Transcendent Experiences in Society's Transformation

What Is the Proper Role of Transcendent Experiences in Society's Transformation?  

Too often the private insights borne of transcendent (putatively "mystical") experience are elevated over the demands of public justifiability. This project seeks to develop an epistemological framework for holding knowledge claims originating in transcendent experience accountable to the demands of discursive rationality.

The profound impacts of transcendent experiences on society are indisputable. Joan of Arc, Najmuddin Kubra, Dōgen, and Ralph Waldo Emerson are just a few examples of mystics whose transcendent experiences redounded to society’s positive transformation. The trouble, however, is in the way these and countless other mystics across the world’s religious traditions claim their transcendent experiences are ineffable, so thus are immune to discursive scrutiny.

The goal of this project will be to demonstrate how ineffability is not simply an unanalyzable characteristic of mystical experience, but an artifact of the peculiar grammatical rules that govern the use of concepts in particular religious contexts.    

Through a constructive account, the project will seek to show how the private truth content revealed through transcendent experience cannot be separated from the public search for justification. Truth claims grounded in mystical experience, specifically, represent the habits of practical reasoning grounded in religious communities, wherein concepts of normativity and responsibility find their standard of authority in discursive practices of reason-giving and exchange.

This project may result in a theoretically robust method for testing the truth claims of transcendent experiences, and thus a means whereby we might reasonably hold the insight engendered by these experiences accountable in the public sphere.  

Project point person: Russell Powell, Postdoctoral Fellow, Philosophy of Religion