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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
William James catalogued an amazing diversity of religious experiences. Yet even the pluralistic James was able to find a nucleus, consisting of an uneasiness and its solution, ‘1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand. 2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.’ But by stressing the moral factor, James seems to exclude those who stress rather the sense of mystery stemming from man's theoretical limitations. Einstein, for example, writes: ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious side of life. It is the deep feeling which is at the cradle of all true art and science. In this sense, and only in this sense, I count myself amongst the most deeply religious people.’ For Einstein as for Pascal (Pensées, Fr. 267): ‘The last proceeding of reason is to recognise that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it.’ Thus I propose the following revision of James' conception of the nucleus of the religious experience: (1) uneasy awareness of the limitations of man's moral or theoretical powers, especially when reality is restricted to sense data and natural objects; (2) awe-full awareness of a further reality—beyond or behind or within; (3) conviction that participation with this further reality is of supreme importance.
page 1 note 1 The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1936), p. 498.Google Scholar
page 1 note 2 Comment je vois le monde, traduit par le Colonel Cros (Paris, 1934), p. 7.Google Scholar
page 1 note 3 Types of Religious Experience (Chicago, 1951), Chap. 2.Google Scholar See also Wach's, The Comparative Study of Religions, ed. Kitagawa, Joseph M. (New York, 1958).Google Scholar
page 2 note 1 Language, Truth and Logic (London, 1936).Google Scholar In the later work of Ayer and logical positivism generally, the sharpness of this position has been modified.
page 3 note 1 This is a free following at this point, for ‘sense data’ and ‘objects’ for Heidegger are abstractions from beings or things. ‘We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g. tones and noises, in the appearance of things.… We hear the door shut in the house and never hear acoustical sensations or even mere sounds. In order to hear a bare sound we have to listen-away from things, divert our ear from them, i.e. listen abstractly.’ ‘The Origin of The Work of Art’, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Philosophies of Art and Beauty, ed. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (New York, 1964), p. 656.
page 3 note 2 There are analogies here, although no more than that, with the Whiteheadian-Hartshorncan concept of God. Heidegger has remained neutral on the question of the relation or identification of Being and God, and I will do likewise throughout this discussion. But, whatever the answer to that question may be, God is not a being. As Tillich puts it: ‘Both the theological and the scientific critics of the belief that religion is an aspect of the human spirit define religion as man's relation to divine beings, whose existence the theological critics assert and the scientific critics deny. But it is just this idea of religion which makes any understanding of religion impossible.… A God about whose existence or non-existence you can argue is a thing beside others within the universe of existing things [beings].’ Theology of Culture (New York, 1959), pp. 4 f.Google Scholar
page 4 note 1 For a sharply opposed position that claims that Being (God) is an object revealed by sensation, and therefore is subject to the scientific method, see Wieman, Henry Nelson, Religious Experience and Scientific Method (New York, 1926),Google Scholar esp. Chap. 1.
page 4 note 2 Paul Weiss makes essentially the same point when he maintains that those who fail to insist on the presence of the ontological in the religious experience, for example Dewey in A Common Faith, ‘have no way of distinguishing a supposed religious experience from similarly toned but quite different occurrences’. The God We Seek (Carbondale, III., 1964), p. 53.Google Scholar
page 4 note 3 On the question of the value function of Being in the ontological experience—for example, the relationship between the subjective value of Being to us and the objective value in Being that claims our homage—see Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of The Holy, trans. Harvey, John W. (London, 1928), esp. pp. 52 ff.Google Scholar
page 5 note 1 This is one of the most lively issues in current theology. See, for example, The Later Heidegger and Theology, ed. James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb, Jr.
page 5 note 2 (New York, 1963). It is perfectly possible to be aware of mystery and yet dismiss the possibility of its ontological origin. Thus Wittgenstein, unlike Ayer, is conscious of mystery. ‘Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical.’ ‘These are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.’ Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, 1922), 6.45 and 6.522.Google Scholar But Wittgenstein never, at least in his writings, suggests that the cause of our awareness of mystery is anything more than a lack in our ontical powers.
page 6 note 1 Cf. Polanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge (Chicago, 1958), p. 286:Google Scholar ‘Objectivism [Positivism] has totally falsified our conception of truth by exalting what we can know and prove, while covering up with ambiguous utterances all that we cannot prove, even though the latter knowledge underlies, and must ultimately set its seal to, all that we can prove.’
page 6 note 2 For discussion of the principal distinctions between ‘proof’ and ‘plausibility’ see Margolis, Joseph, The Language of Art and Art Criticism (Detroit, 1965), pp. 85–94.Google Scholar Plausibility, furthermore, is a species of verifiability, as Tillich points out: ‘The verifying test belongs to the nature of truth; in this positivism is right.… The safest test is the repeatable experiment. A cognitive realm in which it can be used has the advantage of methodological strictness and the possibility of testing an as sertion in every moment. But it is not permissible to make the experimental method of verification the exclusive pattern of all verification. Verification can occur within the life-process itself. Verification of this type (experiential in contradistinction to experimental) has the advantage that it need not halt and disrupt the totality of a life-process in order to distil calculable elements out of it (which experimental verification must do). The verifying experiences of a non-experimental character are truer to life, though less exact and definite.’ Systematic Theology (Chicago, 1951), I, 102.Google Scholar The thinking that attempts to make plausible our understanding of Being is aptly described by William J. Richardson following Heidegger as ‘foundational thought’. Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague, 1963).Google Scholar See also the distinction between ‘verification’ and ‘validation’ as used by Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 202.
page 7 note 1 Language and Reality (London, 1951), p. 500.Google Scholar
page 8 note 1 ‘On the Ontological Mystery’, The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Harari, Manya (London, 1948), p. 5.Google Scholar
page 8 note 2 Schleiermacher, for example, in some of his works infers the existence of God (Being) from introspective sense data, his feeling of ‘absolute dependence’. He reasons that if this feeling is present, then there must be a cause that accounts for this feeling; and because of the absolute character of this feeling, it must have an ontological origin. See Otto's criticisms of Schleiermacher on this point, The Idea of The Holy, pp. 10 and 20 f. However, this is not the whole story, for there are passages in Schleiermacher that affirm a direct awareness of God. See, for example, On Religion, trans. Oman, John (New York, 1958), pp. 41 ff.Google Scholar It is surely futile to attempt to infer and reify Being, for then Being is reduced to a being. Thus theodicy is atheism. This is one of the points of Tillich's insistent reminder that God is ‘the God beyond gods’. Max Scheler, one of the first to apply the phenomenological method to the religious experience, came to the following fundamental conclusion: ‘This is therefore the first sure truth of all religious phenomenology: on whatever level of his religious development he may be, the human being is invariably looking into the realm of being and value which is in basis and origin utterly different from the whole remaining empirical world; it is not inferred from that other world, neither won from it by idealization, and access to it is possible solely in the religious act. This is the proposition of the originality and nonderivation of religious experience.’ On the Eternal in Man, trans. Noble, Bernard (London, 1960), p. 173.Google Scholar
page 8 note 3 ‘On the Ontological Mystery’, p. 24. Cf. Jaspers ‘On My Philosophy’, trans. Felix Kaufmann in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter, Kaufmann (Cleveland, 1964), p. 149:Google Scholar ‘Everything that becomes an object to me approaches me, as it were, from the dark background of Being. Every object is a determinate being (as this confronting me in a subject-object division), but never all Being. No being known as an object is the Being.… This Being… is that which always makes its presence known, which does not appear itself, but from which everything comes to us.’
page 9 note 1 This is the point behind Heidegger's criticism of Kant's characterisation of self-consciousness as something substantial, the ‘I’ or the ‘I think’. Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie, John and Robinson, Edward (New York, 1962), pp. 366–8.Google Scholar
page 9 note 2 Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, Hazel E. (New York, 1956), p. 47.Google Scholar
page 9 note 3 ‘The Two Environments’, Encounter, XXV, I (July 1965), p. 9.Google Scholar
page 10 note 1 Émile Durkheim comes to the similar conclusion that ‘religious beliefs rest upon a specific experience whose demonstrative value is, in one sense, not one bit inferior to that of scientific experiments, though different from them’. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Swain, J. W. (Glencoe, 1947), p. 417.Google Scholar
page 10 note 2 Concerning the confusions involved in the claim that Being can be encountered without mediation, see Lewis, H. D., Morals and Revelation (London, 1951),Google Scholar Chap. 8. ‘Mystic’ and ‘mysticism’ are highly ambiguous terms, as Otto points out (The Idea of the Holy, p. 211). Zen Buddhists and Wordsworth, for example, are often classified as mystics, and yet they make no claim of encountering Being as disembodied. Restricting the term ‘mystic’ to the type of Meister Eckhardt is closer to such conventional usage that does exist, and it helps avoid confusion. See van der Leeuw, G., Religion in Essence and Manifestation, trans. Turner, J. E. (London, 1938), Chap. 75.Google Scholar
page 10 note 3 From an entirely different point of view and in very different terms Eliade comes to a similar conclusion. ‘Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism,’ The History of Religions, ed. Mircea, Eliade and Kitagawa, Joseph M. (Chicago, 1959), p. 103.Google Scholar
page 11 note 1 With that remarkable intellectual honesty that made it possible for him to record fairly facts that were apparently inconsistent with his own theories, James suggests the same point. The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 58.
page 11 note 2 See, for example, the description by Ruskin of how the ontological experiences of his childhood and youth faded away as his ‘reflective and practical power increased and the “cares of the world” gained upon me’. Quoted by Otto, , The Idea of The Holy, p. 221.Google Scholar
page 12 note 1 The Sickness unto Death, trans. Lowrie, Walter (New York, 1954), p. 166.Google Scholar
page 12 note 2 No one has documented more thoroughly the depersonalising forces of technology than Jaspers. See especially Man in the Modem Age, trans. Eden, and Paul, Cedar (London, 1951).Google Scholar
page 13 note 1 ‘Life on the Mississippi’ in The Favorite Works of Mark Twain (Garden City, N.Y., 1939), pp. 46 f.Google Scholar
page 13 note 2 In this denial of Being, as Henry G. Bugbee, Jr. sorrowfully observes, is ‘the root denial of the possibility of philosophy. Isn't this denial in its clearest form just the point to which so much of Positivism has come? That our thought can be responsible only to empirical [ontical] discoveries, or to the elements of an abstract system, and that thought in any other mode would be vague and irresponsible, devoid of any authentic purchase: this is “scientism”, the antiphilosophical persuasion so evident in our time.’ The Inward Morning (New York, 1961), p. 84.Google Scholar
page 13 note 3 Heidegger's career is an interesting exemplification of these main approaches to Being. In Being and Time (1927) it is the tragic and especially the dreadful experience that is stressed, but in his writings since then it is a kind of aesthetic experience.
page 14 note 1 Fear and Trembling, trans. Lowrie, Walter (New York, 1954), p. 166.Google Scholar
page 14 note 2 ‘Tragedy’, as used in this essay, is the artistic interpretation of the tragic, and thus a species of the tragic.
page 16 note 1 Being and Time, pp. 306 f.
page 17 note 1 The Will to Believe (New York, 1956), p. 27.Google Scholar
page 17 note 2 Whitehead, Alfred North, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York, 1927), p. 44.Google Scholar
page 18 note 1 Such scientists usually find the one-dimensional scientism of Ayer and the positivists at best only partially descriptive of their work and at worst a travesty. Pierre Duhem, for example: ‘If he wishes to be nothing but a physicist, and if, as an intransigent positivist, he regards everything not determinable by the method proper to the positive sciences as unknowable, he will notice this tendency powerfully inciting his own research as it has guided those of all times, but he will not look for its origin, because the only method of discovery which he trusts will not be able to reveal it to him. If, on the other hand, he yields to the nature of the human mind, which is repugnant to the extreme demands of positivism, he will want to know the reason for, or explanation of, what carries him along; he will break through the wall at which the procedures of physics stop, helpless, and he will make an affirmation which these procedures do not justify; he will be metaphysical [ontological]. What is this metaphysical affirmation that the physicist will make, despite the nearly forced restraint imposed on the method he customarily uses? He will affirm that underneath the observable data, the only data accessible to his methods of study, are hidden realities whose essence cannot be grasped by these same methods.…’ The Aim and Structures of Physical Theory, trans. Wiener, Philip P. (New York, 1962), pp. 296 f.Google Scholar
page 18 note 2 Michel Seuphor stresses the same point: ‘I believe that religious sentiment, in all religions, resides first of all in an immobilization before life, a prolonged attention, a questioning and expectant attitude that suspends all corporeal activity and that is a prelude to an activity of a quite different nature that we call inner life, spiritual life.’ The Spiritual Mission of Life (New York, 1960), p. 26.Google Scholar
page 18 note 3 Between Man and Man, trans. Smith, Ronald Gregor (Boston, 1955), p. 126.Google Scholar
page 19 note 1 Greene, Theodore Meyer, The Arts and the Art of Criticism (Princeton, 1940), p. 231.Google Scholar
page 19 note 2 The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. O'Brien, Justin (New York, 1959), p. 73.Google Scholar
page 20 note 1 Υoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. Trask, Willard R. (New York, 1958), p. 82.Google Scholar Cf. Bernard Berenson's description of what he calls ‘the aesthetic moment’: Aesthetics and History (Garden City, N.Y., 1954), p. 93.Google Scholar
page 21 note 1 Being and Nothingness, esp. pp. 177 ff. See also my ‘On the Supposed Incompatibility of Expressionism and Formalism’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XV, I (09 1956), p. 98.Google Scholar
page 21 note 2 Such unity is also a characteristic of the mystic experience; but the mystic experience, unlike the participative experience, is an awareness of the ontological free from the ontical.
page 21 note 3 Paintings of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Mervyn, Levy (New York, 1964), p. 39.Google Scholar
page 21 note 4 The Inward Morning, p. 110. The Zen Buddhists put it this way: ‘The unreal life is a life forever unconsummated. The man who stands apart from things, unable to give himself to them, receives payment in kind; because his relation to things is an external one, these things, in turn, withhold their full reality from him. When life is contemplated objectively, nowhere is there to be found anything that is free of limitations, nothing that fully satisfies the yearning of the human heart. It is only when man's experience of life is integral that it “means everything” to him; only when the subject is not outside the object, where each lives in the other as well as in itself—only then is life complete from moment to moment.’ Suzuki, Daisetz T., The Essential of Zen Buddhism, ed. Bernard, Phillips, (London, 1962), p. xiv.Google Scholar
page 22 note 1 The spectator sensibility taken to its ultimate extreme is a cult now called ‘Camp’. See Sonntag, Susan, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, Partisan Review, XXI, 4 (Fall 1964).Google Scholar For a denial that the complete aesthetic experience is participative, see Gasset, Ortega y, ‘The Dehumanization of Art’, Symposium, ed. Burnham, J. and Wheelwright, P., 1 (04 1930), pp. 194–205.Google Scholar
page 22 note 2 Science and the Modern World (New York, 1948), p. 202.Google Scholar
page 22 note 3 Cf. Heidegger's description in ‘Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerkes’, Holzwege of a painting by Van Gogh: ‘The painting is of a pair of peasant's shoes—and nothing else. Just a pair of shoes; yet around and through them emerges the world in which the peasant traces his furrows, watches patiently for the wheat to bloom, or trudges tiredly at evening back from the fields. The cycles of time—Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter—enfold these simple boots, which as serviceable and dependable, find their place in a world. Being, as presence, emerges through the painting of the shoes; yet in such a way that it enfolds them in their concrete thingness—just a pair of shoes, and nothing else—as the simple, serviceable gear that they are.’ Translation by Barrett, William in ‘Art and Being’, Art and Philosophy, ed. Sidney, Hook (New York, 1966), p. 172.Google Scholar
page 23 note 1 How each of the arts does this in its distinctive way is another story. With respect to music, see my ‘Unrealized Possibility in the Aesthetic Experience’, The Journal of Philosophy, LII, 15 (07 1955).Google Scholar With respect to painting, see my ‘The Beautiful as Symbolic of the Holy’, The Christian Scholar, XLI, 2 (06 1958).Google Scholar
page 23 note 2 If Mark Twain is correct (see p. 13), it would seem that functions could never be experienced participatively. Bugbee has convinced me otherwise. See especially the moving descriptions of how his absorption in the functions of the life of a ship at sea became participative experiences. The Inward Morning, pp. 174–89. See also Antoine de Saint Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars, trans. Lewis Galantiere (New York, 1939). Functions directly dependent upon the vagaries of nature, such as sea-faring, space-exploration, and farming, are more likely, I believe, to involve us participatively than such functions as business and machine technology. For how technical objects can become aesthetic objects, see Dufrenne, Mikel, ‘The Aesthetic Object and The Technical Object’, Aesthetic Inquiry: Essays on Art Criticism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Beardsley, Monroe C. and Schueller, Herbert M. (Belmont, Cal., 1967).Google Scholar
page 24 note 1 Unless the duality of subject and object is transcended to some significant degree through participative experiences, this slavery is of two basic kinds, as Berdyaev points out: ‘The “objective” either entirely engulfs and enslaves human subjectivity or it arouses repulsion and disgust and so isolates human subjectivity and shuts it up in itself.… Engulfed entirely by his own ego the subject is a slave, just as a subject which is wholly ejected into an object is a slave. Both in the one case and in the other personality is disintegrated or else it has not yet taken shape.’ Slavery and Freedom, trans. French, R. M. (Glasgow, 1943), p. 138.Google Scholar
page 24 note 2 ‘Either all occurrences are in some degree revelation of God [Being], or else there b no such revelation at all; for the conditions of the possibility of any revelation require that there should be nothing which is not revelation.’ Temple, William, Nature, Man and God (London, 1935), p. 306.Google Scholar Everything in ontical reality is a ‘cipher’, in Jaspers' terminology, whose secret text can be deciphered not by scientific codes or keys but only through the participative experience.
page 24 note 3 Without this convictional power, as Bugbee points out, religious belief or faith is groundless and thus a deception. ‘I have encountered no attempt to accord the idea of faith a “sympathetic” interpretation, “a defence”, more misleading than the kind suggested by Pascal's “wager” or William James' “forced option”: that faith means tipping the scale in favor of a set of beliefs which can be neither established nor disproven conclusively, because we have everything to gain and nothing to lose (a) if they are true, by believing so, and (b) by believing they are true even if they are not.’ The Inward Morning, p. 67. It seems to me, however, that second-hand religious belief or faith based entirely on traditional authority, even when that tradition is based on participative experiences, is equally misleading.