MYSTICISM, LANGUAGE AND TRUTH
Keywords:
MYSTICISM, Truth, LANGUAGEAbstract
Ever since Friedrich Schleiermacher addressed the “cultured despisers” of his time by turning to religious experience, experience has come to occupy a central place (if not the central place) in philosophy of religion. He attempted to show that the truth of religion does not consist in the externals that they despised but in an inner experience. With the linguistic turn of philosophy in the twentieth century, the linguistic dimension of experience came to the forefront. But there is a palpable tension between these linguistic and truth dimensions of religious experience such that any overemphasis on one puts the other in jeopardy. This is clearly seen in the philosophy of Steven Katz who emphasizes language, and thereby putting religious truth at risk. The opposite tendency is seen in Walter Stace. Examining their theories will show that a theory of religious experience, if it is to hold on to both these dimensions, must be such as to make religious experiences logically identifiable and the theory of experience empirically adequate. Together, I shall call them the experiential imperatives.
References
Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Addresses in Response to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. Terrence N. Tice, Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1821; reprint, 1969.
W. V. Quine, Theories and Things, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981, 102; P. F. Strawson, Entity and Identity: And Other Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 22.
Antony Flew, R. M. Hare, and Basil Mitchell, “Theology and Falsification,” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, London: SCM Press, 1955.
John Hick, “Eschatological Verification Reconsidered,” Religious Studies 13, 2 (1977), 192.
Walter T. Stace, The Teachings of the Mystics, New York and Toronto: The New American Library, 1960, 15.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, 34 ed., New York-London-Bombay: Longmans, Green and Co., 1923, 388.
Walter T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy, Bombay: MacMillan, 1960, 66.
Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy, 89; also, Stace, The Teachings of the Mystics, 21.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, New York: Mentor, Penguin Books, 1958, 307.
Bede Griffiths, The Golden String, London: The Harvill Press, 1954, 9.
Patrick Olivelle, “Orgasmic Rapture and Divine Ecstacy: The Semantic History of Ananda,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 25(1997), 153-80.
Steven Payne, “The Christian Character of Christian Mystical Experiences,” Religious Studies 20, no. 3 (1984), 424 f.n.1.
Ninian Smart, Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the Worlds Beliefs, London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996.
Steven T. Katz, “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism,” in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, ed. Steven T. Katz, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978, 26.
Robert K. C. Forman, Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999;
Robert K. C. Forman, ed. The Innate Capacity: Mysticism, Psychology, and Philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press,1998.
Michael Stoeber, “Constructivist Epistemologies of Mysticism: A Critique and a Revision,” Religious Studies 28, 1 (1992), 112.
Alexander Wynne, The Origin of Buddhist Meditation, London & New York: Routledge, 2007.
R. C. Zaehner, Mysticism, Sacred and Profane, London: Oxford University Press, 1961, xv.
Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience, Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985, 121.
George Karuvelil, “Missing the Wood for the Trees,” The Heythrop Journal 50 (2009) 31-43.
