The footnote will probably make it to the trash bin—both because the beginning of a paper should not have an enormous footnote and because I should not start by treating my key interlocutor with blatant antipathy. But dadgumit, I find the guy irritatingly imprecise, and since my prof won’t be reading this footnote, maybe one of you will. That should make me feel better.
First Paragraph:
Wayne Proudfoot argues that religious experiences are constituted by language paradigms. More precisely, he believes that mystical experiences obtain their specific phenomenological character in part due to the logical apparatus inherent to a corresponding religious vocabulary. So, for instance, one of the conditions necessary for experiencing nirvana is the disciple’s familiarity with and, in some cases, adherence to predetermined doctrines specified by Buddhist’s dogma.[1] Proudfoot takes this basic argument and criticizes William James’ typology of mystical experience as it appears in The Varieties of Religious Experience. This paper aims to understand the extent to which Proudfoot’s theory is applicable to James and at what point the two thinkers are talking past each other.
[1] To say, as Proudfoot does, that when the Buddha characterizes nirvana as ineffable or St. Francis characterizes communion with God as ineffable that these two tokens of ineffability are not phenomenologically isomorphic experiences fails, in the end, to say much at all. If we bracket the harder points of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, and assume, as everyone does, the real possibility of inter-subjectivity, no one may be said to share a phenomenologically isomorphic experience under any conditions. To use Husserl’s terminology, the horizonal content—retentions like memories or past experiences (including language) and protentions like present appearances or future possibilities—is always different for everyone. Falling in love for Bob or for Jane may be called the same thing by both, but that love appears differently to both people. Analogously, the ineffable mystical experience as it appears to any individual is inevitably different—whether due to the religious language employed or merely a difference in point of view i.e. both being part of the horizonal content. Given Proudfoot’s criteria, the same criticism might be applied to states of nirvana, i.e. that the Buddha experiencing nirvana cannot be the same as some other Buddhist experiencing nirvana in virtue of the two Buddhist’s differing language armamentarium. If Proudfoot wants to go the reductionstic route, he must either tell us where to stop or keep going to the logical conclusion. So far as I can tell, he gives no hints about stopping, only insisting that ineffability for Buddhists is different from ineffability for Christians. Well, of course it is! But if the criteria for these differences is merely the phenomenological character of an experience constituted by a language—where all persons have a different set of horizonal language games constituting the appearance or experience of mystical states—then, like ineffability, no state of nirvana is alike: no nirvana is the same as the original state of nirvana. Why is Proudfoot willing to critique differing religious paradigms and not homogenous religious persons where the criticism can apply to both groups? Why is Proudfoot comfortable keeping nirvana in tact and not ineffability? It all sounds vaguely Derridadian to me.
