No such thing as pure experience
An interesting conversation is going on between James McGrath, Duane Smith and others on the place of religious language in describing experience. This is well worth following. I have no great answers or wise perspectives to contribute, but I do want to draw attention to what seems to me to be one of the key issues.
Experience is never raw, but the language and habitual narratives we tell about ourselves and the world help determine how we experience the things we experience and not just how we explain them. Thus Duane’s metaphor of extra baggage is not entirely accurate, since the language and implicit narrative is intrinsic to the way the experience is experienced. Experiences don’t exist independently of the way we understand them as they are experienced. Are the “quite normal and common experiences” Duane refers to the same experiences for atheist and believer, or for Christian and Buddhist (say)? The same things may be being experienced, but is the experience the same? And how would we know?
May 20th, 2008 at 12:59 am
Doug,
I have to reject your assertion that experience is never raw due to language and habitual narratives, as babies clearly have experience but lack either of those latter categories of thought.
Furthermore, while it may be the case that we constantly filter experience through those layers of cognition, it is also true that we have direct sensations that temporarily elude them - e.g. intense pain. It is only upon reflection that we assign categories to these raw experiences, but we nonetheless had the experiences themselves prior to any value judgement about them.
-JAK
May 20th, 2008 at 1:01 am
Addendum: Considering how intense a spiritual experience would be, I imagine that a genuine one transcends those thought categories even more than pain would. I’m sure that training the mind to accept or reject certain experiences would dramatically change the value assigned to them and the point-of-view of an individual can still shape the experience per se, but I am not convinced that language would act as a kind of “trap” to limit the experience of God in and of itself.
May 20th, 2008 at 1:04 am
Doug,
Thanks for the interaction. I completely agree with you on one of your points but have more than a little quibble on another. First, you are completely correct; my metaphor is not entirely accurate. I introduced it more in fun than in seriousness although I think it does have pedagogical value. The better defined metaphor which was the target of “extra baggage” is “parsimony.”
I also agree, in part, that “Experience is never raw, but the language and habitual narratives we tell about ourselves and the world help determine how we experience the things we experience and not just how we explain them.” Please excuse the following simplistic example. Upon experiencing a strong earthquake, an atheist is likely to experience it as a natural phenomenon and may immediately begin to help any who are injured (or not). Some (I use “some” because I know this does not apply to all) Christian believer will experience it as a willful act of God and an example of His mighty power and seek to do His will, i.e. immediately begin to help any who are injured (or not). In this kind of a shared experience, this particular Christian believer’s “way the experience is experienced,” particularly the helping part of the experience, sure seems like extra baggage to me. But I actual worry, that how we explain an experiences and our “language and habitual narratives” applied to those experiences manifests a distinction without a difference. We repeatedly explain the events of our lives to ourselves to the point that those explanations become part of the fabric of our lives themselves. By the way, while I apologize for the simplistic example, I do believe that if we can’t work our way through simple examples we are not ready to take on the more complex ones.
May 20th, 2008 at 7:29 am
My reply
May 20th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
There’s some additional discussion over at the comments on Iyov’s post.
I am not denying that “what is experienced” happens independently of the experience, but I am reflecting on what we actually do when we experience things, and I think we inevitably refract “what is experienced” through our language and stories so that it is possible for the experience itself to be varied.
I reiterate the comments I made on Iyov’s blog, I don’t mean this in a narrow linguistic way, but rather out of the language and stories with which we habitually make sense of reality.