A Consideration of William Alston’s View of Mystical Perception and Its Critique in terms of the Views of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty

In this paper, we analyze William Alston’s model of “mystical perception” in terms of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In his theory of “mystical perception,” Alston believes that there is a fundamental commonality between sense perception and mystical perception. With a phenomenological analysis of sense perception, he identifies the most central feature of sense perception as the “givenness” of its objects to consciousness. In fact, he characterizes perception as “direct and immediate presence of objects” or “presentation,” and characterizes mystical perception as “direct experiential consciousness of God based on one’s own conception.” To the contrary, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty rely on concepts such as “intentionality,” “phenomenological body,” and “spatiality and motion” to show that perceptual objects are never fully “given” to consciousness, because perception is never separable from body, motion, and spatiality. In Husserl’s view, perception is something “dynamic” and is in contrast to Alston’s idea that perception is “static.” Thus, what Alston refers to as mystical perception is, according to phenomenologists such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, void of basic properties of perception. Therefore, God’s presence to the mystic is a “personal presence.” It is like the presence of “other” and “self-consciousness” for the person.