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Taking nature mysticism seriously: Marshall and the metaphysics of the self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2010

ANTHONY N. PEROVICH
ANTHONY N. PEROVICH*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Hope College, 126 East Tenth Street, Holland, MI 49422-9000
*
e-mail: perovich@hope.edu
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Abstract

Paul Marshall takes extrovertive mystical experience seriously by providing a metaphysical framework inspired by Plotinus and Leibniz that aims to interpret it non-reductively and to explain it persuasively. However praiseworthy Marshall's intentions, his account fails for a variety of reasons, among them an inability to establish convincingly why natural objects appear as transfigured and alive, characteristics frequently encountered in the reports of nature mystics. An alternative approach, rooted in contemporary pan-experientialist philosophy of mind, is able to take extrovertive mysticism equally seriously while accounting more successfully for its pre-eminent features at a less extravagant metaphysical cost.

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Articles
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Religious Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 165 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

Notes

1. Marshall, PaulMystical Encounters with the Natural World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar [hereafter ME, with references in the body of the text].

2. See Proudfoot, WayneReligious Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles CA: University of California Press, 1985), 196–197Google Scholar. See also Bagger, MatthewReligious Experience, Justification, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘We could have no good reason for asserting that an event, in principle, resists naturalistic explanation.’ Bagger explicitly exempts his naturalism, however, from any commitment to physicalism or to a materialist reduction of the mind.

3. If the person interpreted is being taken seriously, then the interpreter must satisfy the criteria for talking about ‘the same thing’ that the person being interpreted is talking about, where the criteria for talking about the same thing are determined by something like the ‘vector’ Putnam introduces in ‘The meaning of “meaning”’; Putnam, HilaryMind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 215–271CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 269).

4. See Bernard McGinn The Foundations of Mysticism (vol I of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism) (New York NY: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1991), xvii.

5. William Wainwright Mysticism: A Study of its Nature, Cognitive Value and Moral Implications (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 33–34; W. T. Stace Mysticism and Philosophy (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1960): ‘unity’ and the sense of a ‘living presence’ make it onto his list (79), while ‘transfiguration’ (69) and ‘timelessness’ (73) figure in his discussion of extrovertive mysticism.

6. Paul Marshall The Living Mirror: Images of Reality in Science and Mysticism, rev. edn (London: Samphire Press, 2006), 75–76, and idem ‘Transforming the world into experience’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8 (2001), 68Google Scholar.

7. See Marshall The Living Mirror, 248.

8. Bede Griffiths, OSB The Golden String, first published 1955 (Garden City NY: Image Books, 1965), 10, 9.

9. Quoted in David Hay Exploring Inner Space: Scientists and Religious Experience (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 138.

10. Marshall ‘Transforming the world’, 69.

11. Ibid., 69–70.

12. Ibid., 69.

13. Stace Mysticism and Philosophy, 286.

14. Marshall The Living Mirror, 63.

15. Meg Maxwell and Verena Tschudin (eds) Seeing the Invisible: Modern Religious and Other Transcendent Experiences (Lampeter: Religious Experience Research Centre, 1990), 49, 151, and 136.

16. Richard Jefferies The Story of My Heart (first publ. 1883; London: Macmillan &New York NY: St Martin's Press, 1968), 80, 7, 61.

17. Richard Maurice Bucke Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (Philadelphia PA: Innes and Sons, 1905), 8.

18. John Edward Mercer Nature Mysticism (first publ. 1913; Charleston SC: Bibliobazaar, 2007), 27.

19. Maxwell & Tschudin Seeing the Invisible, 177.

20. Stace Mysticism and Philosophy, 71–72. (The reference to N. M.'s philosophical training is found on 74.)

21. Ibid., 72 [my italics].

22. Representative of the authors mentioned are Thomas Nagel ‘Panpsychism’, first published in idem Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 181–195; Seager, William ‘Consciousness, information and panpsychism’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2 (1995), 272–288Google Scholar; David Ray Griffin Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind–Body Problem (Eugene OR: Wipf & Stock, 1998); and Galen Strawson et al. in Anthony Freeman (ed.) Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? (Exeter & Charlottesville VA: Imprint Academic, 2006). For the newspaper notice mentioned, see Jim Holt ‘The mind of a rock’, The New York Times Magazine, 18 November 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-lede-t.html. These are merely some of the more prominent names; just how common pan-psychism was in the past has recently been documented in David Skrbina Panpsychism in the West (Cambridge MA & London: MIT Press, 2006), and he devotes considerable space to current discussions of the topic. It should be noted that Marshall describes his own position as ‘a panpsychic idealism’ (ME, 278; see also ‘Transforming the world’, 75), but it is the idealism rather than the pan-psychism that plays the central role in his explanation of extrovertive mystical experience. This is unfortunate for reasons I try to explain below.

23. See, for example, Block, Ned ‘Troubles with functionalism’, in idem (ed.) Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 268–305Google Scholar.

24. Griffin Unsnarling the World-Knot, 64–65.

25. See, for example, the texts cited in nn. 9 and 15.

26. Maxwell & Tschudin Seeing the Invisible, 133.

27. Jefferies Story of My Heart, 10.

28. Bayne, T. & Chalmers, D. J. ‘What is the unity of consciousness?’, in Cleeremans, Axel (ed.) The Unity of Consciousness: Binding, Integration, and Dissociation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 41Google Scholar.

29. Andrew Brook & Paul Raymont ‘The unity of consciousness’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-unity/

30. See Griffin Unsnarling the World-Knot, 95–97.

31. Reported in Margaret Isherwood The Root of the Matter: A Study in the Connections Between Religion, Psychology and Education (New York NY: Harper Bros, 1954), 97.

32. Maxwell & Tschudin Seeing the Invisible, 48.

33. Isherwood Root of the Matter, 99.

34. Stace Mysticism and Philosophy, 72–73.

35. Josiah Royce ‘The temporal and the eternal’, in idem The World and the Individual. Second Series: Nature, Man and the Moral Order (New York NY: Macmillan, 1901), 111–151.

36. Ibid., 142.

37. Ibid., 227.