LINDA LOPEZ McALISTER

LINDA LOPEZ McALISTER

I.  BIOGRAPHY1

Gerda Walther was bom at Nordrach Colony, a tuberculosis sanitorium owned and directed by her father Dr. Otto Walther, in the Black Forest near Offenburg. Otto Walther and his first wife, a British physician named Hope Adams, founded the Colony in 1891 after having been forced out of Frankfurt for their illegal Socialist political activities. They were divorced in 1893 and Otto’s second wife was Ragnhild Bajer, who had come to the Colony at age nineteen as a patient. She was the daughter of Danish Nobel Prize winner, pacifist, and feminist Fredrik Bajer and his wife and colleague Mathilde Bajer. Gerda Walther was the only child of this marriage and her mother died in 1902 when she was five years old. Her father then married Ragnhild’s sister Sigrun.2

Gerda’s childhood was spent with her father and stepmother at Nordrach and later on the Starnbarger See outside Munich. Her rela-tionship with her stepmother was difficult and her childhood a somewhat unhappy one, especially the brief period when she was sent away to boarding school. Nonetheless, she met interesting visitors from all over the world, travelled throughout Europe, and visited frequently with her relatives in Denmark. She got her political education in Marxism at the feet of August Bebel, the Kautskys, Gustav Eckstein and other leaders of the Socialist movement, all close family friends.3

At the outbreak of World War I, Gerda was attending Gymnasium in Munich and was an active member of the youth group of the Munich Social Democratic Party. In 1916 she enrolled in the University of Munich and was greatly dissatisfied with that “bourgeois university,” but was convinced by her advisor and her father that it was beneficial even for someone who wanted to be a Socialist agitator to learn about other peoples’ points of view.4

A History of Women Philosophers/Volume 4, ed. by Mary Ellen Waithe, 189-206.

© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

In her second semester she was looking for a course that would fit into a free hour in her schedule so she enrolled in “Introduction to Psychology” taught by Alexander Pfander,5 an event which was to change the entire course of her life. As she comments in her autobiography, she probably would have ended up as a minor government functionary in East Germany if it had not been for this “coincidence.” The next term she took Pfander’s “Introduction to Philosophy,” and attended his lectures on logic which motivated her to read Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, then his Ideas, and finally to want to study with him in person.6

She arrived in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1917 to join the circle of young philosophers around Edmund Husserl.7 Husserl, it seems, was not altogether overjoyed by the arrival of this spirited young Marxist who announced that her career goal was to become a political agitator. At first he rejected her outright. Then he relented and sent her to see his assistant, Edith Stein, whose opinion he apparently wanted before deciding whether to admit the Socialist Walther. Stein (see Chapter 7) was friendly to Walther and seemed amused by the situation. Walther apparently made quite a favorable impression on her because she was allowed to enroll not only in Stein’s “philosophical kindergarten” but in Husserl’s courses as well during her first semester. In a letter to a friend about the new group of students Stein singles out Ludwig ClauB and “Frl. Walther” as “very promising people.”8

Among the other students with Husserl at that time in addition to ClauB were Roman Ingarden, Otto Griindler, and Karl Lowith. Martin Heidegger was already a junior faculty member and most of the students attended his lectures and courses as well, along with those of Jonas Cohn in history of philosophy. Walther studied Aristotle with the Catholic philosopher J. Geyser and, at Husserl’s suggestion, she took courses in set theory and analytical geometry, courses in which she found herself the only woman. In Husserl’s lectures there were about 30 to 40 students, among whom were several other women including Stein, an economist named Ilse Busse, a Frl. Lande, and another woman remembered only for her habit of smoking cigars.9

Walther did not complete her doctoral studies under Husserl but chose instead to return to Munich to write her dissertation under Pfander. The primary reason for this decision was the manner in which Husserl worked with his graduate students. He was extremely directive in his approach, allowing his students little freedom to develop their own ideas. Walther wanted to write about the essence of social communities and knew that 

Husserl had other ideas for her, so she told him she had already discussed her dissertation topic with Pfander and wanted to return to Munich. It is indicative of Husserl’s attitude that when she told him this, Husserl’s response was that, “if the assignment has already been given to you, you must of course go back to him.” Walther did so and earned her doctorate summa cum laude in Munich with a dissertation entitled Zur Ontologie der Sozialen Gemeinschaften {On the Ontology of Social Communities) which was later published in Husserl’s Jahrbuch fur Philosophie und Phanomenologische Forschung.10

A pivotal event in Gerda Walther’s life took place in November, 1918 on a train as she was returning to Freiburg from her parents’ home in Baden Baden. She underwent an intense spiritual or religious expe-rience which, as she describes it later, was “a force, an all-consuming light, a sea of warm love and goodness” which surrounded her for most of the trip. Whatever this “something” was, it was absolutely clear to her that it had not come from within herself, but from another world. From that time on she dedicated her life to exploring this spiritual world she had been privileged to discover, and to look for signs of it in others, in order to help them, too, to explore and develop it further. This was certainly a far cry from the atheistic materialism in which she was raised. A significant result of this experience was that Walther gave up much of her political activism and decided to pursue an academic career.11

In 1920 Edith Stein had paved the way for women in academia.12 Unlike Stein, Walther was able to find an established professor, Karl Jaspers, to sponsor her for habilitation. At that time, however, only those who had an outside source of income could aspire to university teaching because a Privat Dozent did not receive a salary from the university, but collected small tuition payments from the students. Despite his Socialistic beliefs, Gerda Walther’s father had been a man of considerable means, and when he died in 1919 he left enough money in cash and stocks for Gerda to live comfortably on the income it gener-ated. The well-meaning executor of the estate took it upon himself to sell most of the stock and reinvest the proceeds in “gilt-edged” securities and gold-based bonds. Early in 1923, Gerda moved to Heidelberg and set to work. There she became involved with the circle of people surrounding the poet Stefan George, who came to have a very special meaning in her life.13 Within a few months, however, Germany was engulfed in ruinous inflation, and Walther found herself almost destitute. She was forced to go to Copenhagen to live with her relatives, only to encounter enormous anti-German feeling there.14 

In Spring, 1924 she returned to Germany to take the first of a life-long series of part-time and occasional jobs which enabled her to support herself and still have time to pursue her own scholarship and writing. Among other things, Walther worked as a nurse’s aide, a ghost writer for a woman politician, a clerk in a bookstore, a translator, and an administrative assistant. Probably the most frustrating experience was her job as a stenographer in the state mental hospital in Emmendingen. While there she became interested in schizophrenia and wrote a paper, “Zur innenpsychischen Struktur der Schizophrenic” which she submitted and was invited to read at a meeting of the Southwest German Psychiatric Association held in 1926. As a result she was fired. Apparently the fragile egos of the medical staff could not endure their colleagues’ jokes that at Emmendingen the secretaries write the papers because the doctors are too stupid to do so.15

One of the participants at that meeting had been Dr. Hans Prinzhom, who sought out Walther and suggested that she contact him if she ever wanted to leave Emmendingen. Sooner than either had suspected she turned to him for assistance, and she went to work for him four hours a day as a research assistant on his book series Das Weltbild. In just a few months, however, Prinzhorn closed his practice and moved to Saxony. Walther was again underemployed, and was reduced to taking in typing for 35 pfennigs a page. Throughout the 1920’s Walther had been expanding her knowledge and experience in the spiritual realm, in astrology, mysticism, seances, and all manner of things “occult.” So when she was referred by Prof. Hans Driesch to the Munich psychiatrist and parapsychologist Dr. Albert Freiherr von Schrenk-Notzing, who was seeking a secretary/assistant, it was a perfect match. Schrenk-Notzing was a typical 19th century scientist whose research paradigm was that of the scientific experiment which could be endlessly replicated. He sought to apply this model in his parapsychological research with trance mediums in seances. Because of this orientation he had a particular liking for the most concrete kinds of phenomena, and devoted much of his effort to studying “physical” phenomena such as telekinesis and materializations under the most highly controlled conditions possible. He hoped, by this means to render impossible the claims that there was any kind of fakery involved, and he regularly invited well-known scholars and researchers to attend his sessions as witnesses. In addition, detailed protocols were kept of all the proceedings. Walther’s duties were to take care of his correspondence, especially that in English, to read articles submitted for publication in the journal he edited, Zeitschrift filr 

Parapsychologie, and to take part in all of the sessions with the mediums. She did not normally take the notes for the protocols during these sessions, but did so on some occasions, using a clock with an illuminated dial to make exact notations of the time each phenomenon occurred. The protocols were typed the next day and copies sent to each participant. In addition, Schrenk wrote an analysis and interpretation of the events of each session. In this position Walther’s talents were appre-ciated and she had the opportunity to learn more about a field that had interested her for nearly ten years, but she had a premonition that it would not last and that the apparently healthy Schrenk would die. Within the year Schrenk was stricken with a burst appendix and died unexpectedly. His widow asked Walther to edit a collection of Schrenk-Notzing’s writing under the title Gesammelten Aufsatze zur Parapsychologie, reissued in 1962 by Kohlhammer in Stuttgart as Grundfragen der Parapsychologie.16

After Schrenk-Notzing’s death Gerda Walther expanded her involve-ment with those areas of particular interest to her, e.g., mental or spiritual phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychometry, which Schrenk-Notzing had not been interested in. And now began her long years on the lecture circuit which took her all over Northern and Central Europe. She also was asked to take on the editorship of the Dutch periodical Tijdschrift voor Parapsychologie. She earned her living as a free-lance writer, publishing mostly in Zeitschrift fur Parapsychologie and Psychic Research published by the American Society for Psychic Research, as well as from interest on the little money she had left after the inflation of 1923 had bankrupted her.17

When the Nazis came to power in 1933 those whose past included Socialist political activity and close personal relations with leaders of the socialist movement in Germany were not exactly in favor. The Third Reich’s attitudes toward parapsychology and the occult were ambiva-lent at best.18 In the early years of the regime parapsychology was tolerated, however, and Walther was able to travel freely around Europe. In 1938, however, she was ordered to appear before the Nazi authorities because her name appeared on a list of contributors to the Dutch periodical Mensch in Kosmos which allegedly was published by a Jew. She was forbidden to write for the journal or even to communicate with them, and dared not do so because her mail was certainly being censored. Luckily a Dutch friend visited her at this time and was able to carry a message back. The article she had already submitted was published in April, 1939, but under the name F. Johansen, Copenhagen.19 

After World War II broke out, the 43 year-old Gerda Walther was pressed into national service and assigned to work in the Foreign Postal Censorship Office, because of her knowledge of English, French, Italian, Dutch, and Danish. Here all mail to and from foreign countries was opened, read and approved or censored. In June, 1941, Walther was arrested by the Gestapo and subjected to hours of interrogation, first about her acquaintance with Kurt Eisner, who had been a leader of the abortive Socialist Revolution in Munich in 1918, and then from a list of prepared questions concerning astrology, parapsychology and the occult. While in custody her apartment was ransacked and many of her books, letters and belongings were confiscated. She remained in prison for a period of several weeks during which she was questioned periodically about her knowledge of such things as Hitler’s horoscope and then released. She learned later that this was part of a nation-wide “Aktion Rudolf Hess” directed against everyone known to be involved in astrological, para- psychological or occult activities.20

Ironically enough, less than a year later Walther and many other people who had been arrested in Aktion Rudolf Hess were asked to participate in a project sponsored by the German Navy which had been suffering heavy losses in their submarine fleet at the hands of the British. The Germans were attempting to locate British submarines through “radi- esthiology,” i.e., the use of “pendulum operators” who would hold a pendulum over a map of the Atlantic, which was supposed to move in a certain way over the spot where a British ship was located. Walther did not believe that this would work, and if it did she had no desire to engage in an activity that would result in the torpedoing of ships, so she declined, informing the Navy that the Gestapo had forbidden her from participating in any such activities. She was allowed to return to her job at the censorship office.21

Walther’s wartime job gave her the opportunity from time to time to perform humanitarian acts by sending messages back and forth to people whom she had come to know through reading their correspondence. She would pencil in warnings or pass along news of loved ones. She had a typewriter at home and spent evenings making copies of underground documents such as the anti-Nazi sermons of the bishops in Munster. In 1944, the Gestapo took direct control of the Censorship Office and fired Walther when they became aware of her previous arrest. In the same year Walther’s spiritual journey from the atheism of her youth led her to convert to Roman Catholicism, almost thirty years after that first religious experience of 1918 which had started her on her path.22 

Walther endured many hardships and was in ill health during the final months of the war. She was bombed out several times, losing all her possessions and finally found refuge with relatives of a close friend outside of the city. The post-war years were equally difficult for her, having lost her health and everything else. When she was strong enough she returned to Munich and resumed her writing and work in parapsy-chology. In 1955 a second, enlarged edition of Phanomenologie der Mystik was published, in 1960 her autobiography Zum anderen Ufer appeared and was designated a “Zeitdokument” which means it was placed in school libraries throughout the Federal Republic because of the insight it gives into German life in the 20th Century.23 In the 1970’s Walther was persuaded by friends to take all of her assets and purchase a tiny apartment in a retirement home in Diefien on the Starnbarger See outside of Munich. She spent her last years here, sadly cut off from the city and from friends and colleagues. Her neighbors were “only inter-ested in fashion shows and reminiscing about the Kaiser Wilhelm days.”24 But she continued to write and read voluminously. In 1973 when two women philosophers, an American and a German, organized a meeting of German women philosophers, which was the beginning of Die Assoziation von Philosophinnen in Deutschland, Gerda Walther was the first person to respond to the announcements. Although she was too poor and too ill to travel to the meeting, her response to the idea was typically enthusiastic.25 She remained mentally alert and actively engaged in correspondence with philosophers interested in preparing both German and English editions of her writings up until a few weeks before her death, three months short of her eightieth birthday.26

II. PHILOSOPHY

1. Phenomenology

All too often the study of the history of philosophy ignores the lives of the philosophers it studies, and the cultural, social and economic contexts in which philosophers have functioned. We frequently look at a philosopher’s work virtually in a vacuum. Perhaps this is because we want to believe that it is reason alone which determines the philo-sophical positions a person espouses. Perhaps it is because philosophy has been such an overwhelmingly masculine endeavor and for males the personal and emotional aspects of life are all too often sharply 

separated from their work and their supposed ability to function in a rational manner. It is, however, undeniable that a person’s life experi-ences and emotions have a bearing on thought processes, and that in the case of philosophical thinkers, on what their philosophy will be. It would be hard to find a better case in point than Gerda Walther. The main events in Walther’s life which have been strong influences on her philosophy were her immersion throughout her childhood and youth in Marxism and socialism, her study with teachers Alexander Pfander and Edmund Husserl, the intense mystical religious experience she under-went at age 22, her association with the psychiatrist and parapsychologist Albert von Schrenk-Notzing, and the fact that she was ostracized by most of her philosophical colleagues because of her interest and involvement in parapsychology.27

Raised in a left-wing politically active family, Walther’s early dogmatic, atheistic, Marxism was tempered considerably by her contact with the philosopher Alexander Pfander at the University of Munich, especially by his teaching, in Introduction to Philosophy, that, “A true philosopher, at least initially, should view it as an open question whether or not there is a God, try to clarify what is meant by ‘God’ and what people mean when they assert God’s existence, and then seek to determine whether the assertion is justified or not.” To Gerda it was a revelation to learn that she could, without giving up anything, leave open the possibility that there might be a God after all, a possibility that had never been entertained in the Walther household, and had previously been scorned by her.28 The openmindedness of the Pfander approach to this question later became a characteristic of Walther’s thought processes.

Nevertheless, it is clear that some aspects of Marxist thought strongly influenced Walther’s first major work, her 1919 dissertation, Zur Ontologie der Socialen Gemeinschaften (On the Ontology of Social Communities).29 While the style, language and approach to her subject mark her unmistakably as a phenomenologist, her understanding of the nature of community and what it is for human beings to be and feel part of a community is rooted in the Marxist view that human beings are by their very nature “socialized beings,” “political animals,” and not, as “bourgeois liberals” believe, essentially isolated individuals who, for more or less practical reasons, make a decision to band together with other equally isolated individuals to form a society or a community. Walther’s effort in this work was to get to the essence of what a community is and what constitutes “communion” with others in this sense. The question is one which had intrigued her since her childhood, 

and rests on the more basic one of how we can know one another, i.e., have knowledge of other minds (fremde Seele). Husserl’s and Edith Stein’s answer to this question was that we get this knowledge through “empathy.” Others express themselves through body language and gestures, through speech, and other various sorts of communications, and, by means of these outward signs, we “empathically” grasp and understand them. So it is an individual body which is “given” first and this body, this material element, gives expression to the mental. Husserl believed that this is the only way it could be. Walther, however, believed that there must be something more, that we must somehow have some sort of more direct knowledge of other minds. Husserl views the the nature of communities as a further step, in that after people “empathically” have experience of one another, they band together (either consciously or unconsciously) to form society. Therefore, on the Husserl/Stein account knowledge of the community is also based on material, external evidence. We begin with experience of the spatio-physical world and derive the inner life of others from that, and move on to the formation of society. Walther wanted to explore the possibility that the answer lay in the opposite direction: that the basic point of departure is some direct inner connection between human beings and that everything else is just an external expression of that inner connection.

It was not possible for Walther to pursue such a line of inquiry in Freiburg with Husserl. He expected his students to elaborate his view-points rather than develop their own theses, and certainly not theses which were contrary to his. As Karl Lowith, one of Walther’s fellow students put it Husserl’s way of working with students was like an architect who had not only designed a house but had already built most of the structure himself. All that he allowed the students to do was the finishing work, such as hanging the wallpaper. But even then Husserl had already picked out the pattern.30

Walther, therefore, returned to Munich to complete her dissertation. Her starting point in working out these issues was Pfander’s analysis of the concept of sentiments (Gesinnungen) such as love and friendship, and what he refers to as inner union (innere Einigung). She also makes use of the work of another of her teachers, the sociologist Max Weber. But for the most part her work was original and broke new ground, delving into areas Pfander and the others had not touched upon. She works out in careful detail the elements essential to a community. As she enumerates them, firstly there must be people who, in at least 

one facet of their lives, are involved in a relationship to the same inten-tional object, understood in a broad sense. Secondly, they must at least know of each other if they do not actually know one another. As a result of this knowledge there must be some interaction between them, either direct or indirect. This mutual interaction, which is motivated directly or indirectly by the fact that they are both in an intentional relationship with the same object, must bring about some commonality in their lives (possibly, but not necessarily, the producing of something in common). But these conditions are not sufficient because they could all obtain and yet no community exist because of negative attitudes on the part of the people concerned. The necessary additional factor is the presence of a feeling of belonging together, an inner unity. Walther’s very detailed analyses of these elements and the issues raised by them is original and creative. Spiegelberg, in The Phenomenological Movement calls it “unusually fruitful and suggestive... especially by virtue of its careful analysis of the acts of mutual inner union in Pfander’s sense as the essential basis for the feeling of belonging together....” This essay might be of special interest to feminists, for whom the concept of community is an especially pertinent one and because Walther herself was a committed feminist. At the end of this long essay Walther appends a short treatment of the phenomenology, as opposed to the ontology, of communities, dealing with the experiences of pure consciousness through phenomenological reduction. Much to Walther’s surprise, this work was published in Husserl’s Jahrbuch in 1922, at a time, however, when that journal was being edited not by Husserl himself, but by Pfander.

2. Mysticism

The single most significant event in Gerda Walther’s life, which brought about a major redirection of her philosophical thinking was the religious conversion experience she went through in November, 1918.31 Her intense interest in mysticism and her best known philosophical work, Die Phanomenologie derMystik (The Phenomenology of Mysticism), can be traced directly to this occurrence. The following year, when a friend of hers in Freiburg was in a state of despair over his inability to believe in God, she got the idea of describing in writing her own religious experience in completely objective, dry, scientific terms, without letting on that this was something she had personally experienced. The title of this early version of the manuscript was “Beitrag zur inneren bewuBtseins-maBigen Konstitution des eigenen Grundwesens als Kern 

der Personlichkeit und Gottes” (Essay on the Constitution, Through Inner Consciousness, of Ones Own Basic Essence as the Core of the Personality and of God). Over the next few years she researched the experiences of a number of mystics from a variety of cultures and centuries, who had had similar experiences, expanded the text, and renamed it Phenomenology of Mysticism. Walther’s project here was to give a phenomenological description of mystical experience and other experiences of a similar nature. The book was first published in 1923, and was reissued in a second edition after World War II. When this edition came out, people remarked to Walther that it seemed as though she were speaking from personal experience and she admitted this to be true. She was then persuaded that she should prepare a revised and expanded version of the work in which she included some of her personal spiritual experiences, both of a religious and an occult nature. This third edition was published in 1976.32

One might wonder how it is possible, even assuming the author has herself experienced something which might be called a mystical expe-rience, that she could write about it. After all, isn’t a mystical experience one that is obscure, irrational, or in some views simply unknowable and inexpressable? Aware that this is the first reaction many will have to her project, she takes some pains to delineate what a phenomenological study of mysticism can and cannot accomplish. First of all, it cannot nor does it try to give a causal explanation of mystical events, or to reduce them to something which can be explained in accordance with the principles of natural science. Nor is its purpose to prove or disprove various opinions in mysticism by means of logical argumentation, for, according to Walther, a mystical experience is an irreducible phenomenon, a basic, ultimate fact which can no more be reduced to something else than can basic sensory phenomena such as colors, sounds, etc. The purpose of her study, then, is to examine these basic phenomena in an openminded and unprejudiced manner, as they occur in the experience of the mystics. Before doing that, however, it is necessary to identify what the essential features of these experiences are, i.e., to undertake an “ontology” of mystical and spiritual phenomena. Equally important is the question of whether mystical experiences really are what they pretend to be, i.e., real, original experiences of the Divine. Walther believes that an ontology of these phenomena can make at least some contribution to the answer to this question. For if there is an experience of God at all, if our conceptions of God, our relations to Him do not rest merely upon fantasy or a blind belief in traditional dogma (which would also be based on 

fantasy if there were no original experience of God), then surely, some-where, there must be a real experience of God, even if it is an imperfect one. If one says that we have to believe on the basis of revelation rather than on immediate experience of the Divine, it simply means that we may not experience the Divine directly but must assume that others, those who transmitted these revelations, have had such experience. So there must have been immediate, original experience of God and at least every religious prophet must have had one. Thus, we cannot avoid the immediate experience of the Divine, and, according to all mystics, we find it in its most perfect and certain form in the mystical experience.

What Walther wants to do is to examine those experiences that, according to their own inner sense, presume to be of God, or in whom, a direct expression, revelation, or appearance of God presents itself. Every experience in which this occurs is considered a mystical experience, not just “mystical ecstasy,” i.e., a complete immersion and submersion of a person into the Divine Being, although such experiences come closest to the meaning and purpose of mystical experience.

Walther argues that there are several common prejudices which keep us from being able to study mystical experience with the open mind with which the philosopher should approach any subject. One is the assumption that it is impossible for the human mind to experience God directly - that the object of mystical experience is merely the deepest and innermost essence of the human soul. It is said that this innermost essence generally lies hidden in the depth of a person’s being as one goes about ones daily, superficial life, and is then falsely thought to be a revelation of God when we suddenly become aware of it. Walther argues that this is nothing but psychologism, a form of thinking which has died out in other areas such as mathematics or logic, but still holds sway here. It is a position which cannot simply be assumed to be true without further investigation and thus should not be allowed to obstruct the study of mystical experience.

The second prejudice that must be overcome is the notion, stemming from the empiricist tradition, that every real thing which can be an object of our consciousness must be presented to it, directly or indirectly, by means of the five senses, i.e., that it is impossible for anything to be experienced which is not in some way or other based upon sensory data. Walther notes that some may think that the reports of the mystics confirm this, in that they frequently use such terminology as “fragrances,” “perfumes,” “sweet feelings,” “light,” “warmth,” and so on. But she argues that this is the only way they can even approximately describe 

that which is “essentially different” from everything else to those who have not experienced it. Again and again the mystics also insist that their use of such language is nothing more than an imperfect metaphor and that only the person who knows these things from experience could entirely understand what they are trying to signify with these terms, but a person who had had that experience would no longer need the metaphors.

To deny the existence of such experiences because we ourselves have not experienced them is unfounded. Walther points out that innumerable people have reported such experiences, and the fact that they are still a small minority of the people in the world is not adequate grounds for distrusting their claims. She draws an analogy with mathematics, pointing out that only a small portion of the human race is capable of understanding and experiencing the highest regions of mathematics, yet we do not assume that those who report such experiences are fantasizing or deluding themselves. On the contrary, it would be a sign of ignorance and prejudice if someone who could not understand mathematics were to distrust the assertions of the mathematicians just because he himself had no experience of them. Why shouldn’t have the same attitude toward mystical experience?

Walther draws an important distinction between “spiritual” and “intellectual,” arguing that intellectual activity, including the whole domain of analyzing, comparing, associating, distinguishing, etc., is dependent on other sorts of experiences which give it concrete material on which to work, and without which it could not function. These experiences upon which intellect depends can be of an external, sensory nature, i.e., the perception of colors, sounds, smells, etc., and the experience of bodily objects such as people, animals, plants, stones, which is based on them. But they can also be of a spiritual nature. She maintains that these spiritual data and the experiences founded upon them are of the same fundamental importance for the intellect, and are just as different from it, as are sensory data. But for some reason people generally choose to overlook, to ignore these or to confound them with other things. Just as the intellect cannot examine the external world of nature without sense perception, it cannot examine the spiritual domain without using spiritual data and the experiences based upon them.

Skeptics might argue that mystics may simply be mistaken, and that what they take to be mystical experience is really just some other kind of experience. In response, Walther points out that all mystics seem to be agreed on one point, that when you have a mystical experience there 

is no possibility of its being confused with any other kind of experi-ence. Only those who have never had such genuine, mystical experiences could think that the entirely unique character of such experiences could be confused with anything else.

3. Parapsychology, Mysticism and Phenomenology

Walther, in the later editions of her book, also raises the question of the relationship between things such as extrasensory perception and other parapsychological phenomena to mystical experience. She maintains that if such phenomena are genuine and not merely expressions of the subconscious, then they, too, must come under the heading of “spiritual phenomena.” It is important to realize that there are many different varieties of spiritual experience, and spiritual data are as different and varied as are the data of sensory perception. Walther uses an example to explain the relationship between mystical experience and parapsy-chological experience. She says it is like the case of a person who has spent his entire life in an underground mine illuminated only by dim, artificial light. Such a person would understand what light is and what colors are. Then, for the first time, he comes out into the bright sunlight and he thinks that only then is he really learning what it is to see, because the experience is so much more vivid than anything he had ever experienced before. This, Walther says, is how occult experiences are relative to mystical experiences. Yet occult experiences, insofar as they really are spiritual perceptions, are more closely related to mystical experiences than they are to external perception. Nonetheless, they may not have anything at all to do with religious experience. Someone may have had a great many occult experiences and yet not have the slightest idea what mystical experiences of the sort Walther is investigating, i.e., religious experiences are like. In spite of all the essential differences between them, however, the experience of the Divine does bear a certain likeness to “paraphysical” experience and experience of ones own innermost being, not only with respect to the inner quality of the experience, but also with respect to the way mystics generally attain these experiences. Therefore, the examination of mystical experience is prefaced by an examination of occult experience, in order better to understand the nature of the genuinely religious experience of mysticism, and to be able to distinguish between the two sorts of experience.

It is clear, then that even in Walther’s early work she was moving in the direction of parapsychology. The inner connection which she posits 

as operating between people in her study of community is not empathy, but a form of telepathy, as she further developed this line of investiga-tion. But Walther’s life situation determined to a large extent the course of her investigations. Unable to get work in philosophy because of the economic situation, she worked for a time in a mental hospital, in close contact with schizophrenics. She used this as an opportunity to study and compare the phenomena of mental illness with those of mysticism, and she argues that they are utterly different in kind, although people frequently claim that mystical experience is some form of psychopathology.33 Landing a part-time job as a research assistant to the Munich psychiatrist Albert Freiherr v. Schrenk-Notzing, who was immersed in research with trance mediums and seances, led her to get involved in parapsy- chological research in earnest. Since mysticism and discussion of mystical experience has long had a place in the history of philosophy, a phenomenology of mysticism could be seen as a legitimate and interesting philosophical undertaking, but a serious involvement with parapsychology met with quite a different reaction from her former colleagues in philosophy. In 1933, her contribution to the Festschrift in honor of Alexander Pfander’s 60th birthday was rejected, almost certainly on the basis of its subject matter, “The Phenomenology of Telepathy.” Although in England many respected philosophers and psychologists were interested in parapsychology and participated in the Society for Psychical Research, attitudes in Germany were much less tolerant. Walther was, in effect, drummed out of the philosophical corps for becoming interested in the phenomena of telepathy, clairvoyance and ESP, phenomena which did not fit into the limits of what were considered legitimate areas for philosophical investigation.

Walther was forced to turn more and more to writing for the popular press and other non-scholarly publications simply to earn a living, and this increased the distance between her and the philosophical establish-ment, although she remained on friendly personal terms with many of her philosophical contemporaries, and she never ceased to consider herself a phenomenologist. She argued in several essays for the employ-ment of phenomenological method in parapsychological research, as well as arguing that true phenomenologists would approach the phenomena of parapsychology without prejudice and predetermined ideas. If they did they would see that parapsychological experiences are as legitimate an area of study as any others.34 This question of the legitimacy of parapsychology as a possible realm of phenomenological investigation is discussed in an exchange of correspondence with Herbert Spiegelberg 

in the 1950’s.35 Spiegelberg raises objections to Walther’s suggestion that parapsychology might be an area for phenomenological investigation,

i.  e., a “regional ontology” like many others. He says, first of all that in order to do such research, “One would have to have not only a thorough grounding in natural science but be a Houdini as well, in order to be able to sort out the wheat from the chaff... Besides, there are so many fundamental areas of phenomenology still in need of clarification without turning ones attention to “dark” or “gray” areas such as parapsychology. Further, phenomenology is in a precarious state, and it is better, as long as there is enough work to do on established areas, not to venure into dangerous areas such as this. Finally, he has the impres-sion that even the solid researchers in the area, such as Rhine,36 have a tendency to draw unwarranted conclusions from their data.

Walther replies, firstly, that her work is based on her own personal experiences. However, she argues that this is not necessary. There are enough published descriptions of such experiences to enable other phenomenologists to compare them and to identify their essential characteristics without having had direct personal experience. In fact, however, at least one parapsychological phenomenon, telepathy, occurs much more frequently than people realize; they just do not pay attention to it and fail to identify it when it occurs. It plays a role in the way children acquire language, for example. So it is not the case that we are dealing here with such arcane phenomena. As for the matter of sticking to certain traditional areas of investigation, Walther argues that as a phenomenologist she should to try to achieve clarity about whatever phenomena she encounters, not just certain predetermined ones. In fact the parapsychological experiences she has had have all been purely spontaneous in nature, nothing she has taken pains to arrange. It is merely prejudice to declare in advance which phenomena are appropriate for phenomenological investigation. As for Rhine’s conclusions, Walther agrees that his methods are unable to prove such things as life after death, etc., but then she does not think that Rhine’s methods are the appropriate ones for the fruitful investigation of these phenomena anyway, despite the fact that their statistical/scientific methodology impresses some people because it is thought to be scientific. While it is clear that Walther does not succeed in getting Spiegelberg interested in the phenomenology of parapsychology, she does get him to concede that phenomenological methods are as appropriate in the study of parapsychological data as they are in an area such as phenomenological psychopathology, which is an area Spiegelberg himself writes on later.37 

III. CONCLUSIONS

The necessity of earning a living through free-lance writing and lecturing, the hardships of World War II and its aftermath, and the disapprobation of her peers kept Walther from doing very much philosophical writing after the early 1930’s. The quality of the work she did produce is such that it is clear that the field of philosophy is impoverished as a result of her absence from it. It may be, however, that history will show that the work she did do in the philosophy of parapsychology was original and important, and that she was simply ahead of her time.