Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things

Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things
Ann Taves | 2009-09-28 00:00:00 | Princeton University Press | 240 | Philosophy

The essence of religion was once widely thought to be a unique form of experience that could not be explained in neurological, psychological, or sociological terms. In recent decades scholars have questioned the privileging of the idea of religious experience in the study of religion, an approach that effectively isolated the study of religion from the social and natural sciences. Religious Experience Reconsidered lays out a framework for research into religious phenomena that reclaims experience as a central concept while bridging the divide between religious studies and the sciences.

Ann Taves shifts the focus from "religious experience," conceived as a fixed and stable thing, to an examination of the processes by which people attribute meaning to their experiences. She proposes a new approach that unites the study of religion with fields as diverse as neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, and psychology to better understand how these processes are incorporated into the broader cultural formations we think of as religious or spiritual. Taves addresses a series of key questions: how can we set up studies without obscuring contestations over meaning and value? What is the relationship between experience and consciousness? How can research into consciousness help us access and interpret the experiences of others? Why do people individually or collectively explain their experiences in religious terms? How can we set up studies that allow us to compare experiences across times and cultures?

Religious Experience Reconsidered demonstrates how methods from the sciences can be combined with those from the humanities to advance a naturalistic understanding of the experiences that people deem religious.

Reviews
As a category of study, religious experience has long been a contentious domain. Ann Taves's recent book, Religious Experience Reconsidered, traces the history of these debates and takes bold steps towards reconciling them.



A focus on experience in religion arose particularly in 19th century culture and philosophy. It was during this time that theorists began to put forth their ideas about the nature and significance of religious experience (and experience more generally). In 1799, the Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher described religion as a 'feeling of absolute dependence.' This move supported the shift away from religious institutions, doctrines, and practices while highlighting subjectivity and experience as the ultimate arbiters of the person's relationship with God. By the early 20th century, religious experience had been thoroughly integrated as a legitimate category into academic and theological discourse. Rudolf Otto, for instance, found the highest expression of piety in the sense of the mysterium tremendum, describing a feeling "sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship...it may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy." He defined religious experience as a 'sui generis' phenomenon "irreducible to any other; and therefore, like every absolutely primary and elementary datum, while it admits of being discussed, it cannot be strictly defined." Many scholars of religion followed this move, essentially setting religious experience aside as an 'irreducible, primary datum.' But, as Taves notes, "...for most scholars, the claim that religion is sui generis is simply another way of saying that religion cannot or should not be explained in anything other than religious terms" (18). This attitude has undoubtedly slowed progress in the understanding of such experiences and prevented the kind of cross-disciplinary work that might shed further light on them. The assertion that religion is a sui generis, irreducible phenomenon has exacerbated the disciplinary turf wars endemic to the modern academy.



In Religious Experience Reconsidered, Taves makes efforts to patch up some of these divisions. In the preface she writes, "This book is devoted to building some usable, albeit imperfect, bridges linking the study of experience in religious studies, the social-psychological study of the mind, and neuroscientific study of the brain" (xiii). A key tool here is the use of attribution theory. Between an experience and subsequent interpretations of that experience lie the dynamic, culturally specific processes of meaning making. In social psychology, attribution theory often refers to the way in which people make use of folk psychology to understand goals, desires, and intentions in human behavior. In short, attribution theory focuses on explanation of causes, especially causes of human behavior. Attribution theory is to human behavior what hermeneutics is to textual analysis.



Wayne Proudfoot and Phillip Shaver comment that "attribution theory would suggest that labelling and interpretation are fundamental to religious experience." According to their notions, religious experience consists in having an experience and attributing religious significance to it. Experience is deemed as religious due to complex factors of attribution and ascription, not because of any quality unique unto itself (e.g. Otto's numinous), though they may seem that way to subjects.



Another noteworthy contribution made in this book is Taves's discussion of 'special things.' Like many contemporary scholars of religion, she believes the division of the sacred and profane to be a once useful heuristic that has been too thoroughly reified. Additionally, the dichotomy of sacred and profane does not work especially well in the study of religion cross culturally. Even if it is a relevant notion in certain contexts specific to the European tradition, it does not 'translate well' to other traditions. Taves believes that "Focusing our attention on 'special things' takes our attention away from 'religion' in the abstract and refocuses it on the component parts or building blocks that can be assembled in various ways to create more complex socio-cultural formations, some of which people characterize as 'religions' or 'spiritualities' or 'paths'" (162). Moreover, by getting away from the sacred/profane dichotomy and grounding discussions in 'special things' and 'things set apart,' religious studies will also move away from the circumscription of religion as a sui generis phenomenon. Whereas sacred/profane language is only useful in the discussion of religion, the notion of 'special things' can apply to all sorts of cultural phenomena that convey a similar 'specialness' but are not otherwise 'religious.' For example, art often has this characteristic as do certain speech practices, sporting events, and military customs.



Taves has concluded that religious experience should not be treated, or studied, as something unique and privileged unto itself. All human experience, religious or otherwise, should be studied by whatever tools, methods, and theories may shed light upon it. It is no longer legitimate to insulate experience from scientific study nor to assign it sui generis status. To set aside religious experience is to handicap the possible understandings scholars may reach. Privileging subjective experience and describing it as a phenomenon knowable only on its own terms is a fallacy. A similar fallacy was committed by those 19th century theorists who asserted that life derives from an élan vital, or some other irreducible essence. The 20th century would bring us a refined understanding of the numerous processes that undergird life: DNA, protein transcription, the Kreb's cycle, and all the rest. The 'problem of life,' it would seem, was no single problem after all. Rather, it was composed of many lesser, more tractable phenomena. Similarly, there is probably no unassailable wall between science and human experience. Decomposing the phenomena and studying the 'building blocks' that make up 'religious experience' will surely permit innovations in our understanding. A more encompassing approach may finally allow a set of bridges to be built between these often divided spheres of human inquiry.

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