Detailed Notes on Theories of Religious Experience and the Evental Subject

General Categories of Theories on Religious Experience

• As an Affective Mode:

  • Affective theories: Religious experience (RE) is fundamentally a feeling or complex of emotions.

  • Friedrich Schleiermacher:

    • RE as "the feeling of absolute dependence."

    • Two-way approach:

      • (a) Justifies religion by appealing to the immediacy of religious experience or "piety."

        • Religion cannot be reduced to knowledge or morality.

        • Religious experience is a feeling.

        • Cannot be reduced to morality because even a religious or moral person can still have a religious experience.

      • (b) Responds to the Kantian critique that experience is about production, not reproduction, structured by the categories of understanding.

        • RE is an immediacy of religious feeling that is pre-conceptual.

        • Kant: Experience is always a product

          • Individuals produce their own worlds.

          • Reality of the world is a product of our experience

          • Everything is conceptual.

        • Schleiermacher: Religious experience is preconceptual

          • Experiences are subjective but universal because they are preconceptual.

• Rudolf Otto:

  • Enlarged Schleiermacher’s concept of RE as the feeling of absolute dependence, arguing that RE is a complex of feelings.

  • Entails a sentiment of dread or awe, involving a longing or desire for the transcendent thing.

  • God as the mysterious Other – mysterium tremendum et fascinans

    • Tremendum - fear.

    • Fascinans - attraction.

    • Example: Moses and the burning bush.

    • Example: Love.

  • Critique: Leaves out the experience of God as “wholly familiar.”

• Difficulties with these theories:

As Perception

• Perceptive theories: Religious experience is a specific type of ordinary experience and needs to be philosophically examined utilizing structural themes.

  • Concrete experience: can be held, seen, etc.

  • Religious experience should be analyzed as an ordinary experience

  • Nothing unique about a religious experience (contrast with affection theories).

  • Structural correspondence = appeal of perception theories

• William P. Alston:

  • Ordinary perceptual experience follows the structure:

    • Subject → Object → Appearance

      • A perceiving subject perceives a particular object that appears to the latter in such-and-such a manner.

    • Theory of Appearing

      • Object and appearance are different.

      • Example: Sitting on a chair in front of a laptop in class

        • The professor appears to be a teacher of philosophy but this appearance will be different to his friends (e.g. his friends will perceive him as a friend)

      • Perceiving an object means perceiving how the object is presented to you

  • Focuses on that which appears in such-and-such manner, and not on whether the object perceived in such-and-such manner exists or not

Theory of Appearing

• Focuses on that which appears in such-and-such manner, and not on whether the object perceived in such-and-such manner exists or not.

• Arguing that RE is pre-conceptual introduces a breach between feeling and reason, sentiment, and concept.

  • Suggests that RE has no cognitive import, because it is pre-conceptual (in order to escape the Kantian critique).

  • Kantian critique - you are the one who made it a religious experience

• It fails to explain how RE can generate truth-claims of religion.

  • All religious experiences entail some kind of truth claims, meaning they tell some kind of reality.

  • Religious experiences does not generate truth-claims because it is preconceptual → does not entail reason → so the question is how can they entail truth claim?

  • Examples:

    • Being scared of spiders.

    • Low scores in an exam.

• Perception is basic and pre-conceptual, and hence, unanalyzable.

• Talks about direct awareness of God, excluding any form of meditation.

  • There are religious experiences that refer to this, which are referred to as mystical experiences.

• RE makes an appeal to its non-sensory character (simply because God is spirit and hence cannot be perceived by the senses). This is mystical experience entailing what he calls a “mystical perception”

  • Our perception of God will be different because God is not physical

• Alston’s final appeal is a Swinburnean Principle of Credulity

  • From what seems to a person to the probability that it is.

  • You have to believe what the person is saying unless there is one good reason for you not to believe what the person is saying.

  • So if the person says that this person is having a religious experience, then you have to believe so.

Difficulties with Perceptive Theories

• How can one sustain the principle of credulity by isolating RE as non-sensory perception, separate from other sensory perceptions?

  • Credulity: readiness or willingness to believe especially on slight or uncertain evidence.

  • Others don’t have access to the non-sensory perception of a person.

• Mystical perception, though nonsensory, always entails some form of sensory perception.

  • Experiences of God are mediated by other experiences.

  • Example: the story of Our Lady of Fatima.

    • 3 shepherd children: allegedly, there was a certain woman that appeared to them.

    • On August 13th, they were supposed to meet the Virgin Mary because they agreed to every 13th of the month.

    • But the children were locked, so they couldn’t see her.

    • While they were seeing the Virgin Mary, the people couldn’t see what they could see.

    • Doctors and curious people investigated.

      • 1 doctor noticed that they were really seeing something.

      • They all moved at the same time without any cue, they all started kneeling at the same time.

      • All of their eyes were looking at a very specific direction and their eyes were not blinking (which was weird).

• Problem of consistency.

  • Accuracy may be attained by checking mystical perception with other perceptions. Mystical perception is always conditioned by specific cultural and religious contexts.

As Interpretation

• Interpretative theories argue that religious experience is a form of ordinary experience but religiously interpreted, understood and evaluated in a mode specific to certain religious traditions.

• The two previous theories view experience as pre-conceptual, that is, explainable independent of concepts and beliefs.

• These approaches are protective of religious beliefs and practices.

  • To understand RE, one must not divorce it from the one experiencing it, and likewise consider the subject in his or her cultural and religious outlook.

    • There is no RE independent from the one experiencing it as such

• Phenomenology of Religion by Gerardus van der Leeuw

  • Experience is by nature relational because that which is experienced, or what appears is constituted by the relation that exists between the object and the subject.

    • One has to consider not just the object, but also the subject

  • According to van der Leeuq, an object is related to a subject, and a subject is related to an object.

  • However, phenomenology of religion falls into difficulties with regard to methodologies, that is, with the notion of epoche, resulting in a divorce between the religious phenomenon and its cultural milieu.

    • Epoche is the first stage of phenomenological reflection

      • You have to bracket/separate preconceptions, biases, received ideas (e.g. about love) — remove them from consideration in order to allow the experience of love to emerge

      • This way of bracketing is subject to problems because one way or another, it still succumbs to the object-subject dichotomy

• Science of Religion by Th. P. van Baaren

  • Dutch scholars developed this because of the dissatisfaction in the phenomenology of religion (epoche).

  • Religious experience cannot be detached from its conceptual framework.

    • Every experience entails a conceptual framework.

    • Question: where does the conceptual framework lie?

      • Answer: The subject

      • You can never bracket a particular conceptual framework by which a particular subject interprets a particular object as a religious experience

  • Religious experience is an ordinary experience religiously interpreted.

  • Religion is adverbial.

    • Acts are modified by the religion that we adhere to

  • RE = Ordinary Experience + religious conceptual framework.

    • Through this framework, you are able to interpret an ordinary experience as a religious experience

Religious Experience as Interpretation

• John Hick generalized Wittgenstein’s concept of “seeing-as” (based on Joseph Jastrow’s duck- rabbit picture).

  • Prolonged perception results in the apprehension of certain aspects or dimensions (“aspect- seeing”) that was not seen before

    • The important thing is the prolonged perception, which tends to be the case in religion

  • Radicalization of Wittgenstein’s position

    • On what it means to have religious faith
      Important points in the Interpretation Theories of RE

• RE is derived from, though not reducible to, ordinary experience

  • Based on ordinary experiences but through your religious framework and certain realities, it becomes a unique experience

• Addresses the issues concerning third-party verification of RE. Religious experience is notably personal. It depends on how one interprets the experience

  • Though you may not have the same experience but because you share the same religious conceptual framework, you can give consent to it that you can have those particular religious experience and make sense of it

Weaknesses in the Interpretation Theories of RE

• Ultimately, it is in danger of falling into religious non-realism / solipsisms

  • What if it’s just a random normal ordinary experience and you’re just making sense of it because you’re delulu

• It does tend to gravitate towards religious solipsism, the total loss of the transcendent’s objectivity in an intensely religious subjective experience

  • Religious solipsism - enclosed in your own reality that the objectivity of the divine is diminished already. Sometimes, the critique of others are minimized because of the intense religious experience

  • Hence, the need to emphasize the noetic quality of RE, in Wayne Proudfoot and in William James

Noetic Quality of RE

• RE is productive of knowledge of the objective world

• The authority of religious experience lies not on the context of RE, but on its noetic quality

  • Experience of a subject in relation to a particular object

  • Wayne Proudfoot and William James talked a lot about this: not just daydreaming, illusion, imagination but it’s an experience with reality

  • Authority of religious experience lies in its noetic quality

  • Noetic quality - we have valid, material and nonmaterial, genuine experiences in our lives

Module 6: Becoming Religious: The Religious Structures of an Eventual Subject Nov 13, 2023

• Core of the human person is always experiences, both ordinary and extraordinary that comes to us unexpectedly, which in turns transforms us

Outline of Lecture

• Alan Badiou and the Ontology of the Event

  • Ontology or Metaphysics are same lang

    • Deals with things beyond physics, more than just physical

  • Badiou’s philosophy is an understanding of reality, utilizing that of relation, becoming, process

  • Faithfulness is a result of particular actions of fidelity

  • Question in Metaphysics: being → actions OR actions → being?

  • Metaphysics is thinking things together

• Becoming – Subject: Fidelity to the Event

• Pauline Event

• The Subject as Universal Singularity

• Ave crux spes unica: the Eventual Subject and the Christ – event

Badiou and the Ontology of the Event

Badiou’s Theory of the Event

• Conjoins the idea of singularity with that of the generic

  • Singularity formalizes an instance of universality because it is disinterested, punctual, insular

  • “The term generic positively designates that what does not allow itself to be discerned is in reality the general truth of a situation”

• It is extraordinary on two counts

  • (1) Thinks of the Event on the level of metaphysics

    • Event is a category that explains the whole of the reality

    • Discussion is always foundational of everything

  • (2) The Event is included in a situation but it does not belong to it

    • Very interesting because Badiou was using transfinite set theory, you can always include something in a situation but it does not actually belong to it → which creates the dynamism of the becoming of a particular subject

The Transfinite Set Theory

• "There is really only one fundamental notion: the ability to regard any collection of objects as a single entity (i.e. a set)"

  • Something very particular in metaphysics

  • It means that metaphysics trains our mindset to think things together

  • E.g. class is composed of Sir and students

    • Set theory: we call it class itself because we regard it just one single entity

  • E.g. the Philippines as a country

    • Has a lot of elements, people, etc. but we consider the Philippines as one single entity

• Being or existence is a result of its belonging to a particular set rather than an attribute

  • To be is to belong

  • Our identity is measured/defined by our belongingness to a particular set or multiple sets

  • E.g. we are attending Sir’s online class because he belongs to an institution with prior commitments but he also belongs in Ateneo that’s why he has to teach us

• Atomistic metaphysics influenced by Whitehead's mathematical background

  • Whitehead also talks about set theory, similar to Badiou

  • Microcosm is a mirror of the macrocosm

  • Every atom reflects to an entirety which metaphysics also subscribes to

• Notions of infinity and set are combined (i.e. every element of a set in a set in itself)

  • Comprised of many things → those things are comprised of many other things

Situation, Event, and Subject

• The extraordinariness of the event is manifested via subjective intervention its belonging to its situation is essentially undecidable

  • It’s included but does not belong

  • It’s state of being within and without defines an event as undecidable

  • It’s undecidable because he insists the notion of subjective intervention

  • Subjective intervention - someone needs to intervene in deciding for this event, deciding one’s freedom if a particular event is true

• "The essence of the event is to be undecidable with regard to its belonging to the situation, an event whose content is the eventness of the event… cannot, in turn, have any other form than that of indecision" (Being and Event 193)

• An event must rally the aid of a subject who, proclaiming the existence of the event itself, assures it of its truth.

  • For Badiou, the subject is very important because the subject affirms the truth of the event

• "What defines the subject is his fidelity to the Event: the subject comes after the Event and persists in discerning its traces within his situation"

• The subject is superject (Whitehead)

  • While it IS the subject but not necessarily the particular subject before the event

  • The subject transforms after the event, transforming it to another version of the subject

Subjectivization

• For Badiou, an individual and a subject are not the same

  • Subjectivization – an individual becomes a subject because of the event

• Concerned with the conjoining of Being and Event

  • What’s important is neither being nor event, BUT the end that lies between the being and event

  • The end is the very process of subjectivization of a particular individual

• The bridging of that which is not (event) into that which is (being) by the subject's naming, intervention, and fidelity to the event

  • Subject is that which is

  • Event is that which is not because being in the event is within and without → there’s always the tension of belonging and not belonging

• Truth according to Badiou: a process, a procedure that finds its characteristic link in the subject who proclaims it as truth

  • Truth is not simply understood as traditionally the conformity of reality with the mind; For Badiou, it is a process

Subject → Universal Singularity

• A singularity without any specificity (and hence can attain to the status of universal) because it is devoid of any relation.

  • A singular/single becomes universal because of the singularity of the single

• Not simply a thinking subject detached from the extended world, but one that is unavoidably linked to the world, an "experiencing subject"

  • This was in mind with Descartes’ res cognitans

    • We are divided because of our thinking things but not necessarily our body

    • Body is part of the extended nature = divided human person

  • No subject without relation to an object, no objective without relation to an object → only through experience

  • Thus, we are not “thinking things” but “experiencing things”

  • Corrected Descartes’ philosophy

Production of Truth

• Subject is necessary because it is the subject who will name and decide on the particular event, thus truth is a procedure

  • Truth is a concept that is not generally followed from a traditional way of understanding

  • Truth is not simply epistemological, but are the following (below)

• Four generic procedures/conditions of philosophy: love, art, science and politics

• "what is proper to philosophy is not the production of universal truths, but rather the organization of their synthetic reception by forging and reformulating the category of Truth" (emphasis added, Saint Paul 108).

Pauline Event

• St. Paul became famous within the circles of Christianity and even among communist, atheist, etc. philosophers because they started to wonder how his life was radically transformed by something that happened to him — pauline event

  • Persecutor of Christianity then became a defender and promoter of Christianity where he established churches among the gentiles.

  • A lot were wondering how this change could be since he was willing to die for something he used to be against Religion

• Event— Religious revelation is an exemplary instance of event

  • Something just happens to you, then you are transformed to that event

  • Doesn’t suggest Christianity is an easy religion

  • St. Paul had to endure many hardships and many executions

• Subject— St. Paul finds the passionate militancy: founding Christian communities in Antioch and surrounding localities

  • Something happens to you which is lifechanging and you allow it to overflow into your life so that others can experience that event

• Truth212) “If no religion were true Christianity, nevertheless, was the religion which came closest to the question of truth” (Being and Event,

• St. Paul

  • Dubbed as a fictional contemporary because of the universal content of his preaching, obstacles

  • Because of this singular experience which became universal → proclamation that it can happen to all of us

  • Interest in his work engendered Neo-Paulinism

    • 3 philosophers interested in his life: Badiou, Žižek, and something

Becoming—Subject

• Damascus Story: “The event is the subjective sign of the event proper that is the Resurrection of Christ” (Saint Paul 17)

• Through the subjective sign which is evental itself, Paul was constituted into an Apostle by the event proper

  • Event proper: eventum tantum (Latin term for “event as such”)

    • In Christianity, this is the resurrection of Jesus, which is an impersonal event

    • Impersonal event because no one even witnessed it, yet it had transformed the life of many believers

  • His experience in the Damascus was a subjective sign only to the event proper

    • Sign to the truth of resurrection

• The universality of a truth procedure necessitates a subjective recognition of its singularity: it needs a subjective intervention

• Personal → Impersonal

• Singularity vs Particularity

  • Singularity is the same thing but is not the same as any other thing

    • Whatever is singular, it’s universal

  • Particularity is just one among many

    • Ex. this chair is a particular chair among many other chairs. Not exactly the same but not exactly different

Features of the Event

• (1) The event is that which is not being qua being

  • Though it has an eventual site, it does not belong to the situation where it finds itself. It is counted as one with the situation where it finds itself but it does not belong there

    • Ex. A circle full of O’s and only 1 X. It’s part of the set but not belong to the set and everything changes because of the presence of that X.

  • “The event, in its internal contradiction, is the impossible which happens in spite of everything, in a terrifying or marvelous manner. It always comes to us by surprise, or from that side when precisely, it was not expected" (Dastur 183)

• (2) The event as source of novelty

  • The truth — event is not about facts, but about the opening universal possibilities inviting actualization in subjects

  • The Christ — event creates apostles, and the becoming— subject of these apostles lies not so much in self-constitution, but on how the event itself

  • St. Paul was made an apostle because of what happened to him, as compared to other apostles who were appointed by Jesus

  • St. Paul called himself an apostle but not a self-proclaimed apostle, but because of the Christ event

  • Apostle is basically a messenger

  • The Greek word apostolos becomes messenger \