The Problem of Perception and the Experience of God

Toward a Theological Empiricism

Sameer Yadav

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781451488852
• eBook ISBN: 9781451496710
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

A fundamental problem in Christian theology has been that of determining whether God can be an object of experience and how we should account for God's empirical availability to us. The central claim in this work is that there is a radical mistake in many contemporary accounts that require grounding a theological story of God's availability to us in experience in a prior general philosophical theory of perception. Instead, it is argued that the philosophical problem of perception is a pseudoproblem and that in virtue of their entanglement with that pseudoproblem, the influential accounts of Christian religious experience, such as in Jean-Luc Marion, Kevin Hector, or William P. Alston, are at bottom incoherent. The study concludes with a new reading of Gregory of Nyssa and his theology of the spiritual senses, which is free from the bewitchment of the problem of perception. This critical retrieval of Nyssen opens the path toward a viable contemporary theological empiricism—one that characterizes both tasks of theological contemplation and spiritual formation in terms of a receptivity and responsiveness to the perceptible presence and agency of God in the world.

3

Toward a Theological Empiricism

6

McDowell’s Naturalized Platonism as a Minimal Empiricism

In part 2, I showed how McDowell’s deconstruction of the problem of perception can function as a wide-ranging critique of the theorizing that Christian philosophers and theologians have taken up to make sense of our perceptual relation to God. Much contemporary theological thinking about the structure of intentionality in virtue of which what we think, say, and do manages to be about God turns on a prior commitment to one of the poles in the vicious oscillation between Givenism and Coherentism. More particularly, contemporary theological debates about whether to construe the perceptual grounds of such intentionality in apophatic or cataphatic terms turn out to be nonstarters. They fail to present us with a coherent candidate for an account of religious experience whose theological merits we might then go on to evaluate.

6.1 A Minimal Empiricism

Thus far, I have been focusing attention on the critical dimension of McDowell’s views, his rejection of the mutually motivating oscillation between Givenism and Coherentism, seeing them as incoherent ways of denying the necessarily fitting and frictional intentional relation between our thoughts and the layout of reality. The incoherence of both poles of the vicious oscillation uncovers the fact that, at a minimum, our ordinary conception of experience requires us to hold together, on the one hand, a proper fittingness between our perceptual intake and the normative concepts by way of which we are responsive to that intake in what we think, say, and do and, on the other hand, a proper friction between our perceptual intake and the world. To say that in experience we are capable of taking in the world in such a way that we think, say, and do can (but need not always) successfully direct us on the world and that in experience the world itself determines the correctness or incorrectness of what we think, say, and do is not to espouse a theory. Rather, it merely restates a trivial truism about experience—on the order of “bachelors are unmarried.” It reminds us of a triviality that we cannot sensibly deny, and each pole of the oscillation is an object lesson about the sort of nonsense we fall into when we attempt to deny it.

The oscillation itself thus functions for McDowell as a criterion for a minimal empiricism—a minimally required commitment to fit and friction without which we lapse back into the oscillation. To avoid the problem of perception is thus not a matter of solving any prior philosophical problem or giving a philosophical explanation of how it is possible for our human perceptual capacities to deliver the world to thought and to find in it reasons to think this or say that or do the other. It is instead simply to give an analysis of what we must minimally affirm to properly fix the notion of “human perceptual capacities” in the first place as a capacity for the conjunction of fittingness and friction that Givenism and Coherentism only manage to disjoin (thereby failing not only to explain such a capacity but also to locate a coherent explanandum in the first place).^[1]

6.1.1 Fit, Friction, and a Minimal Empiricism

So what conception of the logical inseparability of fit and friction are Givenists and Coherentists nonsensically attempting to deny? Coherentism affirms the fittingness between our empirical concepts and empirical content by refusing the idea that the world’s bearing on us in experience furnishes us with nonconceptual mental content that we then somehow convert or incorporate into the normative context of our system of concepts. But in so doing, it denies that empirical thinking can put us in touch with the world at all, since it forces us to understand the world either as a nonconceptual domain that serves as a causal determination external to the reasons we might have to think, say, or do anything or as reducible to our own socially constructed system of concepts and attitudes. Givenism, on the other hand, affirms the friction between our empirical concepts and the empirical content afforded by the world itself by allowing us to internalize the world’s immediate impacts on us, allowing them to function as an imposition on our thinking from the side of the world outside the domain of thought. But in doing so, it denies the irreducibly norm-governed character of our observational thinking as a space of reasons by supplying it with a form of mental content alien to the space of reasons constitutive of our concepts, beliefs, and judgments.^[2]

The oscillations between Givenism and Coherentism make nonsense of our observational thinking by affirming either a fit between perceptual content and belief content incapable of securing friction with the world (Coherentism) or else a friction with the world incapable of securing a fit between perceptual content and belief content (Givenism). To bring this oscillation to rest would at a minimum require that we hold together the friction that Givenism supplies with the fittingness that Coherentism supplies. Such a minimal empiricism would thus involve a single unified understanding of experience that holds onto both that which Coherentism affirms about the normative character of fittingness between perceptual content and belief content without thereby denying friction between perceptual content and the layout of reality itself, and that which Givenism affirms about the friction between perceptual content and the layout of reality itself without thereby denying the normative character of fittingness between perceptual content and belief content. Each pole of the oscillation, it would seem, possesses not merely a half-truth, but half of a logical or grammatical truism regarding the notion of perceptual experience. If we are to make any sense of the idea that in experience the world as it is anyway, whatever anyone happens to think about it, somehow directly presents itself to us in a manner capable of entering into thought, both bits must be coherently coordinated into a single picture.

In order to avoid the incoherence arising from a denial of friction, the Coherentist must acknowledge with the Givenist that our norms of observational thinking are constrained by the world external to thought not merely causally but by our capacities to receive and internalize its impacts on us and incorporate them into our normative thinking. And in order to avoid the incoherence arising from the denial of fit, the Givenist must acknowledge that the form of mental content the external world gives to thought is susceptible of such internalization and incorporation—not ill-suited to the normative character of thought. On McDowell’s diagnosis, both the Givenist and the Coherentist are prevented from acknowledging the relevant neglected dimension of experience by having taken on board the same faulty assumption.

The assumption in question is that the world itself—the layout of reality independent of anything we think or say about it (if it exists at all)^[3]—must be a nonconceptual reality, a domain that does not intrinsically possess the sort of normative character we find in it.^[4] Therefore, either we must deny that our experience of the world is intrinsically conceptually structured, or, if it is, we must take our experience of it as so structured as to be ultimately grounded in a function of human thought rather than in the world itself. This assumption, moreover, is itself constitutive of the problem of perception; it is what generates the very philosophical puzzlement to which Givenism and Coherentism address themselves as responses. Once we assume that a reality that exists independently of all exercises of human conceptual capacities is itself inert of any intrinsically normative structure, we can rightly come to be puzzled about how a reality like that could possibly inform or justify our observational concepts. But if the layout of reality itself is nonconceptual, then it could not inform or justify our observational concepts—the very idea is impossible, and the attempt to entertain it results in nonsense.

The engine that gets the problem of perception going, therefore, is the idea that the empirical world itself is disenchanted or intrinsically inert of meaning and value. If, as we have seen, the presumption of disenchantment prevents Givenism and Coherentism from holding fit and friction together, thereby making nonsense of experience, then a minimal empiricism must deny that assumption. McDowell’s claim is that the minimal affirmation required to get us off the seesaw and return us to our ordinary and trivial conception of experience—one that includes both the fittingness of our thought with the content of experience and the friction of that content with the world—is the affirmation of a naturalized platonism.^[5]

The purpose of this chapter, therefore, will be to articulate the sense in which a naturalized platonism counts as a minimal empiricism—a reminder of the conception of experience that we already trivially know. McDowell’s naturalized platonism supplies us with an analysis of what has gone missing in the Christian philosophers and theologians discussed in earlier chapters—what they have forgotten in their failed attempts to make sense of our perceptual relation to God. Insofar as a naturalized platonism articulates a minimal empiricism, we should take it to be a minimal criterion by which to assess what counts as a candidate for a theology of religious experience. With that criterion in place, we can ask whether it is possible to articulate a theology that meets it. I take up this latter question in the final chapter. For now, the task is to establish the criterion itself by setting forward McDowell’s conception of a naturalized platonism.

6.1.2 Naturalized Platonism as a Minimal Empiricism

Rather than seeing the problem of perception as confronting us with an impossibility—the impossibility of conjoining fit and friction on a disenchanted conception of the world—philosophers have mistaken that impossibility for a theoretical challenge: a call to articulate how a nonconceptually constituted world could constrain our normative empirical thinking so as to establish such thinking as directed on the world. On pain of acquiescing to an intolerable mysteriousness about how our thought manages to put us in touch with reality at all, philosophers have been forced to address themselves to the challenge either by positing some form of nonconceptual content by which we internalize the nonconceptual bearing of the world on us (Givenism) or by coordinating our conceptual thinking to a nonconceptually constituted reality without any recourse to such nonconceptual content (Coherentist realism). Or, conceding the nonconceptualism about a mind-independent reality but wishing to escape the pressures of the challenge, they deny that there is any such thing as a mind-independent reality, anything external to human conceptual activity (Coherentist phenomenalism).

In order to secure the necessary friction between the world itself and the content of experience that it impresses upon us, we must say (contra Coherentist phenomenalism) that there is a mind-independent world, but in order to secure the proper fit between the sort of thing we can experience and the sort of thing that we can think, say, and do, we must suppose (contra Givenism) that what that world gives to us in experience is conceptual content. Finally, if the world’s imparting of conceptual content is to supply the particular sort of fiction required to establish our thoughts as directed on or about the world, then we must hold (contra Coherentist realism) that being furnished with such conceptual content does not tether us to reality in a merely causal way but constitutes a direct presentation of reality itself, a way of internalizing the world’s own conceptual structure.

Thus, in order to escape t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Theology and the Problem of Perception
• The Perception of God in Some Recent Philosophical Theology
• Toward a Theological Empiricism
• Bibliography
• Index