40 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGIONexperiences are subject/content; the experience’s “owner” feels a certain
way. The latter experiences are subject/consciousness/object; the
experience’s “owner” senses (or seems to sense) a particular object – a tree,
a bell, or coffee. To have generalized anxiety or euphoria, panic attacks, or a
headache is to have subject/content experience. To be anxious about the
large dog pulling at his chain, euphoric at the thought of buttermilk
doughnuts, or pained by a friend’s harsh words is to have a subject/
consciousness/object experience. This leads us to our first criterion.
Criterion 1: Experience A is of a different sort from experience B if A
is of subject/consciousness/object structure and B is of
subject/content structure, or conversely.
Whether there are other experiential structures besides the two we have
mentioned or not, an experience possessing one of the two identified
structures is of a different sort from one that has the other sort of
identified structure.
The second criterion has to do with experiential content. One way of
understanding “different sort of content” is to consider different sensory
modalities. Since there seems not to be much by way of different modalities
relevant to religious experience, such considerations are of no help in
understanding the notion of a sort of religious experience. An easily
formulated criterion concerns what philosophers sometimes call hedonic
content – the pleasantness or unpleasantness of an experience. Is having
the experience a matter of pleasure or of pain? So, where the different
hedonic content types are being pleasurable, being painful, and being
neutral regarding pleasure and pain, one can offer:
Criterion 1a: Experience A is of a different sort from experience B if
they have different hedonic content.
But this criterion has little relevance to our concerns.
Phenomenologically, as-experienced so to say, color content is one thing
and auditory content another. True, different sensory content arises from
different sensory sources, the deaf can see colors and the blind can hear
sounds, and it is logically possible that there be a world without colors but
with sounds, or a world without sounds but with colors. But after one has
recited such things, the difference between color experience and sound
experience that makes us think of them, if we do, as of different sorts lies in
their intrinsic phenomenological difference, their experienced quality.
More generally, color and sound experiences differ from each other and
from taste experiences because colors, sounds, and tastes are themselves of
different sorts. Recognized phenomenological distinctness is here the basis