophers of Saintliness - Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James.

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Preamble
Given both that ethics has always been a matter of philosophical concern, and that saints are commonly supposed to epitomise moral righteousness, it should be of little wonder that a great many philosophers have made use of the notion of saintliness in their work. Of the so-called ‘Great Philosophers,’ the following exemplify this tendency: St. Augustine, Martin Luther, Voltaire, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, William James, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, John Hick, and Aldous Huxley.
Although the above considerations and invocations combined ought to suffice in legitimising ‘the saint’ as a proper philosophical concept (as opposed to, say, a theological one), it is my intention to add a further dimension to our appreciation of The Philosophy of Saintliness.  The contention of this essay is, therefore, that the philosophical characterisations of ‘the saint’ have been inexorably affected by the deep-seated psychologies of the individual philosophers themselves, and that no subsequent philosophy of saintliness is complete without adequate consideration of these aspects. This thesis shall be demonstrated via a comparative investigation of the lives and philosophies of three of the great Philosophers of Saintliness - Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James.

1.2 Structural Outline
In the first instance I shall argue that, given the historical evidence, we can easily (re)establish a portrait of Arthur Schopenhauer as a particularly miserly, misanthropic, and conceited person. In this light it appears inconsistent, as Søren Kierkegaard aptly noted, that while Schopenhauer himself made no (successful) attempts towards personifying or imitating either the charitable saint or the ascetic saint, his philosophy nevertheless extols both as the highest possible attainment for humankind and the universe respectively. I shall consequently argue that a re-evaluation of the supposed authenticity of Schopenhauer’s philosophy is required; one that takes into account the apparently second-hand and/or speculative nature of his masterpiece, The World as Will and Idea. The cultural context in which Schopenhauer was writing and the inspiration he reaped from reading the then recently introduced Eastern philosophies will be evidenced as further supporting this interpretation.

Secondly, the development of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche will be explored, from the triadic conception (qua Schopenhauer) of the saint, the artist, and the philosopher, to his own unique concept of the Übermensch.
Although Nietzsche himself claimed that the nature of the Übermensch was essentially unknowable, he nevertheless implicitly characterised ‘him’ as an artistic philosopher, long devoid of any resemblance to the saint. Subsequently, the thesis of Alexander Nehamas’s Nietzsche; Life as Literature will be employed as a springboard for claiming that Nietzsche’s (perhaps unconscious) motivation for this progression was that he no longer personally aspired towards saintliness - only artistic philosophy - and so his philosophical ideals followed suit.

Finally, in response to Richard M. Gale’s two possible explanations as to how William James could have been so sensitive to and appreciative of religious mystical experiences whilst simultaneously claiming to have not had any himself, I will suggest a third alternative. Taking the lead from the first chapter of John. J. Shea’s work, I shall argue that William James was motivated by the religious conviction and passionate spirituality of his father, the late Henry James Snr., in attempting to philosophically discredit what was increasingly regarded in academic circles as the absurdity of religious belief.
From these psychological insights, I shall subsequently conclude that we are also provided with a more satisfying alternative to Charles Taylor’s recent evaluation of James’s Varieties of Religious Experience.
Charles Taylor’s Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited seeks to locate James’s philosophy of religion within a broader historical context so as to account for the argumentative strategy James adopted. Again, I shall suggest that James’s relationship with his father offers a more directly satisfying explanation of James’s intentions.

With the above arguments having been made, I shall ultimately conclude with a few brief remarks to further explicate and establish the central metaphilosophical thesis of this essay; namely, that any exhaustive Philosophy of Saintliness needs to take into account the personal psychological makeup of its individual philosophical proponents.

2. ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
The philosopher who advocated denying the ego could hardly have been a greater egotist or more concerned with his personal and material wellbeing.

2.1 The Man
Apart from, most notably, a young Friedrich Nietzsche,  Arthur Schopenhauer has consistently fallen foul of highly critical personal appraisals – far be it for me to deviate from tradition:
Born in Danzig in 1788, Arthur Schopenhauer’s father committed suicide not long after. Although this sad occurrence provided the son with solid economic support,  it seems fair to claim that his father’s passing simultaneously deprived him of much emotional support. His mother, a popular novelist of the time, soon took to polyandry following the ‘loss’ of her conservative husband. Needless to say, young Arthur was appalled. The mother-son relationship ultimately ended when, following an impassioned quarrel, Frau Schopenhauer pushed the young philosopher down a flight of stairs; whereupon he cruelly, though quite accurately, predicted that she would be known to prosperity only through him. Thereafter he moved to Dresden and lived alone. Concerning the alienation that Schopenhauer felt at this time, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote (perhaps with some personal insight):
He was absolutely alone, with not a single friend; and between one and none there lies an infinity.

Always pessimistic, it was in this particular phase of his life that the solitary Schopenhauer most acutely cultivated his cynicism. He became gloomy, paranoid and obsessive - locking his pipes and tobacco away immediately after use, never trusting his neck to a barber’s razor, and sleeping with loaded pistols ready to hand. The result of this period, however, was the masterpiece The World as Will and Idea. With this work, Schopenhauer was so confident that he had overcome Philosophy’s fundamental dilemmas that he toyed with the idea of having a signet ring made, bearing an image of the Sphinx tossing herself down into the abyss as she had promised to do if her riddles were ever answered. Regardless of whether or not he was being unwarrantedly arrogant in this sentiment, his work was poorly received, with the majority of the first edition ending up as waste paper. In response, however, the great philosopher took solace in the elitism of Litchenberger, who wrote:
Works like this are as a mirror: if an ass looks in you cannot expect an angel to look out.

Eventually Schopenhauer was invited to lecture in Berlin, but as he defiantly scheduled his classes at the very same hours that the then immensely popular Georg Hegel was lecturing, the resulting poor levels of attendance left him dejected, and the series was discontinued.
At the age of thirty-three, Schopenhauer fell for a 19-year-old singer. The relationship continued for ten years, though, for reasons essentially unknown, only sporadically. Alain de Botton, in his popular work, The Consolations of Philosophy, suggests, however, that Schopenhauer’s apparent lack of commitment was born of a preference for polygamy.  Yet when we look to Schopenhauer’s own explicit commendation of the practice, I think that, taking into consideration his own troubled family life, we can perceive a philosophy affected by deep psychological anguish:
[A widespread practice of male polygamy would mean] the restoration of women to her rightful and natural position, the subordinate one, and the abolition from the world of the lady, with her ridiculous claims to respect and veneration …

But Schopenhauer’s attitude was more misanthropic than purely misogynistic, as we can glean from the following anecdote related by Will Durant in his work, The Story of Philosophy:
At the beginning of each meal [Schopenhauer] would put a gold coin on the table before him; and at the end of each meal he would put the coin back into his pocket. It was, no doubt, an indignant waiter who at least asked him the meaning of this invariable ceremony. Schopenhauer answered that it was his silent wager that the English officers dining there should talk of anything else than horses, women, or dogs.

As final evidence of the degree of his egotism, let it be noted that all throughout his career, Schopenhauer requested of even his remotest acquaintances that they send him copies of any mention of his name in the media. Again as Nietzsche wrote:
It makes us sad to see [Schopenhauer] hunting for the slightest sign that he was not utterly unknown; and his loud, too loud, triumphing when he did finally acquire readers (‘legor et legar’)  has something painfully moving in it. All the traits he exhibits that are not those of a great philosopher are those of the suffering human being fearful for the safety of his noblest possessions…

2.2 The Philosophy of An Immoral Moralist
As related above, Schopenhauer’s masterpiece, The World as Will and Idea was, in part, the product of the most pessimistic stage of his life. Unsurprisingly, it is also exceedingly pessimistic. Going one step further than Buddhism’s precept that all life is suffering, Schopenhauer concludes that ours is ‘the worst possible world.’ Consequently, the highest possible attainment for not only a human, but indeed for the universe itself, is self-annihilation. The denial of what is otherwise the universal force of The Will to Life via asceticism is, however, the only way to achieve such annihilation, and therefore is the highest of Schopenhauer’s five incremental ethical categories: cruelty (harm to others); egoism (profit to self); righteousness (equilibrium of advantage); charity (profit to others); and asceticism (denial of self).

At first glance, the philosophy outlined above may not seem overly inconsistent. However, a dilemma arises when we relate the more eminent categories of Schopenhauer’s philosophy with the earlier characterisation of him as a gloomy, miserly, and egotistic person. As Søren Kierkegaard wrote:
After reading [Schopenhauer’s] ethics through, one discovers – he is, of course, that honest – that he is not such an ascetic himself. Consequently he does not himself represent the contemplation that is attained through asceticism, but a contemplation which relates contemplatively to that asceticism.
This is extremely suspect; even here the most fearful sort of melancholic voluptuousness, a corrupting kind, can be concealed, likewise a profound misanthropy, etc.
It is also suspect in that it is always dubious to propound an ethics which does not exercise such a power over the teacher that he expresses it in himself.

Of course, the apparent irony was not lost on Schopenhauer either. The World as Will an Idea itself contains the following passage, which might well be regarded as something of a pre-emptive defence on Schopenhauer’s part:
A saint may be full of the absurdest superstition, or, on the contrary, he may be a philosopher, it is all the same. His conduct alone certifies that he is a saint, for, in moral regard, it proceeds from knowledge of the world and its nature, which is not abstractly but intuitively and directly apprehended, and is only expressed by him in any dogma for the satisfaction of his reason. It is therefore just as little needful that a saint should be a philosopher as that a philosopher should be a saint; just as it is not necessary that a perfectly beautiful man should be a great sculptor, or that a great sculptor should himself be a beautiful man. In general, it is a strange demand upon a moralist that he should teach no other virtue than that which he himself possesses.

However, as we shall see, the substance of the former portion of the passage, in Schopenhauer’s case at least, precludes our acceptance of its latter claim.

To be a saint, according to Schopenhauer, requires no abstract knowledge of why or what it is that he or she does; it is enough that they act in a saintly fashion. Indeed, the type of knowledge known by the saint is directly experiential and, regardless of whatever fanciful theories one might invoke to try to account for it, it cannot be adequately expressed in abstraction.
Similarly, Schopenhauer reasons, vice versa, that the contrary holds for the philosopher; moralists need not act morally themselves in order to propound true philosophical ethics. Analogically, he stresses that a sculptor who creates a beautiful piece need not be beautiful himself; a point readily validated empirically.
Nevertheless, I think it fair to claim that the sculptor must have, in one sense or another,  some knowledge of what is beautiful in order to create a beautiful piece. Schopenhauer, however, has excluded the immoral moralist from both concrete and abstract knowledge of the saint that his philosophy is seeking to abstractly characterise. As he himself says:
… genuine goodness of disposition, disinterested virtue, and pure nobility do not proceed from abstract knowledge. Yet they do proceed from knowledge; but it is a direct knowledge, which can neither be reasoned away, nor arrived at by reasoning, a knowledge which, just because it is not abstract, cannot be communicated, but must arise in each for himself, which therefore finds its real and adequate expression not in words, but only in deeds, in conduct, in the course of the life of man.

One may feel inclined here to contend this point by noting that this passage was primarily intended to bolster the sentiment of The World as Will and Idea’s reccurring maxim, velle non discitur.  That saintly knowledge is excluded from the realm of the abstract is meant only to add weight to Schopenhauer’s following argument as to why it is beyond the reach of the majority of us:
It would [be] absurd to expect that our moral systems and ethics produce virtuous, noble, and holy men, as that our aesthetics will produce poets, painters, and musicians.

Normally such a claim would not be so detrimental to an ethical philosophy. However, Schopenhauer’s ethics is intimately related to his metaphysical system. This is, in part, the genius of Schopenhauer. But it is also his downfall, because, if saintly knowledge is excluded not only from abstract conceptualisation, but from those who do not themselves live the saintly life, then surely Schopenhauer has cut himself off from personally perceiving the true metaphysical nature of the universe, and thus from authentically communicating to his audience the supposed wisdom/knowledge of The World as Will and Idea.
But does this mean that his philosophy is wrong? Well, to answer this further question, I recommend we take a step back and consider the historical and philosophical background of the thirty-year-old genius who composed this masterpiece.

2.3 Schopenhauer’s Eastern Influence
Even those who warn us from understating the influence of Immanuel Kant on Schopenhauer’s philosophical development must concede, as Bryan Magee did, that “of the major figures in Western philosophy, Schopenhauer is the one who has the most in common with Eastern thought.”  Indeed, Schopenhauer himself referred to Buddhists as his fellow-believers. But, although Schopenhauer emphasises the originality of his own thinking whilst simultaneously marvelling at the ‘coincidences’ it shares with that of the Eastern religions,  his indebtedness to and high regard of Eastern thought cannot be overstated:
The direct exposition of [the living knowledge of eternal justice that] we find in the Vedas, the fruit of the highest human knowledge and wisdom, the kernel of which has at last become accessible to us in the Upanishads is the greatest gift of this century.

It was reputedly the ‘Orientalist’, Frederick Mayer, a friend of Frau Schopenhauer’s, who, prior to Arthur’s solitary retreat to Dresden, first extended the horizons of our young philosopher. It was in Dresden, however, that Schopenhauer’s consumption of “the Oupnek’hat, the Latin translation of the Upanishads, absorbed a great deal of his time.”  In this light, we can, with reasonable confidence, attribute the birth of The World as Will and Idea, not only to pessimism and genius, but to an Eastern influence as well.

2.4 Conclusion: The Life of Religion and The Thoughts of Philosophy
In this, the first of three sections working to establish my central thesis, a characterisation of Arthur Schopenhauer, the man, has been made in order to demonstrate that his personal life did not reflect the ideals of his philosophy. This, it was argued, is significant in so far as it excludes Schopenhauer, the philosopher, from the direct experiential knowledge of what his philosophy sought to abstractly express. In responding to the issue of whether or not this fact undermines the validity of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, if we take into account the profound influence Eastern thought had on Schopenhauer’s thinking, we can partly characterise The World as Will and Idea as an attempt to couch the central doctrines of the Eastern Religions in Kantian terminology. This conclusion, however, is not intended to definitively answer the motivating question of the validity of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Rather, it is to suggest that, whereas the Eastern insights are religiously experiential, Schopenhauer’s insights are philosophically speculative. As Dorothea Dauer wrote in her thesis, Schopenhauer as Transmitter of Buddhist Ideas:
Schopenhauer pushed the Buddhist ideas to extremes in his speculation, while the Buddha as a preacher wisely adhered to his middle-of-the-road policy and never expected what his followers could not possibly do in reality. Schopenhauer never had in mind the possibility of the effect of what he preached, but Buddha had. Buddha was more realistic, Schopenhauer in many cases merely toyed with interesting ideas.

This is as much to say that, while Gautama reputedly experienced enlightenment first-hand, Schopenhauer’s account is, at best, speculative and second-hand. In either case, however, unless we take the testimonies of their adherents, the metaphysical foundations of both requires that any definitive test of validity must make recourse to the direct, first-hand experience they both stress so emphatically.

3. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

3.1 Segue: Schopenhauer’s Influence on Nietzsche.
As Bertrand Russell aptly noted in the opening sentence of his mammoth History of Western Philosophy: “Nietzsche regarded himself, rightly, as the successor of Schopenhauer…”  Indeed, we need look no further than Nietzsche’s own writings to discern the profound influence that Schopenhauer had on his thinking. As Nietzsche recalls in the first of his published works, Untimely Meditations:
…whoever has felt what is means to discover among our tragelaphine men of today a whole, complete, self-moving, unconstrained and unhampered natural being will understand my joy and amazement when I discovered Schopenhauer: I sensed in him that I had discovered that educator and philosopher I had sought for so long.

It should therefore come as no surprise to discover that, in the same way that Schopenhauer conceived of his philosophy as amending the shortcomings of Immanuel Kant’s work, much of Nietzsche’s own, profoundly original philosophy progressed from a continuation, to more of a rectification, if not outright denial, of his predecessor’s work.

3.2 The Triad of Saint, Artist and Philosopher in Nietzsche’s Early Work.
Initially, Nietzsche conceived of a triad of the saint, the philosopher and the artist as forming the highest attainments possible for a human being. In his own words: “They are those true men, those who are no longer animal, the philosophers, artists and saints …”  And again:
This [triad] is the root of all true culture; and if I understand by this longing of man to be reborn as saint and genius, I know that one does not have to be a Buddhist to understand this myth.

This sentiment is entirely reminiscent of Schopenhauer, who held that it is only ‘the genius’ in artistic contemplation,  philosophical acuity  or saintly asceticism,  that can in any way transcend phenomenal suffering. Take, for example, the following passage of Nietzsche:
“… the genius longs more deeply for sainthood because from his watchtower he has seen further and more clearly than other men, down into the reconciliation of knowledge with being, over into the domain of peace and denial of the will, across to the other coast of which the Indians speak.”

And yet, although these passages express what are supposedly Nietzsche’s own (albeit adopted) personal inclinations,  he soon abandoned this supreme triad in favour of a single, unified concept – the Übermensch.

3.3 The Development of The Overman.
As Nietzsche’s philosophical life progressed, he became evermore disenchanted with much of what had inspired him in his youth. Although he had abandoned his once devout religious faith long before, in his early writings we can still glean a degree of reverence for Christianity. For instance:
One has only to recall what Christianity has gradually become through the greed of the state. Christianity is certainly one of the purest revelations of the impulse to culture and especially of the impulse to the ever-renewed production of the saint…

In contrast to this sentiment, by the time Nietzsche came to write the scathing polemic, The Antichrist, in 1888, his philosophy of the Overman and The Will to Power had become firmly enshrined in his thinking, leaving little room for saintliness. As Walter Kaufmann wrote:
In his early philosophy, Nietzsche had envisaged artist, saint, and philosopher as the supreme triad of humanity. [Later] he would still agree that these are the three types that have tried to rise above the mass of men, but he would evaluate them differently. The saint is now pictured as the man who has extirpated his passions and thus destroyed his chances of ever living the Good Life, while artist and philosopher employ their passions in spiritual pursuits and are the most nearly perfect of men; for the powerful life is the creative life.

Although the role that the Overman explicitly played in Nietzsche’s philosophy is too often overstated – the term Übermensch being employed only infrequently by Nietzsche himself – throughout his writings we can perceive an ever-present striving and desire to raise the bar for humanity. The saint, unfortunately, in Nietzsche’s view, is irrevocably a victim of ‘sin’ as it is understood by the psychohistorical theory of his genealogy of morality. As Jörg Salaquarda explains in his essay, ‘Nietzsche and the Judaeo-Christian tradition’:
[After hierarchies of power had been established by physical oppression,] from the “strong” among the slaves …. there arose another, important type of human being. They who had lost influence among their peers discovered the possibility of regaining power as leaders of the slaves. These “ascetic priests” offered to the slaves a new scapegoat on which to blame their sufferings: their own sinfulness. Combined with the promise of redemption for those who believed in God, and in God alone, this interpretation became irresistible. Historically appearing first in Judaism and reformulated in the Christian tradition, it brought about the first “revaluation of values.” The new interpretation of the ascetic priests succeeded by inspiring the slaves with a strong “sense of power” [“Gefühl der Macht”] that finally enabled them to overcome even the “masters.”

Just how these ‘saints’ were able to achieve such a profound feat, Nietzsche himself explains over the following two passages:
…The saint as the most powerful type of man-: it is this idea that has elevated so high the value of moral perfection. One must imagine the whole of knowledge labouring to prove that the moral man is the most powerful, most godlike. – The overcoming of the senses, the desires – everything inspired fear; the antinatural appeared as the supernatural, as something from the beyond –

Why the weak conquer.
… The sick and the weak have had fascination of their side: they are more interesting than the healthy: the fool and the saint – the two most interesting kinds of man – closely related to them, the “genius.”

3.4 Nietzsche’s Denial of Saintliness
Philosophically speaking, why it was that the saint was dropped from Nietzsche’s triad of human potentiality is obvious; if The Will to Power was to be, unlike Schopenhauer’s Will to Life, a truly universal principle, then at least for the sake of philosophical coherency, the ascetic saint’s apparent self denial (i.e. denial of willing) must, nevertheless, manifest The Will to Power via the type of double-think ‘displacement’ expressed in the above quotations. Psychologically speaking, however, we may need to take a further moment to consider the nature of Nietzsche’s characterisation of the human ideal to appreciate why the saint came to fall short by his estimation.

In his work, Nietzsche; Life as Literature, Alexander Nehamas seeks to demonstrate that for all of his posturing about how the Übermensch is as far removed from present-day humanity as we are from the apes,  Nietzsche strives to re-embody and idealise his own self as philosopher and artist throughout his entire body of work:
Nietzsche’s texts therefore do not describe but, in exquisitely elaborate detail, exemplify the perfect instance of his ideal character. And this character is none other than the character the very text constitutes: Nietzsche himself.

Indeed, this sentiment seems not to have been lost even on Nietzsche:

The ‘work,’ whether of the artist or of the philosopher, invents the person who has created it, who is supposed to have created it: ‘the great,’ as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction.

With this insight, we are provided yet another avenue by which to appreciate why the saint came to be abandoned from the Nietzschean canon. Nietzsche, although known as ‘the little saint’ in his devout youth, came to identify himself more as a philosopher and an artist and less and less as a saint as his life progressed. It is little wonder then, that in his philosophy he should have turned his back on his adolescent ideal. As he wrote in his ‘autobiography,’ Ecce Homo: “I do not want to be a saint, rather a buffoon. Perhaps I am a buffoon.”

3.5 Conclusion: Metaphilosophical Limitations of The Will to Power
Again, as in the case of Schopenhauer, these considerations are not aimed at refuting the validity of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Rather, they are intended to add another dimension to our appreciation of Nietzsche’s philosophy of saintliness. Indeed, one only need appreciate the supposedly all-consuming nature of The Will to Power to realise that Nietzsche could never coherently discount the role played by his own subjective psychology in the formulation of his philosophy. This then is to conclude, not that we must discount Nietzsche’s philosophy of saintliness, but rather that we must regard it in the light of his own personal self.

4. WILLIAM JAMES
My personal position is simple. I have no living sense of commerce with God. I envy those who have, for I know the addition of such a sense would help me immensely.

4.1 Non-Mystical Mysticism
In the recently published work, The Philosophy of William James: an Introduction, Richard M. Gale proposes the following two explanations as to how a self-avowed non-mystic, such as James, could be so sensitive to and appreciative of mystical experiences:  1) drawing an analogy between the fact that an inability to compose an Eroica symphony does not necessarily exclude a person from the ability to appreciate one, Gale suggests, in a move reminiscent of Schopenhauer’s sculptor analogy, that the same holds, mutatis mutandis, for James’s appreciation of mysticism; and 2) “… because [James] didn’t want to appear as some kind of a bleeding heart mystic engaged in special pleading,”  he lied about, or at least downplayed, his actual mystical sensibilities; the broad existence of which we can infer from his purposeful experimentation with conscious-altering drugs. Regardless of the validity of Gale’s explanations, I shall now offer a third alternative, which I believe to be far superior.

4.2 In Loving Memory of The Late Henry James Snr.
John J. Shea, in his work, Religious Experiencing: William James & Eugene Gendling, interprets James’s “grappling with religious feeling [as] the grapplings of a man who has both a need to understand and a genius for description.”  And yet, the question of why it was that this psychological yearning beset James has not, to my knowledge, been sufficiently addressed. Shea, it must be admitted, indirectly provides an answer, though it is only found implicitly in the guise of an account of James’s philosophical influences – the main source of which was his father.
Henry James Snr. was an immensely religious man,  and exerted a profound influence over his son, as is plainly evident from the following testimony of William James’s last, sadly unread letter to his dying father:
All my intellectual life I derive from you; and although we have often seemed at odds in the expression thereof, I’m sure there’s a harmony somewhere, and that our strivings will combine. What my debt to you is goes beyond all my powers of estimating, - so early, so penetrating and so constant has been the influence.

To assuage any question of false sentimentality here, we can further appreciate from the following letter James wrote to his wife, the passion with which he sought to justify, via his philosophy of religion, not only religious faith, but moreover the high esteem in which he held his own father:
You must not leave me till I understand a little more of the value and meaning of religion in Father’s sense, in the mental life and destiny of man. It is not the one thing needful as he said. But it is needful with the rest. My friends leave it altogether out. I as his son (if for no other reason) must help it to its rights in their eyes. And for that reason I must learn to interpret it aright as I have never done …

In this light, I believe we can readily concur with R. B. Perry in his description of The Varieties of Religious Experience as “in the first place, an act of filial piety.”

4.3 Conclusion: A Saintly Father?
The notion that William James’s need to understand and come to terms with the religious life that he did not have, as being motivated by his deep respect and love for his religious father, goes a long way, I believe, to accounting for Gale’s question of how a non-mystical individual such as James, could have such a profound sensitivity to and appreciation of mystical states. As Perry notes:
[James’s father] was to him the most vivid instance of that religious experience which consists in “an acute despair, passing over into an equally acute optimism, through a passion of renunciation of the self and surrender to the higher power.”

Indeed, if one looks to the chapter entitled ‘Saintliness’ in The Varieties of Religious Experience, the similarity of James’s characterisation of the saint is remarkable. James lists the following four characteristics of what he deems to be the ‘universal saint’ (i.e. “the same in all religions” ): 1) a feeling of a “wider life [and] of an Ideal Power” ; 2) a friendly continuity and willing self-surrender to the ideal power; 3) a feeling of “immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining self-hood melt down” ; 4) and “a shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious affections, towards ‘yes, yes’.”  These comparisons, however, are not intended to suggest that James’ characterisation of the saint was unduly extended to include his own father. Rather, it is my intention to draw a much broader conclusion.

4.4 Addendum: An Alternative to the Philosophy of Charles Taylor
By investigating the psychological life of William James, a promising avenue has been opened for better comprehending various aspects of his philosophy of religion. For instance, in Charles Taylor’s recent work, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited, James’s philosophy of religion is contextualised as belonging to a long historical movement towards an understanding of ‘God’ as sharing a personally intimate relation to the worshipper. As Taylor puts it: “[James] plainly belongs to that strand of [thought] which is ready to challenge the traditionally mediated revelation in the name of one’s inner inspiration.”  The Lateran Council of 1215 C.E., The Brethren of Common Life, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation are all counted as influential predecessors to William James’s work. This tendency is significant, Taylor explains, in so far as its influence had already permeated the beliefs of James and his audience, often to the point of atheism, leaving James little choice but to eschew any recourse to formal theology or organised, collective religion, and instead appeal to ‘the primacy of experience.’
Although Taylor is certainly correct in making such a broad contextualisation, I nevertheless feel that the more immediate psychological context espoused above is of equal, if not greater significance in explaining why it is that “James sees religion primarily as something that individuals experience.”  In writing of his Gifford lectures,  we can, I believe, confidently ascertain that James was indeed aware of the influential nature of those historical tendencies that Taylor invokes in his argument:
The problem I have set myself is a hard one: … to defend (against the prejudices of my “class”) “experience” against “philosophy” as being the real backbone of the world’s religious life.

Certainly, it is tempting to attribute the emphasis that James’s places on ‘the primacy of experience’ in his philosophy of religion as a fully conscious argumentative strategy to turn the atheist’s very own arguments against them. That is to say, that because the atheist contests the claims of religion on the grounds that 1) the philosophy/theology intended to establish such a religion is inadequate, and 2) the atheist has no personal religious experiences, James believes that if he can convince the atheist that the theist does, at the very least,  have actual ‘religious’ experiences - beneficial not only to the individual but to humanity as a whole - then he will have gone a significant way to refuting the atheist’s initial ground for their disbelief.
However, I think it is misguided to presume that James therefore resigned himself to only making the limited claims that his argumentative strategy would allow for; as if he would have liked to have more conclusively demonstrated the existence of God, but instead had to ‘make do’ with what he had. Rather, it is far more satisfying, in thinking back to the filial sentiment expressed by James in the previous sections, to understand the emphasis he placed on ‘the primacy of experience’ not as a direct result of broad historical tendencies, nor as the result of the pragmatic limitations of various argumentative strategies; William James’s philosophy of religion is best understood in terms of a reluctant atheist’s attempt to honour, justify, and respect the religious faith of those he admired most.

5. CONCLUSION
Throughout this essay, I have sought to add a further dimension to our appreciation of The Philosophy of Saintliness. By concomitantly examining the lives and philosophies of three of the ‘Great Philosophers’ of Saintliness, I have argued that we are better equipped to adequately regard and interpret their works. Essentially this is a metaphilosophical claim; i.e. that no philosophy of saintliness is complete without an adequate consideration of the psychological aspects involved. Just how a proponent who is actively engaged in the philosophy of saintliness is to take such seemingly self-reflective/psychoanalytical factors into account is, however, a matter for later consideration.