CHAPTER 7

Mystics and Skeptics: Joseph Segond’s Psychology of Prayer

Alexandra Kieffer

Pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James, in the series of Gifford lectures given in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902 that would comprise his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, observed that music has a special relationship to the mystical. “Music,” he wrote, “is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth.”1 This idea that music can “speak” a “mystical truth” smacks of a familiar nineteenth-century musical metaphysics, a vestige of Schopenhauerian claims that music is the unmediated revelation of a metaphysical Will. Musical listening transports us out of ourselves into higher regions of being. “Lyric poetry and music,” James tells us,

are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch those vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.2

Thus music “gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict.”3

James was a hugely influential, though polarizing, figure in the development of an early twentieth-century “science of religions.” This essay focuses primarily on his influence on the French intellectual Joseph Segond, a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure and professor of philosophy at the Lycée in Toulon and later in Aix-en-Provence. Segond’s doctoral thesis was a psychology of prayer, which he defended in 1911 and which was subsequently published by Félix Alcan. Segond was positively disposed toward James, and his work bears the clear imprint of James’s influence. But Segond was also highly attuned to objections to James’s work raised by French sociologists of the time, specifically Émile Durkheim and Durkheim’s nephew and close associate, Marcel Mauss. Segond’s attempt to insulate his account of prayer from the objections of Durkheim and Mauss drove him to theorize the psychology of religious experience in a very different way than James. Segond’s account of musical attention, in particular—which is very much unlike James’s paeans to “mystical truth”—provides insight into his attempt to articulate a psychological stance that could preserve aspects of a Jamesian approach to religious experience while also addressing the critiques of Durkheimian sociology.

My goal, then, is to use Segond’s psychology of prayer, and specifically his discussion of musical attention as a tool to inculcate religious contemplation, as a nodal point from which to triangulate a nexus of social-scientific thought on musical attention and religious experience in the early years of the twentieth century. Implicit in this undertaking is the idea that the coalescence of the modern social sciences around the turn of the twentieth century was crucial for defining and reifying a modern understanding of “religion” itself, a claim that has been argued with particular cogency by anthropologist Talal Asad. As he observes, “It was late nineteenth-century anthropological and theological thought that rendered a variety of overlapping social usages rooted in changing and heterogeneous forms of life into a single immutable essence, and claimed it to be the object of a universal human experience called ‘religious.’”4

Understandings of music, I argue, are tangled up in this intellectual-historical project of defining the “religious” in a variety of ways, even as the theorization of a specifically musical attention—that is, attention as it pertained to ostensibly “autonomous” art music—in early twentieth-century French thought differed fundamentally from Segond’s attempt to formulate a psychology of prayer. The divergence between these two varieties of attention, at a formative moment in the early history of the social sciences, tells us a great deal about the ways in which the categories of “music” and “religion” emerged as starkly different kinds of epistemic objects in twentieth-century thought. It also sheds light on the complications that attended the entire project of making “experience” into a stable object of social-scientific knowledge, which exposed basic incompatibilities in understandings of both experience and attention in different disciplinary contexts. In particular, this project was from the outset beset by a methodological push-and-pull between fundamentally opposed impulses underlying the increasingly professionalized and distinct disciplines of psychology and sociology: on the one hand, the study of the inner recesses of white European subjectivity, and, on the other, the decentering of European cultural practices through the othering gaze of ethnography.

Segond and the Liberal Protestants

James’s Varieties of Religious Experience was a watershed in the development of the “science of religions,” a text that reoriented the study of religion away from intellectual argumentation and religious doctrine sanctioned by the institutions of the Christian church and toward the psychology of feeling. James understood religious experience as a fundamentally interior phenomenon; he approvingly cited the French Protestant theologian Auguste Sabatier, whose book was a touchstone of the project of so-called “liberal Protestantism” underway in the late nineteenth century, and endorsed Sabatier’s contention that the essence of religion lies in interior prayer. James was especially interested in mysticism, the “root and center” of “personal religious experience”:5 The fact of mystical experience, in James’s view, provided a compelling body of evidence for the supposition that the truth of our existence exceeds what we are able to discern in our ordinary and rational course of life. “No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. They may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map.”6 While those who have not had such experiences are not enjoined to “accept their revelations uncritically,” James maintains that the fact that many people have had these experiences “break[s] down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith.”7

Thus, when James talked about music as a conduit of “mystical truth,” he was speaking quite literally and deliberately about a kind of disclosure that exceeds what can be known in our everyday, rational mode of existence. James was, in fact, centrally concerned with this “truth” of the mystical, the truth of the sphere beyond ordinary knowing. “The counting of that wider world of meanings, and the serious dealing with it,” he writes, “might, in spite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages in our approach to the final fullness of the truth.”8

The Varieties of Religious Experience was published in French translation by Alcan, Paris’s renowned publisher of philosophical and psychological works, in 1906, just four years after its initial publication in English, disseminating James’s ideas more widely in French intellectual circles. Segond’s dissertation on prayer, published five years later by the same press, drew from this translation extensively. Soon into his introduction, Segond notes that he follows James in his understanding of religious experience itself: “I take the term [états réligieux] in a broad sense, as M. W. James does, without a specified relationship to the idea of the Divine”;9 Segond cites James, along with Sabatier, in support of his contention that prayer is the central fact of religious life.10 By referencing the work of both Sabatier and James favorably at the outset of his work, Segond was positioning himself, in a broad sense, as congenial to the project of liberal Protestantism associated with Sabatier. Further, in a very long footnote, Segond undertook a defense of James responding, in part, to a critical review of The Varieties of Religious Experience by Mauss (to whom I will return later in this essay), who, Segond claimed, did not “understand James correctly.”11 Characterizing the experience of prayer as, most essentially, a “felt Presence,” Segond reproduced precisely what Mauss had critiqued in James and Sabatier: the elision of the principles of “the most liberal Protestantism,” and specifically the doctrine of the “interior God,” with religion writ large.

Like James, moreover, Segond noted the special affinity between music and mystical religious experience. Indeed, he raised the phenomenon of music as a point of reference immediately after establishing the basic identity of mystical experience as reverent contemplation, or recueillement, and appealed to the nineteenth-century French Catholic theologian Auguste Gratry as an authority:

It would seem that contemplation [le recueillement] constitutes the essential character of the activity of prayer. It is thus through the analysis of contemplation that we must begin our study. Yet, if this act [acte], or this state [état], offers a religious aspect in itself, if any disposition that responds to this term presents a mystic allure, the analysis that we must make does not constrain us to remain enclosed in mystical life, in the ordinary and “technical” [positif] sense of the word. Because it is a disposition of this type that determines melodic “invitation”; and it is not without reason that prayer so easily takes on the musical mode; it is not without reason that Gratry insists on the kinship [parenté] between music and prayer.12

Yet Gratry by no means positioned music as a conduit of “mystical truth”; in fact, his account of its purpose and effect was very different from that of James. Lauding music as a “means of true repose,” Gratry had focused on the bodily effects of musical rhythm, which “regularizes movement in us, and accomplishes, for the mind and the heart, as well as the body, what sleep accomplishes for the body—it reestablishes, in its plentitude and calm, the rhythm of the beating of the heart, the circulation of the blood and the rising of the chest.” Thus, he concluded: “True music is the sister of prayer, like poetry.”13 Segond’s account of music, too, focused particularly on the effects of rhythm—and not only rhythm understood in a musical sense. “All rhythmic rocking,” he writes, “engenders a similar ‘return’ [retour] to oneself; and all regular actions, even if they are mechanical and physical, tend to bring about, not so much concentration on the action itself as on the regularized and lulled consciousness that assists the action.”14

Segond’s account thus placed under special scrutiny the relationship between the experience of consciousness and the materiality of the body. Like James, Segond believed in the utility of thinking deeply about the testimony of mystics, but he located this utility not in any extrarational intimations of a metaphysical realm but in the physiological aspects of mystical states themselves, which presented an opportunity to investigate human capacities of being and knowing. Regularized gesture, he tells us, is an aide to contemplation because it turns consciousness toward the body: What facilitates the “absorption” of one’s attention

is not the gesture itself, mechanical and automatic (thus a woman who paints her face in a contemplative silence), but the feeling that one acts according to the rhythm of the gesture and that all functions are regulated in this rhythm, thus the consciousness of “internal rhythms.”15

Musical rhythm, too, though “seemingly intellectual,” as Segond acknowledges, acts in precisely the same way. Even leaving “auditory rhythm” and its “physical vibration of the tympanum” to the side, the “heard sounds” of music “may well occupy all of one’s attention.” As he continues, “one ‘communes with oneself’ [se recueille] only through inward concentration, and the content of the feeling, here again, is not so much the object of hearing itself as the collection of vital rhythms regulated by the changing harmonies.”16 As an outward stimulus that induces “inward concentration,” the “heard sounds,” precisely by being an object of absorbed aural attention, create a state to which they are ultimately incidental; what enables us to be “absorbed” or captivated by these experiences is not a matter of close attention to, say, the thematic unfolding of a sonata form, of actively listening for aesthetic features of a musical composition, but a simple regularity of rhythm or gesture that induces a contemplative state in the physical body. From there, Segond makes an easy leap to states of religious contemplation, which he maintains can be induced through similarly physiological means:

If, from these “secular” states, which are only such in a “technical” sense [d’un point de vue “positif”], we move to truly “religious” states, the functional nature of contemplation does not change at all: the best proof of this is furnished by the method of prayer [oraison] that St. Ignatius of Loyola recommends in a curious passage of the “Spiritual Exercises,” which consists in modeling the recitation and meditation of vocal prayer on the physiological intervals that separate inhalations.17

Yet, as Segond goes on to explain, even though ecstatic or mystical states are characterized by the manipulation of physiological states, the effects of such manipulation are not experienced as such by the person in the throes of an ecstatic experience. He turns, once again, to music by way of explanation:

The “melodic” contemplation that constitutes musical enjoyment . . . is a consciousness of respiration and of visceral and circulatory rhythms; but the feeling of lightness and the ebb and flow of vital rhythms does not appear to the man who listens “ecstatically” as a respiratory, visceral, or arterial phenomenon. If the faithful who participate in the gestures of the Office and who inhale the perfume of the incense, if the religious who conform the modulations of their thought and the articulation of their vocal prayer to the rules of Saint Ignatius, determine by this “mechanism” a manner of vital being and a consciousness of this manner of being, the “concentration” that is also thereby established does not appear to them in the form of a state of cænesthesia.18

Segond’s invocation of cænesthesia—the generalized coordination of bodily sensibility—was a reference to Théodule Ribot’s widely influential Les maladies de la personnalité, published in eighteen editions between 1885 and 1921. Ribot had argued that the apparent unity or coherence of the self is not a psychological given but rather an emergent phenomenon that arises from the coordination of disparate physiological states.19 Segond, then, was drawing on Ribot’s conclusion that the foundation of the self is physiological in essence, with the implication that contemplation must also be considered a fundamentally physiological phenomenon.20 Yet, Segond’s point was that this state of contemplation is not experienced primarily as a physiological phenomenon, as a state of coordinated bodily sensibility, but as a change in consciousness. Consequently, Segond was not simply appealing to Ribot as a psychological authority but also issuing a subtle rebuke to his conception of the body as an opaque, static, inert materiality—the kind of bodily materiality supposed, for instance, by the physiological optics of Hermann von Helmholtz (by whom Ribot had been strongly influenced), which took as a given an unchanging mechanism of bodily sense perception. That is, Segond was contending that recueillement reveals the relationship between consciousness and bodily materiality to be complexly dynamic, subject to alteration simply by cultivating certain kinds of contemplative attention. Bodily gesture and musical rhythm were, in his estimation, useful as aids to contemplation because they returned attention to the bodily coordination, the “internal rhythms,” that are the foundation of the self, in such a way as to change the experience and perception of one’s embodied personhood.

In short, to scrutinize the psychological reality of mystical experience, for Segond, is to realize that the relationship between consciousness and bodily materiality is other than what we often take it to be (and other than what the prevailing empirical psychology of the time, as represented by Ribot in particular, took it to be). But, crucially, this awareness of the relationship between consciousness and bodily materiality that arises from using rhythm and gesture as tools of mystical contemplation does not disclose anything beyond the experience itself, even though belief in such disclosure may be central to what the experience is. Put another way, the physical and psychological reality of these experiences, Segond contends, does not imply a corresponding metaphysical reality, even though the mystic herself understands the experience in a metaphysical way. “We envision this consciousness of ‘internal’ rhythms and this ‘interior life,’” he writes, “as the mystics themselves envision it; we adopt, as psychologically real, the aspect under which the life of the body appears to them, [even] if we do not adopt, as metaphysically real, the interpretation that conforms to this appearance.”21 Unlike James, Segond insistently bracketed the metaphysical truth of religious experience as outside the bounds of psychological inquiry. Musical sound becomes relevant to this inquiry not because it discloses anything, not because it “speaks” to us of “mystical truth,” but because the effect of its rhythm, and specifically the capacity of rhythm to regulate attention, is an especially apt example of a potential contained within the human person, a coextension of consciousness and the materiality of our “vital being” that challenged common conceptions of what consciousness was.

Segond and the Bergsonians

The distinction between the “psychologically real” and the “metaphysically real” was central to Segond’s project, and while this distinction has affinities with the general orientation of liberal Protestantism (as represented by Sabatier), Segond’s articulation of it speaks equally clearly to the influence of Henri Bergson. In addition to citing Gratry as a theological authority on the contemplative potential of musical attention, Segond also, in passing, mentioned an account of aesthetic experience at the beginning of Bergson’s 1889 Essai sur les données de la conscience, which comes very close to his own description of a consciousness “lulled” by rhythm. From Bergson:

In the processes of art we shall find, in a weakened form, a refined and in some measure spiritualized version of the processes commonly used to induce the state of hypnosis. Thus, in music, the rhythm and measure suspend the normal flow of our sensations and ideas by causing our attention to swing to and fro between fixed points.22

Segond’s conclusion also extensively discussed Bergson’s more recent L’évolution créatrice (1907), whose ideas he attempted to align with his own. Bergson himself seems to have been persuaded by his efforts: After the publication of Segond’s thesis, Bergson wrote to his younger compatriot, assessing his work favorably and analogizing Segond’s analysis of the mystical state to the harmonics of a vibrating string:

You have submitted to penetrating analysis the fundamental state of a praying individual and the states that are like harmonics, those that, reinforcing it, give it its psychological timbre. You have studied the mystics as they should be studied, with sympathy, but also submitting them to penetrating critique: for my part, I think that they gain more than they lose by being critiqued in this way, and that they can give the philosopher extremely valuable information, precisely that which intuition brings to reason. . . .

I would accept the majority of views that you develop in your conclusion. You have kindly established a connection between your ideas and mine. I am pleased to see that, by different routes, we come to similar conclusions.23

Yet not all ostensibly “Bergsonian” thinkers of the early twentieth century took up the connection between musical rhythm and mystical contemplation that so interested Segond and to which Bergson himself seems to have been inclined; indeed, the link is largely absent from French psychological discourse in the first few decades of the century. Instead, a number of thinkers within the Bergsonian orbit drew on Schopenhauer’s legacy to situate music as a means to access unconscious phenomena. Albert Bazaillas (who wrote favorably of Bergson’s ideas in his 1905 book La vie personelle) published another study in 1908 on music and the unconscious that was essentially an elaboration of Schopenhauerian music aesthetics, purporting to reinterpret the German philosopher’s metaphysics in light of “the modern psychology of feeling”—a method of which, Bazaillas claimed, Schopenhauer had “had a presentiment.”24 Bazaillas saw music as a means of access to our unconscious interiority: “The sentiment that we feel in the course of [musical] experience,” he wrote, “is that of a regression, of a return to primitive simplicity.”25 This “primitive simplicity” consists in the vestiges of a consciousness that evolutionarily preceded so-called rational thought, persisting in human psychology in a kind of subaltern form that, even as it coexists with rational consciousness, is unavailable to its scrutiny.

Music thus achieves an apparently paradoxical feat in Bazaillas’s account: It is able to direct conscious attention to that which is definitionally excluded from conscious attention. Though Bazaillas at times pointed to music’s capacity to induce an altered state of consciousness, much as Segond did (e.g., that musical rhythm can “bring about a state comparable to hypnosis”),26 he was also keenly aware that musical attention involved conscious cognition, including forms of recognition prepared by stylistic competence in a specific musical tradition.27 His account, then, was constantly toggling between the idea of music as a conscious activity and claims about its “analogical” correspondence with the unconscious, which purportedly “reveal[ed]” the true nature of our deep sensibility.28 As such—and like the human unconscious itself, which Bazaillas likened to the unconsciousness of plant life—music is incapable of deceit or subterfuge; rather, it “speaks profoundly to the soul through its great naïveté. The soul gives way to its spontaneous movements without thought of dissimulating them to itself.”29 In Schopenhauerian terms, music is a “true copy of psychological life, transposed into the register of sound.”30

In his Musique et inconscience, Bazaillas did not posit any direct links between his ideas on music and Bergson’s philosophy. Five years later, however, André Joussain, in an article entitled “L’expansion du Bergsonisme et la psychologie musicale,” took Bazaillas as attempting a Bergsonian psychology of music:

Without insisting here on the musicality of M. Bergson’s ­literary forms, one must observe that, since [Bazaillas’s] effort was to rediscover in pure durée the deep life of the soul [la vie profonde de l’âme], music is precisely the art that unfurls in pure durée, that expresses the deep life of the soul, the elements of which, like those of the deepest consciousness, succeed one another or penetrate one another without ever being juxtaposed. But this relationship between music and deep life was barely indicated by M. Bergson. It was inevitable that a philosopher would take up his thought on this point in order to continue, clarify, and expand upon it. This is what M. Bazaillas has attempted.31

Joussain held that this “Bergsonian” understanding of music, and of the intimate relationship between music and durée, was a recognition of music as a means of knowledge, a method of psychological investigation. “Without leaving the soul [âme], quite a large field of research is opened up to us. Music does not reveal to us the deepest foundation of our being; it simply expands the domain of the knowable [le domaine des faits]. It should be a means of psychological investigation for us.”32 The music of Beethoven and Wagner allows us to penetrate into the deepest recesses of consciousness—that is, into what is old and “primal” in human nature, something that is inaccessible to historical as well as empirical scrutiny. “Music is our final resource when reflection becomes powerless; it allows us to grasp the part of our psychic life that eludes concepts.”33 Like Bazaillas, moreover, Joussain held that in musical experience there is no duplicity, no possibility for deception or delusion:

Music renders all of the emotional content of our subconscious activity perceptible to us. Through the effects that it produces on our soul, it uncovers for us all of the potentialities that are in us, and the innumerable energies that our being holds within itself manifest through [music] their reality and their power. This, for example, is how Wagner’s music reveals to us some of our highest aspirations in all their purity and in all of their depth.34

As long as the “truth” to which music gives us access is imagined as subjective, inner truth (i.e., the truth of unconscious interiority), there is no reason to doubt the veracity of music’s supposed disclosure of such truth. It “renders perceptible” our inner emotional life; it reveals what is otherwise hidden within our consciousness. There is no sense of a gap between the experience of musical listening and the otherwise inaccessible domain of human psychology to which it corresponds.

In stark contrast, then, to Segond’s insistence on maintaining a distinction between the “psychologically real” and the “metaphysically real,” there is a certain conflation here—and along with it, a credulity about the power of disclosure that (autonomous) music was imagined to have. Whereas Segond’s text continually grapples with the precise nature of the psychological “reality” of mystical prayer, highly attuned to the problem of parsing what is felt in the body and how the “life of the body” enters into conscious awareness, Bazaillas and Joussain seemingly felt no need to interrogate how the physiological and cognitive processes involved in musical listening ostensibly make aspects of the unconscious mind available to conscious experience. By insisting that musical attention was a direct means of acquiring knowledge of the workings of the unconscious, Bazaillas and (still more explicitly) Joussain thereby disallowed this attention from becoming an object of knowledge, as Segond had made mystical contemplation an object of knowledge.

Segond and the Sociologists

The striking disjunction between Segond’s approach to mystical contemplation and musical experience and that of other Bergson-inclined thinkers might be understood in light of another thread running through Segond’s text: his intense, and contentious, engagement with sociological accounts of religion put forward by Durkheim and Mauss. Segond’s notes refer frequently to arguments made by these thinkers; indeed the central issue of Segond’s entire approach—the question of the “psychologically” versus “metaphysically” real—can be understood as his response to the challenge posed by Durkheim’s sociological study of religion.

In particular, Segond’s text attempted to answer a central question in both psychology and sociology during this period regarding the nature of human experience and how it can enter into social-scientific knowledge. The differences between Segond (as a psychologist) and the sociologists on this point were fundamental. They were made clear in Mauss’s 1902 review of James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, where Mauss complained that James did not give sufficient weight to the distinction between “experience” and “belief”:

To the extent that M. James’s formula is limited to expressing an important current of Christian religious opinion, it is quite right. The states that were thus described to us are and were actually felt [ressentis]. . . . But when one comes to attribute to these ideas and impressions an experimental value, an ontological import; when, instead of saying ‘the conscious person feels himself [se sent], believes himself [se croit] in relationship with a superior consciousness,’ one says, ‘the conscious person is,’ the language of ‘experience’ [expérience] does nothing but mask the much clearer ideas of faith and belief.35

Segond’s answer to this critique attempted to show that a religious “experience,” as a phenomenon of human consciousness, was more than simply a matter of “belief.” Rather, the psychology of religious experience, he contended, could not be explained if it was regarded as mere delusion; that is, if the psychologist was not willing to take religious subjects as reliable witnesses to their own experience. He quoted a different portion of Mauss’s review of James, in which Mauss claimed that “M. James’s last stand would be to deny the unrepentant ‘scientist’ the right of speaking of these states that he has not experienced [éprouvés]. [Yet] the psychologist has no need whatever of having felt [ressenti] any feeling in order to speak of it with lucidity.”36 Segond rejoined:

[Mauss] does not seem to have grasped that this is precisely the essential difficulty, and that these observations ‘made by the mystics of themselves,’ by the very fact that they are ‘personal’ and have a ‘subjective’ character, cannot be treated as ‘institutions,’ that is to say we cannot behave toward them like a pure ‘sociologist,’ nor take the ‘mental attitude’ in which we imagine them as ‘things’ [choses]. Rather it is necessary, if one wants to not only ‘speak with lucidity’ but ‘know’ them ‘deeply,’ to in turn ‘experience’ [éprouver] them sympathetically and ‘feel’ [ressentir] their import [valeur].37

Segond’s reference to “things” was a reference not to Mauss but to Durkheim, though precisely what Durkheim meant by a “thing”—an idea explicated in the preface to the second edition of his Règles de la méthode sociologique (the first edition of which was published in 1895, with the second edition appearing in 1901)—is somewhat more nuanced than Segond lets on. Durkheim had claimed, famously, that a “social fact” is a thing, a chose, because it is external to us (as opposed to an idea, which is known internally), and therefore cannot be understood scientifically through introspection.38 Durkheim’s argument was that the appearance of psychological phenomena to consciousness—that is, the way in which these phenomena are experienced—does not disclose their nature in the way that properly “scientific” methods can. Rather, all “faits” [facts] in Durkheim’s assessment

are necessarily, from the moment at which we attempt to do science, unknown to us, unknown things, since the representations that we have been able to make in the ordinary course of life, having been made without method and without critique, have no scientific value and must be kept at a distance. The facts of individual psychology themselves have this character and must be considered under this aspect. In fact, though they are internal to us by definition, our consciousness of them reveals to us neither their internal nature nor their origin. It lets us know them to a certain point, but only as sensations make heat, light, sound, or electricity known to us; they give us confused, fleeting, subjective impressions of them, but not clear and distinct ideas or explicative concepts.39

The “mental attitude” that Durkheim takes towards “things” was thus a kind of skepticism that he saw as indispensable to the social-scientific enterprise—the need to set these “things,” these objects of study, at a distance from our habitual ways of knowing and assume a posture of (ostensibly) self-imposed ignorance so that they can be approached anew through the steadying methods of science.

Segond, however, insisted that by taking this “attitude” Durkheim had merely deceived himself into believing he had found a solution to an epistemological problem that was far more complex than he was willing to acknowledge. The methodological divergence between the two was thrown into particular relief at Segond’s doctoral defense, over which Durkheim presided (and the proceedings for which were published in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale). Over the course of a long and combative line of questioning, Durkheim eventually came to the heart of his critique of Segond’s work:

M. Durkheim: The point of my objection is this: The mystics do not know the essence of prayer; you have to look for it.

M. Segond: Who knows this essence?

M. Durkheim: We do, when we study things.

M. Segond: Minds are not things.40

The disagreement between Segond and Durkheim, ultimately, was a disagreement about witnessing and the status of witness accounts vis-à-vis the scientific study of human life.

Crucially, the shape of this disagreement was determined in no small part by the specific methodological challenges presented by the study of religious experience: It was, after all, because Durkheim regarded the testimony of religious believers as “objectively” uncredible that he sought a different explanation for their experience, an explanation that located the true object of that experience (unbeknownst to the believer) in the phenomenon of sociality itself. As Donald Nielsen writes, “‘The unanimous sentiments’ of believers [in Durkheim’s view] could not be based on pure illusion. There was a truth to religion. However, the object of this religious ‘experience’ was different from what the faithful believed.”41 In a crucial sense, this stance emerged from Durkheim’s conception of “religion,” which differed profoundly from Segond’s understanding of the term. The foundations of Durkheim’s (and Mauss’s) understanding of religion were not the accounts of premodern Christian mystics but instead recently published ethnographies of Indigenous societies (especially those of Indigenous Australians). Mauss’s critique of James was precisely that he had misunderstood “religion” by supposing that its essence was determined largely by historically recent incarnations of European Protestantism rather than by the broadly comparative perspective enabled by ethnography.42

Both Segond and James thus can be understood as engaged in an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to insulate European religious experience as a meaningful component of human life against what they saw as the encroachment of sociology, specifically the efforts of thinkers like Durkheim and Mauss to redefine the category of religion based on ethnographic evidence. Sociologists, so it seemed, were making religion into a “thing”—a concept fundamentally illegible to the educated, modern European. James says this explicitly:

[The scientist’s] antipathy to religion finds an echo within the very science of religions itself. The cultivator of this science has to become acquainted with so many groveling and horrible superstitions that a presumption easily arises in his mind that any belief that is religious probably is false. In the “prayerful communion” of savages with such mumbo-jumbos of deities as they acknowledge, it is hard for us to see what genuine spiritual work—even though it were work relative only to their dark savage obligations—can possibly be done.43

Notwithstanding the validity of Mauss’s critique of James’s stubbornly narrow Eurocentrism, James had a point, too: that the way in which Durkheim and Mauss were able to imagine religion as an object of social-scientific investigation was possible only because they were not theorizing about people whom they imagined to be fundamentally like themselves or whose full humanity they were willing to acknowledge. Durkheim’s focus on Indigenous societies whom he encountered as abstractions in ethnographic literature was surely closely tied to his conviction that the people whose religious practices were chronicled in this literature were not doing and experiencing what they thought they were doing and experiencing, and that the modern European sociologist therefore had access to the truth of those experiences in ways that the participants themselves did not.

We might understand Segond’s intense focus on the relationship between consciousness and physiology, experience and truth, as a response to the challenge represented by Durkheim and Mauss, a refutation of their skepticism regarding the nature of social-scientific evidence and its relationship to mystical experience as attested by mystics themselves. In the context of this broader project, Segond’s account of musical attention lent support to a conception of consciousness and the human person that could understand mystical experience as psychologically, if not metaphysically, real. When it came to theorizing about musical experience as autonomous art form, on the other hand, as Bazaillas and Joussain demonstrate, the intellectual landscape was very different. The sociology of music was a curiously uncultivated area of inquiry in the early years of the century. Charles Lalo, a student of Durkheim, wrote on the subject, but his “scientific,” sociological music aesthetics was premised on the history of European music, not on ethnographic accounts of musical practices in Indigenous societies.44 His work did not find any particular success with other members of the Durkheim school and was met with derision from musicologists.45 As a result, Bazaillas and Joussain did not need—as Segond did—to interrogate the nature of musical attention itself as a way of validating the reality they attributed to the experiences made possible by such attention; there was no one to question that such experience was meaningfully “real.”

This fundamental, radical asymmetry between conceptions of music and conceptions of religion in human life and culture—an asymmetry through which religion, in Durkheimian thought, became the root and center of sociality, to the point that to explain religion was to explain sociality itself, while musical activities were never more than peripheral to the sociological enterprise—was of course made possible and conditioned by existing ideas about music as an “autonomous” art object forged in the crucible of nineteenth-century, largely German, music aesthetics. But it was surely no foregone conclusion that such ideas should receive so little scrutiny when they came into contact with ostensibly nonmetaphysical strains of early twentieth-century social-scientific thought. It is not that the arguments espoused by Bazaillas and Joussain can be said to characterize the whole of intellectual thought on music of the time (or that the links they posited between music and the unconscious were universally accepted); rather, simply that their ideas could be taken seriously at all speaks to the contours of so-called “psychological” debate about music and their remarkable difference from those of debates about religious experience. In a variety of ways, and in the work of a variety of thinkers, music became fodder for an especially naïve, if covert and unacknowledged, metaphysics that continued to assert itself from within ostensibly empirical psychologies. Musical attention, in this context, could only be understood as the act of a self-present and self-aware perceiving subject—not as anything resembling a Durkheimian “thing,” an object of study whose true nature remains opaque to the person experiencing it.

Conclusion

One cannot draw overly broad intellectual-historical claims from the work of marginal thinkers whose influence, even in their own milieu, quickly dissipated; yet, in their insistence on music as a (more or less reliable) means of knowledge, Bazaillas and Joussain are illustrative of an emerging stance toward musical experience that has bearing on broader questions about the place of music in academic thought in the twentieth century. As Schopenhauerian claims about music’s immediate disclosure of unconscious interiority faded from academic respectability, the knowledge to which musical attention grants access often became, instead, a knowledge limited to the formal structure of musical objects. What for James had been a disclosure of mystical truth, and for Bazaillas and Joussain a disclosure of psychological truth, became, in much mainstream academic thought on music, a disclosure of a purely formal truth. Accordingly, musical attention, in prominent strains of twentieth-century music-academic thought, became a matter of training and discernment to ascertain what is present in music as formal object, and such attentiveness was the hallmark of the successful music academic (who can thereby draw the attention of others to subtle features of the work). This approach is aptly summed up in Schoenberg’s observation that “efforts to discover laws of art” can, at best, “influence the way in which the sense organ of the subject, the observer, orients itself to the attributes of the object observed,” a process that can “bring closer what is too distant, thereby enlarging details, and remove to some distance what is too close, thereby gaining perspective.”46 Decades later, Allen Forte, in his 1959 explication of the work of Heinrich Schenker, noted that Schenker’s achievement was “the deepening of musical understanding through the discovery of structural levels”; this “discovery,” Forte contended, rested not on “abstruse speculation, or in acoustical or metaphysical formulations” but on “the organization of the music itself,” and, more specifically, on “aural experiences with actual musical compositions”—aural experiences that can then be shared with the student willing to attend in the way that Schenker prescribes.47

We might see Schoenberg and Forte as examples (among many) of a distinctly twentieth-century attempt to regulate musical attention, most ­notably and emphatically within the discipline of music theory, by insisting on the importance of focusing on formal details rather than on the “subjective” images, narratives, or affective connotations that characterize so much nineteenth-century music criticism (E. T. A. Hoffmann’s hearing of “radiant beams” in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, say, or A. B. Marx’s Idee).48 And from this vantage, the increasingly narrowed scope of musical disclosure in certain spheres of Euro-American intellectual discourse—from Schopenhauerian metaphysics, to early twentieth-century attempts to adapt Schopenhauer to an ostensibly nonmetaphysical psychologie, to the purely formal relationships explicated by twentieth-century music theorists—suggests an attempt to ensure, according to ever more stringent criteria, that the posited object of study (unlike the visions of Segond’s mystics) is demonstrably real.

Yet, ensuring the reality of “music” as an object of quasi-scientific inquiry meant eliding or ignoring fundamental epistemological questions of the sort that had so preoccupied Segond; that is, questions about the variegated ways in which song, rhythm, and dance are experienced, across and within human cultures, and how these experiences—unanchored by any objective aesthetic content—may be shaped and made palpable by beliefs that are unverifiable from the standpoint of academic inquiry.49 Such an enlarged perspective would necessarily encompass not only those experiences that are recognizably “aesthetic” in post-Enlightenment European musical culture but also, perhaps more crucially, those that are not (including trance and other altered states of consciousness and the kinds of communal experiences that Durkheim referred to as “collective effervescence”).50

Put another way, the transformation of a nineteenth-century metaphysics of musical disclosure into a twentieth-century aesthetics of the formally closed, autonomous musical art object went hand in hand with the constitution of music as a secular object of knowledge. The reinvention of nineteenth-century musical metaphysics within an avowedly nonmetaphysical social science in the work of Bazaillas or Joussain should thus be understood in tandem, and in implicit dialogue, with the contemporaneous social-scientific invention of religion in the work of Durkheim and his school. Musical experience was able to avoid a certain kind of “scientific” scrutiny precisely because such scrutiny had been displaced onto religious experience from which music-as-object had been definitively cleaved; yet, the price for evading this scrutiny was that “music” in this sense, requiring a narrowly conceived, aesthetic mode of attention, could have only a fraught and undertheorized relationship to beliefs about what music is and does (an exclusion that occasionally surfaced in music discourse as questions about “presence” or the “ineffable”). Building on arguments made by Gary Tomlinson about the entire category of “music” in post-Enlightenment European intellectual culture, we might posit that a fundamental condition of autonomy in twentieth-century European musical thought—an autonomy that was conceived quite differently from its nineteenth-century progenitor—was that this “music” exclude anything that it could possibly have in common with Indigenous religious ritual.51

Notes

1. 1.  William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (London and Bombay: Longman, Green, and Co., 1903), 420–421. First published 1902.
2. 2.  James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 383.
3. 3.  James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 421.
4. 4.  Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 31.
5. 5.  James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 379.
6. 6.  James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 388.
7. 7.  James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 423.
8. 8.  James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 428.
9. 9.  Joseph Segond, La prière: étude de psychologie religieuse (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1911), 43.
10. 10.  Segond, La prière, 52.
11. 11.  Segond contends that Mauss does not appreciate the extent to which James is aware, at the end of his text, that he is presenting “overbeliefs,” and that James does not take the “immediate” experiences of mystics as objectively true statements of fact but simply as real, felt experiences that have import as experiences.
12. 12.  Segond, La prière, 69.
13. 13.  Auguste Graty, Les Sources (Paris: Librairie P. Téqui, 1876), 34.
14. 14.  Segond, La prière, 69.
15. 15.  Segond, La prière, 71.
16. 16.  Segond, La prière, 71.
17. 17.  Segond, La prière, 71–72.
18. 18.  Segond, La prière, 77.
19. 19.  “The unity of the self is thus not the single entity of the spiritualists that is dispersed in multiple phenomena, but the coordination of a certain number of continually renewing states, having as their only point of reference the vague feeling of our body. This unity is not ‘top-down,’ but rather ‘bottom-up’; it is not a starting point, but an endpoint.” Théodule Ribot, Les maladies de la personnalité, 7th ed. (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1897), 170–171. First published 1885.
20. 20.  Segond observes that “because caenesthesia, as the psychologists have proved, is the very basis of individual consciousness, the fact of contemplating [se recueillir], of returning to oneself, of taking consciousness of oneself, must have the same essential nature as caenesthesia,” that is, the consolidation and coordination of the material body. Segond, La prière, 71.
21. 21.  Segond, La prière, 76.
22. 22.  Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1889), 11; Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: G. Allen, 1913), 14–15. Cited in Segond, La prière, 79.
23. 23.  Henri Bergson, letter to Joseph Segond (18 January 1911); in Bergson, “Henri Bergson (1859–1941) Lettres à Joseph Segond (1872–1954),” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 205, no. 4 (October–December 2015): 543–560, at 543.
24. 24.  Albert Bazaillas, Musique et inconscience (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1908), 85.
25. 25.  Bazaillas, Musique et inconscience, 297.
26. 26.  Bazaillas, Musique et inconscience, 155–156.
27. 27.  “The purest melodies, the richest sonorities are lost in the vacuum of an unprepared consciousness: they find no echo, lacking a sufficiently prompt adaptation of auditory images to our emotional life.” Bazaillas, Musique et inconscience, 154.
28. 28.  “Instinctively, music . . . intuits that each of [our feelings] is an individual organization and that it has a deep, dynamic constitution. It is this dynamism of sensibility that [music] reveals to us and of which, in some way, it causes us to touch the foundation.” Bazaillas, Musique et inconscience, 160.
29. 29.  Bazaillas, Musique et inconscience, 169.
30. 30.  Bazaillas, Musique et inconscience, 149.
31. 31.  André Joussain, “L’expansion du Bergsonisme et la psychologie musicale,” La Revue bleue 50, no. 24 (15 June 1912): 758–763, at 759.
32. 32.  André Joussain, “L’expansion du Bergsonisme,” 759.
33. 33.  Joussain, “L’expansion du Bergsonisme,” 759.
34. 34.  Joussain, “L’expansion de Bergsonisme,” 759.
35. 35.  Marcel Mauss, “William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience,” L’Année sociologique 7 (1902–1903): 204–212, at 205.
36. 36.  Mauss, “William James,” 207.
37. 37.  Segond, La prière, 62, n. 2
38. 38.  This was precisely the argument advanced by Ribot for psychology as an “objective” science two decades earlier; see Ribot, La philosophie anglaise contemporaine (Paris: Librairie philosophique de Ladrange, 1870).
39. 39.  Émile Durkheim, Les Règles de la méthode sociologique, 3rd ed. (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1904), xi–xii.
40. 40.  “Thèses de doctorat,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 19, no. 1 (January 1911) (supplément): 26–35, at 33.
41. 41.  Donald A. Nielsen, “Auguste Sabatier and the Durkheimians on the Scientific Study of Religion,” Sociological Analysis 47, no. 4 (1987): 283–301, at 294.
42. 42.  Mauss, “William James,” 204.
43. 43.  James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 490.
44. 44.  Charles Lalo, Esquisse d’une ésthetique musicale scientifique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1908).
45. 45.  See J. C. [Jules Combarieu], “Esquisse d’une Esthétique musicale scientifique, par Charles Lalo,” La Revue musicale 8 (1908): 235.
46. 46.  Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 3^rd ed., trans. Roy E. Carter (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press: Faber, 1978), 11. Third edition first published 1922; first edition published 1911.
47. 47.  Allen Forte, “Schenker’s Conception of Musical Structure,” The Journal of Music Theory 3, no. 1 (1959): 4.
48. 48.  See, e.g., Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Scott Burnham, “Criticism, Faith, and the Idee: A.B. Marx’s Early Reception of Beethoven,” 19th-Century Music 13, no. 3 (1990): 183–192.
49. 49.  The entire question of belief is, to be sure, an enormously complex one to which I cannot do justice here. Far from disputing important critiques of the idea of belief by Rodney Needham and Talal Asad (among others) as it tended to figure in anthropological writing of the mid- to late twentieth century—in which, to quote Asad’s critique of Clifford Geertz, the anthropological conception of religion is “a modern, privatized Christian one because and to the extent that it emphasizes the priority of belief as a state of mind rather than as constituting activity in the world”—my suggestion here is that this anthropological critique has considerable utility, in a musicological context, for revisiting the role of belief as it relates to the experience of musical effect. Along lines that historian Ethan Shagan has recently advocated, such a project would historicize, rather than take as given, the contours of “belief” in a specifically Euro-American secular modernity: “Modern belief” for Shagan is “not a particular epistemic regime” but “a space in which epistemic controversy is managed,” and this space itself vitally depends upon not subjecting the coherence of the (inherently incoherent) category of “belief” to scrutiny. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 47; and Ethan H. Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), 21. See also Rodney Needham, Belief, Language, and Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); and Bruno Latour, “‘Thou Shalt Not Take the Lord’s Name in Vain’: Being a Sort of Sermon on the Hesitations of Religious Speech,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 39 (2001): 215–234.
50. 50.  Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1912).
51. 51.  Gary Tomlinson, “Musicology, Anthropology, History,” Il Saggiatore musicale 8, no. 1 (2001): 21–37.