Author’s final draft, please cite published version Phenomenology, Neurology, Psychiatry, and Religious Commitment Ian James Kidd University of Nottingham Forthcoming in Alasdair Coles and Frazer Watts (ed.), Neurology and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), forthcoming. Abstract This chapter offers a phenomenological analysis of the nature of neuropsychiatric disorder and religious commitment, focusing upon a set of neglected affective states called existential feelings. I focus on the work of Matthew Ratcliffe and Mark Wynn and make extensive use of phenomenology of religion and phenomenology of neurology and psychiatry. After offering an account of existential feeling and their role in shaping experience, thought, and activity, it is argued that both neuropsychiatric illness and religious commitment ought to be understood in terms of altered existential feeling. Since existential feeling lies beyond the scope of empirical enquiry, it follows that the task of understanding neuropsychiatric illness and religious commitment is fundamentally phenomenological rather than neuroscientific. This suggests that careful analysis of the lived‐experience of people with neurological disease should play a primary role in understanding their religious life. 1. Introduction. This chapter offers a phenomenological analysis of changes in the structure of experience that fundamentally characterise both several main forms of neuropsychiatric illness and the nature of religious commitment. The use of the portmanteau term ‘neuropsychiatric’ acknowledges the fact that many of the conditions discussed in this chapter do not fit neatly within the shifting and unclear professional boundaries of psychiatry and neurology, a problem with which other chapters in this volume engage. In this chapter, in fact, I propose that these conditions are best understood phenomenologically in a way that challenges those professional partitions. Specifically, I argue that both neuropsychiatric illness and religious commitment both involve distinctive changes to the structure of first‐person experience that can be characterised phenomenologically in terms of altered existential feelings – a neglected set of affective states, currently a topic of research by philosophers, psychiatrists, and cognitive scientists. Later in the chapter, I go on to make the further, stronger claim that the fundamentally phenomenological character of neuropsychiatric and religious experience assigns investigative and interpretive priority to phenomenology rather than to neuroscience. As a caveat before beginning, my claim is not that neuropsychiatric illness and religious commitment are identical or that religiosity is pathological, though doubtless they can be, and indeed surely are, complexly related in many cases.1 Instead, the claim is that what a person experiences during neuropsychiatric illness and in religious commitment ought to be understood phenomenologically in terms of alterations in their existential feeling. 2. Existential feeling and neuropsychiatric illness. The term ‘existential feeling’ was introduced in a 2005 paper by the philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe to refer to a set of neglected affective experiences that are distinct from, but often conflated with, the more familiar set of emotions, feelings, and moods.2 Given this fact, it is Author’s final draft, please cite published version useful to begin a characterisation of existential feeling by explaining how they differ from emotions and moods, and how this makes them significant to our understanding of neuropsychiatric illness. The philosophical literature on emotions has tended to construe them either as intentional states, bodily feelings, or some combination of these two.3 An emotion is an intentional state in the sense that it is directed towards particular objects, persons, or situations – as when I am angry at my broken laptop, or a lazy colleague, or an instance of social injustice. Such emotions can also take the form of bodily feelings, as when a person is ‘shaking with rage’ or ‘angry to the core’—indeed, most cases of emotion will plausibly have both intentional and bodily aspects. There is a standard philosophical list of emotions that usually includes anger, fear, grief, guilt, joy, and sadness and the attention and interest of philosophers has usually been directed at these. Ratcliffe argues, however, that this focus has tended to occlude a range of other affective states that are distinctive by virtue of their being pre‐intentional – they are not directed at particular things, but rather allow things to appear as things, which can then become the objects of intentional thoughts and attitudes. Such feelings are existential feelings and they pertain to our sense of being or belonging to the world, and which therefore provide the essential background to the more familiar set of explicit intentional emotions. Consider once again the emotion of anger. To experience anger – at an object, person, or situation – is already to find oneself within a world of structured activities, projects, and purposes because it only against this background that specific intentional attitudes become possible and intelligible. An object can after all only anger or frustrate us, or delight and please us, against the background of a sense of the world as a space of significant possibilities. Otherwise there is no reason why any particular object, person, or situation could elicit anger, joy, or any other emotion – they would not ‘stand out’ as features of our experience.4 It is this typically taken‐for‐granted sense of being in a world that the more familiar range of emotions and moods become possible – a sense of belonging to a world of significant possibilities for experience, thought, and action. It is this elusive sense of being in, and belonging to, a world that is captured by the concept of existential feeling. A useful way to further characterise these feelings is to consider the different ways in which people often try to describe their relationship to the world. Ratcliffe notes that use of the term ‘feeling’ is not restricted to emotions, given that it is also used to ‘articulate various ways of experiencing one’s relationship to the world that would not ordinarily be regarded as … emotional’ (2005:45). A person might feel distant, detached, or estranged from the world, such that it appears strange, oppressive, or forbidding; or one might feel in tune with, part of, or in harmony with the world, which might the feel homely, expansive, and peaceful.5 Such remarks are clearly not descriptions of particular features of the world – of this object or that situation – even if it might be certain objects or situations that prompt a person to recognise and report these feelings. These feelings are ‘world‐directed’ in the sense that they structure our relationship with the world as a whole, and thereby provide the experiential basis for our specific intentional and emotional experiences of specific objects, persons, and situations. An existential feeling therefore structures all experience, thought, and activity and constitutes a tacit and implicit sense of reality, in a way that constitutes our sense of being in a world at all. The task of describing existential feeling is difficult for two closely related reasons. The first is that because they pre‐structure all thought, experience, and activity, including our explicit practices of reflection and enquiry, they do not usually appear as objects of thought and experience. Generally a person is absorbed in their experiences and activities – enjoying a sunset, writing a book chapter, laughing with friends – such that the background conditions for their possibility do not appear at the level of consciousness awareness and attention.6 It generally takes special types of interest, practice, or experience to achieve such Author’s final draft, please cite published version recognition, a point emphasised throughout the writings of the founding figures of the phenomenological tradition.7 Consider, for instance, how during our everyday linguistic activity ‐ arguing, chatting, negotiating – we are not usually conscious of the grammatical rules and norms that are constantly and automatically pre‐structuring that activity—except during special situations (such as engaging in linguistic analysis or after a deliberate misuse of grammar for comedic purposes). Since existential feelings underlie and shape our experience, thought, and activity as a whole, it takes special effort and skill to recognise and explore them; indeed, phenomenology has to be practiced. The second reason why it is difficult to describe existential feelings is that they are inextricable from our sense of reality, our typically implicit sense of the world as a space of meaningful practical and experiential possibilities.8 Consider, for instance, my experience of being in my office as I am typing. This rather small and drab room appears as being filled with objects that are significant in various ways – a keyboard for typing, pens for writing, biscuits for nibbling – and these objects are experienced as being available, usable, as being ready and ‘on‐hand’ for practical use. These objects can, however, only appear as available and ready for use because they enjoy a more basic sense of reality: before an object can be available, usable, or significant it must first be experienced as being real, being there, and located within a structured array of other objects that collectively and holistically constitute a space of meaningful experience, thought, and activity. Since this sense of reality is usually quite stable it remains invisible and unrecognised, but in certain cases it can change and become conspicuous, such that once‐familiar objects and situations seem strange or unreal, in a sense that can be hard to articulate, and the world somehow feels somehow different or altered. A rich source of descriptions of alterations in a person’s sense of reality is the vast body of first‐person accounts of a variety of neuropsychiatric illnesses. Much of the literature in phenomenological neuropsychiatry and psychopathology is devoted to case studies of a range of specific neuropsychiatric conditions, including major depression, schizophrenia, depersonalisation disorder, and the Cotard and Capgras delusions.9 As I suggest later in the paper, many forms of religious or mystical experience likely also involve changes in the sense of reality. These case studies use phenomenological methods to describe changes in the structure of experience that characterise these conditions. Consider, for instance, the following accounts offered by persons with major depression. The first: ‘I awoke into a different world. It was as though all had changed while I slept: that I awoke not into normal consciousness but into a nightmare’ (quoted by Rowe 1978:269) The emphasis here is on change, whereas in the second it is on a felt sense of loss: ‘You know that you have lost life itself. You’ve lost a habitable earth. You’ve lost the invitation to live that the universe extends to us at every moment. You’ve lost something that people don’t even know it’ (quoted by Hornstein 2009:213) These two testimonies describe alterations in the overall structure of a person’s relationship to the world, rather than to a shift in the experience of specific objects or situations within that world; indeed, what is different is ‘the world’, ‘the universe’, or ‘life itself’. Ratcliffe suggests that these experiences can be understood in terms of the erosion of a formerly taken‐for‐granted sense of reality that ordinarily discloses the world as a structured space of significant experiential and practical possibilities. The loss of this sense is experienced, by the two persons quoted, as an emergence into a new and understandably ‘nightmarish’ Author’s final draft, please cite published version world. A third account is offered by a woman who describes the experience of melancholic depression as being akin to ‘falling into a deep black pit’ in which gradually enters a ‘state of nonbeing’ in which the ‘ability to live recedes’ (Whybrow 1997:23). These sorts of remarks are typical of first‐person accounts of a variety of neuropsychiatric illnesses and can be interpreted as reports of alterations in existential feeling and the sense of reality. The entire character of the world changes and alters as it becomes alien, strange, different, often in a way that is difficult to express and even more difficult to endure; especially since our capacity to identify and describe objects and experiences will depend upon a sense of reality that, in these cases, has suddenly changed. The interpretive utility of a phenomenological analysis of neuropsychiatric illness in terms of altered existential feeling is further demonstrated in cases where a person reports the temporary restoration of a sense of reality. Ratcliffe quotes the following remark by ‘Renee’, the eponymous subject of the Diary of a Schizophrenic Girl: ‘…when we were outside I realised that my perception of things had completely changed. Instead of infinite space, unreal, where everything was cut off, naked, and isolated, I saw Reality, marvellous Reality, for the first time. The people whom we encountered were no longer automatons, phantoms, revolving around, gesticulating without meaning; they were men and women with their own individual characteristics, their own individuality. It was the same with things. They were useful things, having sense, capable of giving me pleasure. Here was an automobile to take me to the hospital, cushions I could rest on […] What an unknown joy, to have an influence on things; to do with them what I liked and especially to have the pleasure of wanting the change’ (Sechehaye 1970:105‐6) A striking feature of this rich and poignant passage is the restoration of Renee’s sense of the world as a space of significant practical and experiential possibilities—of cushions for sitting, cars for driving, of people as concrete individuals—and of her consequent ‘joy’ at an experience of the world with a restored sense of reality. During this fleeting moment, Renee again had the feeling of being in and belonging to the world, where a world is understood to consist not simply of recognisable objects—chair, car, man, woman—but as objects that constitute a meaningful structure of practical and interpersonal possibilities. It is not difficult to see why the restoration of this sense of being in and belonging to a world should be accompanied by a sensation of joy. Indeed, anhedonia, or diminished capacity to experience pleasure, is a typical feature of depression. The syndrome of “derealisation‐depersonalisation” is also relevant here. Patients describe the world as unreal and stripped of emotional valence or significance. They lose their sense of their own distinctness from the environment and will often describe the experience as “dreamy” and may experience autoscopy, “seeing myself from the outside”. Such experiences have several contributing psychiatric and neurological causes, including brain tumours,10 migraine,11 multiple sclerosis12 and head injury.13 I have argued that one can provide a phenomenological analysis of changes in the structure of experience in neuropsychiatric illness in terms of altered existential feeling, and consequence changes in the sense of reality. Such an analysis has the double virtues of being empirically adequate by virtue of its fidelity to the body of first‐person testimonies and explanatorily successful. The phenomenology of existential feeling offers the resources to better understand aspects of the experience of neuropsychiatric illness – such as loss of hope, things ‘seeming strange’, and so on – in terms of radical changes in the structure of one’s experience of the world. But what is not yet clear is the question of the relative merits Author’s final draft, please cite published version of phenomenology and neuroscience in the context of understanding neuropsychiatric illness, and specifically of the contested question of the priority of the one over the other. The relationship between phenomenology and empirical science has been a topic of debate throughout the history of the phenomenological tradition, and of course is the subject of lively debate in other areas of contemporary philosophy. Certainly it is clear that the founding figures of the phenomenological tradition all maintained, albeit for slightly different reasons and in different ways, that the empirical sciences were a second‐order form of enquiry. There are several different ways to make this claim, depending upon the particular figures and arguments one might prefer to employ, but a very general form of the argument is that scientific enquiry can only proceed upon the basis of a more fundamental sense of the world that cannot, itself, be an object of scientific enquiry.14 Scientific enquiry is directed to particular objects within the world that are judged to be significant in light of our purposes or projects, and so relies upon a taken‐for‐granted sense of being in the world. Since the objects of scientific enquiry are selected from a pre‐existing structure of experience, thought, and activity which does not itself appear as an object of scientific enquiry—and does not figure in scientific descriptions of reality—the claim that science is an epistemically fundamental discipline is untenable. It obliviously presupposes a background sense of reality that cannot be an object of scientific enquiry, and so has a derivative or second‐order status. As phenomenologists often put it, scientific enquiry is not fundamental because it cannot account for the conditions of its own possibility, though this is a rejection, not of the epistemic utility of science, but rather of a claim about its epistemic status relative to other kinds of enquiry. Since this is a complex claim, I will focus upon the specific case of neuroscience, phenomenology, and neuropsychiatric illness.15 It is uncontroversial to say that any enquiry must begin with at a working account of its subject matter, on the basis of which one could develop appropriate investigative strategies, select relevant objects, and so on. In the case of neuropsychiatric illness, for instance, a neuroscientist might seek to identify the neural correlates of various specific conditions, such as major depression. Ratcliffe asks us to consider the case of a patient who ‘complains that nothing seems real anymore, that her body feels peculiar and that the world is drained of significance’, and warns again the temptation to distinguish three distinct phenomena: bodily feelings, altered experience, and certain consequent beliefs (2009:239). A neurobiologist who then began to investigate the neural correlates of such feelings, experiences, and beliefs would break up a phenomenologically unitary experience in three abstracted components: even though the altered sense of things being ‘unreal’ diminishes our sense of being bodily situated within a space of practical possibilities. In this case, the utility of neuroscientific enquiry can evidently proceed only on the basis of descriptions of the structure of experience provided by phenomenology. As Ratcliffe puts the point: ‘The phenomenologist studies aspects of experience that are presupposed by all empirical, scientific investigation into what the world contains […] Hence scientific practices do not escape existential backgrounds and then confront them as objects of empirical study. Rather, scientific practices and scientific conceptions of the world arise within the space of possibilities that the phenomenologist describes’ (Ratcliffe 2009:241) A general form of the argument for the explanatory priority of phenomenology is therefore that it provides the subject matter for investigation by neuroscience. There is a further, related sense in which neuroscience ought to cede explanatory priority to phenomenology. The epistemic contribution of neuroscience is to identify the neural Author’s final draft, please cite published version correlates of experience within neuropsychiatric illness, but this is neither identical with, nor reducible to, the phenomenological task of describing alterations in the structure of those experiences. Even a complete description of the neural correlates of the experiences that accompanies neuropsychiatric illness, such as estrangement or of loss of hope, would still not provide a description of the structure of those experiences. 16 If so, then to assign privileged status to neuroscience would be to needlessly deprive ourselves of a richer range of investigative resources for understanding the experiential complexity of neuropsychiatric illness. In this section, I have argued that neuropsychiatric illness ought to be understood in terms of altered existential feeling. In the next section, I make a parallel claim about religious commitment. 3. The phenomenology of religious commitment. A central debate in analytic philosophy of religion is the nature of religious belief and a wider set of issues concerning the nature of religiosity itself. Such debates have typically operated on the basis of what one might call a ‘belief model’, according to which to be religious is to hold a set of beliefs, typically drawn from doctrinal and creedal structures of religious traditions. Such beliefs can then be appraised in terms of their rational and evidential credentials, hence the vigour of debates concerning faith and evidence, the rationality of religious belief, and the merits of arguments for the existence and attributes of one or more divine beings.17 A standard complaint about the belief model and its variants has been that it arguably fails to capture certain distinctive, if not essential aspects of the nature of religious commitment. Central among there are the roles of feeling and a range of related affective states and experiences, including a foundational sense of belonging to the world that unmistakably recalls Ratcliffe’s remarks on existential feeling. Such a sense might be tacit and inarticulate, but no less genuine for that reason, and several testimonies could be offered for this claim. It was, for William James, a feeling of ‘spiritual excitement’ that animated religious reflection; or took the form of the ‘impulses’ that for John Dewey constitute a ‘religious attitude’; or perhaps the ‘feeling of participation in the ultimate reality’ described by Leszek Kolokowski.18 Such remarks merit close and careful analysis, not least given the differing concerns of the figures cited, but an obvious theme is that religiosity is grounded in an affectively charged experiential relationship to the world.19 Many other testimonies could be offered and interpreted profitably as instances of what the philosopher Paul Moser calls kardiatheology – ‘a theology of the heart’, to be contrasted with cognitivist theologies that tend to be more narrowly focused upon argument, belief, and theory.20 Such claims gather around the conviction that it is a mistake to construe religious commitment in terms of a set of rationally determined and evidentially warranted doctrinal and doxastic commitments, usually for the reason that – as the philosopher of religion John Cottingham puts it ‐ the cognitivist stance ‘does not capture what is at stake when someone gives, or refuses, their allegiance to a religious worldview’ (2005:2). Certainly argument, belief, and doctrine are only certain components of a religious life, alongside practices, communities, institutions, texts, soteriological projects, a spiritual heritage, aesthetic experiences, each complexly related to one another in what can be concisely and complexly described as a way of life.21 The obvious question is what the cognitivist stance misses about the practical or experiential nature of religious commitment. An answer is that is fails to recognize and examine the phenomenological conditions for the possibility of religious experience, thought, and activity. Any conscious experience, thought, or activity can only become possible against the background of a taken‐for‐granted sense of being in the world – of belonging to a world that appears as a structured space of possibilities, of being among Author’s final draft, please cite published version objects, persons, and situations that appear as real, significant, and so on. This is just true of a religious person as of the secular atheist humanist, given that existential feeling and a sense of reality is a precondition for the possibility of experience, thought, and activity. The study of the structure of experience in the context of religious belief, practice, and experience is called phenomenology of religion.22 The starting point for a phenomenological study of religion is the core idea that our thought, experience, and activity presuppose a lived relationship to the world, which can be understood in terms of existential feeling and a sense of reality. Indeed, the phenomenologist Mark Wynn suggests that existential feelings might provide the experiential basis for the consciously articulate systems of concepts, beliefs, and practices upon which typical philosophical interest has tended to focus.23 There are several closely related aspects to this claim, the first of which being that existential feeling will be implicated very generally within the life of a religious person. After all, if our existential feelings constitute our sense of being in a world of significant practical and experiential possibilities, then the possibility of religious belief and practice will depend upon certain existential feelings. A person who engages in religious practices, such as thanksgiving or praying, and who believes in the goodness of god and the providential structure of his creation, can only do so on the basis of their sense of being in the world – of, for instance, their being in a world in which thanksgiving and praying appear as significant practical possibilities. Since this is true whether a person is religious or not, the second aspect of Wynn’s claim is that certain existential feelings might predispose a person towards the practical and doctrinal resources provided by the historical religious traditions. Given that existential feelings comprise both a ‘generalized sense of the nature of reality’, inclusive of some sense of its ‘existential import’ for human life, then one might judge that certain existential feelings could count as forms of religious experience (2013:67). Such religiously‐tinged existential feelings are not, of course, associated with specific beliefs or doctrines, but rather act to predispose a person towards certain broad types of metaphysical or ethical conviction. A person who feels the world to be dark, empty, and forbidding is not thereby required to adopt a mystical doctrine coupled to a pessimistic estimate of the human condition, but they would certainly have experiential justification for finding such doctrines cogent, if not compelling. Indeed, Wynn speculates—quite plausibly, in my view—that, at least in cases of religious commitment, ‘many believers take their tradition to be plausible … because they find that there is a ‘fit’ between the defining concepts of that tradition and the world as it is presented to them in experiential terms’ (2013:107). Certain beliefs and doctrines about the nature of reality, and the existential situation of human beings within it, can enjoy a pre‐ reflective degree of intelligibility and plausibility, not on the basis of careful rational deliberation, but because at a deep, often inarticulable sense, they cohere with one’s foundational sense of how the world is. And in case this seems to entail that religious commitment is, ultimately, irrational or ‘subjective’, it should be emphasised that these claims also apply to non‐religious doctrines and claims. It is clear that many critics of religion are, in fact, equally reliant upon a taken‐for‐granted sense of what the world is like, even if they fail to recognise it.24 Indeed, our capacity to provide robust rational justification for our fundamental convictions is actually quite limited, especially since we must take certain facts about the world for granted even to begin projects of enquiry. So far, I have suggested that existential feeling plays a general role in a religious life, given that such a life will presuppose a way of being in the world, and also the more specific role of shaping a person’s predispositions towards the articulated beliefs and doctrines contained in the world’s historical religious traditions. There is no necessary causal chain from having a certain existential feeling and adopting the beliefs and doctrines of a Author’s final draft, please cite published version particular religious tradition. Rather, we do better to think of existential feelings as contributing to tacit sense of the nature of reality and of our situation in it – perhaps one of estrangement from a ‘dark’, ‘alien’ realm – that can be explored and articulated using the inherited resources of historically contingent religious traditions. Indeed, Wynn suggests that ‘certain cultural and religious traditions’ could, perhaps, ‘contribute to the formation of a correlative existential feeling’, and, through ‘ongoing interchange’, even arrive at a ‘state of equilibrium’ (2013: 68, 65). Certainly this suggestion is consonant with the deep imperative, evident across diverse religious traditions, to achieve a degree of experientially and existentially complex relationship with reality, and obviously this is an imperative that presupposes a certain sense of being in, or belonging to, the world—for instance, a world to which one feels one could or does belong, in some suitably integrated and intimate way, and not dark, cold, or forbidding. Wynn brings these points about existential feeling and religious commitment together in a way that include bodily feeling, experience, and what I called the deep imperative that animates the world’s religious traditions: ‘[T]he religions are interested in a deeper transformation of the person […] aim not simply, if at all, at doctrinal conformity, and outward conformity of the body to various religious practices. They also aim at engendering in the person a new sensibility, where this sensibility does not, in the normal case, float free from doctrinal affirmations or bodily practices, but nonetheless transcends them insofar as it is a condition of the whole person, and extends not simply to what they do and what they, in all sincerity, say, but to what they feel and, crucially, how the sensory world is presented to them’ (2013:74) It should be clear from these remarks that there are complex phenomenological preconditions for the possibility of a life of religious commitment. Such a life only partly involves reflective adoption of certain beliefs, robust performance of certain practices, or regimented participation in certain social and historical communities, even if these tend to be the focus of philosophical and anthropological enquiry. Instead, such experiences, thoughts, and practices all presuppose a background sense of being in the world – of being in, and perhaps belonging to, the world – that should be understood in terms of existential feeling and a sense of reality. A life of religious commitment begins in a felt sense of one’s being in the world, upon the basis of which beliefs can be adopted, and activities undertaken. Certainly something like this phenomenological account is evident in the writings of many leading spiritual writers and religious authorities, of which I will offer just two. The first is a beautiful passage by the eighteenth century German theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, describing a type of ‘mysterious moment’—both profound and indescribable’—that is ‘the natal hour of everything living in religion’. Such moments are experienced as ‘feelings or intuitions’ rather than articulable insights, and occur when some particular ‘event’—a church service, say, or sunset—‘develops quickly into an image of the universe’ (1976:31‐ 32).25 These religious experiences are bodily feelings and involve an altered, intensified experiential relationship with the world, and commentators have interpreted them in terms of changes in existential feeling.26 The second example of altered existential feeling in religious life is taken from the nineteenth century German theologian, Rudolf Otto, who describes, in his book The Idea of the Holy, certain experiences involving awareness of ‘the presence of that which is a Mystery inexpressible’. Such experiences need not be profound and periodic, for they can underlie ‘sudden, strong ebullitions of personal piety’ and the ‘fixed and ordered solemnities of rites’—belief and practice, one might say—and they bring with them a sense of the world‐as‐ Author’s final draft, please cite published version a‐whole as ‘something beautiful and pure and glorious’ (1923:12‐13).27 These remarks by Schleiermacher and Otto both testify to the core claim of phenomenologists of religion, such as Wynn, that a fundamental experiential relationship to the world underlies the articulated beliefs and structured practices of a religiously committed life. If religious commitment ought to be understood phenomenologically in terms of existential feeling, then it will be useful to consider potential cases of radical alterations in existential feeling. An obvious place to look for altered existential feeling in religion is conversion experience, defined by Wynn as an experience of ‘fundamental and in principle dateable shift in religious outlook’ (2013:16). Though existential feelings are naturally changeable, they will naturally be more conspicuous when they alter rapidly or radically, or indeed when a person has rich descriptive or introspective capacities. A good example is the experienced described by the Russian author, Leo Tolstoy, in the autobiographical essay A Confession, especially since it is discussed by both Ratcliffe and Wynn. 28 The Confession describes an experience that would today be classed as major depression, during which Tolstoy struggles with a profound state of existential despair, despite reflecting on the positive course of his life until that point. After failing to find solace in religion, philosophy, or learned culture, Tolstoy finally came to a new religious conviction, and in chapter thirteen he reflects on his altered ‘relations to faith’: ‘Formerly life itself seemed to me full of meaning and faith presented itself as the arbitrary assertion of propositions to me quite unnecessary, unreasonable, and disconnected from life. I then asked myself what meaning those propositions had and, convinced that they had none, I rejected them. Now on the contrary I knew firmly that my life otherwise has, and can have, no meaning, and the articles of faith were far from presenting themselves to me as unnecessary – on the contrary I had been led by indubitable experience to the conviction that only these propositions presented by faith give life a meaning. Formerly I looked on them as on some quite unnecessary gibberish, but now, if I did not understand them, I yet knew that they had a meaning, and I said to myself that I must learn to understand them’ In the richness of this passage there are three broadly discernible stages that could be interpreted as reflections of altering existential feeling. The first stage is that of a comfortably taken‐for‐granted sense of existentially secure being in a world, with no felt sense of any need for religious solace. The second stage, by contrast, involved a radical loss of a sense not only of the meaningfulness of Tolstoy’s life, but also the loss of the possibility of its ever being meaningful. A person might, after all, feel that their life currently lacks meaning, but still feel that it could come to have meaning, perhaps if one changed it in some substantive way. The third stage involved a partial restoration of the sense of the possibility that a life could be meaningful, albeit newly accompanied by a felt need that actualizing this possibility required spiritual effort. At this third stage, we might say that Tolstoy gained, to recall Wynn’s words, a ‘new sensibility’—or way of being in the world—that incorporated a felt sense of need for the practical and doctrinal resources of, in this case, the Russian Orthodox Church. Although this is far from a complete analysis, I suggest that Tolstoy’s conversion experience can be understood in terms of a radical alteration of existential feeling, especially when contrasted with the more positive experiences described by Schleiermacher and Otto. These three figures each testify, albeit in different ways, to the conviction that certain ways of experiencing the world can be religiously significant, but which are not ‘religious experiences’, for two reasons. The first is that they do not necessarily have as their object anything specifically religious—such as God or a prophet—and the second is that they are not, strictly speaking, experiences of any specific object at all; for sure, they may be Author’s final draft, please cite published version occasioned by religious activities, such as prayer or worship, and might be interpreted using the conceptual resources of a given religion, but they are, on close analysis, ways of being in the world that can be articulated and perhaps cultivated using the practical and conceptual resources of the world’s historical religious traditions. In fact, one might speculate that those traditions emerged partly as responses to felt need by persons with requisite existential feelings to express them practically and conceptually. James, in fact, suggested that ‘dispassionate intellectual contemplation of the universe’ by itself could not have ‘resulted in religious philosophies such as we now possess’ (1902:431). In this section I have argued that religious commitment should be understood phenomenologically in terms of particular forms of existential feeling, though the relationship between such feelings and explicit systems of religious belief and practice is very complex. It should also be clear that, if that claim is correct, then neuroscience can play only a limited explanatory role where religious commitment is concerned.29 The core of religiosity will not lie in specific beliefs or practices, hence in neurobiological structures or cognitive processes, but rather in tacit sense of being in the world that lies beyond the epistemic reach of the empirical sciences. 4. Conclusions. This chapter has offered a phenomenological analysis of the structure of experience in neuropsychiatric illness and religious commitment in terms of altered existential feeling. The core idea is that the possibility of experience, thought, and activity presuppose our having a typically tacit, unrecognised sense of being in, and belonging to, a world, and that this can be disclosed through phenomenological analysis. During certain forms of neuropsychiatric illness, such as major depression, this background sense of being in the world is eroded and a person loses their sense of inhabiting a space of significant possibilities—hence reports of objects, people, or the world itself seeming to be different, altered, or unreal, and of a consequent sense of emptiness, despair, or estrangement. Such transient alterations in the background sense of the world are typical of both pathological and non‐pathological experiences, even if they become particular acute, and therefore conspicuous, in cases of grief, despair, sin, moral abjection, or during conditions such as temporal lobe epilepsy. Moreover, the focus on experiences of altered existential feeling can also be used to interpret cases of religious conversion, including either the loss or the gain of religious faith, and so in turn illuminate the nature of religious commitment. Indeed, the case of Tolstoy’s experience—of despair, conversion, and faith, as one prefers—could be classified as either religious or neuropsychiatric, or it could be taken more usefully as an illustration of the interpretive complexity of human experience. A central claim of the chapter has been that experience, thought, and activity rely upon a tacit sense of being in the world. Since scientific enquiry takes those experiences, thoughts, and activities as they are given as its subject matter, and is therefore confined to particular aspects of certain experiences rather than the conditions of possibility for experience as such. If so, then phenomenology enjoys priority in the task of exploring and understanding neuropsychiatric illness and religious commitment. Ian James Kidd ian.kidd@nottingham.ac.uk Acknowledgements Author’s final draft, please cite published version I offer my thanks to Matthew Ratcliffe for helpful discussions of existential feelings and to the Editors for their invitation and guidance. This chapter was written during an Addison Wheeler Fellowship. Notes 1 W. James. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature: Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1902‐1902. London, Longman, Green & Co., 1902. Carrette, J. William James and The Varieties of Religious Experience. London, Routledge, 2004. C. Taylor. Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Harvard, Harvard University Press, 2003. 2 Ratcliffe M. The feeling of being. Journal of Consciousness Studies 2005; 12: 43‐60; Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry, and the Sense of Reality. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008; The Phenomenology of Existential Feeling. In: Marienberg S, Fingerhut J, eds, The Feeling of Being Alive. Berlin, de Gruyter, 2012; 23‐54. 3 Goldie P, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010. 4 The main writers include Antonio Damasio, Peter Goldie, and Robert Solomon. 5 For examples, see Ratcliffe, Feelings of Being, ch.2. 6 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980, 80 7 A useful introduction to phenomenology is Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. London: Routledge, 2008. 8 See, e.g., Ratcliffe, ‘The Phenomenology of Existential Feeling’, sections 3 and 5. 9 See, e.g., M. Ratcliffe, Experiences of Depresion: A Study in Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014; ‘Interpreting delusion’, Phenomenology and the Cogntiive Sciences 2004, 3(1):25‐48. 10 Ceylan EM, Önen Ünsalver B, Evrensel A. Medial cranial fossa meningioma diagnosed as mixed anxiety disorder with dissociative symptoms and vertigo. Case Reports in Psychiatry, 2016;2016:3827547 11 Kakisaka Y, Fujikawa M, Kaneko S, Nakasato N. Prolonged depersonalization/derealization‐ like symptom after migraine headache: a case report. Neurological Science, 2014 Sep; 35(9):1483‐4 12 tröhle A, Kümpfel T, Sonntag A. Paroxetine for depersonalization associated with multiple sclerosis. American Journal of Psychiatry, 2000, Jan; 157(1):150 13 Cantagallo A, Grassi L, Della Sala S. Dissociative disorder after traumatic brain injury. Brain Inj. 1999 Apr;13(4):219‐28 14 The phenomenological critique of the primacy of science takes different form, but a sophisticated ‘synthetic’ account is offered by M.J. Ratcliffe, ‘Phenomenology, naturalism, and the sense of reality’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 2013, 72: 67‐68 and D.E. Cooper, The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery. Oxford: Clarendon, 2002, chs. 5, 9 and 10. 15 Ratcliffe M. ‘Phenomenology, Neuroscience and Intersubjectivity’, in H. Dreyfus and M. Wrathall (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 327‐343. 16 A lively study is R. Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Durham: Acumen, 2011. 17 A useful critical survey of the ‘belief model’ and its status within contemporary philosophy of religion is J. Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy, and Human Value. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Author’s final draft, please cite published version 18 I.J. Kidd. Emotion, religious practice, and cosmopolitan secularism. Religious Studies, 2014; 50: 139‐156. I.J. Kidd. A phenomenological challenge to “enlightened secularism”. Religious Studies, 2013; 49: 377‐398. 19 See, e.g., M. Wynn, Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding: Integrating Perception, Conception and Feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 20 Moser, P. The Evidence for God: Religious Knowledge Reexamined. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010. 21 See Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension, and Why Believe? London: Continuum, 2009. 22 A useful starting point is M. Wynn, ‘Phenomenology of Religion’, in E.N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology‐ religion/>. 23 M. Wynn, Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 64‐70 and passim. 24 I.J. Kidd , ‘Is naturalism bleak?’, Environmental Values 2013; 22(6): 689‐702. 25 Friedrich Schliermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, tr. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976 [1799]), pp.31‐32 26 G. Andrejč. Bridging the gap between social and existential‐mystical interpretations of Schleiermacher's ‘feeling’. Religious Studies 2012; 48(3): 377‐401. 27 R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non‐rational Factor In the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. J.W. Harvey (London: H. Milford/ Oxford University Press, 1923), 12‐13. 28 Ratcliffe M. Evaluating Existential Despair. In; S. Roeser & C. Todd. Emotion and Value. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014, 229‐246. 29 I say more about these epistemological and methodological issues for the study of religion in I.J. Kidd, ‘Epistemic Injustice and Religion’, in I.J. Kidd, J. Medina, and G. Pohlaus. The Routledge Handbook to Epistemic Injustice. New York: Routledge, 2017, forthcoming.