Robert Bennett

PHIL-4920

Dr. Ari Santas

Radical Empiricism and The Epistemological Status of Mysticism

This paper supports the assertion that, while ground for reconciliation between mysticism

and rationalism will not be found, there is indeed room for compatibility between mysticism and

empiricism – a proposition which is traditionally criticized but made plausible by introducing

William James’ notion of radical empiricism. The paper is laid out into three main sections,

following this introduction to mysticism lead by Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rudolf Otto, Walter

Stace and William James. Firstly, a section on rationalism, utilizing the philosophies of

Pythagoras, Plato, Rene Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, for the purpose of defining and

contextualizing, through negation, mysticism. A section on empiricism will follow, divided into

two subsections: a transition from rationalism, discussing the compatibilist theories of Descartes

and Kant, and an examination of David Hume and William Clifford. Reason for the popular

rejection of mysticism by empiricists will be given here. Lastly, an elaboration of William

James’ radical empiricism, with commentary from C.S Peirce, and an argument for the

admittance of mystical experience into the epistemological realm.

Outline

I. Introduction

II. Rationalism

III. Empiricism

IV. Mysticism

V. Radical Empiricism and Conclusion

I. Introduction/Mysticism

This paper aims to answer the questions of whether there exists any room within

the philosophy of empiricism to allow for the assimilation of mysticism into the domain of

epistemology, and how this can be accomplished without reducing experiences of the divine to

some anomaly of neural malfunction or damaging the cogency of the empirical method. With

respect to the realm of the knowable, are only the objects of sensory experience admissible, or

does all experience, including that of the mystical, carry equal epistemological weight? The

factor which gives an epistemological theory its weight is its ability and readiness to provide the

subject with an apprehension of reality. Thus, the benefit of holding the strict empiricist view is

that it implies an immediate apprehension of reality; one is able to negotiate and understand the

world confidently because it supports the belief that the one’s experience of the world not only

provides knowledge but provides it more readily than reason a priori. Mysticism as well supports

the notion that reality is apprehensible, though it requires one to be in a certain mental state,

which is elusive and fleeting, before the experience provides knowledge; it lacks repeatability or

readiness. It is because of this weakness that the empiricist is traditionally skeptical towards any

notion of an apprehensible reality outside of ordinary experience. For the mystic however, his

state is in fact repeatable and apprehension readily available. I maintain that there is indeed room

for compatibility between mysticism and empiricism – a proposition which is traditionally

criticized but made plausible by introducing William James’ notion of radical empiricism.

The paper is laid out into three main sections, following this introduction to mysticism

lead by Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rudolf Otto, Walter Stace and William James. Firstly, a

section on rationalism, utilizing the philosophies of Pythagoras, Plato, Rene Descartes and

Baruch Spinoza, for the purpose of defining and contextualizing, through negation, mysticism. A

section on empiricism will follow, divided into two subsections: a transition from rationalism,

discussing the compatibilist theories of Descartes and Kant, and an examination of David Hume

and William Clifford. Reason for the popular rejection of mysticism by empiricists will be given

here. Lastly, an elaboration of William James’ radical empiricism, with commentary from C.S

Peirce, and an argument for the admittance of mystical experience into the epistemological

realm.

The definition of mysticism we will be working with throughout the paper goes as

follows: mysticism is the belief that one can, through spiritual discipline or otherwise, come into

union with the divine, or experience a reality transcendent to ordinary existence and gain access

to insight otherwise unattainable. An understanding of mysticism, even to the mystic himself, is

not easily approachable however. Shrouded in the confounding ineffability of the imagination’s

largely unchartered depth, a shadow to the Plato’s light of reason, it cannot be approached in the

strictly logical mode of mind typical of philosophers, and we must depend carefully upon the

trustworthiness of mystics, withholding skeptically our credulity. A sufficient inquiry into the

nature of mystical experience requires a comprehensive collection of the words of mystics like

such given to us in William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience and Samuel Dresner’s

anthology on Abraham Joshua Heschel called I Asked for Wonder. Rabbi Heschel graces us with

a poetic insight into the nature of the realm he called “the ineffable:”

The search of reason ends at the shore of the known; on the immense expanse

beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which

is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason

cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we

measure, where we weigh” (Dresner 1).

He continues on to liken our mind to a “fantastic seashell,” its lips upon which we can

press our ear and hear the “perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore.” This is why, for

Heschel, the mystic sails – not for the sake of some spiritual attainment, but because, in times of

silence, one can hear a call from the unintelligible realm.

‘Ineffability’ is a word commonly associated with the mystical experience, a word whose

connotation, according to his widow, Heschel even worshipped. James names ineffability to be

the handiest of marks for identifying mystical experience, reporting, “the subject of [the

experience] immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can

be given in words” (James 380). For this reason, it must be experienced directly – “[this

experience] cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, its can only be evoked, awakened within the

mind” (Otto 7). Walter Stace tells us the mystical experience is unintelligible an unutterable to

not only those who have not had the experience, but even to those who have (Runzo 149).

According to Otto, like in James, the subject must be led in contemplation and meditation upon

the silent regions of the mind until the numinous begins to stir within him and he is ripped from

ordinary experience, thrown into The Great Who-Knows.

The numinous represents a mental state of “mysterium tremendum” whereby the subject

feels embraced by some holy Other, completely dependent and powerless to the Other’s

formidable presence. This state is represented by elements of awfulness, overpoweringness,

urgency, fascination and identification with the Wholly Other (Otto 7-31). In James’ words, “it is

as if there were in human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a

perception of what we may call ‘something there.’” (James 58). The sense through which one

perceives this transcendent other is one, according to James, beyond the understanding of

contemporary psychology. The mystical experience has other qualities however, besides

ineffability, discussed by James.

The first of these qualities for James is the noetic quality of mysticism, a sense that a

mystical state is not only a state of feeling, but one of knowledge. In James’ words, “they are

states of insight into depth of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect” (James 380). Though

ineffable and inarticulate to even the mystic, mystic revelation seems to linger in the form of

divinely inspired wisdom. Second is the quality of transiency, of a temporal short-lasting,

fleeting and lacking impressionability upon memory. One feels as though a lifetime of

experience has passed and dispensed its wisdom upon the soul in a matter of minutes, or even

seconds, leaving only the sense that something significant has occurred. The last quality for

James is the state’s passivity, as James calls it – Otto’s identification with the Wholly Other, or

James’ feeling of objective presence, a sense of there being present another power, foreign and

superior to the subject himself. James’ testifies, “the mystic feels as if his own will were in

abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power” (James

380-381). James provides numerous textual examples, in sections XVI and XVII in The

Varieties of Religious Experience, of mystics who have been rapt in this way.

J.A. Symonds writes, “Suddenly… at church, or in company, or when I was reading, and

always, I think, when my muscles were at rest, I felt the approach of the mood. Irresistibly it took

possession of my mind and will, lasted what seemed an eternity, and disappeared in a series of

rapid sensations which resembled the awakening from anesthetic influence” (James 385).

A German idealist named Malwida von Meyensburg articulated her experience, “earth,

heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast world-encircling harmony. It was as if the chorus of all

the great who had ever lived were about me” (395).

A Canadian psychiatrist named Dr. R.M. Bucke describes an “immense joyousness

accompanied by or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to

describe…” He goes on, “I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not

composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in

myself of eternal life… I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that

without any per-adventure all things work together for the good of each and all” (399).

After qualifying the mystical experience and providing this thorough collection of

testimonies, James arrives at a series of conclusions: 1) that the experience is usually

authoritative over the subject, 2) that mystics have no right to implore others to explore the same

places and 3) that “the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of

nonmystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe” (427). However,

the purpose of this paper is not to acknowledge the power of such states, but to argue in favor of

their status as empirically observable and epistemologically respectable – an effort which

requires us to build the philosophical context of mysticism before returning to James.

Rationalism then is next in what needs to be considered in order to give a full account.

II. Rationalism

An understanding of mysticism becomes more readily approachable when one first

understands what mysticism cannot be – by sharpening through negation the scope with which

one examines. Rationalism represents the antithesis of mysticism; mystical experience is not

rationally intelligible. It is an experience definitively void of concept and number, entirely

unattainable by use of the intellect. We will therefore begin by contextualizing mysticism within

the realm of epistemology and define as the following: rationalism is the belief that knowledge is

founded upon reason; episteme is attained a priori. The degree of certainty with which the

rationalist holds his beliefs is contingent upon his quality of reasoning. While for some

rationalists, like Plato and Descartes for instance, extended reality cannot be apprehended

directly; we can only have knowledge about the ideal, mental world. For others, like Pythagoras

and Spinoza, the extended world is ideal, a harmonious and intelligible organization and so

apprehensible through reason. Our definition can be made more precise however by giving a

philosophical overview of the below, rationalist exemplars – an elaboration which will, again,

give us an understanding of what mysticism cannot be.

The historical roots of rationalism go back as far as the times of ancient Greece – to the

time of the Pythagoreans, who claimed as a motto, “all is number.” This was not however an

attempt to deify number or spiritualize mathematics, but an affirmation of number’s unrivaled

epistemological potency. By the phrase, “all is number,” the Pythagoreans mean that nothing can

exist outside the explanatory capacity of mathematics; all can be explained by number. The

Pythagoreans were in fact such committed rationalists that they would consider the words

‘rationalizable’ and ‘knowable’ to be synonymous. They “reasoned that the entire universe is a

harmonious arrangement, ordered by and so knowable though, number” (Cohen 18). They

likened the world to a musical ballad, the chaos within which, merely illusory, and only apparent

within the stanzas not yet ordered by number. The imposition of number reveals harmony, or

order, within the chaos and knowledge is thus attained.

Plato, only 200 years historically removed from Pythagoras, echoes his rationalism. He

argued for the ideal existence of what he called the “Forms,” or archetypes transcendent to

physical reality. The Forms, defined at 52a-b in his Timaeus, are invisible, indivisible,

immaterial, unchanging, eternal, and ontologically precede physicality – “ungenerated and

indestructible… neither [receive] anything else into [themselves] from elsewhere nor

[themselves] enters into anything else anywhere.” Materiality on the other hand, for Plato, “is

sensible; is brought into existence; is perpetually in motion, coming to be in a certain place and

again vanishing out of it.” Materiality participates in the Forms, or imitates the Forms, existing

within the void, in likeness to the Forms, organized or reasoned into ordered existence by the

demiurge, or craftsman, in English (Plato 52a-b); the demiurge is Plato’s personified

representation of reason. The mediator between the physical and the transcendent, he observes

the Forms and orders the world according to them, out of chaos. The Forms, or the ideal, deal in

truth whereas materiality, because it exists merely in likeness to the Forms, can only be

accounted for probabilistically and is therefore remote from absolute truth. This is where Plato

echoes Pythagoras: one can reason about the Forms – about the ideal – reason about truth, but

there exists no truth outside of the ideal. Materiality before reason, before the Demiurge, is

chaotic; Plato’s light of reason illuminates the knowable.

Modernity’s first rationalist, Rene Descartes, in observing the deceitful nature of the

ever-changing physical world, was skeptical of sensible experience, subjecting it to his method

of systematic doubt. Descartes then sets out to lays his new epistemological foundation upon

what he calls clear and distinct ideas – those ideas which come to the intellect as rational

intuition after reasonable consideration of perception; sensory experience only begets true

knowledge when subjected to pure reason. We will come back to this notion soon. However,

much as in the way the classics seemed argue for the existence of innate ideas bestowed upon the

soul by some transcendent, ideal reality (i.e. through number, Socratic recollection or Platonic

Form), Descartes, in Meditation Three, claims that God is located above reason ontologically and

is the cause of ideas “more perfect” than his mind. While causes such as those found in the

interactions between corporeal things are considered formal causes – causes by which their

effect possesses just as must reality as the cause, by which the effect is just as perfect as the

cause. The idea of a corporeal thing however, the idea of a rock for example, exists within the

mind eminently, as an effect of the rock – the cause of my idea, the rock, possesses more reality,

or is more perfect than, my idea of the rock; the rock is the eminent cause of my idea of the rock

(Cahn 541-542). Implicatively, God is the eminent cause of ideas such as the idea of God, the

idea of infinite or of perfection.

Arguing for the above conclusion, an effect cannot possess more reality, cannot be more

perfect, than its cause; an idea of the infinite cannot possess more reality, cannot be more perfect,

than that which causes the idea; the infinite contains more reality, is more perfect, than the finite;

the mind is finite, so ideas caused by the mind are finite; an idea of the infinite cannot be caused

by the mind; therefore, in the same way that there can exist no idea of the rock until it is caused

eminently by the rock, there can exist no idea of the infinite unless it is caused eminently by

something outside the mind, possessing as much or more reality than the idea of the infinite

(Cahn 542-543).

This argument however, because it is self-evident that no corporeal object possesses

sufficient reality to cause an idea of the infinite, leaves the question of where the idea of the

infinite comes from. In Descartes’ own words, “although the idea of substance is in me by virtue

of the fact that I am a substance, that fact is not sufficient to explain my having the idea of an

infinite substance, since I am finite, unless this idea proceeded from some substance which really

was infinite” – proceeded from God (Cahn 541-543). We have it then that, for Descartes, God is

placed above reason ontologically. This is not to say that Descartes carried any notion of a

mystical apprehension of reality, but rather that God placed these ideas of perfection and infinity

within us, innate yet dormant until discovered through reason. It is this misplacement of God

over reason, along the fervent devotion to dualism, which his commentator, Benedict Spinoza,

condemns.

Spinoza, likewise to Pythagoras, rationalizes the world according to some ideal construct,

organized geometrically, patterned by logical implication. In Cahn’s words, “Spinoza viewed the

world as possessing an intelligible structure according to which every event was in principle

comprehensible as a necessary part of the whole” – a structure, the framework of which can only

be known through reason (Cahn 592). The word “necessary” is italicized here because it signifies

the importance of Spinoza’s notion of a deterministic whole – a connotation vital to his

conception of a rationally knowable world; the world must be deterministic, all parts absolutely

necessary to the whole, in order for our deductions about the world to be valid. It was this

“whole” for which he used three names interchangeably (i.e. substance, nature, or God) – all

three perfectly synonymous to one another. Spinoza, a thoroughgoing monistic idealist or, more

precisely, an attributive dualist, rejects Descartes’ substance dualism, proposing that, “the order

and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of extended things” (Spinoza

II.7). Though he conceives of infinitely many, Spinoza claims that we are aware of two

attributes of substance, or God: the mental and the extended. And, there is no real separation

between the mental and the extended, or between anything for that matter; their separation is

merely an illusion of the intellect, necessary, by logical implication, to our capacity for

rationalizing God. A mode, or an attributive modification, of spatial extension and the idea of

that extended mode are one and the same, only differing attributively. Both extension and idea,

and all things that fall under them, contain the whole, or are of God, the one substance – different

expressions, or different modifications in attribute, of the same substance. Furthering his

monism, no parts of the whole interact because “parts” contain no reality in Spinoza’s

philosophy; individual entities, people, objects, ideas, are not substances of their own, but are

merely modifications of God (Kolak 107-109). God is substance; God is nature; God is the

whole, and the whole is knowable strictly through reason.

Taking from two propositions found in his Ethics, I.18 and I.28, “God is the indwelling

and not the transient cause of all things” (Spinoza I.18) and “every individual thing, i.e., anything

whatever which is finite and has a determinate existence, cannot exist or be determined to act

unless it be determined to exist and to act by another cause which is also finite and has a

determinate existence, and this cause again cannot exist or be determined to act unless it be

determined to exist and to act by another cause,” and this succession of causes continues on into

infinity(Spinoza I.28). God’s existence is immanent rather than transcendent, and finite modes

are conditioned deterministically, ad infinitum, by previous finite modes and by the laws of

God’s nature. There are therefore an infinite number of finite modes acting as modifications of

God’s infinite attributes and these modifications only become differentiated when met by the

intellect’s capacity of rationalization; apparent separation and causal succession are necessary for

conceptualizing the world – separations the boundaries of which are defined by logical

implication, or reason, for the sake of maintaining God’s intelligibility, for categorizing.

Spinoza’s mode of the mental attribute, rationalized differentiation, is God’s attempt at

understanding Himself through a process of reasoning about Himself. This potentiality of

knowing reality through a process of reasoning is the common thread between all rationalists,

and it is the notion which stifles any desire to compatibilize rationalism and mysticism. To

rationalize the world is to interpret the contents of the mind and compartmentalize these contents

according to logical implication, according to some ideal construct. Knowledge then becomes

anything which scaffolds the construct without weakening the integrity of its logically ordered

whole – anything which fits the construct without contradiction, a requisite definitively opposed

to the claims of mysticism.

Mysticism asks the question of whether rationality should require of knowledge an

obligatory humbling to the mind’s rational models of reality. It is irrational in itself to assert that

it is man’s imperative to order existence according to the mind’s structural condition of

necessary implication; it is irresponsible to believe that existence should kneel to reason. First to

the Pythagoreans and then to Spinoza: is it true that “all is number –” that all is explainable by

number? Or, is it that all which is explainable by number, is number? Is substance knowable

through reason, or is that which is knowable, about substance, through reason, knowable through

reason? To observe the world through the lens of one model is to see only the truths which aren’t

filtered by that lens. For the mystic, the notion that reason contains knowledge is an illusion

potent over those who fail to understand that rationality is a lens rather than an eye. Mystical

experience forces one, whether a thoroughgoing rationalist or otherwise, to leave their notions of

differentiation and logical necessity behind. There is no room in this experience even for

language. For the mystic, it is exactly the rationally contrived, ideal construct of the intellect,

within which everything is ordered and plays nicely with logical necessity, that keeps us hidden

from truth, from divinity. Truth will never find the one who hides within the intellect. Perhaps

though it will find the one who places experience over reason. Following a transitional

subsection on the relationship between rationalism and empiricism, a determination of what

Hume and Clifford would say about mysticism will be given.

III. Empiricism

Though the same cannot be said of the former philosophies, rationalism and empiricism

do not always find themselves in opposition. Immanuel Kant for example admits both reason and

experience into his epistemology, arguing that a combination of the two is required in order to

gain an accurate understanding of the world. If one conceives of rationalism and empiricism as

an epistemological polarity of varying degrees, moving from Spinoza’s rationalism at one end, to

Humean empiricism at the other, it will become apparent that they meet in the middle with Kant.

At the far rationalist end, one might believe, like Socrates reportedly, that all knowledge exists

innately within the mind and is discoverable through a sort of Socratic recollection, or a

remembering of the contents of one’s soul. In Plato’s articulation as well, knowledge holds an

innate existence within the mind; knowledge exists within the ideal, as Form, and is

approachable through reason. Another articulation of the same idea is found in Descartes’

Meditation Three: ideas “more perfect” than us, such as those of perfection and infinity, are

given to us by God, and discoverable through careful meditation upon the contents of the mind.

There are also, for Descartes, certain truths, in addition to those given to us by God, that are

approachable by use of a natural capacity of our intellect, namely rational intuition, or insight.

Descartes also gives credence eventually, however hesitant in his skepticism, to sensible

experience. Reporting in Meditation Six, “since the ideas perceived by sense were much more

vivid and explicit and even, in their own way, more distinct than any of those that I deliberately

and knowingly formed through meditation or that I found impressed on my memory, it seemed

impossible that they came from myself. Thus the remaining alternative was that they came from

other things” (Cahn 554). It is our capacity of rational intuition which establishes these

perceptions of the senses as vivid and explicit, or clear and distinct, and it is upon clear and

distinct ideas which Descartes founds his argumentation. It follows then, from this admittance of

sensible experience into the epistemological realm, that, if one were to distrust the senses, as

Descartes at first did through his method of systematic doubt, any deductions premised in

sensory perception would so too become weightless to knowledge. It is because of this

considerable authority given to the senses that I place Descartes near the center of our

epistemology spectrum.

Immanuel Kant, as mentioned above, could be called a compatibilist. His Humean

influence becoming apparent here – and many compatibilists share this notion – both rationality

and empirical study are necessary in order to come close to an accurate understanding of the

world. Causation, for example, cannot be observed directly, or empirically, but must be reasoned

about with sufficient consideration given of course to the observed repeatability of succeeding

phenomena. In his Critique however, he did not overlook the apparent fact that rationality loses

its potency when applied beyond the limits of its capacity, when applied without consideration of

experiential evidence. Reason is a capacity of the intellect which plays an important, rather than

an absolute, role in epistemological endeavors; all knowledge must originate in the evidence of

sensory experience.

Kant agrees with Descartes, and with the classics, in that mathematical claims – and I

maintain that mathematical claims are extendable to any claims which deal in logical abstraction

– about the way the world is are necessarily true. However, he does not support Descartes’

notion that mathematical truths are objects discoverable by rational intuition. Rather, he owes

our knowledge of mathematical proportion to the world’s necessary conformity to the mind’s

organization of perception. The mind takes in sensory data and interprets it, organizing the world

rationally into a geometrically proportional, ideal construct, within which truths of proportion

exist necessarily (Cahn 974). “The world is empirically real because… objects are real in that

they exist independently of us [as noumena]. The world is transcendentally ideal because such

objects are, and must be, relative to the a priori forms of experience –” ‘a priori forms of

experience’ meaning phenomenal experience (Kolak 390). The objects of our perception have

reality in that they come to the observer as phenomena, but the world must conform necessarily

to the conditions of a priori experience because the objects of the world are necessarily relative

to the conditions of a priori experience; the world conforms necessarily to the ideal, categorical,

rational construct of the mind. Or, in Kant’s language,

“We have therefore wanted to say that all our intuition is nothing but the

representation of appearance; that the things that we intuit are not in themselves what we

intuit them to be, nor are their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us;

and that if we remove our own subject or even only the subjective constitution of the

senses in general, then all constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, indeed

space and time themselves would disappear, and as appearances they cannot exist in

themselves, but only in us” (Kant a42/b59).

Kant refutes strict rationalism because, by his reasoning, no truths, even analytic truths,

can be deduced without working from a priori experience. He refutes empiricism because the

objects of the world must first conform to the necessary conditions of experience before having

any epistemological weight.

Having now discussed rationalism at length, and Descartes and Kant in transition to

empiricism, we will now utilize David Hume and William Clifford to gain an understanding of

empiricism, an account of empiricism sufficient for this paper. Empiricism then is the

epistemological theory that knowledge is founded upon experience, a posteriori. In the terms of

Humean empiricism however, with due consideration given to his thoroughgoing skepticism, we

can give it the following definition: warranted belief is founded upon the repeatability of

conjunctly successive impressions (Santas – Hume On Miracles); beyond that, any

epistemological inquiry into the way the world is fruitless.

In section IV of the Enquiry, Hume draws a distinction between two forms of judgement:

“relations of ideas” are based in logical necessity and their truths are discoverable through reason

alone (e.g. “all effects have a cause”); truths regarding “matters of fact” however are contingent

upon the way the world actually is and, Hume claims, require one to have had prior

impressionable experience of the matter (e.g. “all events have a cause”). A claim that all events

have a cause is not justifiable because 1) it, unlike the proposition, “all effects have a cause,” is

not what Kant would call an analytic truth and 2) it is impossible to observe all events (Kolak

321-322). Furthermore, with respect to claims of causal relation, the observer witnesses nothing

more than a repeating succession of events. Causation is not impressive; to have the impression

of two events occurring in succession is not to have an impression of a necessary connection,

and, because claims of causation are claims of matters of fact, nor are they justifiable through

reason. The repeatability of succession only yields a higher probability of correlation, and a

belief in causal connection is warranted only by this repeatability. Knowledge is an ideal,

incapable of being actualized; Hume deals in warranted belief. A belief that the sun will rise

tomorrow is a warranted belief because I have had the impression of a rising sun on many days

in the past.

What remains then, in our section on empiricism, is the question of why most empiricists

are opposed to mysticism. Hume answers this question for us in his section on miracles, section

X of the Enquiry. A miracle, to Hume, is an event which violates experientially established

patterns of repeatable succession, a supernatural occurrence; in this way, mystical experience is

miraculous experience. To clarify, though ‘miraculous’ and ‘mystical’ are not strictly speaking

synonymous, I maintain that mystical experience can be placed under the umbrella of what is

miraculous. And, given that a warranted belief is a belief based in established patterns of

repeatable succession, it is therefore unjustified to have a belief in miracles, and therefore in

mystical experience (Hume, Section X, Part I). If one accepts Hume’s definitions as well as the

assertion that mystical experience is miraculous, then this claim is true analytically.

So, given that the reader is not a mystic himself, what is left is a belief in mystical

experience through considering the testimonies of others. In Hume’s words, “no testimony is

sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would

be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish” (Hume, Section X, Part I).

The same claim can be made about the establishment of mystical experience. In the opening

paragraphs of part II, Hume gives us four reasons why no sufficient testimony has been given: 1)

history yields no example of any miracle attested to by a sufficient number of credible and

trustworthy men, so as to warrant belief. 2) “The passion of surprise and wonder, arising from

miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those

events, from which it is derived.” 3) Belief in miracles is “observed chiefly to abound among

ignorant and barbarous nations,” or is inherited from ignorant and barbarous ancestors. 4) Most

of whom attest to miracles attest out of vested interest (Hume, Section X, Part II). Hume then,

because a warranted belief in mystical experience is self-contradictory by definition and no

sufficient testimony regarding the reality of the experience has been given, finds no room in his

empiricism for mysticism.

William Clifford, a skeptic of the same vein as Hume, comments as well on the credulous

tendencies of the religious, going so far as to say that a belief in God, or any notion of a

supernatural realm, is not only unwarranted but immoral. He analogizes to a negligent ship-

owner. The ship-owner knows his ship is old and poorly built, in need of repairs, but repairs are

expensive. Either the voyage is successful – a lucrative outcome – or it fails and he collects his

insurance on the ship – also a lucrative outcome. The doubts of her safety weigh on him though

and disturb his peace of mind; so, he suppresses them, rationalizing his desire to overlook the

expense of repairing her by considering all the many times she has returned safely in the past,

and sends her out to sea, dozens of emigrant families aboard. The ship-owner dismisses all

suspicion eliciting discomfort to the point of self-deception and she leaves the shore with his

confidence. Inevitably, the ship fails the voyage and all those aboard die at sea. Though in the

end he truly believes in the ships ability to complete the journey safely, according to Clifford, the

ship-owner “had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him” (Clifford 1). Further,

the ship-owner’s misplaced belief is immoral regardless of its consequences; even if the ship

completes her voyage, the ship-owner is just as guilty.

Clifford asks that we extend this analogy to its religious application. Consider the ship-

owner to be a priest or some mystic in whom thousands of followers place their trust. The

mystic, Clifford would defend, in this case, represents an authority of great moral import; he has

the power to shape the beliefs of thousands. And, he would add, the mystic shapes the beliefs of

his followers according to his own rationalized self-deception. Is it the mystic’s belief in his

experience, though, which is immoral, or is it the action of leading others?

Clifford acknowledges moral value to apparently lie in the action. He deals with this

however by making the claim that it “is not possible so to sever the belief from the action it

suggests as to condemn the one without condemning the other;” a belief “is stored up for the

guidance of the future. It goes to make a part of that aggregate of beliefs which is the link

between sensation and action at every moment of all our lives, and which is so organized and

compacted together that no part of it can be isolated from the rest” (Clifford 3). Even a belief, not

only the action of leading others, in mysticism, by virtue of its being based on lacking evidence,

is immoral.

The majority of history’s empiricists would agree that, because evidence for the reality

mystical experience has not been established in repeatability of sensory experience, a belief in

mysticism is unwarranted. Hume would owe a belief in mystical experience to the human

tendency towards aggrandizing the contents of the imagination – the contents of which are

constituted by the increasing complexification of interacting ideas (e.g. the idea of a unicorn

combines our ideas of majesty, a horse and a horn). An experience which a mystic might call

divine is reduced by Hume to the result of deified imagination or a paradoxical confusion of

proto-ideas not yet fully developed by the conscious mind. I use the phrase ‘proto-ideas’ to

convey the sense that these ideas have surpassed the state of impression, while not yet having

been the objects of thorough contemplation.

William James’ response to such a reduction however, as founded upon his notion of

radical empiricism, would ask the question of whether it is responsible to believe that these

moments of mystical experience – moments of such profound insight whereby the subject is left

so completely confounded by the readiness of truth, that he can attribute the experience to

nothing other than God – should be discarded in the way Hume and Clifford discard of them.

James argues not. Furthermore, should not all experience – the experience of a sensible

particular, of a cause, of a mental object, or otherwise – be taken into consideration if one is to be

a true empiricist? I think that, in A World of Pure Experience, Varieties of Religious Experience,

and The Will to Believe, is has been made clear that James would not only find it permissible, but

responsible to believe the claims of mysticism, and that his commentator, C.S. Peirce, would

agree.

IV. Mysticism and Radical Empiricism

A. Radical Empiricism

i. Section I in A World of Pure Experience: “Ordinary empiricism, in spite

of the fact that conjunctive and disjunctive relations present themselves as

being fully co-ordinate parts of experience, has always shown a tendency

to do away with the connections of things, and to insist most on the

disjunctions.” While rationalism works from universals to deduce

particulars, and thus ordering the whole over the parts in both logic and

existence, according to James, the empirical method traditionally works

from particulars, a collection of disjunctive individuals, to arrive at an

abstract universal induction (McDermott 195-196). However, a radical

empiricism is one by which conjunctions are real respected.

ii. Section I: “the relations that connect experiences must themselves be

experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be

accounted as real as anything else in the system” (McDermott 195).

Empiricism therefore should include all experience, be it of a particular or

of a relation of particulars.

iii. To be radical, he says, “an empiricism must neither admit into its

constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude

from them any element that is directly experienced” (McDermott 195).

iv. Section III: “On the other hand, if I can lead you to the hall, and tell you of

its history and present uses; if in its presence I feel my idea, however

imperfect it may have been, to have led hither and to be now terminated; if

the associates of the image and of the felt hall run parallel, so that each

term of the one context corresponds serially, as I walk, with an answering

term of the others; why then my soul was prophetic, and my idea must be,

and by common consent would be, called cognizant of reality” (Dermott

201). Testimony, contrary to Hume’s notion, is admissible into an

empiricist account. On the same token, one can be lead by testimony

through a series of steps in order to bring that person to a similar, if not the

same, location as he who did the leading.

B. The Will to Believe – response to Clifford (Santas – Notes on Clifford and James)

i. Some things must be believed before evidence. Clifford wants certainty

ii. Not all beliefs suspended until after all facts are in

iii. Can’t will to believe something that is unbelievable to us

iv. Passion due to upbringing rather than intellect

v. Options in decision: forced, avoidable, momentous, trivial

vi. Should will to believe if the option is genuine (must choose in order to

know truth) and evidence is unhandy

vii. Belief in God meets above criteria (avoidable but momentous) and

evidence is unhandy

viii. Belief in mysticism is avoidable and momentous and is such that truth

depends on belief

C. C.S. Peirce

i. God as Love = God as experienced by the heart through meaning and

order, or “Thirdness” (Peirce). Heart as an organ of perception.

Experiences of God can be observed in this way.

D. Argument for mysticism

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