Metaphysical glimpses and what they mean
Some thoughts on the epistemology of religious experience
I'm no longer a religious (church attending etc.) person, but I still have a religious impulse. I doubt I could be an atheist, because it seems to me atheism doesn't grant adequate space for this feeling (However, recently Brook Ziporyn defends mystical atheism and Eric Steinhart defends an atheist religious naturalism).
I call this impulse religious, rather than spiritual, because of the way Abraham Joshua Heschel defines it, “Religion is an answer to man’s central questions.” If that's true, philosophy of religion is the process of (re)discovering what these central questions are and how we approach them. This is why I find philosophy of religion one of the central areas of our discipline, and one we must approach with thoughtfulness.
A few days ago, I was cutting vegetables for dinner—a calm task that does not require much thought. Suddenly I got a moment of clarity, that insight that Spinoza calls scientia intuitiva: all at once it seemed to me that the universe is perfect and beautiful exactly as it is.* Of course, as I'm well aware, there's warfare, starvation, disease, horrendous suffering, but it didn't matter in that moment, or rather, it does matter, and yet it fits in that glorious, bigger picture. No matter how things turn out (personally, cosmically), it's all perfect as it is.
These moments never last long, so now I'm back to my usual medical anxiety and worries about my future and the future in general. What is their significance? For Spinoza, this kind of insight (which is his third kind of cognition) is indubitable. It is distinct from reason (the second kind of knowledge), but can arise out of reason. Once you grasp it, you can understand yourself as a finite mode of God, the one substance, and you also understand that your mind is eternal. Realizing this will grant you peace of mind and increases your power, virtue, and happiness. “It is of the nature of reason to perceive things under an aspect of eternity.” (Ethics 2p44c2). The Ethics is a guide to help you reach this state of enlightenment and peace of mind (blessedness, see this book by
).But what reason have we to suppose to think that it's true? Even scholars sympathetic to Spinoza concede that there are problems in some of the arguments, so the conclusions do not follow inevitably.
At a workshop in Santiago de Chile last year (intended for young Latin American scholars), I discussed these glimpses I've had over the years with an epistemologist who was also invited to give talks and lead discussions. We were having a coffee break and we tried Chilean dulce de leche (can recommend).
This epistemologist had tried mushrooms only once. When she did, she suddenly grasped with utter clarity that left no room for doubt that the world is intrinsically evil, and that we're all fundamentally alone. It took her months to rid herself of this horrible feeling, and on occasion she still thinks about it.
“No more mushrooms for me,” she said, “But who is to say that what I saw at that moment wasn't true? Why do we attach epistemic significance to the good glimpses but not the bad?” I had never had a bad glimpse, but on occasion have had good ones. I've never tried mushrooms. I don't know how the good and bad glimpses are in proportion to each other. When you read studies of mystical experience, starting with William James's classic Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), then the emphasis is on good experiences. However, glimpses of evil could be far more common than bad mushroom trips. Jerome Gellman argued in a classic paper (in Faith and Philosophy, 1992) that our experience of evil is a kind of religious experience. As he writes:
It seems to me, for example, implausible in the extreme to suppose that someone who endured the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust in the extermination camps of World War II, is arguing, either inductively or deductively, from the fact of those evils to the non-existence of God. Rather, what seems highly more plausible to say is that such a person has lost his or her faith because in experiencing those evils he or she has had an experience of God's non-existence. (Gellman, 1992, 213).
Gellman characterizes experiences of profound evil and suffering as religious experiences that give us some evidence, not in a propositional sense but in an experiential sense, of the non-existence of an all-powerful benevolent God. I grant that such experiences are salient and widespread. Our constant connection to news (which is usually bad) may make them even more so today. Who can possibly believe the world is perfect as-is if children are dying and starving in war zones?
I'm reluctant to discount my glimpse while cutting vegetables, and I don't think it's mere wishful thinking. There's a certain forcefulness to these experiences that make them significant. In recent decades, various epistemologists (have your pick: Swinburne, Plantinga, Huemer) have argued that our seemings have prima facie justification (see e.g., here). However, this is miles away from the certain knowledge that our minds are eternal, that we're fundamentally part of one substance, as Spinoza held. Sorry, but prima facie justification is not good enough. Because the bad glimpses, our experience of evil and the accompanying feeling that not all shall be well (or is well) can act as plausible defeaters. So we need something more. What is it?
One way is Tolkien's notion of eucatastrophe, the cathartic effect of a happy ending. As he writes in On Fairy Stories (1939):
Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function. (Tolkien, 1939).
Tolkien thought (see also here) and Nietzsche agrees (in Daybreak), that the constant onslaught of bad news does not weigh up to these occasional feelings of joy about the world. Joy outweighs all the bad experiences and horrors. There's a certain fittingness to a happy ending, to an experience of beauty, that the flatness of our experience of evil lacks. At least for me, good glimpses give me a sense of possibility and modes for action. I am aware that for some people, seeing our lives as intrinsically composed of suffering also provides such possibilities and modes for action, but I am not a Buddhist. I want to experience the world as perfect and beautiful. Maybe there is no fact of the matter, just a bunch of disparate facts that make a consistent attitude impossible, as Yujin Nagasawa has recently discussed in his book The problem of evil for atheists. However we parse the world, we'll have what he calls “axiological expectation mismatches.”
In that respect, our glimpses, no matter how imperfect, or uncertain, should be treasured. The fact that we cannot put them into words, nor use them to glibly argue our way out of our existential difficulties only adds to their enduring mystery and their personal, almost intimate, significance.
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*I've had such experiences several times in my life. This one did not especially have theistic content, maybe because I was not in a theistic mood.
Helen this is a beautiful post. It actually gave me another way of thinking about an experience I had over the summer. I was at my grandmother’s funeral with just my 6-week-old (other child was ill, husband was with her). At one point, the only people in the church foyer were my mother, myself, my newborn, and my grandmother’s body. It felt like a moment of extreme clarity about two seemingly distinct/opposite things: that life is largely composed of immense suffering (my mom was torn apart by her months of caregiving and her mothers subsequent and sudden death), and that life is surely infinitely good (my newborn felt like a candle of truth in that environment). It was a kind of sublime experience where the two extremes of joy and grief brought each other out in maximally deep clarity. We suffer largely because life is so good (we suffer from love). And we keep making life in the face of all its terrors. So I feel like I’ve experienced both of these types of religious experiences, but I see them as magnifying one another. This is largely why Weil’s work resonates with me, I think. It seems to make sense of this idea.
A fascinating analysis. I decided some time ago that the universality and timelessness of religions and religious experience means either that humans are just wired that way -- perhaps connected to our love of stories -- or just maybe we're all perceiving, albeit through a dark glass, something ineffable that's really there. More likely the former, I suppose, but who knows?