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Responses and Rejoinders 757in the very sense that the meaning and value of the expenence is different forthem" (265) 1 could not agree more But King confuses the issue by conclud-ing that, nonetheless, "the expenence of listening to that music [cannot] bereduced to that training ." W hoever said it could?

5 King continually attributes my "m ethod" to a W ittgensteinian influ-ence, what she often calls a "W ittgensteinian mode l." This is a mistake. Theroots of my thinking on the nature and conditions of expenence are Kantian,not Wittgensteinian6 Lastly, King takes me to task for an "excessive reliance upon the literal,referential function of language" (267 ), and she goes on. "For the mystic 'God'need not necessanly be 'God ' 'Brahman' cannot be 'Brahman,' and nirvana" is

certainly not nirvana (268) This position is logically preposterous If non e ofthese terms is to be taken m some sense "literally," and "referentially," thenthey cannot be used meaningfully at all. The poetic and transformative modesof religious language to which King calls attention, of course, exist but they donot exhaust the meaning of religious discourse nor do they replace the 'literal'and 'referential' sense upon which the transformative and poetic are parasitic.If all religious language is only poetic and transformative, what can King meanwhen she wntes that for example "in mystical expenence the self is undergoingtransformation?" Does this statement not refer to something? W hen Kingasserts that "evidence of the claim tha t mystical expenences entail radical trans-formation in the self-sense is found in St Paul's 'no t I, but C hnst in me,' inHallaj's impassioned declarations that he was God, in his widespread talk ofdying to the self, in Zen master Hakuin's Great Death, and talk in Hinduismand Buddhism of realizing the true self (Atman, Buddha nature, onginalmind)" (274) is she only being poetic and transformative 7 If so how are we tounderstand her insistence that "1 do not mean to imply that these terms allreduce to the same meaning, far from it'** (274) ?

I do not comment on the second half of King's essay, which does not dealdirectly with my work.In conclusion, let me repeat that my interest and approach grow out of thedata provided by the mystics and mystical traditions themselves If that datacannot be conveniently assimilated to chenshed beliefs, then we have to give upthose beliefs Scholarship dem and s noth ing less

Steven T. KatzCornell University

1 have to admit that "Katz & Co , Ltd " was a flippant heading and apolo-gize if it seemed to imply disrespect Katz alleges that under the pretext ofacademic debate I damn evidence in favor of pontificating dogmatically becauseI know the way things must be, and that 1 do so in contrast to Katz himself wh o(a) opens his generalizations to debate and disconfirmation, (b) reads textsclosely, intimately, carefully, and expertly, and (c) wrestles with data to explain

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758 Journal of the American Academy of Religionrather than exp lain away W hether Katz in fact outranks me on the virtues helists is not for me to say; but neither, I should think, is it for Katz to say, giventhat people are seldom the fairest judges of their critics' abilities. W hat he andI are qualified to do, presumably, is discuss the issues in a topic on which wehave both pondered extensively, so I am disappointed that he did not pick upon the central ones I raised.

This leaves us no further along than before Katz's "Reply" on how the per-ennial philosophy should be defined Since in my essay 1 explicitly disjoin theperennial philosophy from the claim that there is a culturally-neutral mysticalexpenence, and since 1 quote the only two perenn ialists Katz names, AldousHuxley and Fnthjof Schuon, to show that they did not tie it to that claim either(William Jam es and W T Stace were not perenn ialists), I had expected Katz(a) to defend his definition, (b) to temper his dictum that "there is no perennialphilosophy," or (c) to argue against the version of that philosophy that 1 pro-posed. Perhaps he sees the charges of circularity and a pronsm that he directsagainst me as accomplishing the third of these alternatives, but they do not, forthey concern no more than the partial control that all theones exercise over thedata they 'gestalt,' his own version of Kantianism inc luded Indeed, RobertK.C. Foreman (in a forthcoming book I mention in my concluding paragraph)points out that though "Katz claims that his approach makes no 'a pnonassumptions,' just the opposite is true [for] once he has assumed that languageenters and in part shapes and constructs all expenences, the remaining 39pages of [his 'Language, Epistemology and Mysticism'] provides virtually no fur-ther argumentation [for] this assumption."

Proceeding from Katz's right to pronounce on a position which (pendingfurther evidence) he has not even accurately targeted, I went on to examine hisown substantive claim that there is no cross-culturally identical mystical expen-ence. Not because I am strongly invested in that claim, but because the episte-mological machinery that modernity has moved into place militates soexcessively against commonalities tha t 1 think it important to inspect thatmachinery at every turn. Katz concedes to Professor King that human beingsare alike "on the most brutish, infantile, and sensate levels," but thereafter the-on es and pre-understand ings shunt us into different cam ps It was this claimof his that led m e to characterize h is position as holistic, instead of Kantian, as 1might have done had Kant not argued for universal conditioning structures ofthe mind, and Katz is suspicious of umversals The point, though, is that untilKatz tells us more precisely what his meagerly nuanced shibboleth "mediation"denotes, we have no way of determining whether it in fact produces the divi-sions he contends it must He tells us that he is not interested in percentagesNot at all? Will one percent do, or pe rha ps a fraction? At the other end of thescale, in the philosophy of science, the unqualified, 100% contextualistic theoryof meaning was quickly abandoned on grounds that every time we change ourminds the referents of our terms would have to change too, which is absurdMore pertinent are the questions first, what precisely, are the m ediatingdevices Katz has in mind, and, second, do they all (once we get past the brut-

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Responses and Rejoinders 759ish) isolate and divide, or can some work to bring people together. I thoughtthat (with Piaget's assist, I now wish 1 had added Frege) this was the mainquestion my essay raised Assuming that it was more than inconvenience to histheory that caused Katz to brush it aside, 1 do not understand why he did so

Regarding Katz's numbered points:1 I continue to find heavy-handed his "logical proof" that paradoxicaland ineffable expenences are incomparable Mystics who invoke those termscontinue to talk Does Katz wan t us to stop listening to them because we havedecidedin the teeth of the contextuahsts1 own insistence that "the mean ing ofevery term we use depends upon the theoretical context in which it occurs"(Feyerabend)that the word "ineffable" (and its family resemblances in otherlanguages) renders all subsequent utterances meaningless? On the altogether

different point in this paragraph, the impossibility of demonstrating "that . .reports [whatever their number] indicate the existence, the reality of . . theOne," 1 do not know who claims otherwise, if "indicate" here means prove.2. It was Katz's repeated use of the singular in his call for "fundamentalepistemological research into the conditions of mystical experience . to laybare the skeleton of such experience" (my emphasis), that led me to presumethat he too assumed that there is something generic in this domain.3. Katz has made it clear from the start that his studies do not prove thatmystical expenences have no objective referent, and that he is therefore not

reductiomstic in that sense But if we are to conclude (from his disavowal ofmy assumption to the contrary) that he holds that mystical expenences can be"legitimated [and] judged by [their] relation to non-human reality," in this casethe referent (or referents) to which they point, this comes as news to me. 1would like to hear more about the matter4 Und er this heading Katz says nothing to take to take exception to.Fortunately, a book will soon appear that carnes this whole discussion fur-ther and sheds more light on our subject than Katz and 1 were able to manage, Irefer to Robert KC Foreman, ed., The Problem of Pure Consciousness (Oxford

University Press, 1989) What stnkes me as bizarre about our own failedexchange is Katz's apparent belief that scholarship can vindicate or retire phi-losophies, of which the perennial philosophy is oneHuston Smith

Syracuse University

In his response to my article, "Two Epistemological Models for the Inter-pretation of Mysticism," Prof. Katz enumerates six objections to my cnticism ofhis work, which I will discuss in tum.1. It is a distortion to say that 1 use Merton as "evidence of . cross-cultural mystical expenence " 1 did not and do not assert the existence of sucha thing, I spoke only of affinity and understanding across cultural and doctnnallines I offered Merton only as a counter-example to the picture Katz creates of