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Negotiating the Nature of Mystical Experience, Guided by James and Tillich

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Abstract

The nature of mystical experience has been hotly debated. Essentialists divide into two camps: 1) immediate identity beyond any subject-object structure 2) the mystical object maintaining some distinctness at the point of contact. Paul Tillich’s mystical a priori has some affinities with the former, while William James’ model of religious experience coheres only with the latter. Opposing the essentialists are constructivists. After noting some ironies of the constructivist position, this article elaborates difficulties with 1) the traditional model of pure identity with the divine by certain mystics, 2) the Tillichian universal mystical awareness, and 3) the Jamesian direct perceptual model. Finally, it proposes that the human body and brain mediate mystical experience, which consists of a distinctive sense of bodily harmony conjoined with openness to the potentialities of an integrated environment, involving distinctive neurological processes.

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Notes

  1. This does not mean that religious symbols are arbitrary for the individual believer. Rather that, in principle, any portion of finite reality can become revelatory or symbolic depending on particular circumstances.

  2. Unwittingly, some radical postmodernists or poststructuralists end up reinscribing the error of the incidental nature of these human mediators through an unbridled constructivism, though now there is no external object to reach (see Nikkel 2010:13–19, 31–36, 81–82).

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  1. Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of North Carolina at Pembroke, Pembroke, NC, 28372-1510, USA

    David Nikkel

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  1. David Nikkel
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Correspondence to David Nikkel.

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Nikkel, D. Negotiating the Nature of Mystical Experience, Guided by James and Tillich. SOPHIA 49, 375–392 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-010-0191-7

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