Dialectic
Apr 8th, 2005, 06:10 AM
This post details Wilber's stance on absolute cross-cultural/ religious enlightenment. This addresses criticisms that, for example, Taoist, Buddhist, Sufi, and Christian Mystical insight should not be considered comparable, are fundamentally different, and that anyone who tries to find or sees commonalities in their conceptions of enlightenment is a dilettante who has no real understanding of the specific culture/ religion.
This post should be of special interest to Sothy; da Tao may wish to check it out out of general intellectual interest and curiosity; Fux, Ram, Kejia, and B may or may not appreciate it, depending on how much they've contemplated this sort of thing already.
I'm going to be directly transcribing Wilber's endnote from page 627-32 of Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality, 2nd ed.:
There is a great deal of semantic and philosophic confusion around the topic of "direct experience," usually centering on the question, does it even exist? Isn't all experience actually mediated by concepts, mental sets, cultural background values, and so forth? Since all knowledge/ experience is situated and mediated, the best we can hope for is a hermeneutic study of individual pockets of "local knowledge," and any transcendental claims, of any sort, are largely unwarranted - or so the argument goes.
This has, among many other things, particularly caused turmoil in the comparative study of mystical experiences. Steven Katz and his colleagues, for example, in a series of articles and books, have made the strong claim that since all experience is mediated - Katz: "There are no pure (i.e., unmediated) experiences" - then there can be no commonalities (or cross-cultural similarities) in mystical experiences. Since each culture and each belief system is different, and these different sets are partially constitutive of the mystical experience, then there is and can be no common mystical experience, and this also, it is said, undercuts the mystical claim to valid or universal knowledge.
This overall general appproach has come loosely to be called "constructivist" - we don't receive knowledge of independent entities, we construct it based on various freeing practices; our basic present experiences are taken up and reworked in a type of neo-Kantian fashion, so that the final display in consciousness is an inseparable mixture of experience and mental-cultural molding.
But this approach suffers, ironically, from not being constructivist enough. To begin with, the dichotomy between experience and construction is a false dichotomy. It is not that there is experience on the one hand and contextual molding on the other. Every experience is a context; every experience, even simple sensory experience, is always already situated, is always already a context, is always already a holon. When Derrida says that "nothing is every simply present," this is true of every holon. As Whitehead would have it, every holon is already a prehensive unification of its entire actual universe: nothing is every simply present (this is also very similar to the Eastern notion of karma, or the past enfolded in the present). Everything is always already a context in a context.
And thus, every holon - and therefore every experience - is always already situated, mediated, contextual. It is not that "original experiences" arrive to be reworked by mental concepts; the original experiences are not original, but a contextual prehensive mediation of boundless contexts. That mind further contextualizes sensory contexts is neither new nor avoidable.
Everything (every holon) is a mediated context, but contexts touch immediately. It does not require "mystical pure consciousness" to be in immediate contact with the data of experience. When any point in the mediated chain is known (or experienced), that knowing or prehending is an immediate event in itself, an immediate "touching." The touching is not a touching of something merely present but rather is itself pure Presence (or prehension). If there were only a mere mediation forever, then nothing would or could ever be known or experienced; there would be nothing to stop the sliding chain from spinning contextually forever (there is no point that it could enter consciousness).
But in any moment of prehension/ experience (and in any domain - sensory, mental, spiritual), there is immediate apprehension of what is given at the moment, and that immediate apprehension is the datum (which William James correctly defined as the given pure experience), and that experiential prehension is pure in the sense that when contexts touch, they touch without further mediation (even if they are always already situated in and as mediated contexts).
At the moment of touch, there is no mediation; if there is mediation, there is no touching. To say everything is merely mediated is simply a fancy modern twist on pure skepticism, which is profoundly self-contradictory (it says, "I have an unshakeable foundation belief that foundations are not possible," which simply allows the skeptic to trash everybody else's beliefs while conveniently leaving his own unexamined).
[To be continued. Perhaps some of you will be able to see where this is going.]
This post should be of special interest to Sothy; da Tao may wish to check it out out of general intellectual interest and curiosity; Fux, Ram, Kejia, and B may or may not appreciate it, depending on how much they've contemplated this sort of thing already.
I'm going to be directly transcribing Wilber's endnote from page 627-32 of Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality, 2nd ed.:
There is a great deal of semantic and philosophic confusion around the topic of "direct experience," usually centering on the question, does it even exist? Isn't all experience actually mediated by concepts, mental sets, cultural background values, and so forth? Since all knowledge/ experience is situated and mediated, the best we can hope for is a hermeneutic study of individual pockets of "local knowledge," and any transcendental claims, of any sort, are largely unwarranted - or so the argument goes.
This has, among many other things, particularly caused turmoil in the comparative study of mystical experiences. Steven Katz and his colleagues, for example, in a series of articles and books, have made the strong claim that since all experience is mediated - Katz: "There are no pure (i.e., unmediated) experiences" - then there can be no commonalities (or cross-cultural similarities) in mystical experiences. Since each culture and each belief system is different, and these different sets are partially constitutive of the mystical experience, then there is and can be no common mystical experience, and this also, it is said, undercuts the mystical claim to valid or universal knowledge.
This overall general appproach has come loosely to be called "constructivist" - we don't receive knowledge of independent entities, we construct it based on various freeing practices; our basic present experiences are taken up and reworked in a type of neo-Kantian fashion, so that the final display in consciousness is an inseparable mixture of experience and mental-cultural molding.
But this approach suffers, ironically, from not being constructivist enough. To begin with, the dichotomy between experience and construction is a false dichotomy. It is not that there is experience on the one hand and contextual molding on the other. Every experience is a context; every experience, even simple sensory experience, is always already situated, is always already a context, is always already a holon. When Derrida says that "nothing is every simply present," this is true of every holon. As Whitehead would have it, every holon is already a prehensive unification of its entire actual universe: nothing is every simply present (this is also very similar to the Eastern notion of karma, or the past enfolded in the present). Everything is always already a context in a context.
And thus, every holon - and therefore every experience - is always already situated, mediated, contextual. It is not that "original experiences" arrive to be reworked by mental concepts; the original experiences are not original, but a contextual prehensive mediation of boundless contexts. That mind further contextualizes sensory contexts is neither new nor avoidable.
Everything (every holon) is a mediated context, but contexts touch immediately. It does not require "mystical pure consciousness" to be in immediate contact with the data of experience. When any point in the mediated chain is known (or experienced), that knowing or prehending is an immediate event in itself, an immediate "touching." The touching is not a touching of something merely present but rather is itself pure Presence (or prehension). If there were only a mere mediation forever, then nothing would or could ever be known or experienced; there would be nothing to stop the sliding chain from spinning contextually forever (there is no point that it could enter consciousness).
But in any moment of prehension/ experience (and in any domain - sensory, mental, spiritual), there is immediate apprehension of what is given at the moment, and that immediate apprehension is the datum (which William James correctly defined as the given pure experience), and that experiential prehension is pure in the sense that when contexts touch, they touch without further mediation (even if they are always already situated in and as mediated contexts).
At the moment of touch, there is no mediation; if there is mediation, there is no touching. To say everything is merely mediated is simply a fancy modern twist on pure skepticism, which is profoundly self-contradictory (it says, "I have an unshakeable foundation belief that foundations are not possible," which simply allows the skeptic to trash everybody else's beliefs while conveniently leaving his own unexamined).
[To be continued. Perhaps some of you will be able to see where this is going.]