Discussion of "The Rhetoric of Experience"

Sharf thinks of the mind as a “sort of inner space in which the outer material world is reflected or re-represented”. In this sense he argues that the mind is separate from the world in some way because there is no evidence to suggest that events in the mind point to anything beyond the inner realm. In this light, he argues that religion was never presented with inner experiences but always with culturally conditioned texts, narratives or rituals. Therefore, our knowledge of religion is not of inner experiences that require being interpreted.

His argument totally discredits the mind as a tool for understanding ones own mental states, such as intent, knowledge and beliefs… In other words, Sharf’s argument alludes to the idea that the mind is incapable of fully functioning without living in the material world as seen through his ‘alien case’ in which he separates the experiential element from narrative. In this light, narratives based on experience “do not faithfully represent actual historical occurrences”.

This leads me to questioning if anyone truly understands how experience is played out in the mind. In this view, if one cannot fully prove that experience takes place in the mind, then how could one prove that religion exists? In other words, religion which is primarily based on religious experience becomes void because according to shaft there is no evidence that inner mental events point to anything beyond themselves. In this case, not only does the mind become a functionless tool, but also history that relies on experience of events becomes nonexistent. Isn’t knowledge itself reliant on how one acts in the world. Meaning knowledge and experience directly imply one another, so how can something have a ‘real’ aspect to it if one has not experienced it?

In this case, we understand the mind as knowledge gained through experience. In which experience is related to multiple meanings due to the fact that my experience will mean something different than someone else’s experience of the same thing. It does not mean to say that experience produces truth, but that ‘truth’ can be reached through experience. More specifically, I will give a concrete example of where I am going. If Larry and Tom both drink excessive amounts of alcohol, their experiences of alcohol would be totally different, in the way that alcohol would affect control over themselves (one may be able to control themselves better than the other) however, through this experience the ‘truth’ becomes that if they both continue at their rate of drinking, they would both be diagnosed with serious diseases down the road.

I address religious experience the same way. For example, two practitioners may have totally different ways of expressing the meaning of religious experience, but the ‘truth’ or what remains important is not so much the interpretations of experience, but the end goal of ‘wholeness’ through being pious. Ultimately what I am trying to say here is that experience is important in producing some kind of truth.

Sharf’s position is the opposite, in which he says that experience seizes to exist because different meanings are brought out by religious experience in a way that it can’t be proved. Therefore, what remains important is how the mind reflects the material world and not what the mind experiences in the material world. In other words, his take is that to remember something is to retell it with material words in this world, so the actual ‘truth’ is the retelling not the experience/thought process in our minds. I on the other hand believe that experience plays an important role or has an important dimension to how we act in the world and to our discourse of religious studies.