This Thing Is Due Soon...

Heidegger: A Deconstruction of Religious Experience Theory

1.  An Introduction to Perennialism and Constructivism

The absence of Martin Heidegger’s presence within both the recent and historical scholarship dedicated to religious experience theory might be puzzling to the neophyte of the phenomenology of religion. In general, Heidegger’s philosophical significance to religion has been sequestered away in theological debate—predominately in Christian theological crowds.[1] Meanwhile, the majority of prominent theorist’s discussions concerning the phenomenology of religion have been dominated by Husserlian undertones, ignoring the more existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger.[2] This is not to say, of course, that scholarship has a uniform conception of Husserl’s impact on the phenomenology of religion, let alone religious experience theory. His exact degree of import on the field is controversial and hazy among scholars. It is, however, to say that scholars almost universally agree that Husserl’s terminology and particular brand of phenomenology has been adopted by religious studies programs and as such has had direct recourse on the study of religious experience.[3]
            The two prevailing camps of religious experience theory under consideration here are perennialism and constructivism, or the phenomenological and reductionistic camps, respectively.[4] Though both borrow facets of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology—a contention I qualify a bit later—it is surprising to find the phenomenologically inclined perennialists shy about involving Heidegger in the religious experience discussion. Given the volume of debates between perennialism and constructivism over the last century, one might have anticipated more Heideggerian interest piquing, at the very least, in the phenomenological camp. But scholarship is scant, and the debates which do occur, occur almost exclusively under a Husserlian canopy.
            Over the last thirty years or so these debates have reached something of an impasse, with scholars going one of three directions. (1) They make compatibilist-like efforts to combine the stronger points of perennialism and constructivism. In 2000, for example, the perennialist Robert Forman hoped to “forge a truce in the twenty years,” [5] sensing that it was time to let, “the constructivist and perennial…positions about religious experience be seen as complementary.”[6] (2) They tweak stock arguments to match the findings of external research. Ann Taves at the University of California interprets Forman’s call for a ‘truce’ as having realized that the debate, “had reached a dead end,” and in her eyes thinks it best to bring in outside academic research (i.e. neuroscience) to enliven the discussion.[7] She combines attribution theory[8] and what one might call a series of anatomical reductions to supply a casual model for why religious experience occur.[9] (3) They simply regurgitate the same thesis over the span of many years. Steven Katz’s, for example, argues that a religious languages’ make-up—its grammar, vocabulary, syntax, etc.—preconditions mystics for a religion-specific religious experiences.[10] Mystics, in other words, export their religious experiences from their language context and biasedly describe their experience using the lingo of their religious tradition. These descriptions, after all, appear in document form ex post facto either as first-hand or second-hand accounts. It is not surprising to find religious people interpreting their experiences within their religious context. 

In all three approaches, the methods employed seem to have been circling the same set of philosophical categories for some time. In fact, not much has occurred over the past one-hundred years at the philosophical level, not even Anne Taves’ work (2009) and recent work like it—most of which has remained more or less within the constructivist genre in what might called spiritual neuroscience.

At issue among scholars is whether some religious experiences are either, 1) irreducible and ineffable: transcendently caused and independent with respect to naturalistic explanations—the position espoused by perennialists, or 2) whether they are all reducible to some combination of cultural, linguistic, or physiological cause—the position espoused by constructivists. Though scholars within both traditions are not necessarily religious or non-religious, phenomenological scholars have tended to defend the religious view where reductionist scholars have tended to defend the more naturalistic approach.

Specifically, scholars within the phenomenological tradition have spent their time shaping theories which establish the possibility for sui generis religious experience.[11] In the early 90’s perennial efforts were in large part reactions to the socio-linguistic push coming from reductionist scholars (e.g. Steve Katz and Wayne Proudfoot) who, conversely, spent their energies explicating the requisite cultural and linguistic conditions without which they believe religious experience would be impossible.[12] Both schools have their list of the necessary and sufficient conditions needed to produce religious experience, both have evolved, and both have their defenses against the opposing tradition. Roughly, constructivist think that for every religious experience, cultural condition “X,” linguistic condition “Y,” and physiological condition “Z” are necessary. For perennialists, however, these conditions are not sufficient— nor, depending on the scholar, are they all necessary—especially since transcendent intervention is said by those who have these experiences to be a necessary condition. [13]

When William James first bracketed institutional religion in order to focus on individual religion in The Varieties of Religious Experience he set the tone for religious experience theory, especially the phenomenological school.[14] By bracketing institutional influence, James allocated authority to the incorrigibility of subjective experience.[15] This move was the first of its kind with respect to religious experience, and might be best summarized as an argument from authority. In James’ eyes, the chief observer is given full credit concerning what, in phenomenological terms, appears to him or her.  Thus James writes of religious experiences that, “they usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.”[16]

 Rudolf Otto too, whose Das Heilige will appear later in this paper, utilizes this argument from authority, though he adds a neo-Kantian twist to it.[17] Like James, Otto thinks that since no one can tell John Smith that his experience did not appear to John the way it did, John is the authority on the matter, and we are at the mercy of his memory and communication skills. What Otto adds to the discussion is the fact that many Johns across time and space say exactly the same thing: that the experience is ineffable, sui generis, and that it can only be known by direct contact. Enchanted by the ubiquity and similarity of mystical testimonies Otto outlines the necessary and universal conditions for this type of cross-religious experience to manifest. The temptation to read Otto as constructing a more sophisticated argument from authority than even James’—one with the aim of demonstrating that these experiences refer to something real— is an alluring one. [18] But we will have to skip it. Our concern lies with the fact that Otto’s primary occupation is essentially neo-Kantian in character. Otto is a major figure to both the perennialist and the constructivist because he sets the methodological parameters (neo-Kantian) for religious experience theory.
            These were the beginnings of religious experience theory, if not, to some degree, the phenomenology of religion as a whole.  Of course, religious reductionists supply counter-arguments, ranging from deconstructions of thinkers like Otto to upshot theory creation.

Not least among the reductionists is Wayne Proudfoot, who, to put it loosely, argues that religious language paradigms cultivate religio-centric experiences.[19] Christians do not undergo nirvana specifically because Christian language, doctrine, and practice does not foster the disillusionment of self. Buddhism, however, does, which is why Buddhist monks undergo nirvana. Furthermore, and by implication, the ostensible similarity between the experiences of people in competing religious traditions is nullified. There is no cross-cultural core religious experience, no mysterium tremendum.  Otto’s numinous consciousness does not manifest everywhere because religious experiences burgeon out of their particular socio-lingual traditions.

With the sui generis element explained, Proudfoot then deals with the ineffability of these so-called cross-religious experiences. In short, he argues that ineffability functions as a logical placeholder within the language grammar of a religious tradition to constitute the religious experience.[20] Ineffability becomes part of the grammar of religious dogma because religious schools educate their adherents in such a way as to exercise or expect ineffable experiences. Christian ascetics, for example, trust that their experience with God will be ineffable because—drawing from the pseudo-Dionysus, apophatic tradition— they have been told that speaking about God at all is impossible.[21] So when they have these experiences, they are unsurprisingly incapable of giving the experience signification. As such, the experience acts, at least in part, as a strategic defense against outside attacks. Where the experience of God is, as a matter of degree, so very spiritual that human utterances cannot possibly contain it, the sacredness of the experience is felt to be impervious to assault.
            Once reductions like these are admitted, physiological reductionists like Ann Taves step in to fill the remaining gaps. After positioning herself under attribution theory along with thinkers like Proudfoot—arguing that religious people attribute sacredness or specialness to ‘things’ (objects, events, or relationships) using the religious system with which they are most familiar—she assigns these ‘things’ physiological causes. Most engaging among her examples is how she explains felt presences (ghosts or otherwise) during sleep paralysis. At the risk of oversimplification, she argues that an alert system intended to warn against predators called TAVS (threat activation system) activates during sleep paralysis.[22] In cases where religious people are involved, attributions of transcendent agency are given to would be predators. Religious people, she says, tend to attribute agency in ideal, anomalous, or ambiguous situations.[23]

Of course, a great deal more could be said about each of these thinkers as well as their respective traditions. But both sketches are only intended to leave an impression of the overall debate. I have reviewed James and Otto because they are to a high degree responsible for the genesis of the religious experience theory discussion en bloc. Not only that, but their methods and conclusions are something of a staple to the tradition. On the other hand, the story of reductionists like Proudfoot and Taves (more contemporary thinkers) consists in large part of reactions to the phenomenological school. As such, their theoretical apparatus—its questions and categories—developed out of the phenomenological school itself. Specifically, beyond the deconstructions of phenomenological theorists, the positive theory of reductionists resides in positing social, linguistic, or biological explanations as opposed to the phenomenological justifications offered by scholars like James and Otto.

2. Methods and Parameters

The challenge for us is to determine just how much Husserl has influenced this debate, and how, or whether at all, infusing Heidegger into the discussion can amend the original exclusivity enjoyed by Husserlian theorists. This is thus a transitory project, a way of moving beyond Husserl but not necessarily outside of the interests of the history of religious experience theory. To do this, however, we will need to start with an analysis of Husserl and his impact on the religious studies tradition. By no means will this be a thorough analysis. Too many competing tableaus overviewing Husserl’s influence already exist. My aim is not to regurgitate these or adjudicate among them, but to focus on those elements which will help us transition into a Heideggerian analysis. The immediate sections to follow therefore supply both a background to the development of Husserl’s thought and an example of how that background manifests itself in the religio-phenomenological tradition, namely Otto’s Das Heilige. 

Two movements in particular play a central role in the development of Husserl and religious experience theory. They are 1) foundationalism, whose cornerstone figure is Rene Descartes, and 2) transcendentalism, whose dominant figure is Immanuel Kant. I will start by looking at the affect of these two movements on Husserl and later look at their significance to the religoius experience theory tradition by virtue of having affected Husserl. Mutatis mutandis this will entail an even closer look at Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige. Again, Otto is very much responsible for the development of religious experience theory, be it within the perennial or constructivist school. It is not surprising, then, to find that foundationalism and transcendentalism both occupy Ottoian theoretical space, making him a helpful representative case study for us.

I hasten to clarify, however, that foundationalism and transcendentalism serve only as vehicles for identifying the noetic building blocks of Husserl’s thought, as well as those of religious experience scholars like Otto.  The specifics governing or constituting the movement’s formulation are what interest us, not the historical movements nor the scholars per se. The goal then is not so much to be explicit about the movements and their relations to their parts or scholars but to introduce piecemeal those elements which, broadly speaking, religious experience theorists use as conceptual tools.

So words of caution are in order. Debates regarding the effects of both the movements (and their working parts) on Husserl and Otto manifest throughout academia—e.g. many scholars opt to either mitigate or altogether remove a foundationalist interpretation of Husserl.[24]  These types of arguments, though typical, stand outside our concern. [25]  Whatever the exact impact, what is essential to us is that the movements are at least taken by some to have a degree of effect. Again, our procedure here is less concerned with the exact formation of this thinker or that tradition. It is concerned with familiarizing ourselves with the philosophical ingredients which constitute the overall soupy texture that is religious experience theory.  

With these provisional materials available we will move into our analysis of Heidegger. Yet even there a number of parameters need to be set. Our interest in Heidegger will be limited to a broad-swath overview of his early doctrine of Being and its immediate relationship to the sui generis discussion within religious experience theory. Friedrich Schleiermacher’s version of religious experience will thus, for example, not be covered here. It also means we will not inspect any individual facet of Heidegger in detail, looking instead at his general (early) philosophy in relation to a few similar passages where he offhandedly mentions Otto’s Das Heilige. One passage, for example, comes from The Phenomenology of Religious Life. Heidegger writes, "the holy may not be made into a problem as theoretical [which Otto wisely avoids]—also not an irrational theoretical [where Otto fails]—noema, but rather as correlate of the act-character of ‘faith,’ which itself is to be interpreted only from out of the fundamentally essential experiential context of historical consciousness.”

We will parse out the meaning of this passage and others like it in light of their relationship to the history of religious experience theory, Husserl, and Heidegger’s general philosophy. It is important to mark from the start, however, that this passage comes from the early Heidegger (1919-1920), even before Sein en Ziet, and amounts to something of a deconstruction of religious experience theory.  As such, it is not far removed from Heidegger’s broader deconstruction of the history western metaphysics in Sein en Zeit. With this in mind, I will first argue that the history of religious experience theory is, in Heidegger’s eyes, an overextension of post-Socratic categories onto religious experience—which is to say that religious experience theory is largely nonsensical— and that, second, as an alternative, we would do well to reevaluate religious experience under the auspices of the “act character of faith.”  

---

     [1] Stalwart theologians like Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich littler their work with Heidegger’s thought, not to mention more contemporary thinkers like Westphal and Jean-Luc Marion who will make their appearance later on in this paper.

     [2] Two authors are the exception to this rule—Gerardus van der Leeuw’s Phanomenologie der religion (1933) and Mircea Eliade’s Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries (1975)—but even they scarcely mention Heidegger with respect to religious experience.

     [3] James Cox writes, “It has been a subject of controversy as to how far and to what extent Husserl influenced the phenomenology of religion, but almost everyone is agreed that at the very least Husserlian terminology was transposed into and utilized within phenomenological analyses of religion. James Cox, A Guide to the Phenomenology of Religion (New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 10.

  

      [4] Perennialism fits within the essentialism, phenomenological, or decontextualism family. Constructivism fits within the anti-perennial, intentionalism and contextualism family. Though the lexical emphasis of each word tends to inform a particular scholar’s approach, these words are more or less coterminous.  

    

     [5] Cognitive Models and Spiritual Maps: Interdisciplinary Explorations, ed. Jensine Andresen and Robert K. C. Forman (Charlottesville: Imprint Academic Philosophy Documentation Center, 2000), 8.

    

     [6] Ibid., 8.   

     [7] Taves writes, “He [Forman] claimed that both [constructivists and perennialists] had made some good points, but he seems to have sensed that the debate had reached a dead end.” Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009) 56.

     [8] Attribution theory in this context refers to the propensity of religious people to attribute transcendent causation or activity to anomalous, ambiguous, or unknown events.

     [9] By anatomical reduction I mean something to the effect of a physio-psycho reduction, both being the result of either how the brain is wired or how other parts of the body effect how the brain responds to external stimuli.

      [10] As late as 1992, Katz writes, “It is my view, argued in detail elsewhere, that mystical reports do not merely indicate the postexperiential description of an unreportable experience in the language closest at hand. Rather, that experiences themselves are inescapably shaped by prior linguistic influences such that the lived experience conforms to a preexistent pattern than has been learned, then intended, and then actualized in the experiential reality of the mystic. Although this reading has been the subject of much scholarly discussion since I first argued it [in 1978], I have not yet been dissuaded of its correctness. Steven Katz, “Mystical Speech and Mystical Meaning,” in Mysticism and Language, ed. Steven Katz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 5.

     [11] In a prototypical way, Mark B Woodhouse argues in On the Possibility of Pure Consciousness, “My intent is…to…illustrate how an abstract philosophical discussion may find expression in a major spiritual tradition built, in part, around the experience of pure consciousness,” where pure consciousness stands for at least one (relatively recent) way scholars try to talk about the logical possibility of sui generis-like experience. Mark B. Woodhouse, “On the Possibility of Pure Consciousness,” in The Problem of Pure Consciousness, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 254.  

     [12] William Barnard, for example, tries to return to the methodology of William James. Standing specifically against the reductionist methods of Wayne Proudfoot, he writes, “Perhaps it is inevitable, even necessary, that as students of religion, we will choose which methodological approach we find most adequate and fruitful. I would like to propose that a modified Jamesian approach is, in the end, far superior to Proudfoot's solution. James's willingness to entertain seriously the possibility of a transcultural reality, combined with his awareness of the tentative nature of every explanatory attempt, and his emphasis on the worth of attempting normative assessments of different religious worldviews and practices, makes his methodology a far more attractive and viable option than the methodology offered by Wayne Proudfoot in Religious Experience. William G. Barnard "Explaining the Unexplainable: Wayne Proudfoot's 'Religious Experience’” in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 60, No. 2, (Summer, 1992), 231-256.

     [13] It is essential at this point to describe the complexity of the problem, both with respect to the definition of ‘religious experience’ and with the varying types of religious experience. In the first place, to calling something ‘religious’ is cheating. There is no hint of uniformity to the term or its conceptions, and probably the best method for determining what we mean by religious is, as Talal Asad explains in The Genealogies of Religion, recognizing it as a piece of folk-vocabulary indigenous to western scholars. It has its uses once parameters are set for its meaning, but once you try ‘getting to the bottom of it’ you find a cacophony of definitions, many of them derivative of western academics.

         In the second place, once you determine what you want to mean by ‘religious,’ you still have to determine what you want to mean when you couple ‘religious’ with ‘experience.’ Naturally, you get the whole spectrum. William James goes so far as to call the emotive high from reading poetry a ‘mystical’ (coterminous here with religious) experience, while Rudolf Otto has more particular conditions for what counts as a religious experience: namely sui generis, rarefied, numinous experience. More than this, even if a scholar manages to establish definitions, it is not simply a matter of applying the term to varying traditions. The explanations of and causes for nirvana supplied by those who have these experience, for example, are in many ways exactly the opposite of, say, the explanations of and causes for Protestant religious experiences similar to Stephen H. Bradley’s vision of Christ, the famous example described in William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. (In truth, James’ work would be better titled The Varieties of Protestant Religious Experience.)

         The epistemological differences alone are enough to demonstrate a severe rift in the two types of experience. Where in the former experience the self (whoever that is) is said to vanish into the All (whatever this may mean), obliterating any subject to object distinction, the latter hinges entirely off of the subject to object distinction. The very gap between God all-powerful (whatever your theology) and self supplies the ostensible qualitative difference between a ‘religious experience’ and ‘normal’ experiences.  The absence or presence of subject to object consciousness is instrumental in the religious experience type.

     [14] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 4.

     [15] As W. T. Jones has said, James was “…one of the first philosophers to adopt what subsequently came to be called the ‘phenomenological’ approach, that is, an approach that seeks to start from, and confine itself to, a presuppositionless description of experience as it comes.” W. T. Jones. A History of Western Philosophy, Vol. IV. (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1975), p. 299.       

     [16] Despite his contributions to the religio-phenomenological school, reading James here in purely phenomenological terms betrays the facts. Strictly speaking, by the time this quote appears in The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902 James is working predominantly under the auspices of radical empiricism and pragmatism, the philosophical methods of his later years, not the phenomenological procedure reminiscent of his earlier career.

     [17] Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958).

     [18] Some accuse Otto of sneaking a Christian apologetic into Das Heilige. He may be using a neo-Kantian transcendental method as a backdoor way to defend and promote the existence of the Christian God. Though I grant that this is possible, for the time being it is enough to point out the difference between that argument and mine, i.e. an argument from authority concerning the actual existence of the object of the mysterium tremendum (the Holy) and an argument from authority of the Jamesian type (that accepts religious experience accounts at face value) and uses it to list the necessary and universal conditions for the possibility of numinous consciousness. Otto certainly makes no obvious case concerning the actual existence of the Holy, let alone something as specific as the Christian God. This is not a point of contention, and is disputed by no-one. The question is whether someone can make an implicit argument. Thus, if a case were to be made in favor of Otto’s Christian apologetic, it would have to be one with implicit value. Otto is vague at best; what is conspicuously clear is that he assumes the existence of the Holy, even providing a passage warning would-be readers to put the book down if they have never experienced numinous consciousness for fear they would not understand his meaning. In any case he spends majority of his efforts formulating the transcendental conditions necessary to sustain human consciousness of such an object. His project is largely neo-Kantian in this sense, a position I spend some time delineating later in this paper. To miss the Kantian influence in Otto is to fundamentally misunderstand Das Heilige, and by extension the corpus of religious experience theory following it. .

     [19] Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkley: University of California Press, 1985). Along with katz…part of the contextualist movement.

   

     [20] Proudfoot writes, “I shall argue that ineffability is not a simple unanalyzable characteristic of the [phenomenological/mystical] experience, as James implies, but that it is an artifact of the peculiar grammatical rules that govern the use of certain terms in particular religious contexts…[ineffability] often serve[s]…to constitute an experience rather than to describe, express, or analyze it” Proudfoot, 125.

     [21] Proudfoot reminds readers that speaking of Aquinas’ esse or Plotinus’ the One. Both have a part to play in the evolution of Christian theology. For Aquinas and Plotinus, God or the One are apophatic in nature, that is, they can only be known by their negative differentia or by analogy.  God or the One are not trees, or stones, or abstractions, or mathematical equations. What positive things can be said about them, at least according to Aquinas, are analogous references. God or the One are something like Love, or Beauty, or the Good. They are not actually those things, but they are like those things.

     [22] Taves, 135.

     [23] Make the argument that she is a biological reductionist. This will require some examples.

     [24] Smith and McIntyre—to select a few scholars at random— say, “The basic task of philosophy, he [Husserl] believes, is to discover the ultimate foundations of our beliefs about the world and our place in it, and to justify – or at least effect an understanding of –the framework within which all our thinking about the world takes place, both our everyday, common-sense thinking and our theoretical, scientific reasoning. Like Descartes, Husserl thinks these foundations lie with an understanding of the nature of the experiencing subject and his consciousness. David Woodruff Smith and Ronald McIntyre, Husserl and Intentionality (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1982), p. 93

     [25] A popular reason scholars think he is not a foundationalist lies with his commitment to the phenomenological reduction, i.e. epoche. Epistemological foundationalism of the kind we find in Descartes operates within the natural attitude. Thus, as Husserl methodologically denies the natural attitude, and therefore the questions concerning the “I” as being, no claims concerning what is foundational in the sense of being can arise. This ontologically preoccupied definition of foundationalism might be too narrow to apply to Husserl. Likewise, other definitions might be too broad. Roughly, all discursive reason operates foundationally. Given the truth of proposition “A,” correlative proposition “B” and “C” may arise. On this model, every philosophy is a foundationalist. The idea is to find a middle ground definition of foundationalism that is resistant to overtly Descartian interpretations as well as useless broad definitions. Husserl, I imagine, fits somewhere in this space.