Jorge Ferrer's Participatory Vision of Spirituality
From in-depth reviews of The Participatory Turn
George Adams
George Adams in: Journal of Contemporary Religion:
"Ferrer presents the participatory vision as a corrective to the errors of the diametrically opposed perspectives of reductionist constructivism and non-reductionist naïve perennialism. Ferrer accepts the post-modern epistemological position of the constructivists (typified by Steven Katz), which claims that there are no unmediated spiritual experiences, and that all such experiences are laden with the cultural baggage brought to the experience by the experiencer. However, Ferrer – contra Katz – argues (quite logically) that accepting the presence of cultural influences as determinants of the content of religious experiences does not necessarily lead to reductionisms which bracket or deny either the reality of the experienced spiritual reality or its creative impact on spiritual knowing.
Ferrer agrees with the perennialists that a spiritual reality does exist and that humans directly experience this reality (thus embracing an epistemological stance of “mediated immediacy”). However, unlike the perennialists, Ferrer rejects the notion that there is a fundamental, universal experience underlying all claims to religious experience. Perennialists tend to claim that all religious experience is the same, but its expression varies according to cultural influences. Ferrer argues (against the constructivists) that religious experience beyond cultural-linguistic construction really does occur, but (against the perennialists) it is not the same experience clothed in culturally influenced language and concepts. Rather, religious experience is infinitely varied...and it is here where the role of participation is introduced.
Ferrer argues that every religious experience is an event in which a culturally conditioned human being interacts, or participates, with an infinitively? varied and mysterious spiritual reality, and this interactive “participatory event” by necessity leads to multiple ways of experiencing the sacred. For Ferrer, spiritual experience always involves an element of reciprocity, in which the human experiencer with his/her culturally-conditioned biases and pre-conceived modes of interpretation encounters a similarly complicated and multi-valent sacred reality, where the resultant interactive “participation” between the two, in which neither party is a static entity, produces an endless array of spiritual experiences. Hence, Ferrer’s participatory vision is based on a radically pluralistic model. If one understands religious experience as a participatory event, it follows that there will be a plurality of accounts of this experience: in a sense, for Ferrer, all religious experiences are different, yet all are still valid. This is nicely characterized by Ferrer when he replaces the often cited perennialist analogy of religious experience as “many rivers leading to the same ocean” by his own analogy of religious experience as contact with “an ocean with many shores.” (138)
Two other significant aspects of Ferrer’s participatory vision bear mention with reference to its impact on the scholarly study of religion. First, Ferrer calls for a rejection of the decidedly culturally-biased Western notion that objective rationality is the only valid means of knowledge. Rejecting the notion of the epistemic superiority of objective rationality, Ferrer instead recommends a “multidimensional cognition” which includes all modes of human knowing, including those that derive from not only the rational mind but also those that derive from the heart, spirit, and body. Secondly, and following from the previous point, Ferrer argues that scholars of religious experience also need to become practitioners of religious experience in order to understand the phenomenon about which they claim to be experts. Ferrer poses the painfully logical question: How can one claim to understand a type of experience which one has never had? How can one understand an internal experience while standing on the outside, safely distanced from the experience? As Ferrer puts it, “One needs to be open to being personally transformed in order to access and fully understand many spiritual knowledge claims.” (138) Both of the above positions presented by Ferrer have enormous, and to some, threatening implications for the status quo in the scholarly study of religion, and are deserving of further exploration."
Ann Gleich and Nicholas Boeving
From Tikkun.org, May/June 2009
Are spiritual experiences nothing but language and culture?
"Following wider trends in the humanities, the discipline of Religious Studies succumbed to the more tyrannical turn of radical contextualism, which resulted in the rise of the "cultural-linguistic paradigm." The major argument here is that language is not only expressive but is constitutive of all human experience. The various perspectives under the cultural-linguistic rubric are united by an insistence that the proper function of Religious Studies is the analysis and interpretation of religious languages and their relationship to other linguistic frameworks. Rather than consciousness or experience, language itself is the crucial and only fulcrum, here, collapsing ontology into nothing but the sign itself. The result is a "linguistification of the sacred" that contextualizes, relativizes, and reduces the sacred to linguistic expression.
It is this reduction of the sacred and spiritual experiences to nothing but language and culture that the participatory turn seeks to redress. This does not mean, however, a return to the earlier philosophy of consciousness that, as the editors rightly note, is equally unsatisfactory. That earlier philosophy posits a supposedly universal consciousness that is, in actuality, disembodied and ahistorical. Isolating the sacred within such a decontextualized consciousness removes it from the world of gendered bodies, relationships, and culture.
In its attempt to move beyond the limitations of both consciousness and culture, The Participatory Turn draws on seven of the most vigorous contemporary trends within the field. The book's editors claim that such strands, when woven together, constitute an emerging academic ethos that recovers ontology without sacrificing the advances of critical scholarship. A brief glance at each of the strands hints at its contribution in combating the shortcomings of both problematic predecessors:
- The postcolonial re-evaluation of emic epistemologies (emic: as described by non-Western people in the language of their own culture) targets the employment of Western scientific and philosophical categories of knowledge, particularly critical rationality, as the ultimate arbiter of what counts as legitimate knowledge. It recognizes the validity of a multiplicity of non-Western cultural and religious ways of knowing.
- The postmodern and feminist emphasis on embodiment and sacred immanence affirms an immanent spirituality that dwells within and not above or apart from the world; celebrates the body, emotions, and sensuality; and resacralizes everyday life as the site of spiritual growth.
- The "pragmatic turn" in contemporary philosophy establishes philosophy as a transformative activity in which interpretation is always bound up with action.
- The resacralization of language undermines the modern split between language and ontology by recognizing the sacred nature, dimensions, and potentials of religious languages and poetic writing.
- The renewed interest in the study of spirituality indicates both culturally and academically the hunger for a deeply lived religion.
- A focus on the question of truth in postmetaphysical thinking anchors the theoretical axis of the participatory turn.
- An emphasis on the irreducibility of religious pluralism helps account for the diversity of religious expression without reproducing the hierarchical rankings and privileging that have dominated past frameworks.
The sixth and seventh strands merit special attention. In the sixth, Ferrer and Sherman challenge the dominance and unquestioned assumptions of neo-Kantian epistemological frameworks in the contemporary study of religion. The basic premise of Kant's hugely influential theory of knowledge is that we can never directly experience things as they truly are, as unconditioned "noumena." Rather we can only encounter them through the filter of certain a priori categories inherent to our intellect and through the mediation of our senses as conditioned "phenomena." The editors correctly point out that the modern and postmodern reduction of all metaphysical claims to conditioned discursive contexts reveals a normative allegiance to neo-Kantian frameworks that either bracket (as inaccessible noumena) or deny the existence of any supernatural sources of religion. To deny that religious phenomena can ever have extralinguistic or transcultural referents, however, assumes an ethnocentric materialistic metaphysical perspective that dismisses various contemplative traditions' claim that one can experience unconditioned dimensions of reality.
This tension is expressed in the longstanding perennialist-constructivist debate about mysticism. Perennialists are united by their belief that behind a variety of different mystical accounts lies the same underlying ultimate reality or "common core." Put simply, perennialists argue that different mystical paths lead to the same unconditioned ultimate reality that is then interpreted according to the mystics' particular culturally conditioned tradition. Asserting that all knowledge is conditioned by linguistic and cultural forms, constructivists adamantly counter, however, that the mystical experience itself, and not just its interpretation, is fully determined by the mystics' conceptual apparatus. Even if an unconditioned reality exists, constructivists insist that we can only encounter it indirectly mediated through our culturally conditioned framework.
As Ferrer and Sherman perceptively point out, however, both sides remain hostage to Kantian assumptions in accepting a dualism between a constructed framework and an unconditioned reality. They alternatively propose that a religious event is neither a purely objective unconditioned discovery nor a merely subjective construction but rather a participatory or co-created phenomenon that undoes the very distinction between subjectivism and objectivism or conditioned and unconditioned. They claim that religious phenomena are participatory—in other words, the phenomena emerge from the interaction of all the different human ways of knowing (such as the rational, imaginal, somatic, aesthetic, contemplative, and so forth) and a real nondetermined creative spiritual power. Ontological veracity, in other words, is not inherently at odds with a contextualist sensibility. To acknowledge that humans do not only discover but also shape and co-create spiritual landscapes does not annul the metaphysical reality of such religious worlds." (http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/may_jun_09_gleig)
Is there one spiritual reality ‘out there,' or many?
"Bringing together ontological veracity and a contextualist sensibility affords us a new perspective on the seventh strand, the irreducibility of religious pluralism: if we relate but not reduce ontology to a contextual framework, we can affirm a plurality of mediated but ontologically existing religious worlds that can, in turn, account for the diversity of religious expression without reproducing the hierarchical rankings and privileging that afflicts, in varying degrees, the current responses of universalism, exclusivism, inclusivism, and ecumenical pluralism. As Ferrer correctly notes, all of these proposed solutions to religious diversity either explicitly or implicitly endorse the exclusive or ultimate truth of their preferred tradition. Universalism's search for a single essence behind the multiplicity of religious expressions was motivated by the attempt to secure a favored spiritual tradition as that ultimate essence. Similarly, exclusivism ("my religion is the only true one"), inclusivism ("my religion is the most complete; the others are only partially true"), and ecumenical pluralism ("there are real differences between religions but all lead to the same [which conveniently happens to be my] spiritual goal") all promote the superiority of a particular religious tradition.
Approaching religious diversity as the result of the interaction between the multidimensional cognitive components of human beings and the radical openness and inexhaustible creativity of an indeterminate mystery affords us an alternative response. It affirms the participatory enactment of an indefinite number of not just spiritual paths but spiritual goals and ultimate realities. This liberates religious thinking and interreligious dialogue from the tyranny of a single static ultimate reality against which all forms of religious diversity are evaluated. In short: there is no one ultimate metaphysical referent; religious diversity reflects the reality of the plurality of ontological ultimates.
With these seven strands, then, the editors issue a clarion call to move beyond the intellectual idolatry of the text and to bring ontology, now forged in the fires of critical scholarship, back to the field of Religious Studies. The participatory turn recognizes that ontology is constructed, but that it is also "out there" too. It is not out there in the static sense that the perennialists would have us believe, as a single ontological ocean with many epistemological shores, but as a dynamic, excessive, and radically plural mystery that we can never definitively chart or circumscribe. Far from any grand unified theory—such a colonizing and confining project being one of its main targets—it is an orientation or sensibility that others are invited to recover in our religious pasts, discover in our religious presents, or creatively flesh out for our religious futures.
The next two sections of the anthology are worthy responses to this invitation." (http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/may_jun_09_gleig)