Jorge Ferrer's Participatory Vision of Spirituality

Source

George Adams in a review of The Participatory Turn, 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."