Originally posted by LemonJello
I do see the simplicity of what you are asking, and I already said I just simply do not care about your primary question in this thread. Why should I?
If you ever want to actually address my other objection -- which does constitute something of interest in my view -- let me know.
My main objection (which I see now is off-topic somewhat) is that you were just supposing that this "personal experience" you refer to can produce knowledge (or less stringently, warranted belief)...
The standard caveats: non-dualism, etc., etc.
Now, I think KM might intend to distinguish between
episteme and
gnosis. That was the distinction that I assume in my answer regarding my wife. That is, I think that when I say I know my wife, I mean something more than just having a justified true belief in certain propositions about her. Excerpted from my cumbersome “Toward a Spiritual Philosophy” thread—
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Here I’d like to distinguish between two types of knowledge,
as I think of them, anyway:
episteme and
gnosis. Epistemic knowledge is propositional, conceptual, descriptive—in short,
episteme belongs to what I have called the
conceptual grammar of our consciousness.
Gnosis is recognition unmediated by conceptual grammar, an immediate “intuitive” grasping, an intimate apprehension (it is noteworthy that gnosis is also used to refer to erotic intimacy, sexual “knowledge” ).
Gnosis is essentially experiential, regardless of any attempts to translate that experience into conceptual terms.
...
What in the literature is called a “mystical” experience (not necessarily a religious or supernatural experience!) is an intimate, conceptually unmediated, experiential,
gnostic realization of the mystery—of the fact that the grammar of the totality transcends our own, while our existence arises from and is intimately entangled with the totality—like the stream in the ocean.
That is the only sense in which I use the word mystical. It is in the sense of, say, the Zen
satori experience.
Aside on mystical content—
Whether or not a mystical experience is triggered intentionally (e.g., by meditation practices), the conceptual processes of our minds seem to want to assert their “grammar,” trying to make conceptual sense of the experience—to give it conceptual content. Such content may take the form of visions, auditions, etc. A memory of some religious image may be triggered—a mental image of Krishna, say—and associated with whatever conceptual content arises. (This religious image need not come from one’s own religion.)
Thus, one may have a “religious experience” in which Krishna seems to appear, surrounded by the fragrance of incense, and to speak. And, just like the ordinary visual images produced in the visual cortex, the vision of Krishna seems to be external to ourselves. To one who objects that her experience was just too powerful to be just a “vision in the mind,” I would say: “Do not form too paltry an opinion of the power of the mind.”
I call this process “immediate translation”—i.e., of an otherwise unintelligible experience into an intelligible one, as the brain attempts to assert its habitual grammar to form recognizable and sensible patterns. Zen masters urge us to ignore such
makkyo (bedeviling illusions). I’d say that at most, one might value them aesthetically. The point is that the mystical experience does not itself validate the conceptual content of its grammatized form.
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Therfore, I do not think that such gnostic experience can provide epistemic knowledge, and so, despite whatever induction I might draw from such experiences, I maintain nondualism, for example, as axiomatic.
to know or not to know
24 Mar '07 19:59
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