Some Options
(i) W.T. Stace and Ninian Smart
(ii) Katz and Constructivists
(iii) Peter Moore
(iv) Louis Dupre
Reflections on Topic Three
(A) Theses from general epistemology
(B) Application to Religious Experience
According to NINIAN SMART, Woods collection pp. 81ff., also Rel. Stud. 1965, in respect of descriptions of mystical experience:
1) we need to take note of what he calls ramifications: the degree of ramification = how much of the writer's doctrinal system is being presupposed by the terms in which the description is made. There may be a high degree or a low degree of ramification: e.g., if the description mentioned Christ or the Trinity or the Lord Krishna, you would think a high degree of ramification. In general, the higher the degree of ramification the less the description is gauranteed by the experience itself.
2) As well we need to take note of the point of view from which the description is being made. There is the description given by the mystic him or her self, in terms of their own tradition. There is the description which others of his own tradition may give, e.g. in their 'lives of the saints'. Also, men or women of another tradition may describe his or her experience in terms of their tradition or standpoint: e.g. if a Christian says that the Buddha's enlightenment experience involved some kind of interior vision of God.
Fundamentally however we can reduce these to two:
Putting these together gives us four categories of description altogether:
Comment: Smart's first criterion, degree of ramification, takes
for granted what it should be proving: an experience which is ostensively
tradition-specific is automatically classed as only interpreted as such.
That the experience itself is tradition-specific is rendered impossible
a priori.
(Cf. also JOHN HICK, 1989, cited above on p. 9, Robert Gimello and others
in the two Katz collections.)
(i) doctrinal interpretations formulated after the experience is over-- 'retrospective interpretation'.
(ii) interpretation spontaneously formulated either during the experience itself or immediately afterwards - 'reflexive interpretation'.
(iii) features of experience which have been caused or conditioned by
the mystic's prior beliefs, expectations and intentions: --'incorporated
interpretation'. Two types of this:
(a)ideas and images reflected
in an experience in the forms of visions and locutions: --'reflected
interpretation';
(b)experiences moulded into
phenomenological analogies of some belief or doctrine.
Finally,
(iv) features of experience unaffected by the mystic's prior beliefs, expectations or intentions: --'raw experience'.
This last category leaves open the possibility of or makes room for the mystic to be surprised by the experience which he has, not only by its timing but also by its nature. Religious experience not only of the numinous but also of the mystical kind can break through categories, it doesn't always in all respects confirm or conform to them. At the same time the schema allows for the complex interplay between experience and doctrine not only at the level of the description of an experience but also at the internal level where doctrine may affect the substance of the experience itself.
Peter Moore talks as if he believes objectivity is dependent on the
existence of this last category, 'raw experience': "The category of raw
experience leaves open all the important questions regarding the ultimate
source and significance of mystical experience." Whether or in what sense
this might be so will be one important subject matter of our reflections.
It may be that this possibility is of relevance for cognitive value but
not as determining as Peter Moore thinks.
Yet, instead of a single, privileged Jesus experience at the beginning, I would rather posit a continuing process of interpreted experience, of which with respect to later generations the first stage was not completed until it was codified, long after most eyewitnesses had died, in what later became the canonical text. The process would constantly pass through new experience and interpretations, all of which, however, remain both subjectively and objectively dependent upon the original, interpreted experience. (Dupre 1988, 117)
This does away with the need for 'raw experience'. One problem it raises however is how to distinguish between 'a primary interpretation' and "the cultural interpretation through models and concepts" (cf. Dupre 116 for terminology). There does not seem to be any easy way to do this. Perhaps the tradition itself does this, perhaps in a rather messy fashion, as it goes along.
[Dupre 1988 = Louis Dupre, Religious Mystery and Rational Reflection (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1988). Chapter referred to is entitled, "Experience and Interpretation: A Philosophical Reflection on Schillebeeckx's Theology", pp. 107-117.]
All experience that we are conscious of bears the traces of lots of work already built into it, which we don't even notice; our everyday world of experience is a 'constituted' world. There is no such thing as unmediated experience and the relationship between experience and interpretation is dialectical or dialogal: interpretation is validated by experience; it also makes certain kinds of experience possible. You can't perceive a table as a table unless you have the concept, 'table'. We get concepts frequently by way of learning the meaning of words, which frequently but not always involves experience of the things in question. Compare Kant: concepts without percepts are empty, percepts without concepts are blind. If the question is asked, which comes first, experience or interpretation, the answer is: it is a chicken and egg situation, experience, which is always already theory-laden, founds theories some of which in turn actually get incorporated into future experiences. But the point here is that experiencing is in practice always experiencing as.
By way of mitigation of this thesis: experience may well be in excess of a given 'horizon' or 'pre-understanding', what I take to the experience. In order to integrate this kind of experience sometimes indeed I have to expand my horizon. However, even the unexpected presumes an expected: you have to expect something before the expectation can be frustrated. The unexpected is integrated, if at all, by way of a modification of or expansion of the horizon of understanding already existing, occasionally by way of an 'explosion' of the pre-existing horizon and it's reconstitution with some different ingredients on another basis, which expansion or explosion dialogue with the experience provokes or helps to bring about.
2) In general, and very strangely to people (inc. myself) who go on about not being "subjective" and the need for "objectivity", the reality revealing function of an experience is quite often directly rather than inversely proportional to the degree of mediation/ degree of incorporation of interpretation.
Otherwise the experience of a new born babe is better than that of an adult, and the experience of a primitive more to be relied on than that of scientists with sophisticated instruments. (Good) theories promote rather than stand in the way of reality-revealing experiences --and by that we mean also incorporated theories.
Along these lines, it may be that standing in a tradition promotes rather than hinders the having of a reality revealing objective religious experience.
3) There is a proviso however in respect of incorporated theories of common life and science, which should flow over also to incorporated theories within mysticism: in common life and science there is, and generally there needs to be, some mechanism for the 'externality' to exercise constraint on theory making.
This means in practice:
The second criterion above, i.e. (ii), is something like a falsifiability or correctibility criterion of cognitive relevance, and is factually the case, I believe, for theories of common life and science as well as for any metaphysics which claims empirical adequacy, at least in the sophisticated and rather messy manner advocated by the likes of Imre Lakatos.1 It is essentially a statement that there is no way of deciding whether cognitively relevant interaction with the reality is all in the past. This would require an admission (in terminology for Christians and Jews and Moslems) that we don't after all happen to be God, whose 'horizon' is absolute, who either doesn't need to interact or who interacts most fully by definition. Or at least that we are not yet in the final Kingdom, beyond the Last Day.
4) In the interests of further sophistication, we could distinguish between various different kinds or levels of 'mind-sets' which determine in one way or another both experience itself and how we interpret and talk about what we experience:
(a) perceptual mind-sets: by definition incorporated into experience
= genetically determined or acquired habits of experiencing. In respect
of sense-perception, these have been subjected to extensive scientific
investigation. See, for example:
Image, Object and Illusion: Readings from Scientific American,
with Introductions by Richard Held (W.H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco,
1974); R.L. Gregory on "Illusions" in Oxford Companion to the Mind;
Edward
Hundert, "Can Neuroscience Contribute to Philosophy?", Mindwaves,
edited by Colin Blakemore and Susan Greenfield (Blackwell, Oxford, 1987),
pp. 407-430. Of relevance also for the next heading.
(b) conceptual mind-sets: some but not all incorporated. We see through our conceptual/linguistic apparatus, but some part of the latter is not yet and perhaps never gets incorporated, stays always as 'theory' or 'interpretation', unincorporated interpretation versus incorporated interpretation.
In something like the manner of Kant, we could then divide conceptual mind sets into two families:
(b)(i) 'empirical' conceptual mindsets: e.g. table, chair, 'tree', 'horse', 'snow', 'summer/winter', 'computer', 'mouse' (as in mouses), 'mouse' as in mice. These are learned, originally in the process of learning a language and entering into a particular form of life.(c) there may also be emotional or affective and psychic mind-sets, affective/emotional and sometimes unconscious psychic determinants of what we are or can be opened out on to. See especially the work of the Lonergan scholar Robert Doran with his talk of 'psychic conversion'. Also Vergote.
(b)(ii) 'metaphysical conceptual mindsets': e.g. substance and quality, causal connectedness: we experience through our metaphysics. These are rather more deeply ingrained and tend to be language and form of life independent, though perhaps not totally.
For more on these, see below, Topic Four, (III)Evaluation of Religious
Experience Independent of Religious Tradition.
1) The burden of proof is shifted to those who allege 'pure
empty consciousness'
Some mystics do claim to be able to successfully shed all conceptual and linguistic frameworks for the sake of entering a state of pure consciousness. Cf. W. T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy, pp. 85ff. Cf. Ninian Smart in Katz, 1983. Cf. Donald Evans in Religious Studies, March 1989, pp. 53ff. Cf. Forman collection 1990.
To rule out this claim a priori is a begging of the question. The most that might be argued a priori is in respect of the burden of proof. Considering that all or almost all other experience that people have is mediated, the burden of proof in respect of unmediated experience is probably to be placed on the people who allege it rather than on their detractors. They could attempt this, for example, by displaying certain common mystical techniques that might plausibly lead to the destruction of various varieties of mind-set, as well as whole heaps of similar textual evidence from the mystics themselves across the various traditions.
This claim for unmediated experience in some kinds of mysticism may be thought to gain some plausibility from the 'deautomatization' hypothesis of Arthur J. Deikman. Cf. Arthur J. Deikman, "Deautomatization and the Mystic Experience", in Woods collection (1980), pp. 240ff. According to Deikman, mystic techniques of contemplation and also renunciation serve to bring about an "undoing of automatic perceptual and cognitive structures" permitting thereby "a gain in sensory intensity and richness at the expense of abstract categorization and differentiation". (p. 251) "A mystic experience is the production of an unusual state of consciousness. This state is brought about by a deautomatization of hierarchically ordered structures that ordinarily conserve attentional energy for maximum efficiency in achieving the basic goals of the individual: biological survival as an organism and psychological survival as a personality...in favour of alternate modes of consciousness whose stimulus processing may be less efficient from a biological point of view but whose very inefficiency may permit the experience of aspects of the real world formerly excluded or ignored." (p. 259.) He argues that this hypothesis of deautomatization is capable of explaining many of the features which mystics claim for their mystical experiences.
Compare also the articles in Woods collection by Roland Fischer, esp. what he says, pp. 289ff., on the "unlearning" of the "constancies" which in the normal state of daily routine form a learned structure of primary ordering of the world "out there", learned for the sake of survival.
The only problem would be as to whether the old biologically adapted conceptual and perceptual and psychic mindsets, having been undone, are or are not in all cases immediately replaced by another lot of conceptual and perceptual and psychic sets. The old spirits having been cast out by the hard work of contemplation and renunciation, another lot of spirits are immediately invited in to take their place. Or perhaps in some cases force their way in. This is an empirical question, in many cases probably very difficult to decide. Also, it might be that the new lot of mind-sets is partially determined by the very experience itself, by the fact of its occurrence and by its experienced character.
The following text may be instructive in respect of this question.
It is from John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, Ch. XIII, paragraph
11 (emphasis mine):
"This shows how great is the mercy of God to the soul when He thus purifies it in this strong lye and bitter purgation, as to its sensual and spiritual part, from all its affections and imperfect habits in all that relates to time, nature, sense, and spirit; by darkening its interior faculties, and emptying them of all objects, by correcting and drying up all affections of sense and spirit, by weakening and wasting the natural forces, which the soul never could have done of itself, as we shall immediately show. God makes it die, in this way, to all that is not God, that, being denuded and stripped of its former clothing, it may clothe itself anew. Thus the soul's 'youth shall be renewed like the eagle's', clothed with 'the new man, which, in the words of the Apostle, is created according to God in justice." (John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul and The Living Flame of Love (Harper Collins, 1995) pp.115-116.Certainly, for John the Cross in this passage, the 'denuding' and 'emptying' is precisely for the sake of being clothed again, and the clothing is quite tradition specific.
2) Even if Katz is right and the mystics and their defenders are wrong, the situation is by no means impossible, just more complicated.
The validity or truth-revealing character of a religious experience as with other experience is not independent of the validity of the incorporated theories, e.g. those determined by the tradition within which the experience occurs. On the other hand, the validity of the incorporated theories (including of the tradition) is relative to the experiences which led to them in the first place and the experiences which they themselves make possible. Thirdly, this side of the Parousia as a Christian would say, it must be possible for the experience to break through the theories including the incorporated theories and cause us to remake them.
Along these lines, our Christian faith, itself based on the solid ground
of the experience of the prophets and Jesus Christ and Mary of Nazareth
and Mary Magdalene and the apostles, may promote rather than hinder an
experience of the one true God by people in the Christian community. Such
experience had by people in the tradition would in turn add strength to
the tradition. More controversially for adherents of the tradition, this
experience may, and it must at least be theoretically possible that it
could, break through the confines of the categories of our present Christian
faith.
3) Even this is not quite complicated enough however, in so far as some features of the tradition have nothing at all to do with religious experience of any kind.
There is no good reason to believe that religious traditions are exempt from the racism and sexism and culture-ism and the lust for power that seem to be endemic among us human beings. The mutual validating function of tradition and religious experience might thus need to be filtered through an hermeneutic of suspicion.
More positively, mysticism and prophetism might help to liberate the tradition from some of its deforming influences: cf. the last two articles in the Woods collection, by Segundo Galilea and by Matthew Fox. Perhaps it is noteworthy in our own tradition that while we have numbers of great women mystics and mystical writers, we have very few women professional philosophers and theologians until recently and of course in the Roman and Orthodox traditions no women priests and bishops.
TOPIC THREE: EXPERIENCE, INTERPRETATION AND MYSTICISM
KATZ (1978, 1983): this begs the question: doctrinal systems may well
and in fact do effect the experience itself, not only its interpretation.
PETER MOORE (Katz 1978 collection):
: four theoretically distinct elements in working with texts about religious experience:
1. 'retrospective interpretation'
2. 'reflexive interpretation': during or immediately after
3. 'incorporated interpretation':
4. 'raw experience': features of the experience unaffected by the mystic's
prior beliefs, expectations and intentions, which breaks through or goes
beyond the pre-existing categories.
LOUIS DUPRE (Dupre 1988)
'Reflective interpretation' subsequent on the experience
'that indispensable interpretation which gives structure, emphasis and meaning to the primary experience', ontologically but not temporally prior to the experience itself.
'primary interpretation' making for the very possibility of originating
experiences as revelatory, which enjoys equal status with the experience
itself.
Though experience may well be, and often is, in excess of a particular given horizon.
2. in general, the reality revealing function of an experience is DIRECTLY rather than inversely proportion to the degree of mediation.
3. important proviso: there has to be some mechanism for the 'externality' to exercise constraint on theory making, which usually means:
(a) the theory was elaborated in dialogue with experiential happenings on a previous level;
(b) theories continue to stand ready to be 'corrected' or 'improved' by further experience.
['raw experience' now = experience which while not literally raw is still in excess of the given horizon.]
4. there are various different levels of mind-set which determine both experience itself and how we interpret and talk about it: at least the following
PERCEPTUAL mind sets
CONCEPTUAL mind sets
two kinds: EMPIRICAL conceptual mind-sets, e.g. table, watchPSYCHIC and emotional or afffective mind sets (Vergote, Robert Doran): psychological determinants of what we can be opened out on to and are capable of experiencing and/or accepting as real.METAPHYSICAL conceptual mind-sets, e.g. substance and quality versus events, cause and effect. Like Kant's Categories, but to some extent historically determined, and may well be affected by e.g. certain meditational techniques.
Some mystical traditions set out consciously to change some or all of
these mind-sets, either for a short time or permanently, for the sake of
experiencing reality another way, e.g. the way the particular tradition
says it really is.
All that the above about the general run of experience implies is that the burden of proof is probably on them rather than their 'constructivist' opponents.
2. if right, the significance epistemologically, metaphysically and otherwise of such phenomena still remains to be determined. The significance could well depend partly on what else happened to be believed and on what grounds. Such unusual happenings would be slotted in and play a more or less profound role in the hermeneutics of belief. In some traditions e.g. the John of the Cross Christian, the role of such experiences might be quite subsidiary to getting clothed anew in any case.
3. even if wrong, and Katz and co. are correct, the situation is by no means impossible, just more complicated.
The validity or truth revealing character of the experience is dependent partly on that of the incorporated theories; and vice versa. Thirdly, this side of the Parousia it must be possible for the experience to break through the theories including the normally incorporated theories and cause us to remake them.
Provided the interpretative structures were elaborated in dialogue with past experience and the system remains open rather than closed, experience and interpretation are capable of being mutually validating, even when the latter be incorporated. (E.g. watches, the sciences.)
4. there are many features of religious traditions which have nothing at all to do with religious experience of any kind.
The need for a 'hermeneutic of suspicion'. On the other hand, mysticism(s) as well as prophetism(s) may help to liberate a tradition from some of its deforming influences.
there is a problem arising from the existence of a number of apparently quite viable religious traditions of experience and interpretation. As far as cognitivity is concerned, there appears to be no reason why we may not construe this along the lines of competing super-theories, paradigms, research programs, traditions of enquiry, each with their confirming instances.
6.. this raises the difficulty of working out non-tradition specific criteria for deciding between traditions, each with their quota of validating experiences some proportion of which is made possible by the tradition itself. We need to find a way of comparing entire complexes. But according to certain people (Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Alisdair McIntyre), this problem whether solvable (Lakatos, McIntyre) or not (Kuhn, Feyerabend) is not specific to religious experience. This is in addition to providing (perhaps tradition specific) criteria for deciding between spurious and genuine experiences. (See Topic 4). But the important thing is that there would not seem to be anything epistemologically peculiar about such difficulties vis a vis the general situation elsewhere.
7. it must also be worked out: to what extent and on what questions are particular religious traditions genuine competitors?
For example, we might after spending a lot of time with the material develop in the direction of an hypothesis that the Ethical and Religious Ultimate (e.g. the Good, God) and the 'Metaphysical Ultimate' (e.g. the Absolute, Nothingness) are probably not the same (cf. John Cobb), so that different traditions are in fact talking about and indeed experiencing different things.
It is also possible to make different statements about the same thing, not all of which are inconsistent with each other: experiencing different aspects of the same thing.
In both of these ways, the traditions might be 'complementary' rather than in contradiction.
On the other hand there may well be genuine and irreconcilable conflicts. Even here, however, we may be better off in terms of the Realities themselves in allowing the free play of a number of different 'models', none of which is perfectly satisfactory or will be this side of the Eschaton. This could conceivably even be the will of the Divine Mystery (to talk the language of a Christian). To some extent we might be faced with different models in respect of whose limits of application we are not yet sure.
8. this is not one of those subjects in which academic or any other kind of sanctions are in order. Truth may be objective, e.g. how things are in the 'Consequent Nature of God' as the process people put it. But we are not God and the appropriation of truth in these matters is far from easy.
9. Cf. Hume, Dialogues, XII: no God worth her salt would bother to be offended by the mistaken opinions of puny human beings on these matters. It is only the devotees who are offended and then only for very human motives. [Hume doesn't realize it, but this amounts to a tradition specific defence of 8, which is also a good Humean thesis.]
For more on theses 3 and 5 through 8, see Topic 4.
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