Ineffability And Religious Experience

Ineffability – that which cannot be explained in words – lies at the heart of the Christian mystical tradition. This is the first book to engage with the concept of ineffability within contemporary philosophy of religion and provides a starting point for further scholarly debate.

This collection of essays is an exercise in comparative philosophy of religion that explores the different ways in which humans express the inexpressible. It brings together scholars of over a dozen religious, literary, and artistic traditions, as part of The Comparison Project's 2013-15 lecture and dialogue series on "religion beyond words." Specialist scholars first detailed the grammars of ineffability in nine different religious traditions as well as the adjacent fields of literature, poetry, music, and art. The Comparison Project's directors then compared this diverse set of phenomena, offering explanations for their patterning, and raising philosophical questions of truth and value about religious ineffability in comparative perspective. This book is the inaugural publication of The Comparison Project, an innovative new approach to the philosophy of religion housed at Drake University (Des Moines, Iowa, USA). The Comparison Project organizes a biennial series of scholar lectures, practitioner dialogues, and comparative panels about core, cross-cultural topics in the philosophy of religion. Specialist scholars of religion first explore this topic in their religions of expertise; comparativist philosophers of religion then raise questions of meaning, truth, and value about this topic in comparative perspective. The Comparison Project stands apart from traditional approaches to the philosophy of religion in its commitment to religious inclusivity. It is the future of the philosophy of religion in a diverse, global world.

Ineffability – that which cannot be explained in words – lies at the heart of the Christian mystical tradition. This is the first book to engage with the concept of ineffability within contemporary philosophy of religion and provides a starting point for further scholarly debate.

Can art, religion, or philosophy afford ineffable insights? If so, what are they? The idea of ineffability has puzzled philosophers from Laozi to Wittgenstein. In Ineffability and its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion and Philosophy, Silvia Jonas examines different ways of thinking about what ineffable insights might involve metaphysically, and shows which of these are in fact incoherent. Jonas discusses the concepts of ineffable properties and objects, ineffable propositions, ineffable content, and ineffable knowledge, examining the metaphysical pitfalls involved in these concepts. Ultimately, she defends the idea that ineffable insights as found in aesthetic, religious, and philosophical contexts are best understood in terms of self-acquaintance, a particular kind of non-propositional knowledge. Ineffability as a philosophical topic is as old as the history of philosophy itself, but contributions to the exploration of ineffability have been sparse. The theory developed by Jonas makes the concept tangible and usable in many different philosophical contexts.

How is religious experience to be identified, described, analyzed and explained? Is it independent of concepts, beliefs, and practices? How can we account for its authority? Under what conditions might a person identify his or her experience as religious? Wayne Proudfoot shows that concepts, beliefs, and linguistic practices are presupposed by the rules governing this identification of an experience as religious. Some of these characteristics can be understood by attending to the conditions of experience, among which are beliefs about how experience is to be explained.

Arguing against the notion that religious experience is ineffable, while advocating the view that it can provide evidence of God's existence, this text contends that social science and nonreligious explanations of religious belief and experience do not cancel out the force of the experience.

The authors in this volume explore a wide variety of the contemporary approaches to mystical and religious experience to elucidate what religious experience is, in its own terms, and how its practitioners understand it. This anthology features contributions that point out that contemporary studies of consciousness, sociology, hermeneutics, neuroscience, medicine, and other fields, are revealing that there is much more to be said for the inner life of a human's consciousness than reductionists and behaviorists will allow. This book is one of very few that primarily takes the stance of academic practitioners, explaining their own experience, rather than that of academics trying to explain the phenomena away, as really politics, or sociology, or delusion, or psychological pathology, or literary flights of fancy, or an aberration of any of the other academic fields. Most of the authors in this volume embrace the task of explaining and analyzing religious experience, mysticism, and the healing power of silence and presence, using the resources of all of the academic disciplines, as appropriate. The essays contained analyze religious, and non-religious, mystical and profoundly personal experiences across several world religions, and in areas such as art and music, as well as in solving personal crises such as family disruption and patriarchal oppression. The authors address the subject matter through analyses of the frequent and destructive failures of language, or just noise, to capture or express the nuances of the inner life of a person. It is this very ineffability of self that renders the spiritual, emotional and interior life of individuals beyond cognition and perception, of the straightforward sorts embraced by most cognitive disciplines. The contributors come from a variety of cross-disciplinary fields to bring forth the possibilities for an intuitive and creative, rich and growing inner life for a human. This text appeals to students, researchers, and practitioners.

Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature explores the nature of religion and, in James' observation, its divorce from science when studied academically. After publication in 1902 it quickly became a canonical text of philosophy and psychology, remaining in print through the entire century. "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind."