(2:49 PM) | Anonymous:

Thought Experiment

The second paper, by Auburn's Donald R. Wehrs, argued that infantile sexual experiences based around either the satisfaction of basic wants by mothers or proximity to maternal figures grounded the metaphors used by various philosophers of religious experience. Drawing on work that argues that consciousness emerges from the body's monitoring itself in relation to objects outside of it, Wehrs sketched a metaphoric continuum of images of religious fulfillment with St. Augustine at one end and Emmanuel Levinas on the other; he also briefly located the preacher Jonathan Edwards and Ralph Waldo Emerson on the continuum too. As Hart the respondent noted, Wehrs showed that there's "an emotional underwebbing to the history of ideas." That is, a set of diverse philosophers expressed a "common cognitive ground rooted in infantile erotic experience rather than practical reasoning."

Augustine, says Wehrs, conflates the divine and human and locates the origin of love and religious ecstasy with the stilling of appetite or desire. In essence, peace is understood as the absence of bad appetites, which accords with one basic infantile erotic or physical response to wants. Levinas, on the other hand, also draws on infantile experience but focuses not on ingestion but on proximity to the mother. Both of these reactions are basic cognitive realities that all humans experience as infants; together, they create a range of possible metaphors that recur in religious discussions. On the one hand, Augustine talks of being one with God (and the mother), of an inviolate bond that shows up in somewhat attenuated form in Jonathan Edward's imagery of being penetrated by God. On the other, Levinas stresses proximity to the Other, which mirrors infantile cognitive experience of closeness with the mother. This understanding, he said, is also reflected in Emerson's metaphors of resting and laying in Nature.