Parsing meaning and value in relation to experience

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Notes

1. Neville (1981, pp. 160–163, emphasis added) makes a parallel distinction when he discusses, first, “synthesis in imagination, which analyzes how more basic elements are synthesized in imagination,” and, then, “the value of synthesis,” in which he asks, “why there is such a synthesis?” He answers the latter question in several ways, depending on how the question is understood.

Insofar as the question asks for purpose served by imaginative integration in experience, the answer is in terms of evolutionary adaptability leading to more successful reproduction of the species. Insofar as it asks what value is accomplished in imagination, the answer … is that it preserves some of the values in the world and reproduces them in a new experience. … Insofar as the question asks for the value peculiar to imagination as synthesis, the answer is beauty (p. 163).

In appropriating Neville's philosophy, Barrett does not distinguish between these various questions. Instead he presupposes Neville's conclusion that “experience begins in beauty” (Neville, 1981, p. 163), which Neville acknowledges must be justified, and Neville's view that “religion has chiefly to do with world construction” and, therefore, that religious experience is rooted in “world-building through imagination” (Neville, 1981, p. 170). Neville is open to both the possibility that “religious apprehension merely grasps the natural beginning of human experience” and the possibility that in doing so, “the ontological foundation of reality is revealed” (Neville, 1981, p. 173). I am more comfortable with the more modest claim that some apprehensions (that some people deem religious) might grasp (or focus on or describe in their own way) the natural beginning of human experience, i.e. the way that experience is constructed out of more basic elements.

2. This paragraph is taken with slight modifications from Taves (in press).