Croce’s Aesthetics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Croce’s Aesthetics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Croce’s Aesthetics
First published Sun May 4, 2008; substantive revision Fri Oct 8, 2021


The Neapolitan Benedetto Croce (1860–1952) was a dominant figure in the first half of the twentieth century in aesthetics and literary criticism, and to lesser but not inconsiderable extent in philosophy generally. But his fame did not last, either in Italy or in the English speaking world. He did not lack promulgators and willing translators into English: H. Carr was an early example of the former, R. G. Collingwood was perhaps both, and D. Ainslie did the latter service for most of Croce’s principal works. But his star rapidly declined after the Second World War.

 Indeed it is hard to find a figure whose reputation has fallen so far and so quickly; this is somewhat unfair not least because Collingwood’s aesthetics is still studied, when its many of its main ideas are often thought to have been borrowed from Croce. The causes are a matter for speculation, but two are likely. 

First, Croce’s general philosophy was very much of the preceding century. As the idealistic and historicist systems of Bradley, Green, and Joachim were in Britain superseded by Russell, Moore and Ayer, and analytical philosophy in general, Croce’s system was swept away by new ideas on the continent—from Heidegger and Sartre on the one hand to deconstructionism on the other. 

Second, Croce’s manner of presentation in his famous early works now seems, not to put too fine a point on it, dismissively dogmatic; it is full of the youthful conviction and fury that seldom wears well. On certain key points, opposing positions are characterized as foolish, or as confused expressions of simple truths that only waited upon Croce to articulate properly (yet his later exchange with John Dewey—see Croce 1952, Douglas 1970, Vittorio 2012—finds him more earnestly accountable). 

Of course, these dismissals carry some weight—Croce’s reading is prodigious and there is far more insight beneath the words than initially meets the eye—but unless the reader were already convinced that here at last is the truth, their sheer number and vehemence will arouse mistrust. And since the early works, along with his long running editorship of the journal La Critica, rocketed him to such fame and admiration, whereas later years were devoted among other things to battling with while being tolerated by fascists, it’s not surprising that he never quite lost this habit.

Nevertheless, Croce’s signal contribution to aesthetics—an interesting new angle on the idea that art is expression—can be more or less be detached from the surrounding philosophy and polemics. In what follows, we will first see the doctrine as connected to its original philosophical context, then we will attempt to snip the connections.

1. The Four Domains of Spirit (or Mind)
2. The Primacy of the Aesthetic
3. Art and Aesthetics
4. Intuition and Expression
4.1 The Double Ideality of the Work of Art
4.2 The Role of Feeling
4.3 Feeling, Expression and the Commonplace
5. Natural Expression, Beauty and Hedonic Theory
6. Externalization
7. Judgement, Criticism and Taste
8. The Identity of Art and Language
9. Later Developments
10. Problems
10.1 Acting versus Contemplation
10.2 Privacy
10.3 The View of Language
11. Conclusion
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1. The Four Domains of Spirit (or Mind)

We are confining ourselves to Croce’s aesthetics, but it will help to have at least the most rudimentary sketch in view of his rather complex general philosophy.

In Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century, the prevailing philosophy or ‘world-view’ was not, as in England, post-Hegelian Idealism as already mentioned, but the early forms of empiricist positivism associated with such figures as Comte and Mach. Partly out of distaste for the mechanism and enshrinement of matter of such views, and partly out of his reaction, both positive and negative, to the philosophy of Hegel, Croce espoused what he called ‘Absolute Idealism’ or ‘Absolute Historicism’. A constant theme in Croce’s philosophy is that he sought a path between the Scylla of ‘transcendentalism’ and the Charybdis of ‘sensationalism’, which for most purposes may be thought of as co-extensive with rationalism and empiricism. For Croce, they are bottom the same error, the error of abstracting from ordinary experience to something not literally experienceable. Transcendentalism regards the world of sense to be unreal, confused or second-rate, and it is the philosopher, reflecting on the world in a priori way from his armchair, who sees beyond it, to reality. What Croce called ‘Sensationalism’, on the other hand, regards only instantaneous impressions of colour and the like as existing, the rest being in some sense a mere logical construction out of it, of no independent reality. The right path is what Croce calls immanentism: All but only lived human experience, taking place concretely and without reduction, is real. Therefore all Philosophy, properly so-called, is Philosophy of Spirit (or Mind), and is inseparable from history. And thus Croce’s favoured designations, ‘Absolute Idealism’ or ‘Absolute Historicism’.

Philosophy admits of the following divisions, corresponding to the different modes of mental or spiritual activity. Mental activity is either theoretic (it understands or contemplates) or it is practical (it wills actions). These in turn divide: The theoretic divides into the aesthetic, which deals in particulars (individuals or intuitions), and logic or the intellectual domain, which deals in concepts and relations, or universals. The practical divides into the economic—by which Croce means all manner of utilitarian calculation—and the ethical or moral. Each of the four domains are subject to a characteristic norm or value: aesthetic is subject to beauty, logic is subject to truth, economic is subject to the useful (or vitality), and the moral is subject to the good. Croce devoted three lengthy books written between 1901 and 1909 to this overall scheme of the ‘Philosophy of Spirit’: Aesthetic (1901) and (1907) (revised), Logic (1909) and the Philosophy of the Practical (1908), the latter containing both the economic and ethics (in today’s use of term you might call the overall scheme Croce’s metaphysics, but Croce himself distanced himself from that appellation; there is also some sense in calling it philosophy of mind).

2. The Primacy of the Aesthetic

Philosophers since Kant customarily distinguish intuitions or representations from concepts or universals. In one sense Croce follows this tradition, but another sense his view departs radically. For intuitions are not blind without concepts; an intuitive presentation (an ‘intuition’) is a complete conscious manifestation just as it is, in advance of applying concepts (and all that is true a priori of them is that they have a particular character or individual physiognomy—they are not necessarily spatial or temporal, contra Kant). To account for this, Croce supposes that the modes of mental activity are in turn arranged at different levels. The intellect presupposes the intuitive mode—which just is the aesthetic—but the intuitive mode does not presuppose the intellect. The intellect—issuing in particular judgements—in turn is presupposed by the practical, which issues among other things in empirical laws. And morality tells the practical sciences what ends in particular they should pursue. Thus Croce regarded this as one of his key insights: All mental activity, which means the whole of reality, is founded on the aesthetic, which has no end or purpose of its own, and of course no concepts or judgements. This includes the concept of existence or reality: the intuition plus the judgement of existence is what Croce calls perception, but itself is innocent of it.

To say the world is essentially history is to say that at the lowest level it is aesthetic experiences woven into a single fabric, a world-narrative, with the added judgement that it is real, that it exists. Croce takes this to be inevitable: the subjective present is real and has duration; but any attempt to determine its exact size is surely arbitrary. Therefore the only rigorous view is that the past is no less real than the present. History then represents, by definition, the only all-encompassing account of reality. What we call the natural sciences then are impure, second-rate. Consider for example the concept of a space-time point. Plainly it is not something anyone has ever met with in experience; it is an abstraction, postulated as a limit of certain operations for the convenience of a ‘theory’. Croce would call it a pseudo-concept, and would not call the so-called ‘empirical laws’ in which it figures to be fit subjects for truth and knowledge. Its significance, like that of other pseudo-concepts, is pragmatic.

In fact the vast majority of concepts—house, reptile, tree—are mere adventitious collections of things that are formulated in response to practical needs, and thus cannot, however exact the results of the corresponding science, attain to truth or knowledge. Nor do the concepts of mathematics escape the ‘pseudo’ tag. What Croce calls pure concepts, in contrast, are characterised by their possession of expressiveness, universality and concreteness, and they perform their office by a priori synthesis (this accounts for character mentioned above). What this means it that everything we can perceive or imagine—every representation or intuition—will necessarily have all three: there is no possible experience that is not of something concrete, universal in the sense of being an instance of something absolutely general, and expressive, that is, admitting of verbal enunciation. Empirical concepts, then, like heat, are concrete but not universal; mathematical concepts, like number, are universal but not concrete. Examples of pure concepts are rare, but those recognized by Croce are finality, quality and beauty. Such is the domain of Logic, in Croce’s scheme.

A critical difference, for our purposes, between Croce’s ideas and those of his apparent follower Collingwood, emerges when we ask: what are the constituents of the intuition? For Collingwood—writing in the mid-1930s—intuitions are built up out of sense-data, the only significant elaboration of Russell’s doctrine being that sense-data are never simple, comprising what analysis reveals as sensory and affective constituents. For Croce the intuition is an organic whole, such that to analyze it into atoms is always a false abstraction: the intuition could never be re-built with such elements. (Although a deadly opponent of formal logic, Croce did share Frege’s insight that the truly meaningful bit of language is the sentence; ‘only in the context of sentence does a word have a meaning’, wrote Frege in 1884).

3. Art and Aesthetics

With such an account of ‘the aesthetic’ in view, one might think that Croce intends to cover roughly the same ground as Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, and like Kant will think of art as a comparatively narrow if profound region of experience. But Croce takes the opposite line (and finds Kant’s theory of beauty and art to have failed at precisely this point): art is everywhere, and the difference between ordinary intuition and that of ‘works of art’ is only a quantitative difference (Aes.13). This principle has for Croce a profound significance:
We must hold firmly to our identification, because among the principal reasons which have prevented Aesthetic, the science of art, from revealing the true nature of art, its real roots in human nature, has been its separation from the general spiritual life, the having made of it a sort of special function or aristocratic club…. There is not … a special chemical theory of stones as distinct from mountains. In the same way, there is not a science of lesser intuition as distinct from a science of greater intuition, nor one of ordinary intuition as distinct from artistic intuition. (Aes. 14)

But the point is not that every object is to some degree a work of art. The point is that every intuition has to some degree the qualities of the intuition of a work of art; it’s just that the intuition of a work of art has them in much greater degree.

4. Intuition and Expression

We now reach the most famous and notorious Crocean doctrine concerning art. ‘To intuit’, he writes, ‘is to express’ (Aes. 11); ‘intuitive knowledge is expressive knowledge’. There are several points that have to be in place in order to understand what Croce means by this, because it obviously does not strike one as initially plausible.

4.1 The Double Ideality of the Work of Art

For our purposes, it is simplest to regard Croce as an idealist, for whom there is nothing besides the mind. So in that sense, the work of art is an ideal or mental object along with everything else; no surprise there, but no interest either. But he still maintains the ordinary commonplace distinction between mental things—thoughts, hopes and dreams—and physical things—tables and trees. And on this divide, the work of art, for Croce, is still a mental thing. In other words, the work of art in doubly ideal; to put it another way, even if Croce were a dualist—or a physicalist with some means of reconstructing the physical-mental distinction—the work of art would remain mental. In what follows, then, except where otherwise noted, we shall treat Croce is being agnostic as between idealism, physicalism, or dualism (see PPH 227).

This claim about the ontological status of works of art means that a spectator ‘of’ a work of art—a sonata, a poem, a painting—is actually creating the work of art in his mind. Croce’s main argument for this is the same as, therefore no better but no worse than, Russell’s argument from the relativity of perception to sense-data. The perceived aesthetic qualities of anything vary with the states of the perceiver; therefore in speaking of the former we are really speaking of the latter (Aes. 106; Croce does not, it seems, consider the possibility that certain states of the perceiver might be privileged, but it is evident that he would discount this possibility). Now the Crocean formulation—to intuit is to express—perhaps begins to make sense. For ‘intuition’ is in some sense a mental act, along with its near-cognates ‘representation’, ‘imagination’, ‘invention’,‘vision’, and ‘contemplation.’ Being a mental act, something we do, it is not a mere external object.

4.2 The Role of Feeling

Feeling, for Croce, is necessarily part of any (mental) activity, including bare perception—indeed, feeling is a form of mental activity (it is part of his philosophy that there is never literally present to consciousness anything passive). We are accustomed to thinking of ‘artistic expression’ as concerned with specific emotions that are relatively rare in the mental life, but again, Croce points out that strictly speaking, we are thinking of a quantitative distinction as qualitative. In fact feeling is nothing but the will in mental activity, with all its varieties of thought, desire and action, its varieties of frustration and satisfaction (Aes. 74–6). The only criterion of ‘art’ is coherence of expression, of the movement of the will (for a comparison with Collingwood’s similar doctrine, see Kemp 2003: 173–9).

Because of this, Croce discounts certain aesthetic applications of the distinction between form and content as confused. The distinction only applies at a theoretical level, to a posited a priori synthesis (EA 39–40). At that level, the irruption of an intuition just is the emergence of a form (we are right to speak of the formation of intuition, that intuitions are formed). At the aesthetic level—one might say at the phenomenological level—there is no identification of content independently of the forms in which we meet it, and none of form independently of content. It makes no sense to speak of a work of art’s being good on form but poor on content, or good on content but poor on form.

4.3 Feeling, Expression and the Commonplace

When Croce says that intuition and expression are the same phenomenon, we are likely to think: what does this mean for a person who cannot draw or paint, for example? Even if we allow Croce his widened notion of feeling, surely the distinction between a man who looks at a bowl of fruit but cannot draw or paint it, and the man who does draw or paint it, is precisely that of a man with a Crocean intuition but who cannot express it, and one who has both. How then can expression be intuition?

Croce comes at this concern from both sides. On one side, there is ‘the illusion or prejudice that we possess a more complete intuition of reality than we really do’ (Aes. 9). We have, most of the time, only fleeting, transitory intuitions amidst the bustle of our practical lives. ‘The world which as rule we intuit is a small thing’, he writes; ‘It consists of small expressions … it is a medley of light and colour’ (Aes. 9). On the other side, if our man is seriously focussed on the bowl of fruit, it is only a prejudice to deny that then he is to that extent expressing himself—although, according to Croce, ordinary direct perception of things, as glimpsed in photography, will generally be lacking the ‘lyrical’ quality that genuine artists give to their works (though this particular twist is a later addition; see section 9 below).
5. Natural Expression, Beauty and Hedonic Theory

There is another respect in which Croce’s notion of expression as intuition departs from what we ordinarily think of in connection with the word ‘expression’. For example we think unreflectively of wailing as a natural expression of pain or grief; generally, we think of expressive behaviour or gestures as being caused, at least paradigmatically, by the underlying emotion or feelings. But Croce joins a long line of aestheticians in attempting a sharp distinction between this phenomenon and expression in art. Whereas the latter is the subject of aesthetics, the former is a topic for the natural sciences—‘for instance in Darwin’s enquiries into the expression of feeling in man and in the animals’ (PPH 265; cf. Aes. 21, 94–7). In an article he wrote for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, speaking of such ‘psychophysical phenomena’, he writes:
…such ‘expression’, albeit conscious, can rank as expression only by metaphorical licence, when compared with the spiritual or aesthetic expression which alone expresses, that is to say gives to the feeling a theoretical form and converts into language, song, shape. It is in the difference between feeling as contemplated (poetry, in fact), and feeling as enacted or undergone, that lies the catharsis, the liberation from the affections, the calming property which has been attributed to art; and to this corresponds the aesthetic condemnation of works of art if, or in so far as, immediate feeling breaks into them or uses them as an outlet. (PPH 219).

Croce is no doubt right to want to distinguish these things, but whether his official position—that expression is identical to intuition—will let him do so is another matter; he does not actually analyze the phenomena in such a way as to deduce, with the help of his account of expression, the result. He simply asserts it. But we will wait for our final section to articulate criticisms.

Croce’s wish to divorce artistic expression from natural expression is partly driven by his horror at naturalistic theories of art. The same goes for his refusal to rank pleasure as the aim, or at least an aim, of art (Aes. 82–6). He does not of course deny that aesthetic pleasures (and pains) exist, but they are ‘the practical echo of aesthetic value and disvalue’ (Aes. 94). Strictly speaking, they are dealt with in the Philosophy of the Practical, that is, in the theory of the will, and do not enter into the theory of art. That is, if the defining value of the Aesthetic is beauty, the defining value of the Practical is usefulness. In the Essence of Aesthetic (EA 11–13) Croce points out that the pleasure is much wider than the domain of art, so a definition of art as ‘what causes pleasure’ will not do. Croce does speak of the ‘truly aesthetic pleasure’ had in beholding the ‘aesthetic fact’ (Aes. 80). But perhaps he is being consistent. The pragmatic pleasure had in beholding beauty is only contingently aroused, but in point of fact it always is aroused by such beholding, because the having of an intuition is an act of mind, and therefore the will is brought into play.

6. Externalization

The painting of pictures, the scrape of the bow upon strings, the chanting or inscription of a poem are, for Croce, only contingently related to the work of art, that is, to the expressed intuition. By this Croce does not mean to say that for example the painter could get by without paint in point of fact; the impossibility of say the existence of Leonardo’s Last Supper without his having put paint on the wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie not an impossibility in principle, but it is a factual impossibility, like that of a man jumping to the Moon. What he is doing is always driven by the intuition, and thereby making it possible for others to have the intuition (or rather, an intuition). First, the memory—though only contingently—often requires the physical work to sustain or develop the intuition. Second, the physical work is necessary for the practical business of the communication of the intuition.

For example the process of painting is a closely interwoven operation of positive feedback between the intuitive faculty and the practical or technical capacity to manipulate the brush, mix paint and so on:
Likewise with the painter, who paints upon canvas or upon wood, but could not paint at all, did not the intuited image, the line and colour as they have taken shape in the fancy, precede, at every stage of the work, from the first stroke of the brush or sketch of the outline to the finishing touches, the manual actions. And when it happens that some stroke of the brush runs ahead of the image, the artist, in his final revision, erases and corrects it.
It is, no doubt, very difficult to perceive the frontier between expression and communication in actual fact, for the two processes usually alternate rapidly and are almost intermingled. But the distinction is ideally clear and must be strongly maintained… The technical does not enter into art, but pertains to the concept of communication. (PPH 227–8, emphasis added; cf. Aes. 50–1, 96–7, 103, 111–17; EA 41–7)

He also defines technique as ‘knowledge at the service of the practical activity directed to producing stimuli to aesthetic reproduction’ (Aes. 111). Again, we defer criticism to the conclusion.

7. Judgement, Criticism and Taste

The first task of the spectator of the work of art—the critic—is for Croce simple: one is to reproduce the intuition, or perhaps better, one is to realize the intuition, which is the work of art. One may fail, and Croce is well aware that one may be mistaken; ‘haste, vanity, want of reflexion, theoretic prejudices’ may bring it about that one finds beautiful what is not, or fail to find beautiful what is (Aes. 120). But given the foregoing strict distinction between practical technique and artistic activity properly so-called, his task is the same as that of the artist:
How could that which is produced by a given activity be judged a different activity? The critic may be a small genius, the artist a great one … but the nature of both must remain the same. To judge Dante, we must raise ourselves to his level: let it be well understood that empirically we are not Dante, nor Dante we; but in that moment of contemplation and judgement, our spirit is one with that of the poet, and in that moment we and he are one thing. (Aes. 121)

Leave aside the remark that we become identical with the poet. If by taste we mean the capacity for aesthetic judgement—that is, the capacity to find beauty—and by genius we mean the capacity to produce beauty, then they are the same: the capacity to realize intuitions.

In Croce’s overall philosophy, the aesthetic stands alone: in having an intuition, one has succeeded entirely insofar as aesthetic value is concerned. Therefore there cannot be a real question of a ‘standard’ of beauty which an object might or might not satisfy. Thus Croce says:
…the criterion of taste is absolute, but absolute in a different way from that of the intellect, which expresses itself in ratiocination. The criterion of taste is absolute, with the intuitive absoluteness of the imagination. (Aes. 122)

Of course there is as a matter of fact a great deal of variability in critical verdicts. But Croce believes this is largely due to variances in the ‘psychological conditions’ and the physical circumstance of spectators (Aes. 124). Much of this can be offset by ‘historical interpretation’ (Aes. 126); the rest, one presumes, are due to disturbances already mentioned: ‘haste, vanity, want of reflexion, theoretic prejudices’ (Aes. 120). Also one must realize that for Croce, all that Sibley famously characterized as aesthetic concepts—not just gracefulness, delicacy and so on but only aesthetically negative concepts like ugliness—are really variations on the over-arching master-concept beauty.

8. The Identity of Art and Language

The title of the first great book of Croce’s career was ‘Aesthetic as a Science of expression and general linguistic’ (emphasis added). There are several interconnected aspects to this.

Croce claims that drawing, sculpting, writing of music and so on are just as much ‘language’ as poetry, and all language is poetic; therefore ‘Philosophy of language and philosophy of art are the same thing’ (Aes. 142; author’s emphasis). The reason for this is that language is to be understood as expressive; ‘an emission of sounds which expresses nothing is not language’ (Aes. 143). From our perspective, we might regard Croce as arguing thus: (1) Referential semantics—scarcely mentioned by Croce—necessarily involves parts of speech. (2) However:
It is false to say that a verb or noun is expressed in definite words, truly distinguishable from others. Expression is an indivisible whole. Noun and verb do not exist in it, but are abstractions made by us, destroying the sole linguistic reality, which is the sentence. (Aes. 146)

If we take this as asserting the primacy of sentence meaning—glossing over the anti-abstraction remark which is tantamount to a denial of syntactic compositionality—then together with (3) a denial of what in modern terms would be distinction between semantic and expressive meaning, or perhaps in Fregean terms sense and tone, then it is not obvious that the resulting picture of language would not apply equally to, for example, drawing. In that case, just as drawings cannot be translated, so linguistic translation is impossible (though for certain purposes, naturally, we can translate ‘relatively’; Aes. 68).

Interestingly, Croce does not think of all signs as natural signs, as lightning is a sign of thunder; on the contrary, he thinks of ‘pictures, poetry and all works of art’ as equally conventional—as ‘historically conditioned’ (Aes. 125; authors emphasis).

There is no doubt that on this point Croce was inspired by his great precursor, the Neapolitan Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). According to Croce (Aes. 220–34) Vico was the first to recognise the aesthetic as a self-sufficient and non-conceptual mode of knowledge, and famously he held that all language is substantially poetry. The only serious mistake in this that Croce found was Vico’s belief in an actual historical period when all language was poetry; it was the mistake of substituting a concrete history for ‘ideal history’ (Aes. 232).

9. Later Developments

As he became older, there was one aspect of his aesthetics that he was uneasy with. In the Aesthetic of 1901 (Aes. 82–7, 114), and again in Essence of Aesthetic of 1913 (EA 13–16) , he had been happy to deduce from his theory that art cannot have an ethical purpose. The only value in art is beauty. But by 1917, in the essay The Totality of Artistic Expression (PPH 261–73), his attitude towards the moral content of art is more nuanced. This may have been only a shift of emphasis, or, charitably perhaps, drawing out a previously unnoticed implication: ‘If the ethical principle is a cosmic [universal] force (as it certainly is) and queen of the world, the world of liberty, she reigns in her own right, while art, in proportion to the purity with which she re-enacts and expresses the motions of reality, is herself perfect’ (PPH 267). In other words, he still holds that to speak of a moral work of art would not impinge upon it aesthetically; likewise to speak of an immoral work, for the values of the aesthetic and moral domains are absolutely incommensurable. It is not merely an assertion that within the domain of pure intuition, the concepts simply don’t apply; that would merely beg the question. He means that a pure work of art cannot be subject to moral praise or blame because the Aesthetic domain exists independently of and prior, in the Philosophy of Spirit, to the Ethical.

In the Encyclopaedia article of 1928, Croce asserts positively that the moral sensibility is a necessary condition of the artist:
The foundation of all poetry is therefore the human personality, and since the human personality fulfills itself morally, the foundation of all poetry is the moral conscience. (PPH 221)

Still it’s possible to read him as not having changed his view. For instance, Shakespeare could not have been Shakespeare without seeing into the moral heart of man, for morality is the highest domain of spirit. But we have to distinguish between the moral sensibility—the capacity to perceive and feel moral emotions—and the capacity to act morally. Croce’s position is that only the first is relevant to art.

The early emphasis on beauty is downplayed in subsequent writing in favour of the successful work art as expression, as constituting a ‘lyrical intuition’. In Essence of Aesthetic he writes:
…what gives coherence and unity to the intuition is feeling: the intuition is really such because it represents a feeling, and can only appear from and upon that. Not the idea, but the feeling, is what confers upon art the airy lightness of a symbol: an aspiration enclosed in the circle of a representation—that is art; and in it the aspiration alone stands for the representation, and the representation alone for the aspiration. (EA 30)

Croce still holds that art is intuitive, a-logical or nonconceptual, and therefore by ‘it represents a feeling’ he does not mean that our aesthetic mode of engagement involves that concept, and he does not mean that art is to be understood as symbolic, implying a relation which would require an intellectual act of mind to apprehend. Both would imply that our mode of aesthetic engagement would be something more, or something other than, the aesthetic, which is as always the intuitive capacity. The point is simply that our awareness of the form of the intuition in nothing but our awareness of the unifying currents of feeling running through it. It is a claim about what it is that unifies an intuition, distinguishes it from the surrounding, relatively discontinuous or confused intuition. This is, in effect, a claim about the nature of beauty:
An appropriate expression, if appropriate, is also beautiful, beauty being nothing but the precision of the image, and therefore of the expression. …(EA 48).
Expression and beauty are not two concepts, but a single concept, which it is permissible to designate with either synonymous word … (EA 49).

Genuinely new in the 1917 essay was Croce’s appealing but enigmatic claim that art is in a sense ‘universal’, is concerned with the ‘totality’:
To give artistic form to a content of feeling means, then, impressing upon it the character of totality, breathing into it the breath of the cosmos. Thus understood, universality and artistic form are not two things but one. (PPH 263).

And:
In intuition, the single pulsates with the life of the whole, and the whole is in the life of the single. Every genuine artistic representation is itself and is the universe, the universe in that individual form, and that individual form as the universe. In every utterance, every fanciful [imaginative] creation, of the poet, there lies the whole of human destiny, all human hope, illusions, griefs, joys, human grandeurs and miseries, the whole drama of reality perpetually evolving and growing out of itself in suffering and joy. (PPH 262)

Croce—and undoubtedly the political situation in Italy in 1917 played a role in this—was anxious to assert the importance of art for humanity, and his assertion of it is full of feeling. And the claim marks a decisive break from earlier doctrine: form is now linked with universality rather that with particular feelings. But it is difficult to see beyond such metaphors as ‘impressing upon it the character of totality’ (not even with the help of Croce’s Logic). One is reminded of the Kantian dictum that in aesthetics we ‘demand universality’ in our judgements, but there are no explicit indications of such. There is one piece of Crocean philosophy behind it: Since art takes place prior to the intellect, so the logical distinction between subject and predicate collapses; therefore perhaps at least one barrier is removed from speaking of the ‘universality of art’. But that does not indicate what, positively, it means. It obvious that there is something right about speaking of the ‘universal character’ of a Beethoven or a Michelangelo as opposed to the pitiful, narrow little spectacle of this month’s pop band, but Croce doesn’t tell us what justifies or explains such talk (various others have reached a similar conclusion; see Orsini p. 214). Still, that doesn’t mean that he had no right to proclaim it, and perhaps not to count his readers as agreeing to it.

10. Problems

There is a lot of Croce’s aesthetics that we have not discussed, including his criticisms of the discipline of Rhetoric (Aes. 67–73; PPH 233–35), his disparagement of ‘genre criticism’—that is, his doctrine that there are ultimately no aesthetic differences amongst different kinds of art (Aes. 111–17, EA 53–60, PPH 229–33)—and his condemnation of psychological and other naturalistic views of art (Aes.87–93; EA 41–7). There is also his magnificent if contentious précis of the history of aesthetics (Aes. 155–474). But these are points of relative detail; the theory is whole is sufficiently well before us now to conclude by mentioning some general lines of criticism.

10.1 Acting versus Contemplation

The equation of intuition with expression as at section 4.3 simply is not, in end, plausible. C. J. Ducasse (1929) put his finger on it. When we look at a vase full of flowers, it simply does not matter how closely or in what manner we attend to it; we do not create a ‘work of art’ unless we draw or paint it. Croce has lost sight of the ordinary sense of passively contemplating and doing something; between reading and writing, looking and drawing, listening and playing, dancing and watching. Of course all the first members of these pairs involve a mental action of a kind, and there are important connections between the first members and the corresponding seconds—perhaps in terms of what Berenson calls ideated sensations—but that is not to say that there are not philosophically crucial distinctions between them.

10.2 Privacy

The equation also defeats the purpose of art criticism or interpretation, and indeed of the very notion of an aesthetic community, of an audience. To say that the work of art is identical with the intuition is to say that it is necessarily private. It is to say, for example, that since one man’s intuition of Botticelli’s Venus is necessarily different from any one else’s, there is no such thing as Botticelli’s Venus, understood not as a material painting but as a work of art; there is only Botticelli’s-Venus-for-A, Botticelli’s-Venus-for-B, and so on. But these intuitions cannot be compared, and there is no higher standard; thus they cannot be said to agree or disagree, since any such comparison would be logically impossible (see Tilghman 1971, Ch. 1, for further discussion; for at attempt at saving Croce, see Schusterman 1983). The position is perhaps not contradictory, but it is exceedingly unattractive; it renders art a diversion away from reality, when as Freud emphasized—to invoke a figure who is Croce’s opposite in almost every respect—the artist’s struggle with the medium is the attempt to conquer reality. Although Croce disowned this consequence, it’s hard not to conclude that on this view art is a domain of fancy (in the bad sense), without any check upon vanity (see Aes. 122 for a point at which Croce almost sees the point). If we bring back the material painted object into the picture, of course, then there is no such difficulty: ones ‘intuition’ will be accurate, or one’s interpretation will be correct, just in case it corresponds to the picture (of course the notion of ‘corresponds to the picture’ is only a placeholder for a great deal to be supplied by theories of representation, perspective, expression and other parts of aesthetics; but the one thing that plausible theories will share is a commitment to the object, the material painting).

It’s worth emphasizing again that Croce’s claim that intuition is expression, and consequently that works art are mental objects, is not just an application of his general idealism. It is independent of it. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica article, for example, he allows himself to speak for convenience of the ‘spiritual’ and ‘physical’, in order to make the point that the physical object is only of practical, and not of aesthetic significance (PPH 227–8).

10.3 The View of Language

Undoubtedly Croce was influenced by his lifelong immersion in literature in his proclamation that all language is poetry. And perhaps it is true that all language has some poetic qualities, and perhaps it is true that language ‘in its actuality’ consists of sentential utterances. But as Bosanquet pointed out in 1919, this does not mean that language is only poetry, or that the referential dimension of language does not exist. It must have something that distinguishes a scientific treatise from a tune—in fact it must be the same thing, which we are calling the referential dimension, that serves to distinguish poetry from a tune (it has to have sound and sense, as we say). So to say that drawings and tunes are equally good examples of language seems, at best, strained. Perhaps Croce would have said that the referential dimension does not exist, or is a false abstraction; but his general philosophical views may be forcing him down an unprepossessing path. More promising would be a formalist endeavor to try to isolate the pure sonic aspect of poetry—comprising metre, alliteration and so on—and then to search for instantiations or at least analogies in the other arts.

11. Conclusion

Suppose Croce were to give up the idea that art is intuition, and agree that the work of art is identical with the material work—remember this would not prevent him being an idealist in his general philosophy—and suppose he allowed that he was wrong about language. What would remain of his theory would arguably be its essence: that art is expression, and we engage with it via the intuitive capacity. It remains individual, and perhaps pre-conceptual.

In closing, the reader may find it useful if we summarize the major differences—narrowly on matters of aesthetics—between Croce and Collingwood, who is often thought of as Croce’s follower. (Indeed the question of whether, how, and to what extent Croce ‘influenced’ Collingwood, not only in aesthetics but in wider matters of metaphysics and history, are vexed questions. According to a careful study Rik Peters, the influence was perhaps pervasive insofar as Croce influenced the questions that Collingwood posed for himself, but Peters concludes that the answers given were of Collingwood’s own making; see Peters 2011 for more; for the matter specifically about art and aesthetics, see also Hospers 1956, Donagan 1962, and Jones 1972.) First, Collingwood seems to agree with Croce that art, so to speak, is everywhere—there no self-conscious perception that lacks expressive and aesthetic qualities—whereas Croce’s theory does not tend to regard the expressive content of work of art as something ‘in the artist’, emphasizing instead its form and later its ‘universality’, Collingwood tries to explain expressive content in terms of a detailed theory of the emotions. Second, although Croce does devote some energy to discrediting the ‘technical’ theory of art, Collingwood offers a more organized and detailed analysis of why art is not ‘craft’, though arguably the main points are Croce’s. Finally, Collingwood devotes his final sections to a topic left unaddressed by Croce: the problem of whether or in what way the responses of the audience can constrain the object presented by the artist.

===

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Works by Croce:
1902. Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, Florence: Sandron.
1909 [1922]. Aesthetic: As science of expression and general linguistic, translated by Douglas Ainslie, New York: Noonday. Cited as Aes.
1909. Logica come scienza del concetto puro, Florence: Sandron.
1909. Filosofia della practica, economica ed etica, Florence: Sandron.
1913. Breviario di estetica, Naples: Laterza.
1917. Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept, translated by Douglas Ainslie, London: Macmillan.
1917. Philosophy of the Practical, Economic and Ethic, translated by Douglas Ainslie, London: Macmillan.
1921. The Essence of Aesthetic, translated by Douglas Ainslie, London: Heinemann. Noted as EA. (Likely to be superseded by the 1992 translation below.)
1952. ‘Dewey’s Aesthetics and Theory of Knowledge, translated by F. Simoni, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 11(1): 1–6.
1995 [1965]. Guide to Aesthetics, translated by Patrick Romanell, Indianopolis: Hackett.
1966. Philosophy, Poetry, History: An Anthology of Essays, translated and introduced by Cecil Sprigge, London: Oxford University Press. Noted as PPH
1992. The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General Part I: Theory, translated by Colin Lyas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2007. Breviary of Aesthetics: Four Lectures, translated by Hiroko Fudemoto, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
2017. A Croce Reader: Aesthetics, Philosophy, History, and Literary Criticism, edited and translated by Massimo Verdicchio, Ontario: University of Toronto Press.
Secondary Sources
Bosanquet, B., 1919. ‘Croce’s Aesthetic’, Proceedings of the British Academy, IX: 261–288.
–––, 1920. ‘Reply to Carr’, Mind, XXIX(2): 212–15.
Carr, H. W., 1917. The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce, London: Macmillan.
Donagan, A., 1962. The Later Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood, Oxford: Clarendon.
Douglas, G. H., 1970. A Reconsideration of the Dewey-Croce Exchange, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 28(4): 497–504.
Ducasse, C., 1929. The Philosophy of Art, New York: Dial.
de Gennaro, A. 1968. ‘Benedetto Croce and Herbert Read’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 26(3): 307–310.
Hospers, J. 1956. ‘The Croce-Collingwood Theory of Art’, Philosophy, 31(119): 291–308.
Jones, P. 1972. ‘A Critical Outline of Collingwood’s Philosophy of Art’, in Critical Essays on the Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood, edited by Michael Krausz, Oxford: Clarendon: 42–65.
Kemp, G. 2003. ‘The Croce-Collingwood Theory as Theory’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 61(2): 171–193.
Moss, M. E., 1987. Benedetto Croce reconsidered: truth and error in theories of art, literature, and history, London: University of New England Press.
Orsini, G., 1961. Benedetto Croce: Philosophy of Art and Literary Critic, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Patankar R. B., 1962. ‘What Does Croce Mean by ‘Expression’?’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2(2): 112–125.
Paton, M., 1985. ‘Getting Croce Straight’, The Brit Journal of Aesthetics, 25(3): 252–265.
Peters, R., 2011. History as Thought and Action: The Philosophies of Croce, Gentile, de Ruggiero and Collingwood, Exeter: Imprint Academic.
Scaglione, A., 1959. ‘Croce’s Definition of Literary Criticism’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 17(4): 447–456.
Shusterman, R., 1988. ‘Croce on Interpretation: Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, New Literary History, 20(1): 199–216.
Tilghman B., 1970. The Expression of Emotion in the Visual Arts: A Philosophical Inquiry, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Vittorio M., 2012. ‘Reflections on the Croce–Dewey exchange’, Modern Italy, 17(1): 31–49. [available online].

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Scholarly approaches to mysticism - Wikipedia

Scholarly approaches to mysticism - Wikipedia

Scholarly approaches to mysticism

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Scholarly approaches to mysticism include typologies of mysticism and the explanation of mystical states. Since the 19th century, mystical experience has evolved as a distinctive concept. It is closely related to "mysticism" but lays sole emphasis on the experiential aspect, be it spontaneous or induced by human behavior, whereas mysticism encompasses a broad range of practices aiming at a transformation of the person, not just inducing mystical experiences.

There is a longstanding discussion on the nature of so-called "introvertive mysticism." Perennialists regard this kind of mysticism to be universal. A popular variant of perennialism sees various mystical traditions as pointing to one universal transcendental reality, for which those experiences offer the proof. The perennial position is "largely dismissed by scholars"^[1] but "has lost none of its popularity".^[2] Instead, a constructionist approach became dominant during the 1970s, which states that mystical experiences are mediated by pre-existing frames of reference, while the attribution approach focuses on the (religious) meaning that is attributed to specific events.

Some neurological research has attempted to identify which areas in the brain are involved in so-called "mystical experience" and the temporal lobe is often claimed to play a significant role,^[3][4][5] likely attributable to claims made in Vilayanur Ramachandran's 1998 book, Phantoms in the Brain,^[6] However, these claims have not stood up to scrutiny.^[7]

In mystical and contemplative traditions, mystical experiences are not a goal in themselves, but part of a larger path of self-transformation.

Contents

• 1Typologies of mysticism
  • 1.1Early studies
  • 1.2R. C. Zaehner – natural and religious mysticism
  • 1.3Walter T. Stace – extrovertive and introvertive mysticism
• 2Mystical experience
  • 2.1William James
  • 2.2Inducement of mystical experience
  • 2.3Influence
  • 2.4Criticism of the concept of "mystical experience"
• 3Perennialism, constructionism and contextualism
  • 3.1Steven Katz – constructionism
  • 3.2Robert Forman – pure consciousness event
  • 3.3Richard Jones – constructivism, anticonstructivism, and perennialism
  • 3.4Contextualism and attribution theory
• 4Neurological research
  • 4.1Temporal lobe
  • 4.2Anterior insula
  • 4.3Parietal lobe
  • 4.4Default mode network
• 5Spiritual development and self-transformation
• 6See also
• 7Notes
• 8References
• 9Sources
  • 9.1Published sources
  • 9.2Web-sources
• 10Further reading
• 11External links

Typologies of mysticism[edit]

Early studies[edit]

Lay scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries began their studies on the historical and psychological descriptive analysis of the mystical experience, by investigating examples and categorizing it into types. Early notable examples include William James in "The Varieties of Religious Experience" (1902); the study of the term "cosmic consciousness" by Edward Carpenter (1892)^[8] and psychiatrist Richard Bucke (in his book Cosmic Consciousness, 1901); the definition of "oceanic feeling" by Romain Rolland (1927) and its study by Freud; Rudolf Otto's description of the "numinous" (1917) and its studies by Jung; Friedrich von Hügel in The Mystical Element of Religion (1908); Evelyn Underhill in her work Mysticism (1911); Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy (1945).

R. C. Zaehner – natural and religious mysticism[edit]

R. C. Zaehner distinguishes between three fundamental types of mysticism, namely theistic, monistic, and panenhenic ("all-in-one") or natural mysticism.^[9] The theistic category includes most forms of Jewish, Christian and Islamic mysticism and occasional Hindu examples such as Ramanuja and the Bhagavad Gita.^[9] The monistic type, which according to Zaehner is based upon the experience of the unity of one's soul in isolation from the material and psychic world,^{[9][note 1]} includes early Buddhism and Hindu schools such as Samkhya and Advaita vedanta.^[9] Nature mysticism refers to "an experience of Nature in all things or of all things as being one," ^[10] and includes, for instance, Zen Buddhism, Taoism, much Upanishadic thought, as well as American Transcendentalism. Within the second 'monistic' camp, Zaehner draws a clear distinction between the dualist 'isolationist' ideal of Samkhya, the historical Buddha, and various gnostic sects, and the non-dualist position of Advaita vedanta. According to the former, the union of an individual spiritual monad (soul) and body is "an unnatural state of affairs, and salvation consists in returning to one's own natural 'splendid isolation' in which one contemplates oneself forever in timeless bliss." ^[11] The latter approach, by contrast, identifies the 'individual' soul with the All, thus emphasizing non-dualism: thou art that."

Zaehner considers theistic mysticism to be superior to the other two categories, because of its appreciation of God, but also because of its strong moral imperative.^[9] Zaehner is directly opposing the views of Aldous Huxley. Natural mystical experiences are in Zaehner's view of less value because they do not lead as directly to the virtues of charity and compassion. Zaehner is generally critical of what he sees as narcissistic tendencies in nature mysticism.^{[note 2]}

Zaehner has been criticised by Paden for the "theological violence"^[9] which his approach does to non-theistic traditions, "forcing them into a framework which privileges Zaehner's own liberal Catholicism."^[9] That said, it is clear from many of Zaehner's other writings (e.g., Our Savage God, Zen, Drugs and Mysticism, At Sundry Times, Hinduism) that such a criticism is rather unfair.

Walter T. Stace – extrovertive and introvertive mysticism[edit]

Zaehner has also been criticised by Walter Terence Stace in his book Mysticism and philosophy (1960) on similar grounds.^[9] Stace argues that doctrinal differences between religious traditions are inappropriate criteria when making cross-cultural comparisons of mystical experiences.^[9] Stace argues that mysticism is part of the process of perception, not interpretation, that is to say that the unity of mystical experiences is perceived, and only afterwards interpreted according to the perceiver’s background. This may result in different accounts of the same phenomenon. While an atheist describes the unity as “freed from empirical filling”, a religious person might describe it as “God” or “the Divine”.^[12] In “Mysticism and Philosophy”, one of Stace’s key questions is whether there are a set of common characteristics to all mystical experiences.^[12]

Based on the study of religious texts, which he took as phenomenological descriptions of personal experiences, and excluding occult phenomena, visions, and voices, Stace distinguished two types of mystical experience, namely extrovertive and introvertive mysticism.^[13][9][14] He describes extrovertive mysticism as an experience of unity within the world, whereas introvertive mysticism is "an experience of unity devoid of perceptual objects; it is literally an experience of 'no-thing-ness'".^[14] The unity in extrovertive mysticism is with the totality of objects of perception. While perception stays continuous, “unity shines through the same world”; the unity in introvertive mysticism is with a pure consciousness, devoid of objects of perception,^[15] “pure unitary consciousness, wherein awareness of the world and of multiplicity is completely obliterated.”^[16] According to Stace such experiences are nonsensical and nonintellectual, under a total “suppression of the whole empirical content.”^[17]

Table 1: Common Characteristics of Extrovertive and Introvertive Mystical Experiences as in Stace (1960)

Common Characteristics of Extrovertive Mystical Experiences	Common Characteristics of Introvertive Mystical Experiences
1. The Unifying Vision - all things are One	1. The Unitary Consciousness; the One, the Void; pure consciousness
2. The more concrete apprehension of the One as an inner subjectivity, or life, in all things	2. Nonspatial, nontemporal
3. Sense of objectivity or reality	3. Sense of objectivity or reality
4. Blessedness, peace, etc.	4. Blessedness, peace, etc.
5. Feeling of the holy, sacred, or divine	5. Feeling of the holy, sacred, or divine
6. Paradoxicality	6. Paradoxicality
7. Alleged by mystics to be ineffable	7. Alleged by mystics to be ineffable

Stace finally argues that there is a set of seven common characteristics for each type of mystical experience, with many of them overlapping between the two types. Stace furthermore argues that extrovertive mystical experiences are on a lower level than introvertive mystical experiences.

Stace's categories of "introvertive mysticism" and "extrovertive mysticism" are derived from Rudolf Otto's "mysticism of introspection" and "unifying vision".^[15]

William Wainwright distinguishes four different kinds of extrovert mystical experience, and two kinds of introvert mystical experience:^{[web 1]}

• Extrovert: experiencing the unity of nature; experiencing nature as a living presence; experiencing all nature-phenomena as part of an eternal now; the "unconstructed experience" of Buddhism.
• Introvert: pure empty consciousness; the "mutual love" of theistic experiences.

Richard Jones, following William Wainwright, elaborated on the distinction, showing different types of experiences in each category:

1. Extrovertive experiences: the sense of connectedness (“unity”) of oneself with nature, with a loss of a sense of boundaries within nature; the luminous glow to nature of “nature mysticism”; the presence of God immanent in nature outside of time shining through nature of “cosmic consciousness”; the lack of separate, self-existing entities of mindfulness states.
2. Introvertive experiences: theistic experiences of connectedness or identity with God in mutual love; nonpersonal differentiated experiences; the depth-mystical experience empty of all differentiable content.^[18]

Following Stace's lead, Ralph Hood developed the "Mysticism scale."^[19] According to Hood, the introvertive mystical experience may be a common core to mysticism independent of both culture and person, forming the basis of a "perennial psychology".^[20] According to Hood, "the perennialist view has strong empirical support," since his scale yielded positive results across various cultures,^{[21][note 3]} stating that mystical experience as operationalized from Stace's criteria is identical across various samples.^{[23][note 4]}

Although Stace's work on mysticism received a positive response, it has also been strongly criticised in the 1970s and 1980s, for its lack of methodological rigueur and its perennialist pre-assumptions.^{[24][25][26][27][web 1]} Major criticisms came from Steven T. Katz in his influential series of publications on mysticism and philosophy,^{[note 5]} and from Wayne Proudfoot in his Religious experience (1985).^[28]

Masson and Masson criticised Stace for using a "buried premise," namely that mysticism can provide valid knowledge of the world, equal to science and logic.^[29] A similar criticism has been voiced by Jacob van Belzen toward Hood, noting that Hood validated the existence of a common core in mystical experiences, but based on a test which presupposes the existence of such a common core, noting that "the instrument used to verify Stace's conceptualization of Stace is not independent of Stace, but based on him."^[27] Belzen also notes that religion does not stand on its own, but is embedded in a cultural context, which should be taken into account.^[30] To this criticism Hood et al. answer that universalistic tendencies in religious research "are rooted first in inductive generalizations from cross-cultural consideration of either faith or mysticism,"^[31] stating that Stace sought out texts which he recognized as an expression of mystical expression, from which he created his universal core. Hood therefore concludes that Belzen "is incorrect when he claims that items were presupposed."^{[31][note 6]}

Mystical experience[edit]

See also: Religious experience, Western esotericism, Spirituality, New Age, and Nondualism

The term "mystical experience" has become synonymous with the terms "religious experience", spiritual experience and sacred experience.^[34] A "religious experience" is a subjective experience which is interpreted within a religious framework.^[34] The concept originated in the 19th century, as a defense against the growing rationalism of western society.^[33] Wayne Proudfoot traces the roots of the notion of "religious experience" to the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who argued that religion is based on a feeling of the infinite. The notion of "religious experience" was used by Schleiermacher to defend religion against the growing scientific and secular critique. It was adopted by many scholars of religion, of which William James was the most influential.^[35] A broad range of western and eastern movements have incorporated and influenced the emergence of the modern notion of "mystical experience", such as the Perennial philosophy, Transcendentalism, Universalism, the Theosophical Society, New Thought, Neo-Vedanta and Buddhist modernism.^[36][37]

William James[edit]

William James popularized the use of the term "religious experience" in his The Varieties of Religious Experience.^[38][33] James wrote:

In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which bring it about that the mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land.^[39]

This book is the classic study on religious or mystical experience, which influenced deeply both the academic and popular understanding of "religious experience".^{[38][33][40][web 1]} James popularized the use of the term "religious experience"^{[note 7]} in his Varieties,^{[38][33][web 1]} and influenced the understanding of mysticism as a distinctive experience which supplies knowledge of the transcendental:^{[40][web 1]}

Under the influence of William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, heavily centered on people's conversion experiences, most philosophers' interest in mysticism has been in distinctive, allegedly knowledge-granting "mystical experiences.""^{[web 1]}

James emphasized the personal experience of individuals, and describes a broad variety of such experiences in The Varieties of Religious Experience.^[39] He considered the "personal religion"^[41] to be "more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism",^{[41][note 8]} and defines religion as

...the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.^[42]

According to James, mystical experiences have four defining qualities:^[43]

1. Ineffability. According to James the mystical experience "defies expression, that no adequate report of its content can be given in words".^[43]
2. Noetic quality. Mystics stress that their experiences give them "insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect."^[43] James referred to this as the "noetic" (or intellectual) "quality" of the mystical.^[43]
3. Transiency. James notes that most mystical experiences have a short occurrence, but their effect persists.^[43]
4. Passivity. According to James, mystics come to their peak experience not as active seekers, but as passive recipients.^[43]

James recognised the broad variety of mystical schools and conflicting doctrines both within and between religions.^[39] Nevertheless,

...he shared with thinkers of his era the conviction that beneath the variety could be carved out a certain mystical unanimity, that mystics shared certain common perceptions of the divine, however different their religion or historical epoch,^[39]

According to Jesuit scholar William Harmless, "for James there was nothing inherently theological in or about mystical experience",^[44] and felt it legitimate to separate the mystic's experience from theological claims.^[44] Harmless notes that James "denies the most central fact of religion",^[45] namely that religion is practiced by people in groups, and often in public.^[45] He also ignores ritual, the historicity of religious traditions,^[45] and theology, instead emphasizing "feeling" as central to religion.^[45]

Inducement of mystical experience[edit]

Dan Merkur makes a distinction between trance states and reverie states.^{[web 2]} According to Merkur, in trance states the normal functions of consciousness are temporarily inhibited, and trance experiences are not filtered by ordinary judgements, and seem to be real and true.^{[web 2]} In reverie states, numinous experiences are also not inhibited by the normal functions of consciousness, but visions and insights are still perceived as being in need of interpretation, while trance states may lead to a denial of physical reality.^{[web 2]}

Most mystical traditions warn against an attachment to mystical experiences, and offer a "protective and hermeneutic framework" to accommodate these experiences.^[46] These same traditions offer the means to induce mystical experiences,^[46] which may have several origins:

• Spontaneous; either apparently without any cause, or by persistent existential concerns, or by neurophysiological origins;
• Religious practices, such as contemplation, meditation, and mantra-repetition;
• Entheogens (drugs)
• Neurophysiological origins, such as temporal lobe epilepsy.

Influence[edit]

The concept of "mystical experience" has influenced the understanding of mysticism as a distinctive experience which supplies knowledge of a transcendental reality, cosmic unity, or ultimate truths.^{[web 1][note 9]} Scholars, like Stace and Forman, have tended to exclude visions, near death experiences and parapsychological phenomena from such "special mental states," and focus on sudden experiences of oneness, though neurologically they all seem to be related.

Criticism of the concept of "mystical experience"[edit]

The notion of "experience", however, has been criticized in religious studies today.^{[32] [47][48]} Robert Sharf points out that "experience" is a typical Western term, which has found its way into Asian religiosity via western influences.^{[32][note 10]} The notion of "experience" introduces a false notion of duality between "experiencer" and "experienced", whereas the essence of kensho is the realisation of the "non-duality" of observer and observed.^[50][51] "Pure experience" does not exist; all experience is mediated by intellectual and cognitive activity.^[52][53] The specific teachings and practices of a specific tradition may even determine what "experience" someone has, which means that this "experience" is not the proof of the teaching, but a result of the teaching.^[34] A pure consciousness without concepts, reached by "cleaning the doors of perception",^{[note 11]} would be an overwhelming chaos of sensory input without coherence.^[55]

Constructivists such as Steven Katz reject any typology of experiences since each mystical experience is deemed unique.^[56]

Other critics point out that the stress on "experience" is accompanied with favoring the atomic individual, instead of the shared life of the community. It also fails to distinguish between episodic experience, and mysticism as a process, that is embedded in a total religious matrix of liturgy, scripture, worship, virtues, theology, rituals and practices.^[57]

Richard King also points to disjunction between "mystical experience" and social justice:^[58]

The privatisation of mysticism – that is, the increasing tendency to locate the mystical in the psychological realm of personal experiences – serves to exclude it from political issues as social justice. Mysticism thus becomes seen as a personal matter of cultivating inner states of tranquility and equanimity, which, rather than seeking to transform the world, serve to accommodate the individual to the status quo through the alleviation of anxiety and stress.^[58]

Perennialism, constructionism and contextualism[edit]

Main article: Perennial philosophy

Scholarly research on mystical experiences in the 19th and 20th century was dominated by a discourse on "mystical experience," laying sole emphasis on the experiential aspect, be it spontaneous or induced by human behavior. Perennialists regard those various experiences traditions as pointing to one universal transcendental reality, for which those experiences offer the prove.^[59] In this approach, mystical experiences are privatised, separated from the context in which they emerge.^[46] William James, in his The Varieties of Religious Experience, was highly influential in further popularising this perennial approach and the notion of personal experience as a validation of religious truths.^[40]

The essentialist model argues that mystical experience is independent of the sociocultural, historical and religious context in which it occurs, and regards all mystical experience in its essence to be the same.^[60] According to this "common core-thesis",^[61] different descriptions can mask quite similar if not identical experiences:^[62]

[P]eople can differentiate experience from interpretation, such that different interpretations may be applied to otherwise identical experiences".^[63]

Principal exponents of the perennialist position were William James, Walter Terence Stace,^[64] who distinguishes extroverted and introverted mysticism, in response to R. C. Zaehner's distinction between theistic and monistic mysticism;^[9] Huston Smith;^[65][66] and Ralph W. Hood,^[67] who conducted empirical research using the "Mysticism Scale", which is based on Stace's model.^{[67][note 12]}

Since the 1960s, social constructionism^[60] argued that mystical experiences are "a family of similar experiences that includes many different kinds, as represented by the many kinds of religious and secular mystical reports".^[68] The constructionist states that mystical experiences are fully constructed by the ideas, symbols and practices that mystics are familiar with,^[69] shaped by the concepts "which the mystic brings to, and which shape, his experience".^[60] What is being experienced is being determined by the expectations and the conceptual background of the mystic.^[70] Critics of the "common-core thesis" argue that

[N]o unmediated experience is possible, and that in the extreme, language is not simply used to interpret experience but in fact constitutes experience.^[63]

The principal exponent of the constructionist position is Steven T. Katz, who, in a series of publications,^{[note 13]} has made a highly influential and compelling case for the constructionist approach.^[71]

The perennial position is "largely dismissed by scholars",^[1] but "has lost none of its popularity".^[2] The contextual approach has become the common approach,^[46] and takes into account the historical and cultural context of mystical experiences.^[46]

Steven Katz – constructionism[edit]

After Walter Stace's seminal book in 1960, the general philosophy of mysticism received little attention.^{[note 14]} But in the 1970s the issue of a universal "perennialism" versus each mystical experience being was reignited by Steven Katz. In an often-cited quote he states:

There are NO pure (i.e. unmediated) experiences. Neither mystical experience nor more ordinary forms of experience give any indication, or any ground for believing, that they are unmediated [...] The notion of unmediated experience seems, if not self-contradictory, at best empty. This epistemological fact seems to me to be true, because of the sort of beings we are, even with regard to the experiences of those ultimate objects of concern with which mystics have had intercourse, e.g., God, Being, Nirvana, etc.^{[72][note 15]}

According to Katz (1978), Stace typology is "too reductive and inflexible," reducing the complexities and varieties of mystical experience into "improper categories."^[73] According to Katz, Stace does not notice the difference between experience and interpretation, but fails to notice the epistemological issues involved in recognizing such experiences as "mystical,"^[74] and the even more fundamental issue of which conceptual framework precedes and shapes these experiences.^[75] Katz further notes that Stace supposes that similarities in descriptive language also implies a similarity in experience, an assumption which Katz rejects.^[76] According to Katz, close examination of the descriptions and their contexts reveals that those experiences are not identical.^[77] Katz further notes that Stace held one specific mystical tradition to be superior and normative,^[78] whereas Katz rejects reductionist notions and leaves God as God, and Nirvana as Nirvana.^[79]

According to Paden, Katz rejects the discrimination between experiences and their interpretations.^[9] Katz argues that it is not the description, but the experience itself which is conditioned by the cultural and religious background of the mystic.^[9] According to Katz, it is not possible to have pure or unmediated experience.^[9][80]

Yet, according to Laibelman, Katz did not say that the experience can't be unmediated; he said that the conceptual understanding of the experience can't be unmediated, and is based on culturally mediated preconceptions.^[81] According to Laibelman, misunderstanding Katz's argument has led some to defend the authenticity of "pure consciousness events," while this is not the issue.^[82] Laibelman further notes that a mystic's interpretation is not necessarily more true or correct than the interpretation of an uninvolved observer.^[83]

Robert Forman – pure consciousness event[edit]

Robert Forman has criticised Katz' approach, arguing that lay-people who describe mystical experiences often notice that this experience involves a totally new form of awareness, which can't be described in their existing frame of reference.^[84][85] Newberg argued that there is neurological evidence for the existence of a "pure consciousness event" empty of any constructionist structuring.^[86]

Richard Jones – constructivism, anticonstructivism, and perennialism[edit]

Richard H. Jones believes that the dispute between "constructionism" and "perennialism" is ill-formed. He draws a distinction between "anticonstructivism" and "perennialism": constructivism can rejected with respect to a certain class of mystical experiences without ascribing to a perennialist philosophy on the relation of mystical doctrines.^[87] Constructivism versus anticonstructivism is a matter of the nature of mystical experiences themselves while perennialism is a matter of mystical traditions and the doctrines they espouse. One can reject constructivism about the nature of mystical experiences without claiming that all mystical experiences reveal a cross-cultural "perennial truth". Anticonstructivists can advocate contextualism as much as constructivists do, while perennialists reject the need to study mystical experiences in the context of a mystic's culture since all mystics state the same universal truth.

Contextualism and attribution theory[edit]

Main article: Attribution (psychology)

The theoretical study of mystical experience has shifted from an experiential, privatised and perennialist approach to a contextual and empirical approach.^[46] The contextual approach, which also includes constructionism and attribution theory, takes into account the historical and cultural context.^{[46][88][web 1]} Neurological research takes an empirical approach, relating mystical experiences to neurological processes.

Wayne Proudfoot proposes an approach that also negates any alleged cognitive content of mystical experiences: mystics unconsciously merely attribute a doctrinal content to ordinary experiences. That is, mystics project cognitive content onto otherwise ordinary experiences having a strong emotional impact.^[89] Objections have been raised concerning Proudfoot’s use of the psychological data.^[90][91] This approach, however, has been further elaborated by Ann Taves.^[88] She incorporates both neurological and cultural approaches in the study of mystical experience.

Many religious and mystical traditions see religious experiences (particularly that knowledge that comes with them) as revelations caused by divine agency rather than ordinary natural processes. They are considered real encounters with God or gods, or real contact with higher-order realities of which humans are not ordinarily aware.^{[web 4]}

Neurological research[edit]

Lobes of the human brain
Frontal lobe Temporal lobe Parietal lobe Occipital lobe
Lobes of the human brain (temporal lobe is shown in green)

See also: Neuroscience of religion

The scientific study of mysticism today focuses on two topics: identifying the neurological bases and triggers of mystical experiences, and demonstrating the purported benefits of meditation.^[92] Correlates between mystical experiences and neurological activity have been established, pointing to the temporal lobe as the main locus for these experiences, while Andrew B. Newberg and Eugene G. d'Aquili have also pointed to the parietal lobe. Recent research points to the relevance of the default mode network.^[93]

Temporal lobe[edit]

Main article: Temporal lobe

See also: Temporal lobe epilepsy

See also: People with epilepsy

The temporal lobe generates the feeling of "I", and gives a feeling of familiarity or strangeness to the perceptions of the senses.^{[web 5]} It seems to be involved in mystical experiences,^{[web 5][94]} and in the change in personality that may result from such experiences.^{[web 5]} There is a long-standing notion that epilepsy and religion are linked,^[95] and some religious figures may have had temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Raymond Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness (1901) contains several case-studies of persons who have realized "cosmic consciousness";^{[web 5]} several of these cases are also being mentioned in J.E. Bryant's 1953 book, Genius and Epilepsy, which has a list of more than 20 people that combines the great and the mystical.^[96] James Leuba's The psychology of religious mysticism noted that "among the dread diseases that afflict humanity there is only one that interests us quite particularly; that disease is epilepsy."^[97][95]

Slater and Beard renewed the interest in TLE and religious experience in the 1960s.^[7] Dewhurst and Beard (1970) described six cases of TLE-patients who underwent sudden religious conversions. They placed these cases in the context of several western saints with a sudden conversion, who were or may have been epileptic. Dewhurst and Beard described several aspects of conversion experiences, and did not favor one specific mechanism.^[95]

Norman Geschwind described behavioral changes related to temporal lobe epilepsy in the 1970s and 1980s.^[98] Geschwind described cases which included extreme religiosity, now called Geschwind syndrome,^[98] and aspects of the syndrome have been identified in some religious figures, in particular extreme religiosity and hypergraphia (excessive writing).^[98] Geschwind introduced this "interictal personality disorder" to neurology, describing a cluster of specific personality characteristics which he found characteristic of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. Critics note that these characteristics can be the result of any illness, and are not sufficiently descriptive for patients with temporal lobe epilepsy.^{[web 6]}

Neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick, in the 1980s and 1990s, also found a relationship between the right temporal lobe and mystical experience, but also found that pathology or brain damage is only one of many possible causal mechanisms for these experiences. He questioned the earlier accounts of religious figures with temporal lobe epilepsy, noticing that "very few true examples of the ecstatic aura and the temporal lobe seizure had been reported in the world scientific literature prior to 1980". According to Fenwick, "It is likely that the earlier accounts of temporal lobe epilepsy and temporal lobe pathology and the relation to mystic and religious states owes more to the enthusiasm of their authors than to a true scientific understanding of the nature of temporal lobe functioning."^{[web 7]}

The occurrence of intense religious feelings in epileptic patients in general is rare,^{[web 5]} with an incident rate of ca. 2-3%. Sudden religious conversion, together with visions, has been documented in only a small number of individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy.^[99] The occurrence of religious experiences in TLE-patients may as well be explained by religious attribution, due to the background of these patients.^[7] Nevertheless, the Neuroscience of religion is a growing field of research, searching for specific neurological explanations of mystical experiences. Those rare epileptic patients with ecstatic seizures may provide clues for the neurological mechanisms involved in mystical experiences, such as the anterior insular cortex, which is involved in self-awareness and subjective certainty.^{[94][100][101][102]}

Anterior insula[edit]

The insula of the right side, exposed by
removing the opercula.

A common quality in mystical experiences is ineffability, a strong feeling of certainty which cannot be expressed in words. This ineffability has been threatened with scepticism. According to Arthur Schopenhauer the inner experience of mysticism is philosophically unconvincing.^{[103][note 16]} In The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky argues that mystical experiences only seem profound and persuasive because the mind's critical faculties are relatively inactive during them.^{[104][note 18]}

Geschwind and Picard propose a neurological explanation for this subjective certainty, based on clinical research of epilepsy.^{[94][101][102][note 19]} According to Picard, this feeling of certainty may be caused by a dysfunction of the anterior insula, a part of the brain which is involved in interoception, self-reflection, and in avoiding uncertainty about the internal representations of the world by "anticipation of resolution of uncertainty or risk". This avoidance of uncertainty functions through the comparison between predicted states and actual states, that is, "signaling that we do not understand, i.e., that there is ambiguity."^[106] Picard notes that "the concept of insight is very close to that of certainty," and refers to Archimedes "Eureka!"^{[107][note 20]} Picard hypothesizes that in ecstatic seizures the comparison between predicted states and actual states no longer functions, and that mismatches between predicted state and actual state are no longer processed, blocking "negative emotions and negative arousal arising from predictive unceertainty," which will be experienced as emotional confidence.^[108][102] Picard concludes that "[t]his could lead to a spiritual interpretation in some individuals."^[108]

Parietal lobe[edit]

Andrew B. Newberg and Eugene G. d'Aquili, in their book Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, take a perennial stance, describing their insights into the relationship between religious experience and brain function.^[109] d'Aquili describes his own meditative experiences as "allowing a deeper, simpler part of him to emerge", which he believes to be "the truest part of who he is, the part that never changes."^[109] Not content with personal and subjective descriptions like these, Newberg and d'Aquili have studied the brain-correlates to such experiences. They scanned the brain blood flow patterns during such moments of mystical transcendence, using SPECT-scans, to detect which brain areas show heightened activity.^[110] Their scans showed unusual activity in the top rear section of the brain, the "posterior superior parietal lobe", or the "orientation association area (OAA)" in their own words.^[111] This area creates a consistent cognition of the physical limits of the self.^[112] This OAA shows a sharply reduced activity during meditative states, reflecting a block in the incoming flow of sensory information, resulting in a perceived lack of physical boundaries.^[113] According to Newberg and d'Aquili,

This is exactly how Robert^[who?] and generations of Eastern mystics before him have described their peak meditative, spiritual and mystical moments.^[113]

Newberg and d'Aquili conclude that mystical experience correlates to observable neurological events, which are not outside the range of normal brain function.^[114] They also believe that

...our research has left us no choice but to conclude that the mystics may be on to something, that the mind’s machinery of transcendence may in fact be a window through which we can glimpse the ultimate realness of something that is truly divine.^{[115][note 21]}

Why God Won't Go Away "received very little attention from professional scholars of religion".^{[117][note 22][note 23]} According to Bulkeley, "Newberg and D'Aquili seem blissfully unaware of the past half century of critical scholarship questioning universalistic claims about human nature and experience".^{[note 24]} Matthew Day also notes that the discovery of a neurological substrate of a "religious experience" is an isolated finding which "doesn't even come close to a robust theory of religion".^[119]

Default mode network[edit]

Recent studies evidenced the relevance of the default mode network in spiritual and self-transcending experiences. Its functions are related, among others, to self-reference and self-awareness, and new imaging experiments during meditation and the use of hallucinogens indicate a decrease in the activity of this network mediated by them, leading some studies to base on it a probable neurocognitive mechanism of the dissolution of the self, which occurs in some mystical phenomena.^{[93][120][121]}

Spiritual development and self-transformation[edit]

Main article: Spiritual development

In mystical and contemplative traditions, mystical experiences are not a goal in themselves, but part of a larger path of self-transformation.^[122] For example, the Zen Buddhist training does not end with kenshō, but practice is to be continued to deepen the insight and to express it in daily life.^{[123][124][125][126][note 25]} To deepen the initial insight of kensho, shikantaza and kōan-study are necessary. This trajectory of initial insight followed by a gradual deepening and ripening is expressed by Linji Yixuan in his Three mysterious Gates, the Five Ranks, the Four Ways of Knowing of Hakuin,^[129] and the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures^[130] which detail the steps on the Path.

See also[edit]

• Dhyāna in Buddhism
• Dhyana in Hinduism
• Default mode network
• Ego death
• Epiphany (feeling)
• Kensho
• Kundalini
• Meditation
• Nondualism
• Satori
• Sahaja
• Subitism
• Trance

Notes[edit]

1. ^ Compare the work of C.G. Jung.
2. ^ See especially Zaehner, R. C., Mysticism Sacred and Profane, Oxford University Press, Chapters 3,4, and 6.
3. ^ Hood: "...it seems fair to conclude that the perennialist view has strong empirical support, insofar as regardless of the language used in the M Scale, the basic structure of the experience remains constant across diverse samples and cultures. This is a way of stating the perennialist thesis in measurable terms.^[22]
4. ^ Hood: "[E]mpirically, there is strong support to claim that as operationalized from Stace's criteria, mystical experience is identical as measured across diverse samples, whether expressed in "neutral language" or with either "God" or "Christ" references.^[23]
5. ^ * Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 1978)
   * Mysticism and Religious Traditions (Oxford University Press, 1983)
   * Mysticism and Language (Oxford University Press, 1992)
   * Mysticism and Sacred Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2000)
6. ^ Robert Sharf has criticised the idea that religious texts describe individual religious experience. According to Sharf, their authors go to great lengths to avoid personal experience, which would be seen as invalidating the presumed authority of the historical tradition.^[32][33]
7. ^ The term "mystical experience" has become synonymous with the terms "religious experience", spiritual experience and sacred experience.^[34]
8. ^ James: "Churches, when once established, live at secondhand upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine. not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case; – so personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete."^[41]
9. ^ McClenon: "The doctrine that special mental states or events allow an understanding of ultimate truths. Although it is difficult to differentiate which forms of experience allow such understandings, mental episodes supporting belief in "other kinds of reality" are often labeled mystical [...] Mysticism tends to refer to experiences supporting belief in a cosmic unity rather than the advocation of a particular religious ideology."^{[web 3]}
10. ^ Roberarf: "[T]he role of experience in the history of Buddhism has been greatly exaggerated in contemporary scholarship. Both historical and ethnographic evidence suggests that the privileging of experience may well be traced to certain twentieth-century reform movements, notably those that urge a return to zazen or vipassana meditation, and these reforms were profoundly influenced by religious developments in the west ii[...] While some adepts may indeed experience "altered states" in the course of their training, critical analysis shows that such states do not constitute the reference point for the elaborate Buddhist discourse pertaining to the "path".^[49]
11. ^ William Blake: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru' narrow chinks of his cavern."^[54]
12. ^ Others include Frithjof Schuon, Rudolf Otto and Aldous Huxley.^[65]
13. ^
    • Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 1978)
    • Mysticism and Religious Traditions (Oxford University Press, 1983)
    • Mysticism and Language (Oxford University Press, 1992)
    • Mysticism and Sacred Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2000)
14. ^ Two notable exceptions are collections of essays by Wainwright 1981 and Jones 1983.
15. ^ Original in Katz (1978), Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, Oxford University Press
16. ^ Schopenhauer: "In the widest sense, mysticism is every guidance to the immediate awareness of what is not reached by either perception or conception, or generally by any knowledge. The mystic is opposed to the philosopher by the fact that he begins from within, whereas the philosopher begins from without. The mystic starts from his inner, positive, individual experience, in which he finds himself as the eternal and only being, and so on. But nothing of this is communicable except the assertions that we have to accept on his word; consequently he is unable to convince.^[103]
17. ^ Minsky's idea of 'some early Imprimer hiding in the mind' was an echo of Freud's belief that mystical experience was essentially infantile and regressive, i.e., a memory of 'Oneness' with the mother.
18. ^ Meditator: It suddenly seemed as if I was surrounded by an immensely powerful Presence. I felt that a Truth had been "revealed" to me that was far more important than anything else, and for which I needed no further evidence. But when later I tried to describe this to my friends, I found that I had nothing to say except how wonderful that experience was. This peculiar type of mental state is sometimes called a "Mystical Experience" or "Rapture," "Ecstasy," or "Bliss." Some who undergo it call it "wonderful," but a better word might be "wonderless," because I suspect that such a state of mind may result from turning so many Critics off that one cannot find any flaws in it. What might that "powerful Presence" represent? It is sometimes seen as a deity, but I suspect that it is likely to be a version of some early Imprimer that for years has been hiding inside your mind.^{[note 17]} In any case, such experiences can be dangerous—for some victims find them so compelling that they devote the rest of their lives to trying to get themselves back to that state again.^[105]
19. ^ See also Francesca Sacco (2013-09-19), Can Epilepsy Unlock The Secret To Happiness?, Le Temps
20. ^ See also satori in Japanese Zen
21. ^ See Radhakrishnan for a similar stance on the value of religious experience. Radhakrishnan saw Hinduism as a scientific religion based on facts, apprehended via intuition or religious experience.^{[web 8]} According to Radhakrishnan, "[i]f philosophy of religion is to become scientific, it must become empirical and found itself on religious experience".^{[web 8]} He saw this empiricism exemplified in the Vedas: "The truths of the ṛṣis are not evolved as the result of logical reasoning or systematic philosophy but are the products of spiritual intuition, dṛṣti or vision. The ṛṣis are not so much the authors of the truths recorded in the Vedas as the seers who were able to discern the eternal truths by raising their life-spirit to the plane of universal spirit. They are the pioneer researchers in the realm of the spirit who saw more in the world than their followers. Their utterances are not based on transitory vision but on a continuous experience of resident life and power. When the Vedas are regarded as the highest authority, all that is meant is that the most exacting of all authorities is the authority of facts."^{[web 8]} This stance is echoed by Ken Wilber: "The point is that we might have an excellent population of extremely evolved and developed personalities in the form of the world's great mystic-sages (a point which is supported by Maslow's studies). Let us, then, simply assume that the authentic mystic-sage represents the very highest stages of human development—as far beyond normal and average humanity as humanity itself is beyond apes. This, in effect, would give us a sample which approximates "the highest state of consciousness"—a type of "superconscious state." Furthermore, most of the mystic-sages have left rather detailed records of the stages and steps of their own transformations into the superconscious realms. That is, they tell us not only of the highest level of consciousness and superconsciousness, but also of all the intermediate levels leading up to it. If we take all these higher stages and add them to the lower and middle stages/levels which have been so carefully described and studied by Western psychology, we would then arrive at a fairly well-balanced and comprehensive model of the spectrum of consciousness."^[116]
22. ^ See Michael Shermer (2001), Is God All in the Mind? for a review in Science.
23. ^ According to Matthew Day, the book "is fatally compromised by conceptual confusions, obsolete scholarship, clumsy sleights of hand and untethered speculation".^[117] According to Matthew Day, Newberg and d'Aquili "consistently discount the messy reality of empirical religious heterogenity".^[118]
24. ^ Bulkely (2003). "The Gospel According to Darwin: the relevance of cognitive neuroscience to religious studies". Religious Studies Review. 29 (2): 123–129.. Cited in ^[118]
25. ^ See, for example:
    * Contemporary Chan Master Sheng Yen: "Ch'an expressions refer to enlightenment as "seeing your self-nature". But even this is not enough. After seeing your self-nature, you need to deepen your experience even further and bring it into maturation. You should have enlightenment experience again and again and support them with continuous practice. Even though Ch'an says that at the time of enlightenment, your outlook is the same as of the Buddha, you are not yet a full Buddha."^[127]
    * Contemporary western Rev. Master Jiyu-Kennett: "One can easily get the impression that realization, kenshō, an experience of enlightenment, or however you wish to phrase it, is the end of Zen training. It is not. It is, rather, a new beginning, an entrance into a more mature phase of Buddhist training. To take it as an ending, and to "dine out" on such an experience without doing the training that will deepen and extend it, is one of the greatest tragedies of which I know. There must be continuous development, otherwise you will be as a wooden statue sitting upon a plinth to be dusted, and the life of Buddha will not increase."^[128]

References[edit]

1. ^ Jump up to:^a b McMahan 2008, p. 269, note 9.
2. ^ Jump up to:^a b McMahan 2010, p. 269, note 9.
3. ^ Matthew Alper. The "God" Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God.
4. ^ James H. Austin. Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness. Archived from the original on 22 February 2004.
5. ^ James H. Austin. Zen-Brain Reflections: Reviewing Recent Developments in Meditation and States of Consciousness. Archived from the original on 23 June 2006.
6. ^ Ramachandran, V. & Blakeslee (1998). Phantoms in the Brain.
7. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Aaen-Stockdale, Craig (2012). "Neuroscience for the Soul". The Psychologist. 25 (7): 520–523.
8. ^ Harris, Kirsten. "The Evolution of Consciousness: Edward Carpenter's 'Towards Democracy'". Victorian Spiritualities (Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies).
9. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n} Paden 2009, p. 332.
10. ^ Zaehner 1957, p. 50.
11. ^ Zaehner 1974, p. 113.
12. ^ Jump up to:^a b Stace, Walter (1960). Mysticism and Philosophy. MacMillan. pp. 44–80.
13. ^ Stace 1960, p. chap. 1. sfn error: multiple targets (4×): CITEREFStace1960 (help)
14. ^ Jump up to:^a b Hood 2003, p. 291.
15. ^ Jump up to:^a b Hood 2003, p. 292.
16. ^ Stace, Walter (1960). The Teachings of the Mystics. New York: The New American Library. pp. 20–21. ISBN 0-451-60306-0.
17. ^ Stace, Walter (1960). The Teachings of the Mystics. New York: The New American Library. pp. 15–18. ISBN 0-451-60306-0.
18. ^ Jones 2016, p. 26-27.
19. ^ Hood 1974.
20. ^ Hood 2003, pp. 321–323.
21. ^ Hood 2003, p. 324, 325.
22. ^ Hood 2003, p. 325.
23. ^ Jump up to:^a b Hood 2003, p. 324.
24. ^ Moore 1973, p. 148-150.
25. ^ Masson & Masson 1976.
26. ^ Katz 1978, p. 22-32. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFKatz1978 (help)
27. ^ Jump up to:^a b Belzen 2010, p. 97.
28. ^ Hood 2001, p. 32.
29. ^ Masson & Masson 1976, p. 109.
30. ^ Belzen 2010, p. 50.
31. ^ Jump up to:^a b Hood et al. 2015, p. 467.
32. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Sharf & 1995-B.
33. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e} Sharf 2000.
34. ^ Jump up to:^a b c d Samy 1998, p. 80.
35. ^ Sharf 2000, p. 271.
36. ^ McMahan 2008.
37. ^ King 2001.
38. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Hori 1999, p. 47.
39. ^ Jump up to:^a b c d Harmless 2007, p. 14.
40. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Harmless 2007, pp. 10–17.
41. ^ Jump up to:^a b c James 1982, p. 30.
42. ^ James 1982, p. 31.
43. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f} Harmless 2007, p. 13.
44. ^ Jump up to:^a b Harmless 2007, p. 15.
45. ^ Jump up to:^a b c d Harmless 2007, p. 16.
46. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g} Moore 2005, p. 6357.
47. ^ Mohr 2000, pp. 282–286.
48. ^ Low 2006, p. 12.
49. ^ Sharf & 1995-C, p. 1.
50. ^ Hori 1994, p. 30.
51. ^ Samy 1998, p. 82.
52. ^ Mohr 2000, p. 282.
53. ^ Samy 1998, pp. 80–82.
54. ^ Quote DB
55. ^ Mohr 2000, p. 284.
56. ^ JKatz 1978, p. 56.
57. ^ Parsons 2011, pp. 4–5.
58. ^ Jump up to:^a b King 2002, p. 21.
59. ^ King 2002.
60. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Katz 2000, p. 3.
61. ^ Hood 2003, pp. 321–325.
62. ^ Hood 2003, p. 321.
63. ^ Jump up to:^a b Spilka e.a. 2003, p. 321.
64. ^ Horne 1996, p. 29, note 1.
65. ^ Jump up to:^a b Forman 1997, p. 4. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFForman1997 (help)
66. ^ Sawyer 2012, p. 241.
67. ^ Jump up to:^a b Hood 2003.
68. ^ Horne 1996, p. 9.
69. ^ Moore 2005, p. 6356-6357.
70. ^ Katz 2000, pp. 3–4.
71. ^ Forman 1997, pp. 9–13. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFForman1997 (help)
72. ^ Forman 1997, p. 9. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFForman1997 (help)
73. ^ Katz 1978, p. 25. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFKatz1978 (help)
74. ^ Katz 1978, p. 28. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFKatz1978 (help)
75. ^ Katz 1978, p. 30. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFKatz1978 (help)
76. ^ Katz 1978, p. 46-47. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFKatz1978 (help)
77. ^ Katz 1978, p. 53-54. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFKatz1978 (help)
78. ^ Katz 1978, p. 65. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFKatz1978 (help)
79. ^ Katz 1978, p. 66. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFKatz1978 (help)
80. ^ Horne 1996, p. 29.
81. ^ Laibelman 2007, p. 207.
82. ^ Laibelman 2007, p. 209.
83. ^ Laibelman 2007, p. 211.
84. ^ Forman 1991.
85. ^ Forman 1999.
86. ^ Newberg 2008.
87. ^ Jones 2016, chapter 2.
88. ^ Jump up to:^a b Taves 2009. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFTaves2009 (help)
89. ^ Proudfoot 1985.
90. ^ Barnard 1992.
91. ^ Spilka & McIntosh 1995.
92. ^ Beauregard 2007.
93. ^ Jump up to:^a b van Elk, Michiel; Aleman, André (February 2017). "Brain mechanisms in religion and spirituality: An integrative predictive processing framework". Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. 73: 359–378. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.12.031. ISSN 0149-7634. PMID 28041787. S2CID 3984198.
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95. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Devinsky 2003.
96. ^ Bryant 1953.
97. ^ Leuba 1925.
98. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Drvinsky & Schachter 2009.
99. ^ Dewhurst & Beard 1970.
100. ^ Picard & Kurth 2014.
101. ^ Jump up to:^a b Gschwind & Picard 2014.
102. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Gschwind & Picard 2016.
103. ^ Jump up to:^a b Schopenhauer 1844, p. Vol. II, Ch. XLVIII.
104. ^ Minsky 2006, p. ch.3.
105. ^ Minsky 2006.
106. ^ Picard 2013, p. 2496-2498.
107. ^ Picard 2013, p. 2497-2498.
108. ^ Jump up to:^a b Picard 2013, p. 2498.
109. ^ Jump up to:^a b Newberg 2008, p. 2.
110. ^ Newberg 2008, pp. 2–3.
111. ^ Newberg 2008, p. 4.
112. ^ Newberg 2008, p. 5.
113. ^ Jump up to:^a b Newberg 2008, p. 6.
114. ^ Newberg 2008, p. 7.
115. ^ Newberg 2008, p. 140.
116. ^ Wilber 1996, p. 14.
117. ^ Jump up to:^a b Day 2009, p. 122.
118. ^ Jump up to:^a b Day 2009, p. 123.
119. ^ Day 2009, p. 118.
120. ^ Nutt, David; Chialvo, Dante R.; Tagliazucchi, Enzo; Feilding, Amanda; Shanahan, Murray; Hellyer, Peter John; Leech, Robert; Carhart-Harris, Robin Lester (2014). "The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs". Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 8: 20. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00020. ISSN 1662-5161. PMC 3909994. PMID 24550805.
121. ^ Barrett, Frederick S.; Griffiths, Roland R. (2018). "Classic Hallucinogens and Mystical Experiences: Phenomenology and Neural Correlates". Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences. 36: 393–430. doi:10.1007/7854_2017_474. ISBN 978-3-662-55878-2. ISSN 1866-3370. PMC 6707356. PMID 28401522.
122. ^ Waaijman 2002.
123. ^ Sekida 1996.
124. ^ Kapleau 1989.
125. ^ Kraft 1997, p. 91.
126. ^ Maezumi & Glassman 2007, p. 54, 140.
127. ^ Yen 1996, p. 54.
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129. ^ Low 2006.
130. ^ Mumon 2004.

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Web-sources[edit]

1. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g h} Jerome Gellman, Mysticism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
2. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Dan Merkur, Mysticism, Encyclopædia Britannica
3. ^ James McClenon, Mysticism, Encyclopedia of Religion and Society
4. ^ The Argument from Religious Experience]] [1]
5. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e} Peter Fenwick (1980). "The Neurophysiology of the Brain: Its Relationship to Altered States of Consciousness (With emphasis on the Mystical Experience)". Wrekin Trust. Archived from the original on 14 February 2016. Retrieved 14 November 2015.
6. ^ William Barr (22 September 2003). "Is there an epileptic personality?". Retrieved 23 August 2009.
7. ^ Peter Fenwick (7 January 1994). "Untitled". 4th International Science Symposium on Science and Consciousness. Retrieved 15 August 2006.
8. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Michael Hawley, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888—1975), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Further reading[edit]

• Katz, Steven T. (1978), "Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism", in Katz, Steven T. (ed.), Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, Oxford university Press
• Forman, Robert K., ed. (1997), The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy, Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780195355116
• Taves, Ann (2009), Religious Experience Reconsidered, Princeton: Princeton University Press

External links[edit]

• Institute for Mystical Experience and Education, including a Mystical Experience Questionnaire on mystical experiences
• Australian Institute of Parapsychology, AIPR Information Sheet: Mystical Experiences
• D. W. Shrader, Seven Characteristics of Mystical Experiences, personal account and theoretical exploration

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