James on Mystical Experience — Epoche B2
Stace's Common Core Is Not James's Typology A genealogy worth checking The philosophy of mysticism in the twentieth century is usually told as a sequence [1] . William James [2] , in the two lectures on mysticism in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), identifies the marks by which mystical states may be recognised. W. T. Stace, in Mysticism and Philosophy (1960), develops the project into a claim about a universal core beneath the world's traditions. Steven Katz [3] , in 'Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism' (1978), attacks the core, arguing that a mystic's tradition shapes the experience and not merely the report of it. The dispute between the last two has run ever since, and James is credited as the founder of the enterprise. This essay argues that the first step of the sequence is wrong. Stace's typology is not a development of James's marks; it is a replacement, and it classifies a different kind of thing. James sorts states by how they present themselves to the subject who has them. Stace sorts experiences by what they contain. The move from one to the other requires a distinction between experience and interpretation which James does not employ and which one of his four marks positively forbids. The question here is therefore not whether mystical experience is ineffable, nor whether the common core exists, but whether the apparatus James built can be used for the job Stace gave it. The marks, and what they are marks of James lists four, and the list is often quoted without the qualifications attached to it. They are ineffability — the subject reports that the state defies expression; the noetic quality — the state presents itself as a state of knowledge, an insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect; transiency — it does not last; and passivity — the subject's own will feels held in abeyance. Two qualifications matter. James says the first two entitle a state to be called mystical for his purposes, and that the second two are less sharply marked, though usually found. And every one of the four is a report about how the state stands to its subject. Ineffability is a claim about the subject's relation to language. The noetic quality is a claim about how the state feels epistemically. Transiency is a fact about duration. Passivity is a fact about felt agency. None is a claim about what the state is of. This is not accidental. James's declared method in Varieties is to treat religion as the feelings, acts and experiences of individuals in their solitude, and to describe them as a psychologist would. A typology built from how states present is exactly the typology such a method can construct out of first-person reports, and it is the only kind it can construct, since a report gives access to how something seemed and not to what was there. What Stace's division sorts Stace's central distinction is between extrovertive and introvertive mysticism. In the extrovertive kind, the mystic looks outward and perceives a unity in and through the multiplicity of physical objects; the world is still there and is seen as one. In the introvertive kind, the mystic looks inward and arrives at a consciousness emptied of all empirical content — an undifferentiated unity, which Stace treats as the higher and more complete type. Around this he assembles a list of common characteristics: the sense of objectivity or reality, blessedness and peace, a feeling of the holy, paradoxicality, and ineffability as alleged by the mystics. Compare the two lists and the difference in subject matter is plain. 'The mystic perceives unity through the multiplicity of objects' is a specification of content. So is 'a consciousness void of empirical content'. To apply either, one must know what the experience was of, and the division cannot be run on presentation alone: a state may present as ineffable, noetic, brief and passive whether its content is the unity of the world, the void, God, or nothing that can be said. James's marks do not discriminate between Stace's types, and could not, because they were not built to look at content. Stace's project also needs a further move that James's does not. To find a core common to traditions whose reports differ, one must separate the experience from the interpretation the mystic's tradition supplies, keep the first and discount the second. That separation is the engine of the common-core thesis, and it is the thing Katz later denies. It is not present in James at all. Why the noetic mark blocks the separation The absence is not an oversight that could be repaired. James's second mark makes the repair impossible. The noetic quality, as James states it, is that mystical states are states of knowledge: they are illuminations, revelations, full of significance, and they carry with them a curious sense of authority. The insight is not an inference the subject draws afterwards. It is part of what the state is, on James's account, in the way that the felt givenness he calls passivity is part of what the state is. Now consider what Stace's method must do with a Christian mystic's report of union with God and a Buddhist practitioner's report of an emptiness. The reported contents are incompatible; to reach a core, the method must treat those contents as interpretation and set them aside, retaining an undifferentiated unity that neither report says. But the contents in question are what the state was noetically about. Removing them does not strip a layer from the experience; it removes the mark. What is left is a state that was brief, ineffable, passive, and no longer a state of insight into anything — which is not the phenomenon James was describing. The traditional reply is that James makes room for something like interpretation under the heading of over-belief. He does, and the two are not the same operation. An over-belief, in James's usage, is doctrine erected beyond what one's experience delivers: the theology, the metaphysics, the account of what the