Toward a Unified Science of Spiritual Experience—Visionary Realism and the Ontology of Interiority: Philosophical Commentary on Chatlos’s Framework of Spirituality

Nicholas Hedlund, PhD

This article, published in the Zygon journal of science and religion, proposes visionary realism as a philosophical framework to underlabor for the development of a unified science of spiritual experience. By integrating elements of Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism, Ken Wilber’s integral theory, William James’s radical empiricism, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s participatory epistemology, and Rudolf Steiner’s subtle empiricism, visionary realism outlines key ontological and epistemological challenges to studying interior realities such as consciousness, culture, and spirituality. Visionary realism critiques the reductionist tendencies of physicalism (scientific materialism) and the neo-Kantian conflation of subjectivity and interiority, reclaiming interiority as an emergent, ontologically real dimension of the natural world that, while epistemically relative and fallible, can, in principle, be understood objectively—namely, in an ontologically realist and transfactual manner. This article advances an expanded or integrative empiricism—radical, deep, and subtle—that integrates subjective, intersubjective, and objective methodologies to legitimize spiritual experience as a domain of rigorous scientific inquiry. It further explores the nested relationship between a science of interiority, a science of spiritual experience, and the emerging academic field of soul studies. This integrative framework seeks to bridge science, philosophy, and theology, offering transformative responses to the meaning crisis and the larger global metacrisis by fostering a secular spirituality capable of re-enchanting the disenchanted world.

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