Faith and Experience. IV: Epistemological Considerations

Extract

Those who take their stand on their own, or others’, religious experience sometimes claim that unsympathetic critics can be dismissed simply with the plea that their lack of experience disqualifies them from offering any kind of useful critique. Ninian Smart, in his essay Understanding Religious Experience, shows that such a claim need not be regarded as compelling. It is possible for us to have a certain theoretical Understanding of situations of which we have no experience, no “existential understanding”, and this theoretical understanding, even if it is not adequate for all purposes (it will not make a man a mystic, for instance), may still be quite adequate for some kind of philosophical comment to be made. If the mystic then seeks refuge in the further claim that his experiences are so transcendent as to be utterly inexpressible and incomprehensible to the rational mind, even so we are still entitled to ask whether they are truly totally inexpressible and incomprehensible. If they were, then it is unclear that the mystic himself is in any better position than his critics, and, like Cratylus, he ought to confine himself to waggling his finger and give up the attempt to communicate anything to anybody, himself included. But if mystical experiences or their objects are not totally beyond reach of reason and language, then there is at least some common ground between the mystic and his critics, and at least some basis therefore for non-mystical comment on mystical experiences.