The aesthetic experience : a theory of embodied mind, affective life and the perception of God

The thesis which follows is an exploration of the general conditions for acquaintance with God (as opposed to knowledge about God). In terms of strategy, however, the work is neither apologetic nor theological. Objectivity conditions for the perception of God are taken up within the context of problems posed by contemporary philosophy of mind. The thesis as a whole is an attempt to follow out the epistemological implications of an ontological premise which is developed in chapter one and further elaborated in chapter seven—that human existence is essentially religious existence and that God is the foundational social complement of human flourishing. If this is so, the concept of religious reality pertains to a relational structure between humans and God. The religious character of human existence, therefore, is best regarded as a determinant and condition of epistemic experience rather than a phenomenological object of such experience. Central to the thesis is that spiritual epistemic competence is a natural competence. Human persons are spiritual in virtue of their character as embodied beings. As such they are communicant members of a social informational environment. This is developed by taking up Joseph Margolis's concept of embodiment and offering resistance to Daniel Dennett's fragmentation of agency and dissolution of subjectivity. Steven Katz's constuctivist challenge to religious cognitivism is shown to be a disguised verificationist challenge; constructivism construed methodologically, however, is not inimical to religious cognitivism. What is fundamentally mistaken about Katz's constructivism is its exclusive preoccupation with ideational and indoctrinational pre-conditioning. The present thesis shifts the crucial pre-conditioning from ideology to affective maturation. Accordingly, the fundamental cognitive modality is that required to discern personal presence—a "knowing-whom" rather than a "knowing-that." The basic epistemological issue for religious cognitivism is thus shown to reside with conditions of gestaltic objectivity rather than discursive provability.