PHI 3393 Sonia Sikka

Sam Anderson 5608595

Term Paper: Question 1

November 19, 2012

Within the scope of human consciousness there have always existed religious experiences that have given persons a temporary unification with the divine. Over time these religious experiences have evolved from being impersonal and community shared to manifesting as unique and personal for the specific individual. Writing in the 19th century, about a people still experiencing the world in the more compact forms of consciousness that precede scientific and philosophic discourse, Dr. Codrington observed of the remote Melanesian people that, as a community, they were dominated by a belief in mana life blood as the explanation for all things supernatural and beyond the possibility of ordinary man. This was the case because Mana could flow through all things and all people and was transferred from object to object living or not. (Cornford, p84) It is only at a later point in the development of human self-reflection and a more differentiated level of consciousness that emerges the type of contemporary personal religious experience best described by William James. For the purpose of this paper both forms of religious experience past and present, will serve as the foundation for the analysis. For James, however, religious experience occurs through a mystical state of consciousness in which separation of self from the mundane and a temporary union with god is achieved. As such, there are “four characteristics of mystical experiences: they are inexpressible in words, yield knowledge, are of short duration, and happen to us independent of our wills.” (p43) The specific question I will ask in this paper, in connection with the study of the philosophy of religion, is whether these experiences can act as a conclusive source of evidence for the existence of a supreme being? In examining this question I will assume that the different forms of religious experience must first be generalized both in content and in structure. If a type of experience is to become evidence for the existence of the divine, all human beings must be able to recognize it as their own. Once universalized to a point where all forms of religious experience are included, however, the remainder will be seen to be so amorphous, so abstract, and so lacking in content that the God it would point to would be unrecognizable to most individuals who believe they have experienced the divine. In other words, the sorts of religious experiences that would prove the existence of God to most believers are too complex and too unique to be generalized to all believers. By looking at anthropological data and by cross analyzing different cultural/religious traditions, inconsistencies undermining these experiences as concrete evidence will become apparent.

For Ludwig Feuerbach in his Essence of Christianity, the distinction between Theology and Anthropology is eliminated by showing that God is a projection of the human being’s own sense of self. Accordingly, our persona is structurally analogous to that of God’s; the wished for

immortality, limitlessness, and independence of one’s own personality are projected onto and mirrored in God’s personality. “God is for man the common place book where he registers his highest feelings and thoughts, the genealogical album into which he enters the names of things most dear and scared to him.” (Feuerbach, pxvi) In the case of Christianity, one may view its emergence as the specific product of a revolt by disenfranchised groups from the oppression of Roman Imperial society. It is the alienation and misery of slaves, outcasts, and the unemployed, their defining experience of existence, that is projected as the suffering of Christ on the cross. And it is the awareness of the unchallengeable might of imperial Rome that makes the kingdom of Christ a spiritual state that is not of this world. More generally for Christianity, it is the resurrection of the central figure which indicates “the fulfilled longing of man for an immediate certainty of his continued personal existence after death.” (Feuerbach, pxviii) The socio-historical conditions under which Islam came into being, by contrast, were those of military weakness and political division among the Semitic peoples of the Middle East during the seventh century; so, naturally, to best fit the needs of its people, Islam became a religion where God sanctions unification through holy conquest. This concept of projected or hypostatic consciousness is also to be found in the example of mana as perhaps the earliest form of religious experience. The primitive Melanesian community simply projected the immediate, visceral sensation of their own flowing, life giving blood, transforming it into a supernatural equivalent which flows through all of nature. What this very quick survey is intended to show is that the substantive forms of religious experience are both structured and coloured by specific historical conditions – “historical” conditions that include the development of consciousness from more compact to more differentiated levels. To act as conclusive proof of a supreme being, accordingly, the religious experience will have to be generalized to its most basic and, therefore, most inclusive components.

The argument we have made above at the macroscopic or collective level can be made again at the microscopic or individual. For instance, philosopher Wayne Proudfoot has criticized William James’ concept of religious experience by noting the pre-structuring, pre-filtering influence already existing religious dogma has on the character of any subsequent spiritual events. He argues that the experience in question is, in fact, a function of the religious belief of the individual. Hence, if the exact same experience had been lived by another individual lacking any knowledge of a specific religious tradition, that person would interpret it in a completely different manner, perhaps in a way absent of all religious symbolism. It is the case that the experience is dependent on the belief; the experience is simply a judgment (a relation of simple event to hermeneutical field) made about one’s existing knowledge. So, for example, “Why did Stephen Bradley identify his accelerated heart rate as the work of the holy spirit? What caused Astor to regard what he saw as a miracle whereas Bingham remained skeptical?” (p65-66) Or again, why does a Christian in North America have a religious experience of Jesus and a Buddhist in China an experience of Buddha. Their religious beliefs already provide the categorical structure and the narrative arch by which the molten material of mystical experiences are forged into something intelligible. Certainly it would be very odd for an individual to have a

mystical experience that he felt was directed by an opposing religion’s deity. Hence, once again, it is because the kind of unique and personal religious experiences William James defines are so dependent on the historical, psychological, and social factors impinging on the individual, that they can not be considered, in themselves and without further reduction, as universal evidence for a God.

The argument made above at two levels of analysis is not intended to discredit religious experience all together. It only aims to demonstrate that the more an experience is unique, personal, complex, psychologically detailed or culturally weighted, the less can the whole of it function as a universal truth for all mankind. In the end, it remains valid only for the individual that experienced it. But if the attempt to make the unique and determinately personal experience of God a form of evidence for the existence of God must fail (because there is no agreement on the detail), then what about abstracting from the specifics; what about looking only at common structures. Well, then the problem would become this: in bringing religious experiences to the level required for them to be universal, and therefore proof of a universal, we must bleed them of everything that was meaningful to the person of faith in the first place. Religious experience, as James describes it, once reduced to its necessary abstraction, is little more than the sense of release that attends the consciousness of losing one’s sense of self. It is a pattern or structure in which determinate being resolves into a greater totality. What it proves, therefore, is only the (universal) existence of a type of orderly relation. The problem with the experience at this level, however, is that it is no longer inextricably linked to the personal salvation that comes through a direct connection to a living God. As such, it is no longer recognizably religious. The other problem, of course, is that abstract patterns of order tend to repeat themselves in the universe, sometimes at more or less complex levels, sometimes at different operational scales dependent on size. As such, the religious experience becomes an analogous form of the type of relation we already see at work in stellar fusion, chemical reaction, cell division, sexual love, friendship, marriage, the family, the nation.

Friedrich Schleiermacher in his major work The Christian Faith attempts to shield fundamental religious experience from scientific and philosophic criticism by clearly defining their respective arenas of legitimate operation. On the one hand, when Schleiermacher thinks about the Christian Church as a formalization of “ecumenical communion” he never departs from fundamental Kantian concepts of the primacy of the individual and of individual experience. On the other hand, Schleiermacher will demonstrate that neither philosophical logic nor scientific method is properly equipped for the task of religious comprehension. “For no science can by means of mere ideas reach and elicit what is individual, but must always stop short with what is general.” (Schleiermacher, p3) The Church, therefore, is properly concerned only with “the maintenance, regulation, and advancement of piety” which is here always understood as an immediate condition of personal sentiment. (p6) But just as it is a “degeneration” of the Church to occupy itself with the affairs of science and the state, so it is equally reprehensible for “the leaders of State or of science to order the affairs of religion” in so far as this pertains, not to universal laws

of reason and conduct, but to the specifics of personal belief. The piety which forms the basis of all religious experience is, “considered purely in itself, neither a Knowing nor a Doing, but a modification of Feeling, or of immediate self-consciousness.” (Schleiermacher, p5) It is for this reason that religious experience (taken as an immediate or undifferentiated modification of feeling) cannot provide evidence for the divine to anyone beyond the beholder of the experience. In its very nature, it can not be generalized into a law. But by the same token, unless religion (as piety) attempts to make claims about the more general nature of divinity, it can not, in all fairness, come under the critical scrutiny of science and philosophy. This is the nature of the terms of truce devised by Schleiermacher after nearly 100 years of Enlightenment critique. The sanctity of personal religious experience remains unassailable so long as it remains (relatively) inarticulate. The ability to prove the existence of God categorically is surrendered for a guarantee that his presence in “immediate self-consciousness’ will remain beyond critique. Contemporary thinkers, intent on developing social ethics or critiques of modernity based on the writings of mystical/religious thinkers like Heidegger and Derrida, would do well to consider the terms of this truce.

Works cited

*All citations with only a page number absent of the authors name are from the course text book.

Cornford, F.M. From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation, United States of America. Humanities Press, 1980.

Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity, United States of America. Harper & Brothers, 1957.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. The Christian Faith, Great Britain. Morrison and Gibb Limited, 1928.