An Investigation, Comparison and Evaluation of Proudfoot and Katz's Constructivism regarding the Essence of Mystical Experience

Proudfoot and Katz are two important characters in constructivism of mystical experience who believe that mystical experiences are made of mental, religious, cultural, educational, and … presuppositions and also the effect of external factors. Ketz more emphasizes on the essential causality between these presuppositions and the produced mystical experiences. Secondly he believes these factors form the content of experience, which arises from an external factor. Therefore he believes presuppositions are present in the creation of experience. Thus he believes although external factors affect the formation of mystical experiences, but it is greatly influenced by internal backgrounds and therefore cannot indicate reality at all. Disagreeing with Katz's view about the essential causality between presuppositions and mystical experiences, Proudfoot has a similar view and believes presuppositions are not the cause of the formation of experiences but says they influence the content of experiences and their formation. This was included in Katz's view as well. Proudfoot believes these presuppositions greatly influence the stages of expression, interpretation and explanation as well and since mystical experiences cannot be separated from their expression, interpretation and explanation, it is formed by presuppositions in all these stages (expression, interpretation and explanation). Although the two perspectives have some differences, but both lead us to this point that mystical experiences do not have any common essence; and the posed commonalities in this regard are secondary and are so far from the essence of these experiences that it only justifies an abstract conceptual absoluteness, but it doesn’t justify accepting a common essence for all of them. Although this view has some positive points such as paying attention to the differences between mystical experiences around the world and the possibility of interference of presuppositions in experiences and their expression and interpretation, but it is generally unacceptable and has some important problems such as: weakness of its basis, inconsistency of the basis and mystical experience, believing the impossibility of having a connection to reality, incomplete induction, a great ambiguity in the position of the real factor in the formation of experience, and the existence of some experiences which breaches constructivism.