On Contemplative Spirituality, Reason, and the Pre-trans Fallacy. Part One of Two.
Pulished on August 17, 2007 • Written by neiswonger
On Contemplative Spirituality, Reason, and the Pre-trans Fallacy. Part One of Two.
<a href=”http://christiantheology.wordpress.com/2007/08/11/to-a-friend-about-jesus-contemplative-spirituality-and-mere-human-reason/”></a>
“It appears that you are operating under the pre-trans fallacy.”
Thanks for the comment, and I can see why you might think so. But I wouldn’t consider this an example of a Pre-Trans Fallacy and I will try to explain why. Your comment is worth a fuller explanation but I will stuff in a lot of information that I’m sure you already know, for the interested reader, … because it’s a blog thing.
When we talk about logic, and reason, and reasonableness we are usually talking about Meta-physical distinctions. But it’s true that when we start to speak of them within the context of consciousness and the related domains of thoughtlife and interpersonal communication, we are blending Psychology and Sociology with the Metaphysical distinctions.
‘Metaphysical’ is a weird word, so before someone takes it as saying something that it isn’t, metaphysics is just the area of philosophy that deals with what things really are, what they are made of, and what their substantial relations are. It’s not as strange as it sounds.
Now I tried to avoid playing too deeply upon the psychological aspect because there is an ocean of information there to go into, but in doing that I purposefully equivocated on the terms. Reason, rationality, logic, inference; mixing the verbs and the nouns for a broad effect without paying too close an attention to the subtle differences in the meaning of the words. I just kind of mean the whole she’bang, if you know what I mean.
Now I don’t really mean that “faith without reason is impoverished.” I mean that it is incoherent. Faith, if it is any kind of a Christian idea of faith, must have content. We don’t just “believe”, we believe something, or as the case may be, someone. Just as a thought without content is a non-thought faith without content is a faith in nothing in particular. And a faith in nothing is not what we mean by Christian faith.
You write that a reasonless faith is similar to superstition, but that really isn’t what I am talking about here. People call superstition superstition because they think that someone believes what they believe with a bad reason. But there is still a reason. Astrology is not believed for no reason but for reasons that are not reasonable and that have no manifestation of complementary effect that we could see as a qualification of truth. It does not really do what it says it does. If it did, if my being born in May really told me that I would be loyal and true, given to long walks in the park, and would marry late and die early, then even if the reasons for believing it were spurious, the proof would be in the pudding. We would all believe it, practically, because it works. Things that work don’t need good reasons because we will use the methods even if we have no idea how they work to obtain practical results. Long before Newton, things fell down. The point being, this doesn’t give anyone practical results unless they read their lives into the tea leaves, the crystal ball, or the stars. It doesn’t tell me anything about myself. Myself tells the stars what they should mean today.
What I am saying about non-rationality is more in line with this, that reason-less faith is not simply a faith without good reasons; it is not faith at all. I’m not implying the distinctions of Kierkegaardian Fideism here, but a primary truth of the state of a personal being, prima facie. When we speak of “prehending the divine”, frankly I don’t see that as being a legitimate category for analysis. Now to prehend simply means to grasp something, as opposed to “comprehend” which means to completely understand something, and “apprehend” which means to truly but partially understand something.
All of us Apprehend mathematics, but no one but God Comprehends mathematics. So what does someone prehend? That depends upon what is meant by it. The most famous ‘prehender’ was Alfred North Whitehead who was always talking about how God prehends itself, the world, and whatever Whitehead thought might be in there. He put prehension as an area of study on the map, but what he meant by it isn’t what we’re talking about, and Whitehead was no Christian.
I think we are talking about mere human prehension which is more suitable to the field of psychology, even if all fields of study overflow, so to speak.
I found a good little statement on this as an abstract of study of the subject…
“A field-oriented interpretation of Whiteheadian societies of actual occasions, when used to explain the notion of “strong supervenience” as applied to the mind-brain problem, allows one to claim that not only higher-level properties such as consciousness but even higher-level entities such as the mind or soul are emergent from lower-level systems of neuronal interaction. Moreover, it also explains the preexistence of God to the world and Christian belief in eternal life with the triune God in a way that is impossible within the limits of a theory of strong supervenience.” 1.
So what he is really saying is the consciousness, or as pertains to the Pre-Trans Fallacy, Personality, is something that emerges from a previously existing state. Personal consciousness, in this way of thinking is an effect, an expression, a later step in a process from a previously existing sub-personal state.
When we think of Freud and all of his now famously discredited bluster we can see how all of this bounced to the surface of the popular imagination. Everything you do, all of you conscious actions and apprehensions, for Freud, are really caused by non-conscious (or sub-conscious) causes manifesting themselves in conscious behavior. William James wrote and influential text on consciousness and found that it did not exist. Jung said that ultimately it wasn’t the non or sub conscious that was the real center of all these things but the super rational, the “transpersonal”.
Transpersonal-ism in psychology is a small minority position but still carries some steam. In the commonly accepted schema, because there is no official textbook interpretation of transpersonal psychologies, there are the Pre-personal, the Personal, and the Trans-personal stages.
We can see why this kind of thinking has had a certain attractiveness for Christian thinkers. Those of a more naturalistic bent, tend to end the discussion at Personal. The manifestation of a mature ego is the end of the road in personal development for them. More spiritualistic thinkers would like to imply something else, something deeper, or wider, to the scope of an individuals mature development, and so they include the trans-personal. Trans-personal, simply, going beyond the merely personal manifestations.
And of course, like just about anything, there has to be at least some truth to this. It isn’t like everything Freud said was false by definition. People really do force themselves to avoid the truth in order to live more comfortably. But they were doing this long before Freud came into the picture, and everybody knew that people did this kind of thing. What Freud came up with was an explanation of the mechanism of how all of this really works, which Christians find to be obviously false and irreconcilable with Christian thought. Did Jesus really want to kill His Father and marry his mother? The implications of this kind of thinking are not only abhorrent to common sense they are offensive to a Christian conscience.
So to the Pre-Trans Fallacy. The supposed fallacy is usually taken to be, the naturalistic assumption, that a spiritual activity or consciousness, which is really a manifestation of a higher Transpersonal maturity, is being ascribed to a Pre-personal cause or level of maturity. Example, a person tells their therapist that they have an experience of the existence of God and that He cares for them deeply. The Therapist scribbles in their notes (because they are always scribbling in their notes being a scribbling type of people) that “the Client is showing signs of the need for infantile care and need that might have been caused by neglect from the nursing mother figure.” Attributing the Trans-personal to the Pre-personal. The Pre-trans fallacy. It is also of course a certain kind of subtle jab at thinkers that think that all such things are thus attributable, Freud being a common example, of reductionism in their thinking, showing themselves to be only Personal egos, not yet Trans-personally mature themselves. How can they treat others if they are only at a Personal stage of development?
Then there is the other fallacy associated with this area, called ‘Elevationist’ in which childlikeness is super-imposed as a higher level of personal development. Many Trans-personalists themselves tend to this direction. The fallacy would be attributing what might even be considered Trans-personal maturity to pre-personal, or at least lower order, personal states. But that’s not what you think I do.
Now I, am a strict Personalist. Let me explain. In taking a specifically Christian approach to an understanding of Psychology, anthropology precedes psychology. We need to know something about what man is, what his purpose and meaning are, before we can interpret his thinking and supposed stages of egoistic maturity. If man is a mere accident of natural forces that has no ultimate meaning and simply decides what he is at the time, then my entire understanding of the human experience of which thoughtlife is simply a part, will be entirely different from what I think they are if I think that a man is created in the image of an eternal, moral, reasonable God, who created me for certain purposes that apply whether or not I think them good. There is either a thing that I am, before I begin thinking about it, or I decide what I am because I am not anything in particular.
Thus in taking that specifically religious Christian approach to these things I have an entirely different kind of soul that I am thinking of when I think psychology. Every soul, every sentient being, is created in the image and likeness of God, and has some aspects of His personal properties, by definition. It might be true that the soulish complexities of the embryo are not scientifically verifiable, and this might be more because of our current barbaric level of understanding in the fields of medicine and the hard sciences, but we have a hard enough time measuring and defining personhood in mature adults for goodness sake. The fact that we can’t ‘see’ a personality at work in the developing fetus does not imply pre-personality in the developing child at all in Christian thought. Being a few cells, for the Christian, is just what a fully personal being looks like when they are very young. As such, that the human person, at whatever age, is pre-rational, is really to say that they are pre-human, or pre imago Dei, or somehow, pre valuable as a life, and I don’t think that’s so.
When we take things that the Bible speaks of as ‘Spiritual’ and describe them through the interpretive lens of this Trans-personal, and so super-rational psychology we can get thing that seem very different from what seems to be the intent of the passages. For instance, when the Apostle Paul chides us for being ‘carnal’ and not ‘spiritual’ people, his intent doesn’t in anyway seem to be that we are too reasonable in our thought.
But these are all rational distinctions.
Neiswonger
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/0591-2385.00344/abs/
http://www.wordwebonline.com/en/PREHEND
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2995