Enlightenment Faith

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"Reason, as used by Voltaire, is a complex of sentiments and ideas. The fundamental sentiment is the intraworldly faith in a society which finds its coherence through compassion and humanity. Humanity is a general disposition in man arising out of his biological structure. Negatively, the reasonable attitude is characterized by the absence of immediate spiritual experiences. As a consequence of this deficiency, the symbolic expressions of spiritual experiences become opaque and are misunderstood as depending for their validity on their resistance to rational critique." -- Eric Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution, p. 29

The declaration that spiritual experiences as "irrational" is based on no more than:

1) Their absence in the person declaring them so; and
2) His reluctance to admit that this might be a deficiency; no, those who claim to have had such experiences must be deluded!

Comments

  1. Samson Corwell5:38 PM

    Number one is plausible. Number two is speculative. Why would they have felt threatened by not having a spiritual experience.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah1:17 AM

      If these are experiences are real, and, as those who have them often claim, the most important experiences in life, someone could feel a little... inferior... for not having had this important experience!

      Delete
    2. Samson Corwell8:13 AM

      It's definitely a rather novel interpretation of things. I'm not so sure I ever heard this point come up with religious conservatives.

      Delete
    3. gcallah9:46 AM

      No, not particularly novel.

      Delete
  2. Unknown8:18 PM

    One of the most awesome things about ethical intuitionism is its justification for experiencing non-spatial things (goodness, for example). But once you can argue for the legitimacy of having cognitive access to the good (which is transcendent to the physical world), you then swing a huge door open: if we can have cognitive access to things that aren't reducible to the physical world, and are transcendent, then we can have cognitive access to 'other' things - like God.

    ReplyDelete

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