In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James lays out four ideas that constitute the qualities of mystical experience – ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, and passivity. These formulations, James says, serve as “marks which, when an experience has them, may justify us in calling it mystical.”
The Ineffability of Mystical Experience
Ineffability is meant to convey the fact that the individual of the experience “says that it defies expression, [and] that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.” Consequently, a mystical experience must be experienced for anyone to understand the reasons for ineffability. It is not enough to attempt a description of the experience, because all descriptions fall short of their goal.
A jazz musician, for example, cannot explain precisely how it feels to get lost in spontaneous improvisation. He will hint by way of pseudo-description, paradox or poetry, but he will most emphatically exclaim that you must experience it to understand it. In a like manner James argues that the mystic feels herself to be in the same position, and often feels “that most of us accord to [her] experiences an…incompetent treatment.”
The Noetic Quality of Mystical Experience
The noetic quality of a mystical experience is the fact that the mystic feels the experience to impute a kind of knowledge by way of “states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” This claim emphasizes James’ insistent appeal to mystical states being the source of an intuitive, non-conceptual knowledge that does not require concepts in order to ‘know’ the knowledge it instills.
This complex idea can be understood as such: non-mystical knowledge of a tree can be thought of as “this tree is tall,” where concepts and their connections are a web of knowledge that support the experience. Mystical states, on the other hand, cannot be articulated in a conceptual manner. These states, James contends, are “inarticulate, [al]though they remain,” and they always leave a lingering feeling that they did in fact mean something.
In an essay titled "The Tigers of India," James discusses conceptual knowledge and immediate knowledge, distinguishing the latter from the former in this way: “Thought-stuff and thing-stuff are here indistinguishably the same in nature…and there is no context of intermediaries…to stand between and separate the thought and thing.” This notion of “no context of intermediaries” is important for James’ concern with the noetic quality of mystical experiences because it focuses on the central problem of understanding knowledge as it relates to the mystic.
Typically, knowledge is understood as an intermediate function where, as in the tree example, ideas of “tree” and “brown” act as intermediaries that allow one to say “this tree is brown.” But in the unmediated knowledge of the mystic James is trying to emphasize that the thought of “what is experienced” and the “thing that is experienced,” come together as a singularity that instills knowledge.
Since no intermediate function takes place, conceptualizing the experience forces separateness onto an experience that in its original state was non-mediated. As a singularity the experienced thing and the experiencing of the thing “are only two names for one indivisible fact which, properly named, is…the phenomenon, or the experience.”
The Transiency of Mystical Experience
The notion of transiency emphasizes the quality of mystical experiences being short and difficult to sustain. Importantly, though, the qualities of the experience can be brought back to the mind afterwards.
As James says, “when they recur it is recognized,” and the significance of such qualities are prone to being developed and built up. In short, the experiences are brief, but they when they recur they mystic knows indubitably that it is the same type of experience, and so implants a deepening of its significance.
The Passivity of Mystical Experience
The notion of passivity is meant to convey that when in a mystical state “[the] mystic feels as if [her] own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if [she] were grasped and held by a superior power.” Even when the mystic induces this state through meditative, intentional acts, it remains that when she enters the state she in effect loses self-control.
James parallels this loss of self-control with prophetic speech or automatic writing, in which the individual feels compelled to act by a force other than him or herself. These moments of passivity are meant to communicate the important fact that the mystic feels as if something else moves her, has a hold of her, and guides her actions, making the deterioration of the self crucial to the significance of the experience.
Sources:
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, (New York: Simon and Schuster: 1997).
William James, Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth, (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA: 1975, 2000 tenth printing) p. [35] 201.
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