*Religious Experience: From Public Discourse to Responsibility and Courage

Religious Experience: From Public Discourse to Responsibility and Courage

working paper
Bosco Bae

Personal experience is often the basis for faith in a religious tradition. While there are debates about the nature of these experiences, there are also debates about the place of religious discourse in the political decision making processes and law. According to Jurgen Habermas, the contemporary task of the liberal state is to go beyond a ‘modus vivendi’ in search for a ‘universalistic legal order’ and ‘egalitarian societal morality.’ In addition to finding a neutral ground of discourse, there is a parallel task of responsibility and courage rooted at the level of identity and social interaction.

Introduction

            Experience has always been a topic of significance in the area of epistemology. Through a personalized space-time continuum and a distinct stream of consciousness, a relationship is built bridging our sense of self to the world around us. Memorable events provide a source of meaning in a coherent framework relevant to the individual. Religious experiences are no different in providing a sense of meaning for the nature of life and what lies beyond. Many have set out to explain what these religious experiences are, how they become possible, and what they entail for other questions in the philosophy of religion. The current debate on religious experiences has largely been divided into two camps: the perennialists and the constructionists. While this paper will provide a brief overview of their positions, it is not the purpose to analyze the relation between experience and knowledge. Rather, I begin with the premise that experience does indeed play a critical role in the formation of beliefs and knowledge, regardless of how and what the role of “reason” is. Religious experiences – how ever way we want to describe, validate, or invalidate them – will continue to provide convincing evidence for the individual in his or her confirmation or affirmation of faith.

Granting legitimacy to this position, my concern is in the appropriation of religious experience, as it contributes to the formation of beliefs and convictions for a religious tradition, within the context of an increasingly globalizing and glocalizing, post-secular society. While acknowledging the possibility of a universal trans-cultural element in religious experiences as well as the necessity of cultural frameworks, religious experiences – regardless of their nature – will continue to be a significant influence and source of meaning for self and identity. Jurgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, take up the task in discussing religious discourse and their place in the political decision-making process. And indeed, this is an important task due to historical, linguistic, and pragmatic concerns, but I would like to argue that there is a parallel task at the level of day to day experience, identity, and social interaction. Here I argue that there is an existential concern of responsibility and courage. That we must hold our identities and belief structures responsible, regardless of where they emanate from, as we are embodied representatives of the choices we make and the identities we take. In doing so, there is an element of courage involved. Without this courage and responsible awareness of our being in relation to society and the content of our representations to others, there is a danger of continuing, reproducing, and re-creating tensions and animosities even if a neutral discourse or official language is created in the political arena.

Religious Experience and the Debate: Perennialists vs. Constructionists

As William James points out in the title of his book, there are “Varieties of Religious Experience” from visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, holistic somatosensory experiences, near-death experiences as well as a variety of methods in the inducement of such religious experiences from meditation, prayer, temporal lobe epilepsy, magnetic stimulation, to drugs and other forms of sensory overload. In another sense, religious experience can also refer to the socialization of persons in a particular religious tradition. The nature of these experiences has been widely debated, and the camps have largely been divided into the Perennialists and the Constructionists. The former argues for a common cross-cultural universal amongst religious experiences that transcend cultural differences, which would also support a ‘God is one’ hypothesis; that we are all on different paths towards the same mountain peak. The latter argues that religious experiences are religious primarily because of the cultural framework and the availability of concepts. In other words, any emotion or experience can be religious if it is appropriated in a religious context, with social and symbolic structures, and/or interpreted through a religious framework.   

The debate is still far from exhausted and pre-mature to definitively claim that it has settled in favor of one camp or the other. Nevertheless, there is insight we can draw from both camps. The possibility of a universal trans-cultural element of religious experiences can provide a common denominator amongst various traditions, cultures, and lifestyles in opening up a discourse. From the constructionist camp, we see how various cultures frame their religious experiences and what areas of life they place significance. Irrespective of how we deliberate the nature of these experiences, the significance of cultural contexts, and how they are induced, these experiences will continue to be foundational as confirming or affirming events for faith in a religious tradition.   

Habermas and Taylor

            In light of religious experiences and various forms of religious discourse, the place of religion in the public sphere of political and legislative decision-making processes has been of recent debate. Charles Taylor proposes that we should not single out religious reasons as a special case and that the discourse across religions have enough similarity within them for mutual understanding. For example, the statement “I’m for the rights of human beings because humans were made in the image of God” is not a specific discourse of one religion but something out of Genesis. There is no one clear denomination that this statement would come from but equally applicable to several. Taylor emphasizes the different kinds of discourse within a religious tradition and that this variety carries the potential to appeal to a discourse within another variety of discourse from a different religious tradition. Taylor gives the example of Martin Luther King Jr., who spearheaded the civil rights movement in the U.S., and made the analogy of civil rights with Exodus. Taylor states that this kind of language appealed to all people regardless of religious tradition.      

            Jurgen Habermas, in contrast, states that religious reasons should be translated into secular reasons for a neutral discourse. He points to the socialization of persons in a particular religious tradition which gives rise to religious convictions and reasons. This creates difficulty in understanding certain forms of terminology. For example, it would be difficult to explain what “revelation” means to someone who is not of that background. Whereas secular reasons, he states, are not dependent upon the socialization to a specific community. Because of these discrepancies in religious language, Habermas states that “religious speech in the political public sphere needs translation if its content should enter and affect justification and formulation of binding political decisions that are enforceable by law.”

            Both Taylor and Habermas agree that a common discourse and mutual understanding is necessary in these decision-making processes. The aim of what Habermas calls a “post-secular society” can be stated in this way:    

“Since the liberal state depends on a political integration of the citizens which goes beyond a mere modus vivendi, the differentiation of these various memberships must be more than an accommodation of the religious ethos to laws imposed by the secular society in such a way that religion no longer makes any cognitive claims. Rather the universalistic legal order and the egalitarian societal morality must be inherently connected to the fellowship ethos in such a way that the one consistently proceeds from the other.”

The concern here is no longer something limited to the political and legal sphere. A “universalistic legal order” and an “egalitarian societal morality,” inherently connected a “fellowship ethos” points to an underlying social concern amongst persons of different backgrounds in a globalizing and glocalizing context. While the discussion about the place of religion in the public sphere is indeed an important and necessary task, these discussions are still abstract from what we can relate to in our personal day to day lives. Even in the event of an agreed form of discourse in the political and legal sphere, without critically looking at the culture of our interactions, inter-subjective spaces, our social habits of thought and critically looking at the culture of power, the established discourse will only go so far; past prejudices and tensions between and amongst traditions carry the danger of re-constituting themselves. The additional task is not only the development of a public discourse and how to approach it, as Habermas and Taylor discuss (and if we consider Foucault, a criticality directed at neutral institutions), but also a reflexive task of responsibility and courage. This is the task of persons living in, participating, and reproducing, the cultures that intersect and interact, which give tangible substance to concepts like morality and culture.  

Responsibility

            No matter how much we want to attribute to ourselves our individuality, we are still inevitably part of a larger whole. We may know that we, as individuals, are different from others. And true enough, we are all distinct persons in our own right. Even identical twins, with the same genetic makeup, will have differences despite their uncanny similarities. The personal creativities, proclivities of being and expression cannot be neglected. Nevertheless, we are participants and constituents of society; units of cultural reproduction, if you will. In this sense, as Paul Tillich says, the “self and world are correlated and so are individualization and participation.”

            The participation in culture and our individuality within it begins at the most basic and mundane; from catching the bus, going to the supermarket, the post office, we abide by the norms of how to say hello, and have tacit presuppositions of what is taboo and what is not taboo. But this extends further when we begin to consider our channels of information, which informs our understanding of the rest of the world. We may place our trust in these vehicles of information and hold them as true because we consider them reliable or have no reason to disbelieve them. Thousands upon thousands of things happen in our society and around the world but we are only given selective information. This is to say that as much information we are given, the information we are not given is equally interesting. And yet, it is the provided information that shapes our understanding of persons of other cultures. At the same time, other countries develop their own understanding of who we are as well. Through various sources – the news on television, movies, newspapers, the internet etc. – we develop certain views of other people and they do the same of us. In social interaction, we create impressions and further those understandings in the minds of others. It is in this arena of social interaction, that inter-subjective space, where we should have a sense of responsibility. Becoming aware of what we represent, how we are seen, how our views affect others, and the responsibility to acknowledge these stereotypes as well as the responsibility to create new impressions and areas of inter-subjective commonality.

              In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, “every man [is] in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his shoulders. And, when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible for only his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men. […] To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen […] Our responsibility is thus greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole. […] I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion man.” This kind of responsibility that Sartre talks about extends to all the categories by which we identify ourselves: as a person, as a gender, ethnic background, nationality, religious tradition, sexual orientation, profession, and so on. This is not to say that we should conceive of a singular definitive lifestyle that everybody should have but rather that we should consider the position we place other people as well as the values and virtues that we wish to have, respecting all persons, traditions, cultures, and lifestyles. When traveling to a country of radically different norms with a different color people, one’s skin will never be more apparent and one becomes a novelty associated with stereotypical content. At the same time, one’s own habits of thought, expectations, and culture will be put into stark perspective when a life of different norms is experienced. This creates the necessity to consider different ways of life as well as being conscious of what we perpetuate. With our individualization and participation, the actions we take are actively reproducing and re-informing cultural categories as well as their representation. In this sense, we are embodied representatives of our identities.   

   

Courage 

            Such a responsibility, however, does not take away anything from individualization. I am by no means implying that we should be so conscientious that we should be afraid to be who we are, to deny the affirmation of self. Nor does it mean that every single one of us is accountable for the atrocities others commit. What this kind of responsibility does entail is a sense of, what Paul Tillich calls, courage. “Courage is self-affirmation ‘in-spite-of’, that is in spite of that which tends to prevent the self from affirming itself.” The self-affirmation that Tillich talks about is not a call to be selfish or self-centered but rather a call for authenticity, for a transcendence of ontic categories for virtue. That is, apart from our differences, it is the courage to participate in the social construction and re-construction of cultural norms in spite of those institutions and social categories we identify with, especially when they take positions and views we do not agree with.  

Tillich sets out the task for Christian theology, “There should be no question of what Christian theology has to do in this situation. It should decide for truth against safety, even if the safety is consecrated and supported by the churches. Certainly there is a Christian conformism […] But this should not induce Christian theologians to identify Christian courage with the courage to be as a part. They should realize that the courage to be as oneself is the necessary corrective to the courage to be as a part - even if they rightly assume that neither of these forms of the courage to be gives the final solution." This is a task for any religious tradition, to take the stance of courage and truth over safety and conformity. Of course, this is dependent on what a tradition regards as “truth,” but at a social level, there are local and global concerns of justice. Cornel West talks about courage as the “enabling virtue that allows one to realize other virtues like love, hope, and faith.” To have courage, he says, “is to be willing to look [at] circumstances and muster the will to overcome fear, never to fully erase and eliminate the fear, but [to] overcome [it] so that fear does not have the last word or […] push one into conformity, complacency or cowardice.” It is this kind of courage that will allow an active sense of culture in the direction of truth and responsibility, as opposed to one of judgmental presumptions. Social Psychologist, Daniel Batson, states that we always tend to interpret other persons’ actions through internal causes, such as personality traits, states of mind, or ideologies, etc. While we interpret our own actions through external causes – this or that happened so I did this; that we explain our own actions as reactionary. This entails a further necessity to understand perspective as well as the courage to be critical of ourselves, our society, and the world. Courage is necessary to be open to persons, different from our own, rather than allowing stereotypes, and whatever information we have, judge what others are about.

Responsibility, Courage, and approaching the Funk together

            In responsibility and courage, there is an underlying sense of hope that persons of different traditions, cultures, lifestyles, can approach each other as fellow persons prior to any presumptive categorical classification. Romantic the notion may be, without the courage to empathize and consider other perspectives, as well as a responsibility to hold one’s self affirmation as representative of a culture, the polemics of peace will continue to fall short of reaching its potential. U.S. historian Howard Zinn said that “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.” Society is already moving in a direction. Events around the world have brought Taylor and Habermas to discuss how different religious traditions and the secular can meaningfully speak to each other. This is a critical task in progressing towards a state where different traditions can converse meaningfully and construct a “universalistic legal order” and an “egalitarian societal morality,” which connects to a “fellowship ethos” in a globalizing as well as a glocalizing (a diversification of local contexts) society. Regardless of whether we believe that certain experiences are valid or not, legitimate or otherwise, experiences will continue to inform our worlds – whether it is a particular culture or religious tradition – and people will continue to find meaning within their respective frameworks of plausibility. The parallel task to Habermas and Taylor, is the responsibility of self-affirmation within the interplay between individualization and participation. As well as the courage to affirm one’s self in spite of, and the courage to overcome the fear that pushes one towards conformity, complacency, or cowardice, such that the judgmental nature of society shifts the cultural habits towards a fellowship ethos and common concerns of justice.