Non-conceptual Religious Experience: Continued

I had started a discussion of non-conceptual religious experience earlier (http://pulpitumvulpei.blogspot.com/2010/09/non-conceptual-religious-experience.html), and started to think of an alternative way around the issues involved. I'm currently working on the paper supporting that conclusion, so I figured that I would post the sequel here as well.

Traditions of any sort, let alone religious traditions, are not actually closed off from each other. They do engage in dialogue, and they do find similarities amongst themselves and occasionally borrow practices and modes of expression. This is as much a part of the formative influence on experience as anything else. We must also look at ways in which the different religions talk about their experiences amongst each other. This will not always lead to similarities - indeed, a good deal of the time such discussions turn polemical - but sometimes it does, and both these elements (of similarity and of dissimilarity) must be preserved in order to do the traditions justice in their own self-conceptions.

Starting from the external aspects of experience, we are not stuck in externals. We can look at the way in which a given tradition shapes both the experience itself and its interpretation, but the experience is no longer interchangeable as it would be under the theory of extrinsic evidence. Once it can be matched up with elements from a different tradition, the experience gains a certain level of independence from the tradition which shaped it and provides some measure of evidence for something in itself. This, however, does not lead to the theory of intrinsic evidence insofar as the experience is not completely independent from the tradition either.

As an illustration, we can look at the Pythagorean theorem. There still can be seen to be some experience associated with "discovering the Pythagorean theorem". Similar enough experiences were encountered in the Greek, Indian, and Chinese traditions, each using different mathematical methods and different standards of rigor. In particular, the Greek tradition focused on strict logical proofs, while the Indian and Chinese traditions resorted to more empirical methods with more of a communal sense of how one goes about doing math. These different practices lead to a different characterization of "discovery of the Pythagorean theorem", to the extent that Indian and Chinese methods may not be appreciated as mathematical by someone steeped with the Euclidean Greek tradition.

One could then quibble with the Indians, and say that their discovery of the Pythagorean theorem could not be the same as that of the Greeks', since an essential element of the former is a strictly rational basis while the former uses empirical methods of proof. The contradictory phenomena would supposedly disprove any similarity of experience. Despite this logical analysis, however, the different traditions have been able to come together and agree that they have something similar in this theorem. Therefore, precisely through the assessments within the traditions and their own practices and not by presupposing some a priori realm of mathematics, we can talk about a shared experience not reducible to any single tradition even though descriptions of it within the different traditions conflict.

The conceptualizable portion of the evidence is still something mediated by the traditions. We still cannot look directly at a non-conceptual experience and have support for concepts. It is only in looking at the ways in which similarities appear across the traditions and as mediated by them that we can have any idea of what evidence the experience itself provides. As a result, the experience itself is never directly rendered conceptual, nor is it ever exhausted - it is always possible that something similar enough would show up in a new tradition with its own sets of practices and beliefs through which it understands the experience.