In my posts on religious experience, I had been focusing on how there might be dialogue about non-conceptual experiences specifically. As was pointed out to me, however, it is far from clear what "non-conceptual" might be. On the one extreme, it could refer to any experience. I cannot tell anyone what "red" is - they must see it for themselves. So if "conceptual" implies "communicable by means of speech/concepts alone", then most things (or perhaps all) would be non-conceptual.
That doesn't seem to help us too much, though, since there appears to be some content to "non-conceptuality". What about the nature of (fill in goal of particular religion here)? That is something neither experienced in this life, nor is it something we could put together from anything in this life presumably (heaven would always exceed our expectations, for example). Or how about "go to church/synagogue/mosque/temple/etc. and your life will make sense"? This one is more difficult. Presumably we will eventually be able to form concepts of an afterlife, and so it is only accidentally non-conceptual. The directive to do something for life to make sense is, by contrast, a command cloaked in the language of a statement. There might be a concept associated with it, but there is also a dissociation between the concept and the experience which one has by following the directive. This is actually a quite interesting topic, especially since it relates to much more than a rather specific form of experience such as I am discussing here. But it is not yet the type of non-conceptuality I am interested in.
I was talking with someone yesterday about math, and I think that there is something there which can come closer to what I am talking about (for a more detailed discussion, see here and perhaps here). We talk about infinite numbers in mathematics, but there is a sense in which all that they show is that we never really talk about the infinite. There is always a larger "infinite" numeral, in fact an "infinite" number of them (whatever that might mean). Any attempt to capture the infinite fails to truly capture it, but must always delimit it in some fashion. Our actual references to the infinite does not refer to the infinite in itself, but rather to the way in which we find that everything that we encounter in insufficient. We are always referring to finite things in describing the "infinite" (and even to talk about describing it is to allow an infelicity of speech).
In this sense, we never have a concept of the "infinite" in itself. Similarly, Heidegger's discussion of the "nothing" is not of an object (since it makes no sense to make "nothing" an object since it is not a thing), but rather of the "nihilation" of beings - that is, we are talking about a particular manner of what is, of how meanings slip away and things recede from us, and only in talking about beings can we in circumlocutions talk of "nothing". There is no way of having a referential concept of the "nothing" or of the "infinite".
So what would a "non-conceptual experience" look like? Not being a practicing mystic myself, I cannot quite say (although they say that they can't say either). Maybe we could think of it like this: even though we never truly find the mathematical infinite, we have some intuitive grasp of the paucity of concepts - not just of the concepts we do have, but of any possible concept we could have. There is a part of us that jumps out of the particular way of thinking about things and takes hold of the whole, even if only to immediately lose it. Any attempt to describe this whole then fails, and we can only think about it by looking at the parts, in their difference, their strife, and their lack. Even in having the experience, then, one does not have something they can conceptualize and refer to. Two mystics can refer to "the mystical experience", but any conceptual content even for them will still be of what happens to beings, to the finite, etc., and not of the ultimate and infinite. So perhaps "non-conceptual" would mean that, even if there might be a concept of it in a sense, such a concept has for content something other than its purported "referent"?
2 comments:
Interesting -- so if I understand you the content of the concept would be the parts, and their relationship to one another, and the referent would be the whole, which is grasped only via the incompleteness of the parts?
This seems to be an inversion of the Cartesian notion that imperfection is known only via the idea of perfection -- an idea that for him is a simple given, available to us all -- totally rational and ordinary -- not mystical at all.
Here I think Descartes is closer than you are to the traditional neoplatonic position -- that without some noetic grasp of unity as such, we would not be able to intellectually recognize such tbings as a whole apple pie.
But of course Plotinus -- if not others -- would take there to be possible a nonconceptual grasp of the One which is going to be available to only a very few -- and it is the possibility of this sort of experience that, I take it, you are wondering about. The situation is complicated here. If I understand the Plotinian position -- and I probably don't -- it would be that even the recognition of the unity of the pie does presuppose the souls unification with the source of all unity -- but in a way that is hidden from the surface level of one's awareness -- that the mystical experience is a matter of coming to realize what is already, always, being experienced within the depths of one's being. Your discussion, in contrast, apparently deals with such an experience as something that you either have or you don't -- like the perception of "red."
In some ways, this might be an inversion of the Cartesian position on an epistemological level - we know perfection through imperfection - but that is only because his position works on the ontological level - it is perfection that allows the imperfect to be. The parts are what they are as the whole, which is why they have the character of being intrinsically imperfect. If the whole were not ontologically prior, then the parts would be only accidentally imperfect and so wouldn't be able to tell us anything.
I want to say something closer to what Plotinus says - after all, most of the mystical traditions I've looked at want to say that their experience in a way is continuous with what everyone else experiences. But at the same time, it is also discontinuous, and I'm wrestling with how to express that paradox. It seems to come back to the issue of how the One brings forth everything else. If you make it the cause, it would seem to be tainted with the character of the caused, or else how could it cause this particular emanation? But if you don't make it the cause, how is it related to anything else, and what sense does it possibly have?
I was leaning more toward the second approach here (mainly inspired by Damascius), but I have no idea how to reconcile the different aspects which seem to all have to be there.
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