Response to Robert K. C.

Forman

BRUCEJANZ

Summary: The hermeneutical and the epistemological paradigms

for understanding mystical experience are not easily translated into
each other. The hermeneutical model has the advantage in that it
shifts the emphasis from explanation to understanding. Mystical expe­
rience, namely, the falling away of the factical conditions of human ex­
istence and the meeting with Infinite Being, cannot be reduced to
epistemology, nor does it adhere to the categories of knowledge. Mysti­
cal experience is not about content at all; the mystic understands
Being without concepts.
Resume: Les modeles hermeneutiques et epistemologiques utilises
afin de comprendre I'experience mystique, sont difficilement traduisi­
bles de l'un al'autre. Le modele hermeneutique offre I'avantage de se
distancer de l'explication afin de mettre l'accent sur la comprehen­
sion. L'experience mystique represente un depart de la condition
d'existence facticale humaine et une rencontre avec l'Etre Infini. Elle
ne peut etre reduite a l'epistemologie ou adherer a aucune categorie
de savoir. L'experience mystique ne se rapporte pas au contenu: Ie
mystique comprend I'Etre sans concepts.

Robert K. C. Forman's response to my article! highlights some omissions

and errors in my argument. I am grateful for this, and in what follows I
want to acknowledge where he is correct. His useful corrections, however,
do not strike at the heart of the difference between regarding the mystical
experience as essentially an epistemological event and regarding it as essen-

See BruceJanz, "Mysticism and Understanding: Steven Katz and His Critics," Studies in Reli­
gion / Sciences Religieuses, 24, 1 (1995): 77-94.

Bruce Janz is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Augustana University College, 4901 46 Ave­
nue, Camrose, AB T4V 2R3.

Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 25/2 (1996): 209-13

© 1996 Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion / Corporation Canadienne des Sciences Religieuses
210 Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 25/2 1996

tially hermeneuticaL I wish to argue that the commitment to epistemologi­

cal metaphors (a commitment Forman himself may have) precludes a her­
meneutical model from being taken seriously. In effect, they are different
paradigms for understanding mystical experience, and neither is easily
translatable into the other.
That is certainly the problem I was faced with as I wrote the article. The
solution at the time was to use the trope of reading a novel to illuminate a
hermeneutical model of mysticism. Forman correctly observes that the
image of reading is a limited one. For one thing, reading is mediated by
language of some sort. For another, it seems a pale comparison to the
power and immediacy of the mystical experience.
The classic Diltheyan distinction between explanation and understand­
ing may help make my intent clear. My argument is that mystical experi­
ence has been regarded as the object of "scientific" study, and as such the
experience has required explanation. That explanation might come from
outside the subject and the experience. This is what "purists" suspect that
constructivists are doing-giving an account that naturalizes (and hence
explains) the experience by appealing to tradition, theology or culture,
thereby draining the experience of all real significance. Or, the explana­
tion might come from inside the subject and experience. This is what con­
textualists suspect "purists" are doing-either giving an account of the
inner logic of the experience which violates Ockham's razor, or more
often, rejecting all explanatory accounts (and thereby affirming explana­
tion as being the central issue by its absence), and at the same time putting
the experience beyond understanding as well.
In both cases, the issue is explanation or the lack of it, along with the
assumption that explanation is the prerequisite for understanding. This is
exactly the point I want to question using the metaphor of reading. Expla­
nation is noetic and must be so due to the history of the connection
between the met.aphor of sensation and knowledge. Understanding is her­
meneutic and requires a different metaphor. I am suggesting that any
knowing in the mystical experience must take understanding into
account. 2

2 My use of Ricoeur betrays that I am not completely against explanation. Ricoeur tries to
mediate between the two by proposing a dialectical relationship from preunderstanding­
validation (explanation)-comprehension. Exploring that connection would take more
space than I have available right now. My purpose here is to put a hermeneutical model on
the table. I should forestall a possible objection. In the recent Library of Living Philoso­
phers volume on Ricoeur (Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed., The Philosophy ofPaul Ricoeur [Chicago:
Open Court, 1995]), Ricoeur responds to an essay by Lik Kuen Tong ("Act, Sign, and C.on­
sciousness: Thinking Along with Ricoeur," p. 511-27) by arguing against Tong's attempt to
ground Ricoeur's philosophy in mysticism. Tong is attempting to say that Ricoeur's her­
meneutics is essentially mystical; I am trying to say that mysticism is essentially hermeneu­
tic. These are different projects.
Jam I Response to Robert K. C. Forman 211

It should be mentioned, though, that there is an ambiguity of stand­

point here. Are we trying to make sense out of mysticism as non-mystics
(Le., from the outside), or are we trying to make the sense that the mystic
makes of his or her experience? The tension between explanation and
understanding applies to the view from the outside, and I would like to
maintain that explanation is not the prerequisite for understanding there.
Purists might argue, however, that the real issue is the nature of the mystics'
experience for themselves. The explication of the "inner sense" is where
the contextualist falls short, and the purist seems to have the upper hand.
This too, however, has been governed by epistemological metaphors. I
would maintain that the hermeneutic model applies here as well, although
somewhat differently.
Understanding can be contrasted with interpretation(s). Heidegger and
Gadamer, for example, portray Being and Truth (respectively) as underly­
ing the horizon or tradition that is illuminated by particular existentiell or
dialogical interpretations. Hermeneutics is the laying-bare of Being/Truth,
a process that both uncovers and covers up at the same time in complex
ways. This presupposes that human existence is rooted in specific condi­
tions. We exist in a social/technological milieu that places limits around
our human way of being in the world and at the same time makes particular
interpretations possible. So, human being in the world is the dialectic of
the particular interpretations we make with the field of possibilities.
~Nhat if that field of possibilities is suddenly opened up and the factical
conditions of existence fall away for a moment? What if the individual's
existence is suddenly met with infinite Being. rather than bounded by facti­
cal conditions? It seems to me that this is the mystical experience. It can
only happen within a history of self-interpretation, and yet it is unique. The
experience both confirms concepts of the culture and tradition (the argu­
ment of contextualists) and also overthrows them (the argument of the
purists). What is important is that the experience cannot be reduced to
epistemology. nor does it adhere to the categories of knowledge.
It is this hermeneutic that offers possibilities for understanding mysti­
cism, or for characterizing the (self-)understanding that happens within
mysticism. The mystic often does report a path, a preparation, some kind of
anticipation, even in the case of "pure" experience. Is this irrelevant to the
experience itself? Why would it be? We do not have to think of context as
causation (as the "constructivist" label implies and many writers continue
to use). It is not explanation. It is not content. Each of these implicitly
assumes a sensory, epistemological metaphor, in which experience either
has content or it does not. In this epistemological metaphor, mysticism is
the experience of seeing without any object of sight, as opposed to sensa­
tion, which is seeing with an o~ject of sight.
212 Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 25/2 1996

Forman's understanding of pure mysticism does seem implicitly to sug­

gest that there is an object-consciousness itself. Several times he refers
to consciousness' knowledge of itself, often in context of talking about the
intentional nature of "normal" consciousness. Our own consciousness, he
says, can only by "point(ed) to through introspection," it cannot be
handed to you.
But note how this consciousness occurs, in Forman's account. We point
it out to each other by pointing to our own introspectiveness. As he says, "I
can only define 'consciousness' by using clues to refer readers (or comput­
ers) introspectively towards that consciousness with which they already
have an intimate familiarity, the sort of familiarity that can only come from
.. 'having' a consciousness." So which comes first? Do we experience our
own consciousness first, and then relate to others by referring to this
shared-yet-unique experience? Are we really individual consciousnesses
first, and do we only later find ourselves in community? This perhaps is the
most troublesome point in Forman's alternative to my account. He seems
to be arguing for reductionism, in which we encounter the world and oth­
ers with an already developed sense of self-consciousness.
But what if the hermeneuticists of suspicion are right? What if Freud,
Marx, Derrida and others, who want to challenge the integrity and self­
evident nature of the self, have really identified a problem with traditional
accounts of consciousness? An account of mysticism that depends on the
putative unity of consciousness assumes a hermeneutic of trust which may
itself be undermined by a mystical experience. Hinging a theory of mysti­
cism on a questionable theory of the self seems problematic. The problem
is the result of suggesting that the nature of mystical experience is the intui­
tive, immediate experience of one's own consciousness.
Immediate awareness is not literally sensation, any more than my origi­
nal account was literally about reading. However, it is still epistemological,
and still uses the implicit analogy of sensory experience, in which there is a
perceiver and a perceived. Collapsing these two into one does not question
the assumption of the epistemological nature of the experience.
The conclusion I draw from Forman's model is that, despite objections
to the contrary, he really does have an intentional account of consciousness
and by extension of mystical experience. The subject!object split has not
been abolished in pure consciousness, but rather only the object has been
abolished. Now the subject reflects on itself and its ground, and that is just
as problematic as before. While the explicit issue of sensation has been
dealt with, the more subtle issue of sensation (that it informs epistemology)
still exists. The issue is still "content or no content?" It is the difference
between the issue for most accounts of mysticism, that mysticism is about
self-knowledge, and a hermeneutical account, that it is about self-under­
standing. The moral is that all accounts of mysticism must take into account
Janz / Response to Robert K C. Forman 213

their own status as accounts-the phenomenology is hermeneutic, not

descriptive.
My contention is that mystical experience, pure or otherwise, is not
about content at all, either in presence or in absence. Any knowledge that
comes out of mystical experience comes after the fact, as a result of later
interpretation of the experience. No mystic ever gets knowledge; he or she
gets understanding, later worked out as knowledge. That understanding
does not come in pieces, and hence cannot be called "constructed"; it is
not reducible to its contextual precedents, and hence cannot be called
"contextual" in a narrow sense; at the same time, its context is relevant,
and hence cannot be called pure.
To turn the point positively, I would argue that mystical experience is
both pure and contextualized. It is pure in the sense that the experience is
unique, not reducible to any cause or rational explanation. Furthermore,
all knowledge appears later as the result of interpretation. No knowledge,
either theological or cultural, constructs the mystical experience. At the
same time, though, the experience occurs in a context that makes it pos­
sible. This is where negation, or forgetting, or abgescheidenheit enters the
picture. The understanding which is the mystical experience may, for some,
give new depth to traditional doctrine, but the experience is not new
insight, either. It is the spark which Eckhart talks about, Boehme's "flash."3
Before the mystical experience, we cover up and distort Being with con­
cepts, while experiencing those distortions existentially; within the expe­
rience, the mystic understands Being without concepts and the distortions
are released; after, he or she lets Being shine forth through concepts
(among other things). This is not new knowledge, nor should the experi­
ence be understood as lack of knowledge. It is both unique, in that a per­
son's showing and understanding of Being is unique; yet it is situated, in
that there is a path, a tradition, and later interpretation that arises. The ini­
tial understanding is that which is revealed through all interpretations; the
interpretations give necessary flesh to the understanding. Any knowledge
requires the grounding of the hermeneutical base (as all knowledge does);
the mystical experience is just the sudden shift of hermeneutical bases.

3 I also am driven to use sense metaphors here. That may be inevitable, part ofthe ineffability
of the experience. But the real problem lies in the epistemological assumptions.