Practice in Still Life 4: Cross-Pressured Spaces

Rough Weather, Dutch and English Fishing Boats, 1805 by Samuel Owen. Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust.

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Welcome to The Base Camp Newsletter.

These posts are part of the ongoing serialization of my new book Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures. (Full publication details are available here.)

A study of saints, mystics, monastics, and philosophers, the book explores how philosophical and contemplative practices transform our perception and understanding of reality.

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Thank you and enjoy the chapter.

— A.E. Robbert

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“There are certain emotions you can have in solidarity that you cannot have alone; the experience mutates into something else by the fact that it is shared.”

— Charles Taylor

Charles Taylor’s Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited has been on my mind as of late. The work itself is a commentary on James’s classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience and what it means for our present moment. Taylor’s engagement with James is fascinating precisely because it helps us understand both the prescience and the limitations of James’s emphasis on individual religious experience. What strikes me most is how James simultaneously anticipated our contemporary spiritual landscape—with its emphasis on personal authenticity and individual seeking, in Taylor’s vocabulary—while missing something central about the collective dimension of religious life. It’s this lack that Taylor picks up in his work.

On one level, Taylor’s texts offers an incisive critique of James—given in Taylor’s characteristically charitable style—but on another, perhaps more important level, he is diagnosing a deeper understanding of our own existential moment and its challenges. At the heart of this narrative lies James’s pronounced emphasis on the personal and experiential dimensions of religion. Taylor opens by drawing James out on the latter’s own definition of religious experience. For James, “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine”¹ constitute the primary locus of religious life, while institutions and collective practices take on a decidedly secondary role. It is this ordering of experience over institution, of the individual over the collective, that forms the basis of Taylor’s critical engagement with James.

In what follows, I trace three key aspects of Taylor’s study. First, I examine his critique of James’s emphasis on personal experience, showing how this individualistic framework shapes modern spirituality. Second, I explore what Taylor calls the “malaise of modernity”—how our emphasis on individual autonomy creates both freedom and a crisis of meaning. This malaise stems in part from the success of the individualistic turn that James championed, where our liberation from traditional religious structures also disconnects us from shared frameworks of significance. Finally, I consider Taylor’s notion of “cross-pressured spaces,” which can help us understand how we might navigate between individual and collective forms of religious life in our secular age.

These questions matter deeply today. My view is that we need to understand both the gains and losses of this shift—the liberation from rigid hierarchies and access to authentic spiritual exploration on one hand, versus the dissolution of shared meaning and communal identity on the other. James’s celebration of individual experience captured something vital about spiritual and religious experience in their modern forms, but Taylor helps us see what we might be missing—and what we might need to recover—in our relentless drive toward individual practice and the atomism that comes downstream from this emphasis. Let us begin, then, with Taylor’s critique of James’s emphasis on personal religious experience.

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Critique of Personal Experience

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On Taylor’s account, James’s way of thinking about religious life is always and foremost the outgrowth of a particular individual’s feeling. In other words, it is rooted, first, in what we could call a phenomenological encounter, a meeting of the person with the transcendent. Second, it is primarily from this person that a religious orthodoxy develops, and it is here where we see James’s religious preferences most pronounced. On his telling, the legislative architecture that grows out from this initial primacy of feeling is a derivative thing. Churches, for example, “play at best a secondary role, in transmitting and communicating the original inspiration.”² For James, says Taylor, “The full intensity of experience is always to some extent blunted as the pattern of spirituality comes to be adopted by large groups. The intense heat of the original feeling cools; what was ‘acute fever’ becomes ‘dull habit.’”³

Here we can see that James’s text, first published in 1902, is quite precisely contemporary with our own moment of religious and spiritual seeking—the emphasis is on the individual, on experience, and moves away from comprehensive theory and corporate belonging. This emphasis amounts to what Taylor sees as a problematic focus on religious feelings over religious ideas—a primacy of the felt sense of ultimacy as opposed to the theology of reason. As Taylor notes, earlier incarnations of Christian religion in the West would have found strange this bifurcation between personal inward commitment and the collective ritual life of the religious community.

Three further aspects of Taylor’s critique seem particularly important: his historical analysis of how we moved from traditional to modern forms of religious life (centered on the rise of nominalism and voluntarism that replaced shared cosmic orders with individual will as the primary locus of religious meaning), his insight into how religious experience is deeply shaped by its social dimension, and his suggestion that we need new ways of bridging individual spiritual authenticity with collective religious practice. This tension feels especially relevant now, as we navigate between the undeniable gains in personal freedoms that modern political life has brought us and the crisis of meaning that this same individualism has helped create. It’s also worth noting that, in being a widespread phenomenon among large groups of people today, the emphasis on the individual becomes its own doctrine—the doctrine of the individual, we could say.

And this is Taylor’s point. James, for all his depth of understanding, misses this communal element of religious life. Here’s Taylor:

What James cannot seem to accommodate is the phenomenon of collective religious life, which is not just the result of (individual) religious connections, but which in some way constitutes or is that connection. In other words, he hasn’t got place for a collective connection through a common way of being.⁴

This elevating of individual experience emerges from and speaks to distinctly modern developments in religious consciousness. It manifests in what Taylor identifies as a polarization between following religious laws or commands without examination, and devotional practices that open one to inner divine guidance. This polarization, while creating space for authentic individual spiritual exploration, also contributes to what Taylor diagnoses as a broader issue emerging from modernity itself.

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The Malaise of Modernity

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While Taylor suggests these approaches need not be antagonistic, their separation becomes particularly apparent in the divide between religious experience and theology proper, which, as we just noted must, on James’s account, take a backseat to the primacy of personal encounter. This insight opens up a question about the very nature of religious experience itself. As Taylor asks, “There are certain emotions you can have in solidarity that you cannot have alone; the experience mutates into something else by the fact that it is shared. How much of what James thinks of as individual experience is socially enhanced or affected in this way?”⁵ This double movement in Taylor’s critique—identifying both the constitutive role of collective religious life and the transformative power of shared experience—demonstrates how James’s framework misses something essential about religious life. The question is not simply whether religious experience can occur in isolation or requires a social context; rather, it’s about how the collective dimension shapes and transforms the nature of religious experience itself. This historical development helps explain the peculiar shape of modern religious life that both James and Taylor analyze. The emphasis on individual religious experience that James celebrates can’t be singled out as a modern innovation alone; rather, it’s the culmination of a long process by which religious life became increasingly understood in terms of voluntary choice and personal seeking rather than participation in a given cosmic order.

We can see this tendency of post-enlightenment thought vividly diagnosed in Taylor’s analysis, where he identifies the radically modern Aufklärung (or Age of Enlightenment) as attempting to ground moral universality purely in rational self-determination. According to Taylor, the deist and materialist philosophers of the Enlightenment carried out a radical transformation, rejecting any notion of Providence in favor of a purely immanent vision of morality. If moral judgments could no longer be grounded in either ancient cosmic hierarchies or divine providential order, they had to emerge solely from rational reflection on the consequences of our acts. We can see this shift exemplified in Immanuel Kant’s famous 1784 essay “What is Enlightenment?,” where he celebrates the courage to use one’s own understanding without guidance from others, framing enlightenment as the triumph of autonomous moral reasoning. Taylor critiques this view as insufficient, arguing that it overlooks the shared practices, social contexts, and cosmic orderings that shape moral understanding, leaving Kant’s vision unmoored from the collective and transcendent frameworks that give ethics its depth. Enlightenment naturalism thus contains a central contradiction that Taylor is keen to expose. While promoting universal benevolence and the greatest happiness for the greatest number, it lacks the philosophical resources to ground or justify these moral aspirations.

In a sense, this emphasis on individual autonomy is not unlike James’s emphasizing of personal religious experience, though the philosophical implications differ markedly. To look at just one example, we could say that Kant restricts God to a necessary postulate of practical reason that lies beyond our theoretical knowledge, while James treats God as a live hypothesis validated through personal experience, whose truth is measured by its practical consequences rather than through abstract rational proofs. The differences aside, we can locate in both a very general similarity—as the two represent attempts to locate authority in the individual rather than in tradition or collective structures. Thus where the Enlightenment thinkers faced an internal contradiction in their moral theory, James’s focus on individual experience simply left unexplored the collective dimensions of religious life that Taylor seeks to recover.

This historical trajectory—whether expressed through Kantian rationalism or Jamesian experiential individualism— helps explain our contemporary spiritual landscape. Taylor critiques both Kant and James in different ways for prioritizing the individual over the communal, though in distinct ways: Kant’s rationalism elevates universal principles derived through autonomous reason, often detached from lived traditions, while James’s focus on personal religious experience embraces subjective authenticity at the expense of shared meaning.

When modern spiritual seekers insist that their religious practice must be individually tailored, they are inhabiting a conceptual space carved out by these modern theological developments. Taylor suggests this individualist turn has had ambiguous consequences. While it helped create space for genuine religious freedom and personal authenticity, it also contributed to the atomization of religious life and the loss of those collective forms of meaning that earlier religious traditions took for granted. Our current religious predicament demonstrates a deep tension at the heart of post-Enlightenment modernity. The emphasis on individual freedom and authentic self-expression—values that James both reflected and helped shape—has created unprecedented space for spiritual creativity and personal religious exploration.

This opening has enabled forms of spiritual seeking and religious hybridization that would have been unthinkable in earlier eras, leading to new forms of religious experience and expression. But this very emphasis on individuality has also contributed to what Taylor elsewhere calls the “malaise of modernity.”⁶ Where the modern emphasis on individual rights and autonomy has brought important freedoms, Taylor argues it has also led to a loss of larger moral horizons and shared meanings that previously gave life purpose. This creates what Taylor calls a “flattening” of life—a diminishment of the spiritual and moral dimensions that once provided humanity with depth and orientation, as religious experience becomes increasingly focused on subjective satisfaction rather than transformation within a meaningful cosmic order.

The atomization of religious life, its reduction to purely personal experience, has contributed to a broader crisis of meaning and belonging that characterizes the contemporary world. This, we could say, inverts the traditional relationship between religious practice and human identity. Where traditional religious life called for individuals to conform themselves to established practices, doctrines, and communal forms of life, modern spiritual seekers increasingly expect religious practices to conform to their own predetermined sense of identity and spiritual needs. Recalling Kant one more time, we could note that his critical philosophy famously inverted the classical sense in which cognition was seen to conform itself to the world, whereas today there’s a tendency to view the world as that which conforms to the structures of human cognition. Similarly, in this modern shift, spiritual seekers expect the religious world to conform to their personal frameworks rather than the reverse. To put a finer point on the issue, modern educated people are in many ways not interested in conforming to a historical grouping of teachings that they ought to fit into; they are instead interested in conforming these teachings to their own individual desires. Ironically, the widespread nature of this emphasis on the individual leads to a surprising result: The nonconformist is, today, the highest and most common form of conformity.

What the earlier, more collective forms of religious tradition provided—and what James’s framework struggles to account for—was not merely a set of beliefs or experiences, but a thick web of social practices, shared and transcendent meanings, and communal bonds that helped situate individual life within a larger framework of significance. The very idea that religious practice might transform us into something other than what we already are—that it might challenge rather than confirm our existing identity—becomes increasingly foreign to modern sensibilities. We see this Jamesian emphasis clearly reflected in contemporary spiritual trends, including in the rise of meditation apps that promise individual transformation without community involvement; the popular refrain “I’m spiritual but not religious” that privileges personal experience over institutional and ontic dedication (the commitment to the fundamental reality claims of a tradition); and the growing practice of selecting elements from multiple religious traditions to create an individualized spiritual path as a solo practitioner, or even as an eclectic group of relatively atomized but nonetheless similarly minded individuals.

We find ourselves, then, in a complex position vis-à-vis James’s legacy. On one hand, we are undeniably downstream from both Enlightenment individualism and James’s emphasis on personal and empirical religious experience. His focus on mystical and transformative experiences associated with religious practice helped shaped the space for a religious life that could survive the downsides of secular modernity, but after more than a century of viewing the Jamesian approach as an advance on earlier corporate forms of religious tradition, we ought now consider its limitations. The very success of this individualistic turn in religious life has revealed how much we have lost in abandoning or diminishing the collective dimensions of religious practice.

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Cross-Pressured Spaces

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In his later work A Secular Age, Taylor would develop this analysis further through his concept of “cross-pressured” spaces, describing how modern individuals find themselves caught between competing pulls—both between individual and collective forms of religious life, and between immanent and transcendent frameworks of meaning altogether. For Taylor, modern secular society is not simply defined by the absence of religion or the triumph of immanent materialism. Rather, we live in a time where both religious and secular worldviews exert pressure on us. We could point here to another inversion: While the religious and the secular have in some sense always existed as their own overlapping magisteria, in the modern world the secular world has come to form the base layer, while the religious one has become optional, whereas before the religious sphere was non-optional and the secular world showed up only as a perforation within this larger framework. This shift notwithstanding, today even the most committed atheist might feel moments of transcendent wonder or meaning that cannot be reduced to purely materialist explanations, while devoted believers often find themselves adopting thoroughly secular ways of thinking about much of life. We are, in Taylor’s terms, cross-pressured between an “immanent frame” that focuses on natural, this-worldly explanations, and persistent intimations of transcendence that suggest something beyond this frame.

The cross-pressured space deepens Taylor’s critique of James by showing how the individualization of religious life takes place within this broader context of competing worldviews. Most of us live with multiple pressures simultaneously. We feel the appeal of individual spiritual exploration while also sensing the inadequacy of purely private forms of meaning-making; we experience moments of transcendent meaning while also being thoroughly shaped by secular, immanent ways of understanding the world. We might practice meditation alone while yearning for community or maintain formal religious affiliations while struggling with traditional authority, all while navigating between scientific materialism and religious ways of understanding reality.

The task before us, then, is to find new ways to understand and articulate how personal religious experience relates to collective religious life within this cross-pressured space—not by simply choosing one side of these tensions, but by learning to live creatively within them. James helped us understand the power and authenticity of individual religious experience, but Taylor’s work, developed across these several books, helps us see how this individualistic turn in religious life plays out in a world where both belief and unbelief have become challenging options, where both immanent and transcendent frameworks shape our understanding, and where the search for meaning must somehow navigate these crosscurrents of modern life.

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This chapter is an excerpt from Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures, by A.E. Robbert, out now in Kindle, paperback, and ebook formats. Consider buying a copy today. All proceeds go towards supporting the research and writing you find here at The Base Camp.

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1. James as quoted in Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today, 5.

2. Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today, 5.

3. Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today, 19.

4. Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today, 24.

5. Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today, 29

6. Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: Canada, House of Anansi Press, 2024).