Gerda Walther and the Necessity of Personhood For Mystical Experience

Antonio Calcagno

pp. 113-134

in: Phenomenological Investigations 2, 2022.

Abstract

In Phenomenology of Mysticism, Gerda Walther argues that one of the eidetic aspects of genuine mystical experience is personhood. Personhood is described in two ways by Walther: first, the individual must be endowed with certain constitutive layers of being, namely, body, soul, spirit, and a fundamental essence; second, these layers work together to form a sense of uniquely unified whole. Mystical experience is understood to be grosso modo an encounter with the divine. But what happens if personhood is somehow broken by trauma or lack? Is mystical experience still possible when the unity of personhood is ruptured, broken, or lacking? Gerda Walther’s fellow phenomenologists Hedwig Conrad-Martius and Edith Stein speak of the soulless and pure spirits, beings that could be described as persons but lack the unity and some of the aspects mentioned above. Moreover, Walther speaks of cases of intersubjective fusion in which a person melts or fuses with other persons or God, suggesting that personhood can be transcended. This paper argues that though personhood may be a defining feature of mystical experience, it is not a necessary one. An encounter with the divine is still possible when a full personal unity is not present or when an aspect of personhood is missing, as in the case of the soulless. known, was a towering figure whose work influenced several fields of philosophy for nearly seven decades, beginning in the 1950s. Though he is perhaps best known for his work in aesthetics, which we honour here, he contributed to nearly every discipline and subfield of philosophy, from metaphysics to philosophy of language, and from philosophy of medicine to feminist philosophy.