EXPERIENTIALISM – All you want to know
EXPERIENTIALISM – All you want to know
As was observed in the previous chapter, fideism often involves an implicit appeal to experience as the test for the truth of its belief. Pascal appealed to the heart’s experience of God, and Kierkegaard and Barth to a personal encounter with God through Christ.
Both psychologically and logically fideism reduces to experientialism. But technically speaking the difference between fideism and experientialism is that the former neither claims nor offers any test for truth, whereas experientialism offers experience as the final court of appeal.
The experience may be special or general, private or available generally, but it is the self-attesting character of experience which verifes the truth-attached claim.
The experiential “proof” for religious beliefs is characteristic of both Christian mysticism and pietism.
It is offered with both intellectual sophistication and held with everyday naiveté. The purpose of this chapter will be to show that, despite its essential contributions to religion, experientialism is an inadequate test for the truth of Christian belief.
An Exposition of Some Major Forms of Experientialism
Not every experientially based religious position uses experience as a test for truth. There is an important difference between the source of one’s beliefs and the warrant for holding them. Some of the following positions tend to use experience for both; others have primarily a grounding in experience. Both types are included because of the appeal of experientialism to what is sometimes used only as a source for truth in one view but offered as a warrant for truth in another view.
Plotinus: Mystical Experience as the Test for Religious Truth
It can be accurately claimed that Western philosophy is a series of footnotes on Plotinus. His influence extends far beyond those who recognize it. It is not only Christian mysticism but hegelianism, existentialism, and pragmatism that find roots in Plotinus. His description of the ultimate, ineffable, intuitive experience of God has formed most of Western mystical thought and bears a parallel resemblance to Eastern mysticism.
A Brief Sketch of Plotinian Pantheistic Mysticism. In Plotinus (d. a.d. 270.) platonism flowers into neo-platonism and the rational comes to fruition in the mystical. The Greeks’ quest for being ends in the One beyond all being, and knowledge is fulfilled in noncognitive intuition. For the rational quest for unity leads to the One beyond rational duality. The ultimate experience is an indescribable experience of the ineffable Source of all being which is experienced only by mystical union.
“God” for Plotinus is the One beyond all knowing and being. God has neither knowledge, being, nor personality; God consists only of absolute unity. But this unity unfolds into Mind (Nous) as necessarily as a flower from its seed, and this Mind unfolds into Soul other minds and souls (VI, 8, 9 and V, 1, 8).1 There is a whole hierarchy of beings from best (Mind) to least, which is Matter (II, 4, 11).
The more being something has, the greater is its unity right on up to Mind, which is a basic unity of knower and known. The only absolute unity with no duality of even knower and known is the unknown and the Unknower (the One). The less being things have, the less their unity until we reach at last the most multiple of all, Matter. Matter is the point at which if being became more multiple it would become absolute non-being (II, 4, 12). Indeed Matter is relative non-being, for it is the mere capacity for being with no being of its own.
In like manner, the more unity something has, the greater good it is. And the less unity, the more evil a thing is. Hence, Nous is the best and Matter is the worst of all things (I, 8, 7). The One is the Source of all good and being but It has neither Itself. For “he had no need of being, who brought it to be” (VI, 8, 19). Likewise, what need for good is there in the Source of all good? And surely there is no duality in the Source of all duality, any more than there is multiplicity in the center from which the many radii emerge.
God transcends not only all good and all being but also all knowing. For only being can be known; the mind cannot know what is not (V, 6, 6). How then can one even speak of “God” or the “One” if It is entirely beyond intelligibility? And how can he experience God if he does not even know he is having the experience? The answer to the first question is that we name God only negatively and from the emanations of God.
Even the “name, The One, contains really no more than the negation of plurality,” and “if we are led to think positively of The One, name and thing, there would be more truth in silence” (V, 5, 6). For “The One is in truth beyond all statement” (V, 3, 13). The statements we do make about It are simply about things that come from It. God causes goodness, being, and knowledge. Hence we call God Good and Being, but It does not have either goodness, being, or knowledge. That is “The One is all things and no one of them; the source of all things is not all things; and yet it is all things in a transcendent sense” (V, 2, 1).
In reality, “it eludes our knowledge, so that the nearer approach to it is through its offspring” (VI, 9, 5). In short, although we cannot speak It, we are able to speak about It in terms of what comes from It (V, 3, 14). In and of Itself the One is absolutely unknowable and unspeakable. And “if we nevertheless speak of it and write about it, we do so only to give direction, to stimulate toward that vision beyond discourse” (VI, 9, 4). In short, all such language is essentially negative, that is, of what God is not. Any positive ascriptions are at best pointers or indicators without descriptive content and are based on what God produces but does not possess (VI, 7, 15).
God Is Experienced Only by Mystical Intuition or Union. If God cannot be described, how can one even know that he is experiencing God? The answer for Plotinus involves rejecting the question. God cannot be known for he is literally the Unknowable; God can only be felt or intuited by mystical union. Of course, man bound by his sense and body to material multiplicity is a long way from home.
He is “busy about many things” (I, 3, 4). Seeing that our soul is “befouled by its housing, made fragmentary by corporeal extension,” Plotinus urges man to turn inward and upward to the true Source of all unity. “Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland,” he wrote (I, 6, 8). This is accomplished by asceticism (purification from the multiple things of the sense world) (I, 3, 6).
The first unity realized as one moves from the external to the internal, from the sensible to the intellectual is unity with the Nous. Our mind merges with Mind; our thoughts find their ultimate basis in Thought (V, 3, 4). Mind, however, involves a basic duality of knower and known; hence, ultimate unity must move on to yet loftier heights.
Since “the Supreme is not known intellectually” (VI, 7, 35), one desiring to experience “what transcends the Intellectual attains by putting away all that is of the intellect” (V, 5, 6). For awareness of the One “comes to us neither by science nor by pure thought … but by a presence which is superior to science.… We must therefore arise above science [philosophy] and never withdraw from unity” (VI, 9, 4, Katz trans.).
In order to know the Supreme, one must be “merged with the Supreme, sunken into it, one with it: centre coincides with centre” (VI, 9, 10). Just as one must “become godlike and each [one] beautiful who cares to see God and Beauty,” so he must become one with the One if he is to experience the One (I, 6, 9). The mind puts away all multiplicity, including that involved in thought, so that “alone it may receive the Alone” (VI, 7, 34).
In this exalted mystical union “no longer is there thing seen and light to show it … ; this is the very radiance that brought both Intellect and Intellectual object into being …” (VI, 7, 36). In point of fact, “only by a leap [from the intellectual] can we reach to this One which is to be pure of all else …” (V, 5, 4).
And the man who experiences this mystical union does so by “coalescence, unification; but in seeking thus to know the Unity it is prevented by that very unification from recognizing that it has found.” For once the union is attained “it cannot distinguish itself from the object of this intuition” (VI, 9, 3).
The Self-Attesting Nature of the Mystical Experience.
This ineffable experience of God cannot be compelled but simply prepared for. “We must not run after it, but fit ourselves for the vision and then wait tranquilly for its appearance, as the eye waits on the rising of the sun, which in its own time appears above the horizon…” (V, 5, 8).
But “if one does not succeed in enjoying this spectacle, … if one does not rise in a purified state but retains within oneself something that separates one from the One, if one is not yet unified enough …, one has no one to blame but oneself and should try to become pure by detaching oneself from everything” (VI, 9, 4, Katz trans.). In short, the experience is both unknowable and inexpressible.
It is a self-attesting awareness of the Transcendent in which one is absolutely alone with the Alone, one with the One. The experience is its own “proof.” There is neither reason nor evidence applicable to it. Either one has had it or he has not. Those who have, need no other “proof”; and those who have not will never be so convinced until they have experienced it themselves (VI, 7, 34 and VI, 9, 4).
Schleiermacher’s Experience of Absolute Dependence
Unlike Plotinus, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) built religion on a general experience rather than a special mystical experience. The feeling of absolute dependence was for Schleiermacher something possessed by all men, even by those who did not identify it with religion. Although Schleiermacher did not test the truth of religious statements or expressions simply on the religious experience behind them, his analysis of religious experience is classic.
As such Schleiermacher’s grounding of religion in experience is the groundwork for much later pietistic appeal to the experience itself as “proof” of the truth of religion.
Experience Is the Basis of All Religion. According to Schleiermacher, men reject religion as a general idea arbitrarily conceived, but to do so is to look only at the shell and reject the kernel. In view of this, Schleiermacher exhorts his contemporaries to “turn from everything usually reckoned religion, and fix your regard on the inward emotions and dispositions.…”2
Dogma is only the echo of religion; true religion is an immediate feeling of the Infinite and Eternal. And since religion is an inner sense of the Absolute, we cannot understand it by an examination of the outward manifestations of religion but only by a study of ourselves. The contrast between inner state and outward statements of religion will help focus his meaning. True religion is related to doctrine the way the original sound is related to an echo.
Religion is based in experience and creeds are only expressions of that experience. One is the feeling and the other a form; religious experience is the “stuff” and religious language and ritual the structure of religion. The experience of God is the primary reality and religious thought is but a later reflection on that reality.3
Another contrast is helpful in understanding Schleiermacher’s concept of religious experience. Ethics is a way of living, science is a way of thinking, but religion is a way of feeling. It is not just any way of feeling but it is the feeling of being utterly dependent on the All. Again, ethics is a way of acting, science is a way of knowing, whereas religion is a way of being or sensing one’s dependence.
Religion does not influence specific ethical actions. However, it does influence the way a man behaves in the sense that a sum total of actions flows from the inner unity religion brings to one’s life. So “while a man does nothing from religion, he should do everything with religion.”4 In like manner religion influences science not directly but indirectly, for piety removes the presumption to knowledge which is ignorance.
Finally, the ethical life is one of self-control but the religious life is one of self-surrender. Thus ethics operates in the practical realm, science in the intellectual, but religion in the intuitional realm.
The Nature of Religious Intuition. According to Schleiermacher, the way to understand religion is by an examination of the intuition at the very root of it. For once we begin even to think about this intuition we are already separated from it. The moment of religious experience is so fleeting that it perishes the very moment it appears. Religion can be experienced but not expressed as such.
The essence of religion is a feeling of piety that results from the operation of God on the soul by means of the world. This feeling is universal, but the ideas by which men express this feeling are foreign to the religious experience itself. For no description is equal to the intuition being described. This is why religion cannot be learned by rote. The religious feeling cannot be taught; it must be caught.
Schleiermacher is careful to point out, however, that “what we feel and are conscious of in religious emotion is not the nature of things, but their operation on us.” Religious feeling does not reach reality or things-in-themselves (Kant’s noumenal realm). We sense only the ceaseless operations of the multitudinous forms of the infinite upon us. And religion does not consist in submitting to any one of the endless variety of these forms individually or in isolation but only to the Whole of which they are part.
“The sum total of religion is to feel that in the highest unity, all that moves us is one; to feel that aught single and particular is only possible by means of this unity; to feel, that is to say, that our being and living is a being and living in and through God.”5 However, the religious feeling is not to be confused with the feeling of the majesty and greatness of the material boundlessness of the universe.
The latter is only an “arithmetic amazement” that is both finite and calculable. Such is only a feeling of personal incapacity; it is a religious feeling in kind but not in extent. On the other hand, neither is mysticism the essence of religious intuition. All truly religious people have mystical traits, but the mystic is turned inward and does not know how to go beyond this.
Schleiermacher summarizes the nature of religious life as follows: “The whole religious life consists of two elements, that man surrender himself to the Universe and allow himself to be influenced by the side that is turned toward him in one part,” and second “that he transplant this contact which is one definite feeling, within, and take it up into the inner unity of his life and being.… The religious life is nothing else than the constant renewal of this proceeding.”6
Commonality and Universality of Religious Intuition. The basic religious experience is the same for all men but religious systems fashion themselves in endless variety even down to individual personalities. This multiplicity is necessary for the complete manifestation of religion; there is no universal religion common to all any more than there is only one way to be related to God.
However, nothing is possible for the individual except through the unity of the Whole. Further, since religion is not constituted by ideas, the concepts of true and false do not apply to it. All religions are “good” and “true” in an infinite variety of forms. We need not attempt to bring all these feelings and beliefs together. Rather, it is sufficient to open up an experience of the original Unity of all things for those who have not had it.
In this respect religion is the capacity for many-sidedness not found elsewhere. Science, morality, and philosophy are limited and narrow; but religion is the sworn enemy of narrow-mindedness and one-sidedness.7
The aim of religion is the love of the World-Spirit, and this World-Spirit is received through the love of humanity. This longing love is the essence of religion. So in order to discover the best in religion we must enter what we love the most. Humanity must be sought in each individual for each is a revelation of the Infinite. But each must be contemplated as part of the Whole, for in the face of the Whole each Individual ego must vanish in humility.
We have an intuition of the Whole only in fellowship with others who have been freed from dependence on their own being by dependence on the All. Yet since each man is a compendium of humanity, he can love himself with a pure and blameless love as one in whom he has discovered the Infinite.8
The religious intuition is not different in kind from other feelings. Rather, it is the sum of all higher feelings. It is a feeling not found easily in nature but more easily found in ourselves and transferred to nature. The universe reveals itself in our inner life and in this way the corporeal is comprehensible through the spiritual. This inner feeling of the universe makes us whole and unified.
Dogmas are formed as a result of reflecting on this feeling but they are merely general expressions of definite feelings. Dogmas are not necessary for religious life and aid little in the communication of it. In order to be religious one need only be conscious of this feeling—not just any feeling but a feeling wherein one’s whole being is related to the Whole. God is essential to religion via his presence in our feeling of dependence.
But this is not to be confused with the idea of God which is merely a reflection on this feeling. Depending on one’s personal needs, there is a tendency to conceptualize God in one way or another. Those who are content with mysterious obscurity tend to think of God pantheistically; those who seek definiteness in thought generally view God theistically. Both are based on the same basic religious intuition, which is the important thing.
Irreligion is not to have God in the consciousness; it does not consist in whether one views God personally or impersonally. Hence, theism is not the beginning or end of religion nor is personal immortality necessarily involved. “Immortality” should be understood experientially, namely, in the sense of enjoying life by giving up to the Infinite. It is a pious longing to be one with the Infinite and Eternal in the midst of our finitude and temporality.9
Every man has an inborn capacity for religion which infallibly develops unless it is crushed by culture. The World-Spirit is revealed to every man at least once. Certain points in life like birth and death provide openings to the Infinite and are surrounded by It. However, the Infinite may be discovered from all levels of consciousness: from the ego (as in Eastern mysticism), from the outer world (as in Egyptian polytheism), or from our sense of art (as in the Greeks).
Again, the important thing is not the direction of approach so much as it is the basic intuition of the Divine or awareness of the All one experiences through it. “Have you not often felt this holy longing?” asked Schleiermacher. “Become conscious of the call of your deepest nature and follow it, I conjure you.”10
To summarize, there is at the level of consciousness a sense of being related to the Whole, an awareness of one’s identity with the All. The individual stands utterly dependent on “God” for his existence; it is a felt relation of absolute dependence. No thinking or acting on man’s part can change the fundamental sense of his own contingency. The core of religion is in the intuition of this deep-seated feeling of finitude.
No description of it can replace it nor can rational process produce it. And yet it is an experience natural to all men if culture has not crushed it. Truth and falsity do not apply to this feeling because they are conceptual and it is experiential. The feeling can be verified by its appearance in one’s own consciousness. No other “proof” is possible, for it can only be caught but not taught as such.
Rudolf Otto: The Experience of the Numinous
Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) continued the analysis of religious experience after Schleiermacher. The central difference in their starting points was noted by Otto. Schleiermacher had begun with the feeling of dependence and moved from there to “God.” For Otto the “Holy” is taken as the primary datum and a feeling of dependence results from this. The latter works from the top down, we may say; and the former works from the bottom up.
The Characteristics of a Religious Experience. According to Otto, all religious experience involves an awareness of the “Holy” or the “Numen.”11 A religious experience, then is a numinous experience. The divine as such can be felt but not thought. However, it is essential to religion to have both the mystical and rational aspects. The rational is essential to but not exhaustive of God. The “Holy” is a necessary a priori category for the understanding of the suprarational aspects of religion.
There are five characteristics of a religious experience. Essentially it is an experience of the mysterium tremendum. The first three characteristics are associated with its terribleness and the last two with its mysteriousness. First, a religious experience is one of Awefulness. It involves a sense of awe or religious dread.
Second, there is in a religious experience an awareness of Overpoweringness, that is, of the unapproachable majesty of the Divine. Third, there is an awareness of Energy or Urgency, which is expressed in emotion or force. These three characteristics together comprise the tremendum. Fourth, the religious man is conscious of the Wholly Other. It is beyond intelligibility and causes blank wonder in the beholder. Fifth, just as the Wholly Other repels, so there is an attractive element in the Holy, namely, that of Fascination. This element allures or captivates the religious person.12
Otto is convinced that the experience of the Holy is neither derived from nor reducible to other feelings. It differs in kind from other experiences. It may on occasion be excited by other feelings, particularly by an aesthetic experience which is closely associated with the religious; for the sense of the sublime is sometimes closely related to the sense of the Supreme.
The Schematization of Religious Experience. The aesthetic may be used to schematize the religious the way nonrational sex instincts surface and are concretized in one’s personal feeling. The rational schematization of religious experience is by no means unimportant to Otto. On the contrary, he believed it to be the most important part of salvation history.
For by a penetration of the nonrational and the rational, our concepts of God are deepened, not blurred. So the “Holy” is a complex a priori category with both rational and nonrational elements in it. And the connection between them is felt as self-evident. Hence, all men have the form or capacity for religion, just as all men can sing, even though some do not. The concept of the Holy did not evolve; its first appearance was unique.
Its earliest manifestations were crude (e.g., magic, manna) but were elevated when it became manifest in higher feeling and thought. The Holy is occasioned by sensation but springs from the depth of the soul.13
The tremendum is schematized by the “Wrath of God” and the mysterium is schematized by the “Grace of God.” This rationalization of the nonrational dimensions of the Numen guards against both rationalism and mysticality. Rationalism is ruled out since the source and depth of religion spring from experience of the nonrational.
Mysticality is eliminated because schematization or rationalizing the Numen is essential to understanding and expressing the religious experience. A balance between the rational and the mystical elements is the measure of the value of a religion. And on this ground Otto concluded that Christianity was the most valuable religion.
For Christ was more than a prophet; he was one in whom the Spirit dwelt in all his plenitude (mystical aspect) and yet who was the most perfect object of religious experience (objective, rational aspect).
The Communication of Religious Feelings. The Holy not only cannot be thought but it cannot be taught as such, for the rational has no meaning without the inner spirit. The tremendum element is communicated best by imaginative sympathy, gestures, attitudes, holy situations, living fellowship, and personal contact. Basically, it must be caught and not taught.
Likewise, the mysterium is revealed directly via miracles and quasi-intelligible religious language and indirectly by way of the sublime (e.g., in architecture). Darkness summons the mystical, silence calls forth a spontaneous response, and emptiness evokes otherness. But there is no purely cognitive or creedal way to produce a religious experience. All men have the capacity for religious awareness of the Holy, but the experience cannot be evoked by purely rational means. The religious experience stands on its own. It can be expressed but not exhausted.
One can sense but not systematize the Holy. He can feel it but never really completely formulate it. Conceptualization of this consciousness is not possible. Schemata can be made of it and rationalization about it, but these are like Kant’s categories—they are not truly descriptive of it. They cannot be, for the Holy is and remains Wholly Other. It can be felt but not thought in anything but purely negative concepts. The mystery of the Holy can be experienced but not really expressed.14
God and the Inexpressible. Many mystics both before and after Otto have emphasized the inexpressibility of God. Mystical emphases from Pseudo-Dionysius to Meister Eckhart and on to Thomas à Kempis and modern pietism have stressed the ineffability of God. A more recent statement of this point will suffice. Thomas McPherson wrote: There are some things that just cannot be said.… We ought not to try to express the inexpressible.
The things that theologians try to say (or some of them) belong to the class of things that just cannot be said. The way out of the worry is retreat into silence.”15
McPherson claimed a similarity of his view to that of Ludwig Wittgenstein who wrote much the same in the last line of the Tractatus: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”16 Both men believe that God is actually inexpressible because he is mystical. That is to say, “the feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling,” but then we cannot ask why the world is this way.
According to Wittgenstein, “how the world is” can be meaningfully asked but not the fact that the world is. To ask, Why is there a world anyway? is to ask the unaskable question. One can feel his creatureliness or the limitedness of the world, but he cannot ask why it is this way. It is mystical and inexpressible and, therefore, unaskable.
From this analysis McPherson concludes from Wittgenstein that skepticism about religious experience is senseless. For, as the latter put it, “doubt can only exist where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only where something can be said” Since God’s existence is unsayable, it is likewise undoubtable. From this McPherson suggests we conclude that positivistic philosophy “can be interpreted as a return to the truth about religion.” For “Otto travels the same road as Wittgenstein.
Are we to call Otto an enemy of religion? Why not call Wittgenstein its friend?” For “by showing, in their own way, the absurdity of what theologians try to utter, positivists have helped to suggest that religion belongs to the sphere of the unutterable.… Positivists may be the enemies of theology, but the friends of religion.”17 For both Otto and Wittgenstein, religious experience is inexpressible.
Summary of Some Important Tenets of Experientialism
Experientialists differ as to the nature of religious experience but there are some common strains of emphasis throughout their stress on experience. Not all of these elements will be true of each particular man discussed above. Together, however, they will aid in characterizing the experiential test for truth.
First and foremost there is the experientialist’s insistence that the sine qua non of all religious truth is religious experience. Truth does not rest in formal abstractions from or about experience; truth is primarily experienced and only secondarily expressed. Without a primary awareness of God no one can claim to have the truth about God.
Second, experience is the final court of appeal for religious truth. There is no more ultimate standard for deciding truth than experience. Appeal to ideas, principles, or propositions fails unless they are filled with and based on the “stuff” of experience. One cannot determine the truth of an experience by a statement or expression about it; on the contrary, the validity of any statement is based on the experience behind it.
Third, a religious experience is ultimately self-verifying. There is no outside source by which a religious experience can be validated as real or genuine; the experience of God (the Holy, etc.) is self-sufficient. The authenticity of religious experience rests not in any external evidential or rational justification—these are secondary spin-offs at best:—but in the very nature of the religious experience as such.
Finally, there is often a contention by experientialists that God, or Ultimate Reality, and so forth, is actually indescribable. Words cannot capture religious consciousness; God can be evoked but not really expressed. The Divine is literally inexpressible. God can be felt but not really thought.
An Evaluation of Experientialism as a Test for Truth
There is an apparent plausibility about experientialism vis-à-vis rationalism that immediately commends itself to many minds. From this we may unpack several positive features of experientialism before attempting to penetrate its methodological inadequacies.
Some Positive Features of Experientialism
Experientialism stands as a polar opposite to formalism in religion. Prepositional and creedal truths are, as such, existentially inept and inadequate. Experience is necessary to religion, and within this context several valuable insights of experientialism emerge.
- First and most importantly, experience is the “stuff” out of which all religious truth must be built. Without a basic source or root in experience there is no meaningful religious expression. Apart from our consciousness of God there would be no valid conceptualizations about him. For all affirmations about the Divine presuppose some priorawareness of him. The real content of religion is, and must be, grounded in experience, whatever form the construction of that content may take.
- A second contribution follows from the former, namely, in the broad sense experience must be the final court of appeal. This follows for a very simple reason: nothing is broader than experience. Even reasoning is an intellectual “experience.” There are primary experiences such as consciousness of God and secondary experiences such as one’s conceptualizations and cogitations about God. But all is experience—that is, all involves a consciousness or awareness of something or someone, or at least by someone.
- Furthermore, primary experience is the ground for secondary experience.18 That is to say, consciousness of something is more basic than one’s concept about it. For affirmation grows out of awareness and expressions grow out of experience—not the reverse. In this sense primary experience of God is the final court of appeal as to the genuineness of one’s experience of God. Unless God were so experienced, there would be no valid basis for speaking of the reality or truth of that experience.
Some Crucial Difficulties with Experientialism
Despite the important contributions just mentioned, experientialism as a test for the truth of a world view is decidedly insufficient for several reasons.
First, it is a confusion of categories to speak of a true experience. Experience in the primary sense is neither true nor false. Experience is something one has, and truth is something one expresses about experience.
That is, experience is a condition of persons but truth is a characteristic of propositions or expressions persons make. Hence, no experience as such is true; one simply has the experience or the awareness. But once one begins to make affirmations about that awareness or experience, then these statements are subject to the test of truth or falsity.
Second, an experience cannot be used to support or prove the truth of that experience. For to use experience to prove the truth claimed about that experience is to beg the whole question. At best the only truth established by an experience is the truth that the person has had that experience, and this is private to the individual having that experience. The basis of truth rests in the experience but not the support of that truth. Truth finds its source in primary experience but not its substantiation. The whence of religious truth is rooted in religious experience but the warrant for claiming truth for this is something else.
Third, no experience as such is self-interpreting. Experiences as such do not come with truth labels on them, at least none that have not been placed there by the meaning-context in which the experience occurred. Even when experiences do come with interpretations, the same experience is capable of different interpretations depending on the overall framework one applies to the experience.
The experience of being shortchanged at the food market takes on quite a different meaning if it is intentional rather than accidental. Or, to use a Biblical example, the same phenomenon was interpreted three different ways in John 12:28, 29. Some took it as the voice of God, others as an angel speaking, and some as thunder. That there was some common phenomenon need not be questioned, but what it meant differed in accordance with the overall perspective taken by the perceivers. So the event itself was not self-interpreting; meaning is given to an event by the context in which one sees it.
Since a world view is an overall interpretation of all facts and experiences, there is no valid way to use any particular experience within that overall interpretive framework to establish the overall framework or world view. Following from this is another criticism.
Fourth, experiences are capable of different interpretations. Different systems account for different experiences in different ways. The experience the theist calls “conversion” may be explained by the naturalistic psychologist as a subliminal explosion caused by repression followed by frustration with one’s way of life.19 Likewise the naturalistic scientist may explain the event a Christian calls miraculous healing as an anomaly or unusual natural event for which there is no known explanation. Each major world view is able to account, on its own grounds, for all the data of experience.
The pantheist is able to account for evil as a “persistent illusion” or for pain as an “error of moral mind,” and so on. He does not need to deny that someone feels or experiences pain, but merely points out that there is no ultimate reality to such sensible experiences. Now if conflicting world views such as theism, pantheism, and naturalism can explain all of the facts and experiences in the world, then no one of these views can have its truth claim justified by experience in face of the others. All the views have a basis in experience and a way of explaining it.
And it will not suffice to plead special case for some particular experiences over others since they can all make the same plea. On what basis would one decide which experience is “key” or “special”? There is no way within experience to mediate this dispute without arguing in a circle, and any appeal outside experience defeats the whole experiential test for truth.
But if opposing world views have equal access to experience and no way within primary experience alone to differentiate and distinguish some experiences as “special” or “key,” then one is forced to go beyond pure experience to reasoning or interpretation of experience in order to support his truth claims about that experience. But once one goes beyond primary experience as a test for truth, then he no longer, strictly speaking, has an experiential test for truth.
Of course there is always the overall and broad sense in which everything including reasoning is an experience, but this is not helpful in solving the dilemma. For one can always ask the warrant for choosing one interpretation given by reason rather than another. What warrant is there for viewing the primary experience through pantheistic eyes rather than theistic ones?
This cannot be justifiably answered by a circular appeal right back to the primary experience, since several conflicting world views can make the same move. And if the appeal is made to something beyond the primary experience such as reason or interpretation, then we may immediately ask again for the justification for one interpretation over another.
Another criticism emerges from the former, namely, in the final analysis one cannot even talk meaningfully about experience unless he is employing cognitive categories that are at least formally independent of that experience. Experience as such has no meaning. It is pure “stuff” with no structure; it is content without form. And consciousness of something without conceptualization or predication of it is cognitively meaningless.
No experience is even meaningful unless it is describable. But therein is the problem for the experientialist, for he would like to believe that a religious experience at least is self-interpreting, that it comes with its own structure. However, this is highly problematic. For those who have made the most careful analysis of religious experience use quite different ways to describe it: “ultimate commitment,” “feeling of absolute dependence,” a “numinous experience,” an “existential encounter,” and so on.
Those who have attempted to determine any common content to all of these descriptions seem to arrive at only purely formal and interchangeable definitions. Indeed, to be consistent to experientialism, we must admit that all the content of these concepts comes from experience. But since it is precisely how to define or form this content of experience that is in question, it would beg the question to argue that the meaning of “absolute dependence” is based on experience.
As we have already seen, experience as such has no truth or meaning apart from the framework or interpretation given it. So experientialism is in the dilemma of not being able to understandthe experience without the interpretation and not being able to have an interpretation unless it is derived from the experience. And there is no purely experiential way out of the dilemma.
At this point a word should be said of the mystical way out. Is it self-defeating for experientialists to speak of the experience without being able to describe it but only to evoke it? How would one know that it was “it” being evoked, and how can he know the “it” without knowing something about what it is in distinction from what it is not? Like Kant’s noumenal realm, one cannot know pure that-ness without knowing something of what it is.
Likewise, one cannot speak of the unspeakable or describe the indescribable and express the inexpressible without engaging in a self-defeating activity. McPherson candidly admits the problem but does not offer a successful solution when he writes, “Otto, then, uses language in order to explain what cannot be said in language” for he “is writing about the non-rational in a supremely rational way.”20
But like Wittgenstein, McPherson wishes us to believe that this allegedly descriptive language is not really descriptive but only evocative. It is a kind of descriptive ladder by which we get to the point where we recognize that God is not really descriptive at all. In response, it should be observed that if the descriptive ladder is able to get one to the religious “roof,” then it is self-defeating to thereupon kick the ladder down and deny that the ladder is able to do what the ladder did indeed do.
For if the ladder enables us to arrive at God as opposed to the devil or at good as versus evil, then our mystical or religious experience cannot be totally devoid of cognitive content. If it were, then we could not even make meaningful denials of it. In short, the very affirmation “no cognitively meaningful statements can be made about God” is either itself a totally meaningless statement (and therefore cannot be true) or else it is wholly self-defeating, since it just made a meaningful assertion about God to the effect that no meaningful statements about God can be made.
Summary and Conclusion
Experientialism claims that all truth is determined by experience and that there is a recognizable and self-attesting religious experience. As a source and basis of truth the experientialist’s claim may be correct, but as a test or warrant for the truth of that claim he is decidedly wrong. For no experience is self-interpreting and there are conflicting truth claims built on experience with no purely experiential way to adjudicate between them. Experience is merely a condition of persons; whereas truth is a characteristic of propositions.
And one must have some justification as to why he interpreted the raw data of the experience itself one way over the other. Further, the retreat to mystical and inexpressible experience is inadequate because it is both self-defeating to meaningfully describe the indescribable and impossible to recognize or distinguish it from anything else unless it is describable. In brief, no religious experience as such is either understandable or justifiable apart from some truth framework independent or separate from the experience itself. Experientialism is either meaningless, self-defeating, or begs the issue.
SELECT READINGS FOR Experientialism
Exposition of Experientialism
- Bonaventura, Saint. The Mind’s Road to God.
- James, William. Varieties of Religious Experience.
- Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy.
- Enneads.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion.
Evaluation of Experientialism
- Ayer, A. J. Language, Truth and Logic.
- Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity.
- Flew, Antony, ed. New Essays in Philosophical Theology.
- Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion.
- Sargant, William. The Battle for the Mind.
Yandell, Keith. “Experience and Truth in Religion,” chap. IV in Basic Issues in the Philosophy of Religion.
1 Unless otherwise noted, quotations are from Plotinus’ Enneads, MacKenna translation.
2 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958 [first published 1799]), p. 18.
3 Schleiermacher, pp. 1–18.
4 Schleiermacher, p. 59.
5 Schleiennacher, pp. 49–50.
6 Schleiennacher, p. 58.
7 Schleiermacher, pp. 53–56.
8 Schleiermacher, pp. 65–74.
9 Schleiermacher, pp. 87–101.
10 Schleiermacher, p. 92.
11 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy. trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1967 [first published 1917]), chap. 2.
12 Otto, chaps. 3–6.
13 Otto, chap. 7.
14 Otto, chap. 9.
15 Thomas McPherson, “Religion as the Inexpressible” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1963), ed. Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, pp. 132–33.
16 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, 1922), trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, 1961.
17 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, 1922), trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, 1961.
18 For further elaboration of religious experience see my Philosophy of Religion (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1974), chaps. 1–4.
19 See William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: A Mentor Book, 1958 [first published 1902]), chaps. 9, 10.
20 McPherson, “Religion as the Inexpressible, ” p. 136.
[1]Geisler, N. L. (1976). Christian apologetics. Includes index. (65). Grand Rapids: Baker Book House.
