Exploring the Coastline of Religious Experience
In last month’s blog posting, we noted that modernity, including Kant’s philosophy, sees thinking for oneself as a rejection of all tradition, even though systematic thinking itself seems to be a tradition. Post-modernity sees modernity as a tradition that is unaware of its own status as a tradition. On this view, modernity is either a dead end, because it and all other traditions have been discredited; or else one tenable tradition, among others, that advances some philosophical insights.
As an exponent of modernity, Kant saw the many, traditional, revealed religions as potential sources of superstition but also as overlapping a common domain, or natural religion of reason. For Kant, this Vernunftreligion exists as an aid in motivating moral choices, fulfilling the Categorical Imperative, and forming part of the philosopher’s proper domain of pure reason. In contrast, Schleiermacher saw religion as based on a feeling (immediate self-consciousness) of complete dependence on the infinite. In this Gefühlsreligion, the self feels itself to be dependent on some romantic totality. Vernunftreligion has the problem of inferring religious experience from purely rational experience, which seems too narrow. Gefühlsreligion has the problem of differentiating religious experience from aesthetic consciousness, which seems too broad. In either case, if one starts looking for God in one’s experience, then one may end up identifying one’s experience with God.
Kant’s coastline analogy in the Critique of Pure Reason (A396) is meant to distinguish empirical appearances from “things in themselves” and to confine the voyage of reason to the continuous coastline of experience. Even allowing for this necessity, it is not clear that observations of “a coastline of religious experience” are sufficient for navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of Vernunftreligion and Gefühlsreligion. The triangulation of one’s position relative to a coastline requires not only multiple observations of known points on that coastline; not only a compass, a map, a parallel ruler, and a pencil; but also the presupposition that one’s predecessors received a reliable inspiration to create this technique and its tools. Beyond empirical observations, what is required for distilling religious experience into religious doctrine?
George Lindbeck (The Nature of Religious Doctrine, 1984, pp. 16-18) provided a suitably “beyond-ist” theory of religious doctrine. If religious doctrines are thought of as purely symbolic expressions of religious experience, then one is espousing an experiential-expressive theory of religion. This theory presupposes that some “individual genius,” perhaps one’s own, is added to experience in order to produce religious expressions. On the other hand, Lindbeck believed that religious doctrines could be thought of as authoritative linguistic rules. These rules are added to religious culture (experience, discourse, attitudes, and practices) in order to permit or exclude certain faith propositions, thereby creating a cultural-linguistic theory of religion. This theory presupposes that some “cultural genius” has produced the required linguistic rules without compromising traditional propositional truth criteria.
The experiential-expressive theory of religion is ideal for interpreting individual quests for personal meaning, because the theory has a clear starting part (the “turn to the subject”), and a clear ending point (a set of personalized religious beliefs, symbols, or doctrines). Lindbeck (pp. 22-23) saw these theories as having extended from a post-Reformation world, with its many denominations of Christianity, to a post-Christian world, with its “multiple suppliers” of principles for organizing one’s inner experiences. For the experiential-expressivist, all internal experiences are equally incontrovertible traces of the Ultimate; hence, all expressed religious beliefs are equally valid.
Lindbeck’s Chapter 2 explores the extent to which the cultural-linguistic theory of religion finds support as the opposing thesis that religious doctrine plays a role in producing religious experience. (Note that the cultural-linguistic theory only maintains that some knowledge of religious doctrine is logically prior to one’s assessment of his or her internal state, not that religious doctrine causes that internal state.) On this account (pp. 33-41), religious doctrine is a cultural or linguistic framework (skill set) that helps shape one’s internal state (life and thought) instead of being only an expression of that internal state. There are internal states (thoughts) that we cannot have unless we have an adequate language, consistent with Wittgenstein’s private language argument. Becoming Christian involves learning Biblical stories and lessons well enough to facilitate the interpretation of one’s experience. Hearing an external word helps shape experience and leads to faith.
Abandoning the notion that the exclusive source of religion is in prior experience is consistent with abandoning the notion that there is an inner experience of God common to all human beings and religions, but expressed differently (pp. 39-40). On the cultural-linguistic theory, adherents of different religions have different experiences. Lindbeck uses the example of Buddhist compassion, Christian love, and French-Revolutionary (quasi-religious) fraternité: These do not represent (express) a fundamental human awareness but are radically different ways of experiencing the cosmos. On this view, religion is not something universal arising from the inmost depths of individuals, but is rather a class name for a set of diverse cultural-linguistic systems that help to shape the beliefs, attitudes, and sentiments of their adherents. These cultural-linguistic systems help confine the voyage of reason to the continuous coastline of religious experience.
(The next posting date for this blog is expected to be February 1, 2020.)