Maverick Philosopher

A Contemplative Nun on Thomas Merton

This just over the transom from Karl White:

Hope you're well. May be of interest.

‘I have never met a real contemplative who found Merton useful’: Letters reveal Sister Wendy’s ambivalence about Gethsemani’s famous monk | America Magazine July 30, 2018 Dearest Robert, I feel about [Henri Nouwen] as I do about Thomas Merton. There is much self-deception and muddle in their lives; and yet there is an unwavering concentration on God. www.americamagazine.org

Hi Karl,

Your message arrives at an opportune moment. The day before yesterday I received Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Christian Perfection and Contemplation: According to St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross. Garrigou-Lagrange's work is the real deal from perhaps the hardest of the hard-core paleo-Thomists.

 

While reading the chapter on infused contemplation, I thought of Thomas Merton. Merton's sense of the reality of the Unseen Order was weak and underdeveloped because of the strong lure of the secular -- to which, however, he never entirely succumbed, pace the thesis of David D. Cooper's excellent but mistaken Thomas Merton's Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical Humanist (University of Georgia Press, 1989, 2008).  Cooper attributed the evolution (devolution?) to Merton's failure to achieve infused contemplation. As I read him, however, Merton never lost his faith. He did, however, remain to the end deeply conflicted. All the Merton commentators that I have read agree that he came to question the contemptus mundi he expressed in The Seven Storey Mountain.  As for whether or not Merton attained infused contemplation, if he had why are there no references to it in his journal? There is a paucity of spiritual disclosure in those private pages of a monk who one would think would reveal the most intimate secrets of his inner life. I have read all seven volumes of his journal several times over. He is one of those key figures without whom you cannot understand the 'Sixties.

 

Thanks for the link.  I read the Ellsberg-Sr. Wendy correspondence with interest.

 

Regards,

 

Bill

Buber on Buddhism: Notes on a Trenchant Critique

Substack latest. 

Martin Buber's critique of Buddhism, and of mysticism generally, is formidable.

 

Felicitas Theoretica et Visio Beata: Monasticism and Christianity

The bliss of the bios theoretikos as described by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics is the model for the Beatific Vision as described by Thomas Aquinas. The ultimate salvific state is a  contemplative state. Monasticism is an institutional expression of this root commitment.  The monk's life is decidedly biased toward the intellectual and the theoretical. As opposed to what? As opposed to a life in which praxis is paramount.

Question: Is the life of the monk the highest life for the Christian? Is the monastic life the highest form of  imitatio Christi?  Christ was no anchorite.  He did not flee from the agitation of the cities and from the people except for relatively short periods. He associated with the canaille, with publicans and prostitutes. His ministry was among them where he risked everything and in human terms lost everything.

Despite their drastic differences, Socrates too moved among the people  and met a predictable fate. He lived in no ivory tower where he could think and write in peace and in leisurely retirement. He wrote nothing. His academy was the agora. His was the dialectic of the streets, not that of the learned essay. A battle-hardened soldier, he knew how to translate military valor into civil courage. Among his interlocutors were powerful and vicious men.  He took risks, offended them, and was executed by the State.  But back to Christ.  Let us hear St. Neilos the Ascetic. This is from his Ascetic Discourse in the Philokalia, that marvellous compendium of Patristic teachings.

For philosophy is a state of moral integrity combined with a doctrine of true knowledge concerning reality. Both Jews and Greeks fell short of this, for they rejected the Wisdom that is from heaven and tried to philosophize without Christ, who alone has revealed the true philosophy in both His life and His teaching. For by the purity of His life He was the first to establish the way of true philosophy. He always held His soul above the passions of the body, and in the end, when His death was required by His design for man's salvation. He laid down even His soul. In this He taught us that the true philosopher must renounce all life's pleasures, mastering pains and passions, and paying scant attention to the body: he must not overvalue even his soul, but must readily lay it down when holiness demands.

The apostles received this way of life from Christ and made it their own, renouncing the world in response to His call, disregarding fatherland, relatives and possessions. At once they adopted a harsh and strenuous way of life, facing every kind of adversity, afflicted, tormented, harassed, naked, lacking even necessities; and finally they met death boldly, imitating their Teacher faithfully in all things. Thus through their actions they left behind a true image of the highest way of life.

Although all Christians should have modeled their own life on this image, most of them either lacked the will to do so or else made only feeble efforts. There were, however, a few who had the Strength to rise above the turmoil of the world and to flee from the agitation of cities. Having escaped from this turbulence, they embraced the monastic life and reproduced in themselves the pattern of apostolic virtue. They preferred voluntary poverty to possessions, because this freed them from distraction, and so as to control the passions, they satisfied their bodily needs with food that was readily available and simply prepared, rather than with richly dressed dishes. Soft and unnecessary clothing they rejected as an invention of human luxury, and they wore only such plain garments as are required for the body. It seemed to them a betrayal of philosophy to turn their attention from heavenly things to earthly concerns more appropriate to animals. They ignored the world, being above human passions.

I draw your attention to the third paragraph. Christ did not flee from the agitation of the cities. He did not ignore the world and its turmoil. He was not above human passions. The God-Man was fully human. He did not die like a Stoic sage. He experienced to the full the brutality of the brutal Romans, dying like a man in utter agony of body and in despair of spirit, abandoned.

So the question is: Is the monastic way a way to evade true imitation of Christ? I myself am of the monkish disposition and not at all inclined to go into the agora like Socrates  or into the temple with its moneychangers like Christ. Luther I find repellent; the anti-rational but also anti-mystical Kierkegaard fascinating but wrongheaded; the Roman church wishy-washy despite its deep depths of mysticism; it is the East and the mystical depths of Orthodox Christianity that attract me. Athens is closer to Constantinople than to Rome.

And so I ask my question in the spirit of Socratic self-examination. I do not have an answer.  The unexamined life is not worth living, and the highest examination is the examination of one's own life.

Related:

Kierkegaard: "To Hell with the Pope!" and Monkishness. The Highest Life

Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?

Three Theisms: Ontic, Alterity, and Onto-Theological and their Liabilities

There is a problem that has occupied me on and off for years. One way into the problem is via the following aporetic triad:

1. There are things other than God that exist, and they all depend on God for their existence.

2.  For any x, y,  if x depends for its existence on y, and x exists, then y exists. (This implies that nothing can depend on God for its existence unless God exists.)

3. God is not one of the many things that exist, and so God does not exist.

It is easy to see that the limbs of the triad cannot all be true. And yet each has some plausibility, at least 'in-house,' i.e., among theists.

(1) or something like it will be accepted by both ontic theists and alterity theists, assuming that they are not pantheists. Roughly, an ontic theist is a theist who maintains that God is a being among beings, an ens among entia, while an alterity theist is one who maintains that God is radically transcendent, radically other, to such an extent that he cannot be identified with any being.

(2) won't be accepted by the alterity theists, but it is to my mind exceedingly plausible! If everything other than God depends on God for its existence, then God must in some mode or manner exist; otherwise he would be nothing at all. And on nothing nothing can depend.

(3) won't be accepted by the ontic theist, but alterity theists find it plausible. If God is other than every being, then he is no being. If to be is to exist, then God does not exist.

Since the limbs cannot all be true, one of them must be rejected.  I am assuming, of course, that there cannot be true contradictions.  There are therefore three main ways of solving the problem.

A. The quickest solution, call it Blanket Atheism, is by rejecting (1).  There is no God in any sense of the term.  No being is God, and there is no God 'beyond being.'   There is just the natural world (and perhaps abstracta) but nature is not God, and so God does not exist. Reality is exhausted by space-time, its occupants, and (perhaps) the Platonic menagerie.  To put it another way, concrete reality is exhausted by space-time and its occupants.

B.  The alterity theist rejects (2) while accepting (3).

C.  The ontic theist accepts (2) while rejecting (3).

But there are two other C-options, two other options involving the acceptance of (2) and the rejection of (3).

One could take a monistic tack, roughly along the lines of Spinoza.  Accordingly, (i) there is a sense in which God exists -- God is not natura naturata, but natura naturans -- ; (ii) God exists in the primary sense of 'exists'; (iii) God alone exists, hence is not one of many existents, and so does not exist in the sense in which Spinozistic modes exist.

This is what I used to think, back in the '80s.  See my "Two Faces of Theism," Idealistic Studies, vol. xx, no. 3 (September 1990), pp. 238-257.  But I moved away from this position in the '90s and took an onto-theological turn that found expression in my existence book.

That is the other C-option.  Accordingly, God is not an existent among existents as the ontic theist maintains.  Nor is God somehow real but nonexistent as the alterity theist maintains.  Nor is God the one and only existent as the monist maintains.  Rather, God is self-existent Existence, yet transcendent of the created realm, pace monism.  This is roughly akin to the position of Aquinas.  Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.  God is not a being (ens), but self-subsisting  Being (esse). So God is Being (esse) but God also is.  God is both esse and ens.  Gott ist beides: Sein und Seiendes. Thus there is no 'ontological difference' (Heidegger) in God. God is Being but also the prime 'case' -- not instance! -- of Being.  (Being has no instances.) But God is in a mode of Being unlike the mode of Being of anything else. So God is not a being among beings, nor does he have properties in the way Socrates has properties. I have gone over this in painful detail in many other entries.

If we take the Thomistic tack, we can navigate between the Scylla of ontic theism and the Charybdis of alterity theism. We can avoid the untenable extremes. God is not a being among beings, but God is also not nothing as he would have to be if he were wholly other than every being.

But this too has its difficulties.  I will mention one. How could anything both be and be identical to Being? How could anything be both ens and esse? How could Existence itself exist? This is unintelligible to intellects of our constitution, discursive  intellects. So now I am contemplating the final step: Into the Mystic.

The above triad strikse me as an aporia, an insolubilium.  The 'solutions' to it are mere stopgaps that generate problems of their own as bad as or worse than the original problem. For example, if you 'solve' the triad by embracing Blanket Atheism, then you face all the problems attending naturalism, problems we have rehearsed many times. The original problem looks to be absolutely insoluble. One has to blast through it, as through a koan, into the Transdiscursive.  The philosopher, however, hovers at the boundary of the Sayable, marking it without overstepping it, incapable qua philosopher of effing the Ineffable, but able -- and this is his office --  to point to it while refuting both denials of it and bad theories about it.

Karl Barth, Divine Revelation, and Mystical Experience

"It [divine revelation] is the opening of a door that can only be unlocked from the inside." Quoted by Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Image Books, 1965, p. 10) from a Christmas sermon preached by Karl Barth in 1931. I am going to take this ball and run with it.

Imagine someone who would  pass through only those doors that he could open himself whether by hand, by key, by picking the lock, or by brute force.  Imagine him declaring, "The only  permissible passages are those initiated by me  and controlled by me at every step." Such a one would never knock or ring a bell. To knock or ring would be to rely on another for entry and thus to sacrifice one's ingressive self-reliance, to give it a name. It would be the heteronomy of help in violation of the autonomy of self-entry. "The only fully responsible entry is self-entry!"  "It is wrong always and everywhere to rely on another for entry."  "The only doors worth opening are those one can open by oneself!"

The person I am imagining would be like the modern (post-Cartesian) man who accepts as true only that for which he has sufficient evidence, only that which he can verify for himself by internal criteria and methods. Such a one, if he were standing before the portals of saving truth that can only be unlocked from the inside, would deny himself access to such truth out of a  refusal to accept help. His fear of error would prevent his contact with truth.

Would that be a prideful, and thus a morally censurable, refusal? Would it be the rebellious refusal of a miserable creature who, though dependent on God for everything, absurdly privileges his own petty ego and sets it up as epistemic arbiter?

Or would the refusal to accept divine revelation be a laudable refusal that bespeaks a cautious and critical love of truth? "I so love the truth that I will accept no substitutes!"

The question is not easy to answer. It is not even easy to formulate. The question concerns the very possibility of divine revelation, and the possibility of its acceptance, not the content of any particular putative revelation.

Trust or verify?  The child is trusting, but gullible; he learns to be critical. Having come of age, and having been repeatedly fooled, he trusts as little as possible. The adult is wary, as he must be to negotiate a world of snares and delusions and evil doers.

I had an unforgettable mystical experience at the age of 28. I was tormented by a torrent of deep doubts as to the ultimate sense of things.  Around and around I went like a Zen man in the grip of his koan. Striding along, alone, in the early pre-dawn of a Spring day in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, I came to a point where I caught a glimpse of the rising sun just as it appeared over the horizon. Suddenly all my doubts vanished and I was flooded with a deep intuition of the ultimate sense and rightness of things. The solar glimpse triggered a mystical Glimpse into the intrinsic intelligibility of the universe.  All my doubts vanished. The Last Word was sense, not absurdity! I bowed my head and was suffused with peace, and Metaphysical Trust, as I later described it in my journal.  Not a trust in this thing or that, or in any human person, or in oneself and one's powers of understanding, but trust in the Unseen Order in which this transient bubble of space-time is suspended and rendered meaningful.

But of course that remarkable experience was only an experience, and no experience proves the veridicality, the reality, of its intentional object.  That's Modern Philosophy 101 and only an unthinking dogmatist could think it easily dismissed.

The dialectic proceeds beyond this point, of course, but weblog entries are best kept succinct.  So I leave you with the alternative: Trust or Verify? Finite reason is not equipped to solve this conundrum. You will have to de-cide. That involves a leap of faith. You can put your faith in the Unseen or in your own powers.

Two Worries about Meditation

One Christian friend worries that his meditation practice might lead him in a Buddhist direction, in particular toward an acceptance of the three marks of phenomenal existence: anicca, anatta, dukkha.  He shouldn't worry. Those doctrines in their full-strength Pali  form are dubious if not demonstrably untenable. As such, they cannot be veridical deliverances of any meditation practice. 

For example, the doctrine of anicca, impermanence, is not a mere recording of the Moorean fact that there is change; it is a radical theory of change along Heraclitean lines.  As a theory it is dialectically driven and not a summary of phenomenology. One could read it into the phenomenology of meditational experience, but one cannot derive it from the phenomenology. The claim I just made is highly contentious; I will leave it to the first friend to see if he can verify it to his own satisfaction.

Since he is a Christian I recommend to him an approach to meditation more in consonance with Christianity, an approach  as inner listening.  In one sentence: Quiet the mind, then listen and wait.  Open yourself to intimations and vouchsafings from the Unseen Order. Psalm 46:10: "Be still and know that I am God . . . ." But be aware that the requisite receptivity exposes one to attack from demonic agents whose power exceeds our own. So discernment is needed.

This brings me to a second Christian friend who asks, "Do you think the mind clearing function of meditation might be akin to the person Jesus taught us of, the person with a clean and emptied soul that was attractive to the demons as a place to occupy?"  

Yes, there is that danger. A mind cluttered and distracted by  petty thoughts and concerns is, from the point of view of the demons, safe against any irruption of divine light. This is why demons are more likely to be encountered in monasteries than in fleshpots. But once the mind is cleared of mundane detritus, once it returns from the diaspora of the sense world and rests quietly in it itself in its quest for the Unchanging Light, the demons have an opening.  But these facts of the spiritual life are no argument against meditation; they are an argument for caution. One would be well-advised to preface every meditation session with a discursive prayer along these lines: "Lord, I confess my spiritual infirmity and humbly ask to be protected from any and all demonic agents. Lord help me, guardians guard me." Sancti Angeli, custodes nostri, defendite nos in proelio, ut non pereamus in tremendo iudicio.  

My second friend is a Protestant, and among other faults, they fail to appreciate the mystical element in Christianity.

Finally:

The East no more owns meditation than the Left owns dissent.  Here is a quick little bloggity-blog schema.

Buddhist Nihilism: the ultimate goal is nibbana, cessation, and the final defeat of the 'self' illusion.

Hindu Monism: the ultimate goal is for the little self (jivatman) to merge with the Big Self, Atman = Brahman.

Christian Dualism: the ultimate goal is neither extinction nor merger but a participation in the divine life in which the participant, transfigured and transformed as he undoubtedly would have to be, nevertheless maintains his identity as a unique self.  Dualism is retained in a sublimated form.

I warned you that my schema would be quick. But I think it is worth ruminating on and filling in.  The true philosopher tacks between close analysis and overview, analytic squinting and syn-opsis and pan-opsis.

You say you want details?

Related

A 'No' to 'No Self' 

Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self? 

Buber on Buddhism and Other Forms of Mysticism

Big Sur, Kerouac, and Being on the Edge

Dwight Green writes,

I had forgotten about your focus on the Beats in October (more of a remembrance of Kerouac, if I remember right) until I saw your recent post introducing it for this year. 

 

A couple of years ago I drove to the Big Sur area and was unable to do much hiking due to recent fire and weather wiping out many trails in the parks. On one of my stops I witnessed what helped push Kerouac mentally over the edge, as he published in Big Sur. The incredible power that defines the area is truly awesome (despite the overuse of that word). It's been a long time since I really connected with Kerouac but I did that weekend. See here.  (I'm in the process of moving this to a new site but I don't have all the links working yet, so this is the old site.) 

 

The incident is more than a little macabre and I don't mean to "profit" from it in any way, but I had not understood his feelings in Big Sur until that moment. Just wanted to pass it on in case it's of interest.

Yes, a remembrance of Kerouac, Memory Babe, by this acolyte of anamnesis. You are using 'awesome' correctly and so you can hardly be taxed with overuse.  Thanks for reminding me of the passage:

So that when later I heard people say “Oh Big Sur must be beautiful!” I gulp to wonder why it has the reputation of being beautiful above and beyond its fearfulness, its Blakean groaning roughrock Creation throes, those vistas when you drive the coast highway on a sunny day opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing sawing.  Jack Kerouac, Big Sur (1962)

I am a native Californian  who knows Jack's book and the coastal road and the bridge and the views and has had his own remarkable experiences at Big Sur.  Gazing out at the Pacific  nearly 50 years ago I felt as if locked into the same nunc stans that I had glimpsed a few months before at Playa del Rey on the southern California coast. 

 

Nature in the extremity of her beauty has the power to unhinge the soul from the door jambs of what passes for sanity.  Mystical glimpses of the Unseen and the Eternal come mainly to the young if they come at all, and some of the recipients of these gifts spend the rest of their lives trying to live up to their vouchsafings.

 

The unhinging I just spoke of can also take a dark and terrible form in this place of beauty and hazard:

. . . Big Sur follows Kerouac a few years after On the Road had been published (and fourteen years after the events in the book) as he's trying to handle the fame of his book as well as his inability to control himself, especially with alcohol. Kerouac's mental deterioration coincides with his visits to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in Big Sur. His isolation, exacerbated by the insignificance he feels in comparison to nature's power brings on a mental and physical breakdown. The poem he wrote while in Big Sur, "Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur," echoes the parts of the novel comparing man's transience to nature's permanence, one of the many tensions in the book such as image vs. reality and beauty vs. hazard.

Worse still are the accidental deaths and the suicides.  You link to the story of the young man who fell into a blowhole and perished while inspecting a marine geyser. 

 

The 19-year-old son of an undergraduate philosophy professor of mine committed suicide by plunging from the bridge.  I remember him as a baby in a high chair in his mother's kitchen. We both wanted Ronda's attention. Little Charley was hungry for food, my young self for truth.  Mommy dutifully divided her attention, but little Charley won.

 

Addendum:  At the end of the above Memory Babe link you will find a number of good critical comments on Jack and on Nicosia's biography.

 

The Old Soul

The old soul sees, while his body is yet young, that this world has nothing to offer us that is finally satisfactory.

Are You an Old Soul?

Don't be put off by the New Age-y vibe of this article.  There are real insights here, and the internal links are worth following out. 

The Sensus Divinitatis Waxes and Wanes

Our sense of the reality of the Unseen Order and the Unseen Other waxes in the measure that we detach our love from the objects of the senses and the pleasures they promise but never quite deliver. It wanes as we lose ourselves in the diaspora of the sensory manifold and its multiple temptations and dis-tractions.  There is a sense in which we 'realize' the mundus sensibilis by our spiritual attachment to it and 'de-realize' it by our spiritual withdrawal from it.

Traditional strictures against gluttony and lust have part of their origin here. The glutton and the lecher seek happiness where it cannot be found. It seems somehow fitting that Anthony Bourdain and Jeffrey Epstein should end their days in awful ways.

Simone Weil, and her master, Plato, approve of this message.

There is a Platonic problem of the reality of the external world. It is a problem not so much about the existence of sensible things as it is about their importance. But this is a large separate topic.

Thought, Prayer, Meditation

"Prayer is when night descends on thought." (Alain, as quoted by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.) Knowing Alain, he must have intended his aphorism as a denigration of prayer. I see it the other way around. We cannot think our way out of our predicament; thinking merely allows us to map the terrain and discover the impasses.  It is merely a means of "consolidating our perplexities." (E. Cioran). It is the failure of thinking that leads us to pray, and the limitations of prayer that lead us to meditate  and wait, like Weil, in silence.  (Curious it is that Simone Weil was a student of Alain.)

So I say: Prayer is when night descends on thought, and meditation is when night descends on (discursive) prayer.  But all three are needed for a complete human life. Each of us should aspire to be a thinker, a believer, and a mystic with triple citizenship in Athens, Jerusalem, and Benares.

A Philosopher's Sign of the Cross

In the name of the Principle, and of its principal Exemplar and Expression, and of the dialectical Unity of the Two.*

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." 

In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum. Secundum Ioannem 1, Prologus.

In the Principle was the Exemplary Expression, and the Exemplary Expression was with the Principle, and the Exemplary Expression was the Principle.

.........................

*That unity-in-difference, and difference-in-unity, is a dialectical  difference.  It is an affront to the discursive intellect with its abrupt and frozen diremptions, but approximates the fluidity of life.

This Morning's Meditation: Notes with the Help of Poulain

Today's sitting  ran from 3-3:45 am.  It was focused and intense, but dry, as most sessions are. The wayward mind was brought to heel, but discursive operations continued.  I was hard by the boundary that separates what Poulain calls the prayer of simplicity from what he calls the prayer of quiet.  But I remained this side of the border, and this side of the first stage of the mystical properly speaking.

Poulain's definition is excellent: "We apply the word mystic to those supernatural acts or states which our own industry is powerless to produce, even in a low degree, even momentarily." (Fr. Augustin Poulain, S.J., The Graces of Interior Prayer: a Treatise on Mystical Theology, Caritas Publishing, 2016, viii + 680 pp.  A translation of the French original first published in 1901. Emphasis in original.) Poulain's tome may well be the greatest secondary source on mystical theology ever written.  It is in the same league as The Three Ages [sic] of the Interior Life by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O. P.

The main point here is that one cannot enter the mystical by one's own power.  Grace is needed. Herewith, a crucial difference between Christian and Buddhist meditation.  'Crucial' from L. crux, crucis, meaning 'cross,' has a special resonance in this context.

A New Testament analogy occurs to me: "Knock and it shall be opened unto you."  (Matthew 7: 7-8, KJV.) If a door is locked from the inside, I cannot pass though it by my own power: I must knock.  The knocking is within my power, but the entry is due to the initiative of another who is not in my power. The prayer of simplicity, the fourth degree of ordinary prayer, is within my power and is like the knocking; the first degree of mystical prayer is not in my power and is like the allowance of entry.

About the prayer of simplicity, Poulain says that "there is a thought or a sentiment that returns incessantly and easily (although with little or no development) among many other thoughts, whether useful or no." (8)  Here are three examples of my own that are either Christian or proto-Christian.

The Jesus Prayer:  "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." 

A favorite line of mine from Plotinus' Enneads: "It is by the One that all beings are beings." 

An invention of mine with a Thomist flavor: "The Lord is Being itself."

In each case, one runs through a short sentence. The run-through is discursive (from L. currere, to run) in that it constitutes an interior discourse. One does not develop these thoughts, but repeats them to oneself incessantly in a condition in which other thoughts obtrude either as distractions or further developments.  There is nothing mystical going on; one remains on the discursive plane even if one whittles longer phrases down to shorter ones.  One has not yet achieved inner quiet. One is merely knocking on the door. To use the Jesus mantram as an example:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner --> Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, a sinner --> Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me -->  Lord Jesus Christ have mercy --> Lord have mercy --> Lord, Lord, Lord.

The whittling process may lead to one-pointed concentration on one word. This brings one to the edge of the discursive plane. Whether one goes over the edge into the mystic is not up to one. It is a matter of grace or divine initiative.

Poulain, following The Interior Castle of the great Spanish mystic St. Theresa of Avila,  calls the first degree or stage of mystical union the prayer of quiet or "the incomplete mystic union." (48)  In this state, "the divine action is not strong enough to hinder distractions," and "the imagination still preserves its liberty." (49).

The claim that God's action brings about the first degree of mystical union is a metaphysical claim that goes beyond the phenomenology of the situation. The same is true of the claim that the mystical state is one of union with God.  If we put God between the Husserlian brackets, and attend solely to the phenomenology, we can still ground a distinction between the fourth state of ordinary prayer, the prayer of simplicity, which remains on the discursive plane, and the first mystical state.  

During the session of 25 July 2019 I experienced a sudden, unanticipated, unwilled,  shut-down of all thoughts. Mental silence supervened all of a sudden, on its own.  It subsided soon enough, and the philosopher's attempt at analysis only speeded its departure. If one is granted a taste of this blissful quiet one must simply receive it, without analysis, and with gratitude. The experience of inner quiet, whether or it it is the effect of a transcendent Source, is undeniable and unmistakable.  

On 7 December 2109 I sat from 3:30-4:22 am.  From my notes:

Very good session. A touch of grace, hard to describe: a pacifying presence of something beyond my mental operations. Subtle, but unmistakable.

On 18 February 2020, the experience was as of a subtle summons, a summoning away from mental chatter and the useless rehearsals of stale thoughts, toward silence, waiting, patient attention, interior listening and hearkening. Hearken, horchen, gehorsam, Gehorsamkeit.

Is Buddhism a Religion?

Julius Evola in The Doctrine of Awakening, pp. 9-10, states unequivocally,

. . . Buddhism -- referring always to original [Pali] Buddhism -- is not a religion. This does not mean that it denies supernatural and metaphysical reality, but only that it has nothing to do with the way of regarding our relationship with this reality that we know more or less as 'religion.'

What he means is that there is a strong tendency in the West to identify religion with faith-based religion, and that Buddhism is not a religion in this sense, based as it is on knowledge and direct insight, not faith or revelation.

. . . Dahlke sums up the matter, saying that one characteristic of Western superficiality is the tendency always to identify religion as a whole with religion based on faith.14 [P. Dahlke, Buddhismus als Religion und Moral (Munich and Neubiberg, 1923, p. 11) Beyond those who "believe" are those who "know," and to these the purely "mytho­logical" character of many simply religious, devotional, and even scholastically theo­logical concepts is quite clear. It is largely a question of different degrees of knowl­edge. Religion, from religo, is, as the word itself indicates, a reconnecting and, more specifically, a reconnecting of a creature to a Creator with the eventual introduction of a mediator or of an expiator. On the basis of this central idea can be built up a whole system of faith, devotion, and even mysticism that, admittedly, is capable of carrying an individual to a certain level of spiritual realization. However, it does so to a large extent passively since it is based essentially on sentiment, emotion, and suggestion. In such a system no amount of scholastic explaining will ever completely resolve the irrational and sub-intellectual element. (p. 9)

Summing up, we can say that pure Buddhism is a 'religion' without faith, revelation, sentiment, emotion, or devotion.  Alternatively, if those features are deemed essential to religion, then Buddhism is not a religion. 

We can easily understand that in some cases such "religious" forms are neces­sary; and even the East, in later periods, has known something of the kind, for instance, the way of devotion-bhakti-marga (from bhaj, "to adore")-of Ramānuja and certain forms of the Sakti cult: but we must also realize that there may be some who have no need of them and who, by race and by calling, desire a way free from "religious" mythologies, a way based on clear knowledge, realization, and awaken­ing. An ascetic, whose energies are employed in this direction, achieves the highest form of ascesis; and Buddhism gives us an example of an ascesis that is outstanding of its kind - -in saying "of its kind" we wish to point out that Buddhism represents a great historical tradition with texts and teachings available to all; it is not an esoteric school with its knowledge reserved for a restricted number of initiates.

For some, the spiritual quest is impossible without devotion and such accessories as pictorial representations such as icons along with other sensory aids including bodily postures (kneeling, etc.), gestures (sign of the cross, etc.) incense, candles, medals, water, ashes, oil, bread, and wine all appropriately sanctified within the context of simple or elaborate rites. Thus ordinary water, appropriately blessed by a priest, becomes 'holy water' and ordinary bread and wine, at the moment of consecration in the Catholic mass, undergoes transubstantiation into the body and blood of Christ.  For Buddhism, this is all in the end "mythological," including the subtle logic-chopping and dialectical maneuvers involved in the scholastic theology of transubstantiation.  Discursive prayer and other devotional practices may be necessary for some to make spiritual progress, but they can become a distraction and a form of superstition.  The Ultimate Realization lies beyond all of these 'bhaktic' or devotional practices and of course it lies beyond all theological dialectics.  And even if there is realm beyond this gross realm, a subtler realm which we will enter at death, that would only be a higher level of samsara and not nirvana, the ultimate goal of Realization. 

In this sense we can, and indeed we must, state that Buddhism -- referring always to original Buddhism-is not a religion. This does not mean that it denies su­pernatural and metaphysical reality, but only that it has nothing to do with the way of regarding one's relationship with this reality that we know more or less as "religion." The validity of these statements would in no way be altered were one to set out in greater detail to defend the excellence of the theistic point of view against Bud­dhism, by charging the Doctrine of Awakening with more or less declared atheism. This brings us to the second point for discussion, but which we need only touch upon here as it is dealt with at length later in this work.

The atheism of the Buddhist is not the crass atheism of the materialistic worldling devoid of spiritual depth and spiritual aspiration. The atheism of the Buddhist is the denial that  any God, even the ontologically simple God of Thomas Aquinas could be the Absolute, the Unconditioned, the Ultimate.  This, I take it, is logically compatible with the belief that there are gods and even a unique God in higher samsaric realms this side of the Absolute.

We have admitted that a "religiously" conceived system can carry an individual to a certain level of spiritual realization. The fact that this system is based on a theistic concept determines this level. The theistic concept, however, is by no means either unique or even the highest "religious" relationship such as the Hindu bhakti or the predominant faiths in the Western or Arab world. Whatever one may think of it, the theistic concept represents an incomplete view of the world, since it lacks the extreme hierarchic apex. From a metaphysical and (in the higher sense) traditional point of view, the notion on which theism is based of representing "being" in a per­sonal form even when theologically sublimated, can never claim to be the ultimate ideal. The concept and the realization of the extreme apex or, in other words, of that which is beyond both such a "being " and its opposite, "nonbeing," was and is natural to the Aryan spirit. It does not deny the theistic point of view but recognizes it in its rightful hierarchic place and subordinates it to a truly transcendental concept.

We are being told that theism is an incomplete worldview because "it lacks the extreme hierarchic apex."  Theism doesn't go all the way to the top. Even if  God is self-subsisting Being itself, ipsum esse subsistens, as on the rarefied conception of Aquinas, which is beyond the prevalent 'God is a being among beings' conception, there is something still higher in the hierarchy, namely 'something' which is beyond Being and Nonbeing. The God of Aquinas is. He is an ens, even if he is also esse.  He is also a personal being. The Absolutely Unconditioned, however, is beyond personality and impersonality as it is beyond Being and Nonbeing.  God is not denied by Buddhism, but placed below the ultimately transcendent.

It is freely admitted that things are less simple than they seem in Western theol­ogy, especially in the realm of mysticism, and more particularly where it is con­cerned with so-called "negative theology." Also in the West the notion of a personal God occasionally merges into the idea of an ineffable essence, of an abysmal divin­ity, as the έν conceived by the Neoplatonists beyond the όν, as the Gottheit in the neuter beyond the Gott, which, after Dionysius the Areopagite, appeared frequently in German mysticism and which exactly corresponds with the neuter Brahman above the theistic Brahmā of Hindu speculation. But in the West it is more a notion wrapped in a confused mystical cloud than a precise doctrinal and dogmatic definition conforming to a comprehensive cosmic system. And this notion, in point of fact, has had little or no effect on the "religious" bias prevalent in the Western mind: its only result has been to carry a few men, confused in their occasional intuitions and visions, beyond the frontiers of "orthodoxy."

Evola's point seems basically correct: the negative theology of the mystics never became mainstream in the way that Aquinas's conception became mainstream in the Catholic church. 

That very apex that Christian theology loses in a confused background is, instead, very often placed consciously in the foreground by the Aryo-Oriental tradi­tions. To talk in this respect of atheism or even of pantheism betrays ignorance, an ignorance shared by those who spend their time unearthing oppositions and anti-theses. The truth is that the traditions of the Aryans who settled in the East retain and conserve much of what the later traditions of races of the same root who settled in the West have lost or no longer understand or retain only fragmentarily. A contributing factor here is the undoubted influence on European faiths of concepts of Semitic and Asiatic-Mediterranean origin. Thus to accuse of atheism the older traditions, particularly the Doctrine of Awakening, and also other Western traditions that re­flect the same spirit, only betrays an attempt to expose and discredit a higher point of view on the part of a lower one: an attempt that, had circumstances been reversed, would have been qualified out of hand by the religious West as Satanic. And, in fact, we shall see that it was exactly thus that it appeared to the doctrine of the Buddha (cf. p. 85-86).

The recognition of that which is "beyond both 'being' and 'nonbeing'" opens to ascetic realization possibilities unknown to the world of theism. The fact of reaching the apex, in which the distinction between "Creator" and "creature" becomes metaphysically meaningless, allows of a whole system of spiritual realizations that, since it leaves behind the categories of "religious" thought, is not easily understood: and, above all, it permits a direct ascent, that is, an ascent up the bare mountainside, without support and without useless excursions to one side or another. This is the exact meaning of the Buddhist ascesis; it is no longer a system of disciplines de-signed to generate strength, sureness, and unshakable calm, but a system of spiritual realization.

Buddhism -- and again later we shall see this distinctly -- carries the will for the unconditioned to a limit that is almost beyond the imagination of the modem Westerner. And in this ascent beside the abyss the climber rejects all "mythologies," he proceeds by means of pure strength, he ignores all mirages, he rids himself of any residual human weakness, he acts only according to pure knowledge. Thus the Awak­ened One (Buddha), the Victor (Jina) could be called he whose way was unknown to men, angels, and to Brahma himself (the Sanskrit name for the theistic god). Admit­tedly, this path is not without dangers, yet it is the path open to the virile mind-viriya-magga. The texts clearly state that the doctrine is "for the wise man, the expert, not for the ignorant, the inexpert." The simile of the cutting grass is used: "As kusa grass when wrongly grasped cuts the hand, so the ascetic life wrongly practised leads to infernal torments."' The simile of the serpent is used: "As a man who wants serpents goes out for serpents, looks for serpents, and finding a powerful serpent grasps it by the body or by the tail; and the serpent striking at him bites his hand or arm or other part so that he suffers death or mortal anguish-and why is this? Because he wrongly grasped the serpent-so there are men who are harmed by the doctrines. And why is this? Because they wrongly grasped the doctrines.'

It must be thus quite clear that the Doctrine of Awakening is not itself one particular religion that is opposed to other religions.

In sum, Buddhism on Evola's account is neither crassly atheistic nor crassly antireligious: it does not deny  supersensible Transcendence.  But this Transcendence is not a personal creator God who reveals himself to man, his creature, but the Unconditioned Absolute the ultimate path to which is not the path of faith and devotion but the path whereby one seeks to realize the Unconditioned Absolute in one's own consciousness by finally overcoming every duality of the discursive intellect.

No Total Clarity in Philosophy

To demand total clarity in philosophy is like demanding that one's visual field be all focus and no fringe.  It is a demand  that cannot be satisfied.  But the situation in philosophy is worse than the metaphor suggests. The visual fringe can be brought into focus if one is willing to allow the focus to become fringe. The transdiscursive, however, to which philosophy is beholden and to which she points, can never be brought into discursive focus. The transdiscursive, ineliminably obscure, must forever remain fringe. 

The unity of the proposition, for example, without which no proposition can attract a truth value, and without which no proposition can be more than a truth-value-less aggregate of its sub-propositional parts, lies beyond the grasp of the discursive intellect.

Might we reasonably expect total clarity in the next world? The next world might be samsara 2.0, clearer, brighter, more intelligible, but still subject to the duality: clarity-obscurity. Ascend from the Cave, and you will still experience light and darkness, but more light and less darkness than down below. And beyond that there perhaps lies samsara 3.0, and so on.  Ever subtler realms of chiaroscuro. The nirvanic terminal state would then be the extinction of all dualities, and the unspeakable unity of clarity and obscurity, intelligibility and ab-surdity.  Could that be the ultimate Goal? Could the ens reallissimum himself take as his final goal, nibbanic extinction? 

Could the ens perfectissimum et necessarium say to himself: Take it to the limit Old Man and become finally in truth what you were supposed to be all along, Absolute and Unconditioned?

The above is a species of nonsense from the point of view of the discursive intellect.  Important nonsense or nugatory nonsense?  If you plump for the latter, are you not assuming that the discursive intellect is unconditioned?

Companion post: The Scariest Passage in the Critique of Pure Reason.

Why Did Thomas Aquinas Leave his Summa Theologiae Unfinished?

Burnout or visio mystica?

Mysticism with Monica

St. Monica's feast day is today; her son's is tomorrow. Of the various mystical vouchsafings, glimpses, and intimations recorded by St. Augustine in his Confessions, the vision at Ostia (Book 9, Chapter 10) is unique in that it is a sort of mystical duet. Mother and son achieve the vision together. Peter Kreeft does a good job of unpacking the relevant passages.

Kreeft in Is Stoke a Genuine Mystical Experience? lists fourteen features of mystical experience which comport well with my experience.

Surfers take note.

Related: Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism, and Wisdom

Synchronicity, Alain, Monasticism, Sense of Life, and the Unseen Order

The other morning I recalled the passage in Alain where he recorded his boyhood visit to the abbey at La Trappe and his visceral revulsion at the life of the monks. So I pulled his On Happiness from the shelf and to my surprise opened right to the passage in question. Coincidence, or synchronicity? I'll leave that question for later. Here is the passage:

If perchance I had to write a treatise on ethics, I would rank good humor as the first of our duties. I do not know what ferocious religion has taught us that sadness is great and beautiful, and that the wise man must meditate on death by digging his own grave. When I was ten years old, I visited the Abbey of La Trappe; I saw the graves the monks were digging a little each day, and the mortuary chapel where the dead were laid out for an entire week, for the edification of the living.

These lugubrious images and the cadaveric odor haunted me for a long time; but the monks had tried to prove too much. I cannot say exactly when and for what reasons I left the Catholic Church because I have forgotten. But from that moment on, I said to myself: "It is not possible  that they have the true secret of life." My whole being rebelled against those mournful monks. And I freed myself from their religion as from an illness. 

("Good Humor" in Alain on Happiness, tr. Cottrell, New York: Frederick Unger, 1973, p. 198. Paragraph break and italics added. Propos sur le bonheur was originally published in 1928 by Gallimard.) 

The Attitude of the Worldling

Alain above frankly expresses his sense of life or sense of reality.  I don't share it, but can I argue against it? Does it even make sense to try to argue against it? Probably not. In a matter such as this argument comes too late. Alain feels it in his guts and with his "whole being" that the religion of the mournful monks, the religion Alain himself was raised in, is world-flight and a life-denying sickness.   

For a worldling such as Alain,  the transient things of this world are as real as it gets, and all else is unreal. The impermanence of things and the brevity of life do not impress or shock him as they do someone with a religious sensibility.  The worldling doesn't take them as indices of unreality as a Platonist would. If you point out the brevity of life to a worldling he might give a speech like the following:

Precisely because life is short, one must not waste it.  Brevity does not show lack of reality or value, pace Plato and his latter-day acolytes such as Simone Weil, but how real and valuable life is. This life is as real as it gets.  It is precious precisely because it is short. Make the most of it because there is not much of it, but what there is of it is enough for those who are fortunate, who live well, and who do not die too soon. Don't waste your life on religious illusions!  Don't spend your life digging your grave and preparing for death. Live!

The attitude here is that life is short but long enough and valuable enough, at least for some of us.  One should make friends with finitude, enjoying what one has and not looking beyond to what is merely imagined.  Near the beginning of the The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus quotes Pindar, "O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible." (Pythian, iii)

A frat boy might put it like this:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So party we must.

Or in the words of a 1970 beer commercial:

You only go around once in life
So you have to grab for all the gusto you can.

This attitude of the worldling is possible because it is actual and indeed widespread more so now than ever before in history, in good measure because of our technology that extends life and makes it vastly  more endurable than in previous centuries. Our 24-7, 365(6) connectivity also practically insures that we will remain trapped within the sphere of immanence and human chatter and be unable to 'pick up any signals' from beyond the human horizon.  Our communications technology is like a Faraday cage that blocks all irruptions from the Unseen Order.

The worldling's attitude is a matter of sensibility and it is difficult and probably impossible to argue with anyone's sensibility. I cannot argue you out of your sense of reality. Arguments come too late for that.  In fact, arguments are often little more than articulations on the logical plane  of a sensibility deep in the soul that was already in place before one attained explicit logical skills.

Is the worldling ignorant?

I would say he is. But how prove it either to him or to myself? Can one PROVE that God and the soul are real? That this life is a vanishing quantity unworthy of wholehearted devotion? That what really matters is beyond matter and beyond mind in its presently paltry and darkened state? No. At best one can give a number of plausible arguments for these 'objects' and a number of plausible arguments against metaphysical naturalism. But at the end of the day one is going to have to invoke certain mystical vouchsafings, intimations from Elsewhere, glimpses, revelations, teachings of some magisterium deemed finally authoritative, all of which are easily hauled before the bench of reason to have their veridicality questioned, and, I should add, in good faith. In the end, a leap of faith is needed. You will have to decide what to believe and how to live. You will have to decide whether to live in accordance with your sense of life, whether it be of the worldly sort or the otherworldly.

Suppose I take the 'bite of conscience' as pointing to the existence of a Supreme Moral Authority of a personal nature.  I could make a very strong case. But would it be rationally compelling? No.  Could I ever be objectively certain that no naturalistic explanation could account adequately for the deliverances of conscience?  No. So the will comes into it.

Is the worldling morally culpable for his ignorance?

Some might be, but in general, he is not.  Pace St. Paul at Romans 1: 18-20, I don't find unbelief to be morally culpable.  It is neither evident that God exists nor evident that he does not exist. One can of course dogmatize and one can of course be a 'presuppositionalist' of one sort or another. But those are not respectable positions.

Emile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951) was a French professor of philosophy among whose students were Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Chartier's sunny disposition, however, did not rub off on the brooding Weil. Under the pseudonym 'Alain,' Chartier published thousands of two-page essays in newspapers. Were he alive and active today he would most likely be a blogger.

Desert Light Draws Us into the Mystical

Today, the feast of St. Augustine, is a clear and dry day in the Valley of the Sun. A meditation, then, on light and the ascent to the Light.

Just as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like the lambent light of the desert. The low humidity, the sparseness of vegetation that even in its arboreal forms hug the ground, the long, long vistas that draw the eye out to shimmering buttes and mesas -- all of these contribute to the illusion that the light is alive.

Light as phenomenon, as appearance, is not something merely physical. It is as much mind as matter. Without its appearance to mind it would not be what it phenomenologically is. But the light that allows rocks and coyotes to appear, itself appears. This seen light is seen within a clearing, eine Lichtung (Heidegger), which is light in a transcendental sense. But this transcendental light in whose light both illuminated objects and physical light appear, points back to the onto-theological Source of this transcendental light. Heidegger would not approve of my last move, but so be it.

Augustine claims to have glimpsed this eternal Source Light, the light of Truth, upon entering into his "inmost being." Entering there, he saw with his soul's eye, "above that same eye of my soul, above my mind, an unchangeable light." He continues:

     It was not this common light, plain to all flesh, nor a greater
     light of the same kind . . . Not such was that light, but
     different, far different from all other lights. Nor was it above my
     mind, as oil is above water, or sky above earth. It was above my
     mind, because it made me, and I was beneath it, because I was made
     by it. He who knows the truth, knows that light, and he who knows
     it knows eternity. (Confessions, Book VII, Chapter 10)

'Light,' then, has several senses.  There is the light of physics. There is physical light as we see it, whether in the form of illuminated things such as yonder mesa, or sources of illumination such as the sun, or the lambent space between them. There is the transcendental light of mind without which nothing at all would appear. There is, above this transcendental light, its Source.

A tetrad of lights: physical, phenomenal, transcendental, and divine.

Mysticism with Monica

St. Monica's feast day is today; her son's is tomorrow. Of the various mystical vouchsafings, glimpses, and intimations recorded by St. Augustine in his Confessions, the vision at Ostia (Book 9, Chapter 10) is unique in that it is a sort of mystical duet. Mother and son achieve the vision together. Peter Kreeft does a good job of unpacking the relevant passages.

Kreeft here lists fourteen features of mystical experience which comport well with my experience.

Related: Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism, and Wisdom

Is God Beyond All Being?

This is a redacted re-posting of an entry that first appeared in these pages on 8 May 2015. It answers a question Fr. Kimel poses in the comments to Divine Simplicity and Modal Collapse.

.....................................

Fr. Aidan Kimel writes,

Reading through Vallicella’s article, I kept asking myself, Would Mascall agree with the proposition “existence exists”? I find the proposition odd. [. . .] What about the assertion of Pseudo-Dionysius that God is beyond all Being? Aquinas would certainly agree that the Creator transcends created being; but I suspect that Dionysius is trying to say something more.  I wonder what the Maverick Philosopher thinks about “beyond Being” language  (I can pretty much guess what Tuggy thinks about it).

I plan to discuss the strange question whether existence exists in a separate post.  Here I will say something about whether God is beyond all Being.

Well, what would it be for God to be beyond Being?  What could that mean?

First we must distinguish between Being and beings, esse and ens, das Sein und das Seiende.  It is absolutely essential to observe this distinction and to mark it linguistically by a proper choice of terms. If we do so, then we see right away that Kimel's question is ambiguous.  Is he asking whether God is beyond all beings or beyond all Being?  Big difference! (Heidegger calls it the Ontological Difference.)

I think what Kimel means to ask is whether God is beyond all beings.  A being is anything at all that is or exists, of whatever category, and of whatever nature.  Being, on the other hand, majuscule Being, is that which makes beings be. Now one of the vexing questions here is whether Being itself is, whether that which makes beings be is itself a being or else the paradigmatic being.  Heidegger and Pseudo-Dionysius say No!  Aquinas says Yes!  (That is, Aquinas says that Being is the paradigmatic being from which every other being has its being.)  Dale Tuggy would presumably dismiss the question by maintaining that there just is no Being, there are only beings; hence the question lapses, resting as it does (according to Tuggy) on a false presupposition.  

Now distinguish three positions.  (A) God is a being among beings. (B) God is not a being among beings, but self-subsistent Being itself.  (C) God is neither a being among beings, nor self-subsistent Being itself, but beyond every being.  Tuggy, Aquinas, Pseudo-Dionysius.  (You're in good company, Dale!)

I have already explained what it means to say that God is a being among beings.  But to repeat myself, it it to say that the very same general-metaphysical scheme, the very same scheme of metaphysica generalis,  that applies to creatures applies also to God.  This implies, among other things, that God and Socrates (Socrates standing in for any creature whatsoever) exist in the same way.  It implies that there are not two modes of Being, one pertaining to God alone, the other pertaining to Socrates. If, on the other hand, one maintains that God is not a being among beings, then one is maintaining, among other things, that God and Socrates exist in different ways.  The difference can be put by saying that God is (identically) his existence and existence itself while this is surely not the case for Socrates: he has existence but he doesn't have it by being it.  In God there is no real distinction, no distinctio realis, between essence and existence while in Socrates there is a real distinction between essence and existence.

Equivalently, if God is a being among beings, then God is one member of a totality of beings each of which exists in the very same sense of 'exists' and has properties in the very same sense of 'has properties.'  But if God is not a being among beings, then there is no such totality of beings each of which exists in the very same sense of 'exists' and has properties in the very same sense of 'has properties' such that both God and Socrates are members of it.

How does (B) differ from (C)?  On (B) God is (identical to) Being but also is.  God is not a being, but the being that is identical to Being itself.  (C) is a more radical view.  It is the view that God is so radically transcendent of creatures that he is not!  This is exactly what pseudo-Dionysius says in The Divine Names (Complete Works, p. 98) It is the view that God is other than every being.  But if God is other than every being, then God in no way is.  

This can also be explained in terms of univocity, analogicity, and equivocity.  For Tuggy & Co. 'exists' in 'God exists' and 'Socrates exists' has exactly the same sense.  The predicate is univocal across these two occurrences.  For Aquinas, the predicate is being used analogously, which implies that while God and Socrates both are, they are in different ways or modes. But for Pseudo-Dionysius the predicate is equivocal.

Fr. Kimel suspects that Pseudo-Dionysius is saying more than that God transcends every creature.  The suspicion is correct.  Whereas Aquinas is saying that God is, but transcends every creature in respect of his very mode of Being, Pseudo-Dionysius is saying more , namely that God is so transcendent that he is not.  

My question for Fr. Kimel: Do you side with the doctor angelicus, or do you go all the way into the night of negative theology with Pseudo-Dionysus? 

Grace

Is it possible to take grace seriously these days?

Well, I just arose from a good session on the black mat.  For a few moments I touched upon interior silence and experienced its bliss. This is nothing I conjured up from my own resources. But if I say I was granted this blissful silence by someone, then I go beyond the given: I move from phenomenology to theology. No philosopher worth his salt can escape the question whether such a move is or is not an illicit slide. An experience describable as having a gift-character needn't be a gift.

Still, the experience was what it was, and could not be doubted a few moments ago, nor now in its afterglow. It is in such experiences that we find the phenomenological roots of the theology of grace which, growing from such roots, cannot be dismissed as empty speculation or projection or wish-fulfillment or anything else the naturalist may urge for its dismissal.

There cannot be a phenomenology of the Absolute but only a phenomenology of the glimpses, gleanings, vouchsafings, and intimations of the Absolute.  To put the point with full philosophical  precision: there can only be a phenomenology of the glimpses, etc. as of the Absolute. That curious phrase from the philosopher's lexicon expresses the latter's professional caution inasmuch as no experience that purports to take us beyond the sphere of immanence proves the veridicality of its intentional object.

On the other hand, the fact of the experience, its occurrence within the sphere of immanence, needs accounting.  However matters may stand with respect to the realitas objectiva of the experience, its realitas formalis needs to be explained. I would venture to say that the best explanation of the widespread occurrence of mystical experiences is that some of them are indeed veridical.

Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism

Philosophers contradict one another, but that is not the worst of it. The grandest philosophical conclusion is and can only be a proposition about reality and not reality itself. But it is reality itself that we want.

Can religion help? Its motor is belief. But belief is not knowledge, either propositional or direct. And if an appeal to divine revelation is made, then the question inevitably arises: how does one know that a putative revelation is genuine?

If you certify the revelation by appeal to the authority of your church, then I will ask how you know that your church is the true church.  After all, not every Christian is Catholic.   Are those stray dogs who refuse Rome recalcitrant rebels who simply reject the truth when it is plainly presented to them? I think not.

The motor of philosophy is discursive reason. The motor of religion is belief and obedient acquiescence in authority. Neither Athens nor Jerusalem seems to be a wholly satisfying destination.  Nor is straddling them with a leg in each a comfortable posture. 

That leaves Benares.

The motor of mysticism is meditation. Its goal is direct contact with ultimate truth. Direct: not discursive or round-about. Direct: not based on testimony.

So should we pack for Benares? Not so fast. It has its drawbacks. Later.

If I want to be read, I have to be brief.

See here for a richer development of these themes.

Related articles

Faith, Reason, and Edith Stein

A Battle of Titans: Plato Versus Aristotle

Intimations of Elsewhere Dismissed

A colleague once reported an out-of-body experience.  He had been resting on his back on a couch when he came suddenly to view himself from the perspective of the ceiling.   He dismissed the experience. He had too much class to use the phrase 'brain fart,' but that is what I suspect he thought it was: a weird occurrence of no significance.  Vouchsafed a hint of what might have been a reality beyond the ordinary, he chose to ignore it as if it were not worth the trouble of investigating.  That sort of dismissive attitude is one I have trouble understanding. Especially in a philosopher!

It would be as if the prisoner in Plato's Cave who was freed of his shackles and was able to turn his head and see an opening and a light suggestive of a route out of  the enclosure wherein he found himself were simply to have dismissed the sight as an insignificant illusion and then went back to 'reality,' the shadows on the wall.

I have no trouble understanding someone who, never having had any religious or mystical experiences, cannot bring himself to take religion seriously.  And I have no trouble understanding someone who, having had such experiences, and having seriously examined their epistemic credentials, comes to the conclusion that they are none of them veridical.  But to have the experiences, and not think them worth investigating -- that puzzles me.

Ross Douthat assembles some examples similar to the case of my quondam colleague in his Christmas Eve column, Varieties of Religious Experience, a title he borrows from the eponymous masterpiece of William James.  Here is one:

As a young man in the 1960s, the filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, of “RoboCop” and “Showgirls” fame, wandered into a Pentecostal church and suddenly felt “the Holy Ghost descending … as if a laser beam was cutting through my head and my heart was on fire.” He was in the midst of dealing with his then-girlfriend’s unexpected pregnancy; after they procured an abortion, he had a terrifying, avenging-angel vision during a screening of “King Kong.” The combined experience actively propelled him away from anything metaphysical; the raw carnality of his most famous films, he suggested later, was an attempt to keep the numinous and destabilizing at bay.

That makes about as much sense to me as blinding oneself lest one see too radiant a light. 

Related articles

Perfect Perversion: The Feature Films of Paul Verhoeven (Part Two)

On the Expressibility of 'Something Exists'

I am trying to soften up the Opponent for the Inexpressible.  Here is another attempt.

..........................

Surely this is a valid and sound argument:

1. Stromboli exists.
Ergo
2. Something exists.

Both sentences are true; both are meaningful; and the second follows from the first.  How do we translate the argument into the notation of standard first-order predicate logic with identity? Taking a cue from Quine we may formulate (1) as

1*.  For some x, x = Stromboli. In English:

1**. Stromboli is identical with something.

But how do we render (2)?  Surely not as 'For some x, x exists' since there is no first-level predicate of existence in standard logic.  And surely no ordinary predicate will do.  Not horse, mammal, animal, living thing, material thing, or any other predicate reachable by climbing the tree of Porphyry.  Existence is not a summum genus.  (Aristotle, Met. 998b22, AnPr. 92b14) What is left but self-identity?  Cf. Frege's dialog with Puenjer.

So we try,

2*. For some x, x = x.  In plain English:

2**. Something is self-identical.

So our original argument becomes:

1**. Stromboli is identical with something.
Ergo
2**. Something is self-identical.

But what (2**) says is not what (2) says.   The result is a murky travesty of the original luminous argument.

What I am getting at is that standard logic cannot state its own presuppositions.  It presupposes that everything exists (that there are no nonexistent objects) and that something exists.  But it lacks the expressive resources to state these presuppositions.  The attempt to state them results either in  nonsense -- e.g. 'for some x, x' -- or a proposition other than the one that needs expressing. 

It is true that something exists, and I am certain that it is true: it follows immediately from the fact that I exist.  But it cannot be said in standard predicate logic.

What should we conclude?  That standard logic is defective in its treatment of existence or that there are things that can be SHOWN but not SAID?  In April 1914. G.E. Moore travelled to Norway and paid a visit to Wittgenstein where the  latter dictated some notes to him.  Here is one:

In order that you should have a language which can express or say everything that can be said, this language must have certain properties; and when this is the case, that it has them can no longer be said in that language or any language. (Notebooks 1914-1916, p. 107)

Applied to the present example:  A language that can SAY that e.g. island volcanos exist by saying that some islands are volcanos or that Stromboli exists by saying that Stromboli is identical to something must have certain properties.  One of these is that the domain of quantification contains only existents and no Meinongian nonexistents.  But THAT the language has this property cannot be said in it or in any language.  Hence it cannot be said in the language of standard logic that the domain of quantification is a domain of existents or that something exists or that everything exists or that it is not the case that something does not exist.

Well then, so much the worse for the language of standard logic!  That's one response.  But can some other logic do better?  Or should we say, with the early Wittgenstein, that there is indeed the Inexpressible, the Unsayable, the Unspeakable, the Mystical?  And that it shows itself?

Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches.  Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische. (Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus 6.522)

Related articles

The Discursive Framework, Logic, and Whether the Via Negativa is the Path to Nowhere

Continental Philosophers I Respect and the 'Continental-Analytic Divide'

The Delight of the 'Find'

John Anderson on Levels of Reality

Is Everything an Object Among Objects?

My opponent says Yes; I return a negative answer.  This entry continues the discussion in earlier theological posts, but leaves the simple God out of it, the better to dig down to the bare logical bones of the matter.  Theologians do not have proprietary rights in the Inexpressible and the Ineffable.

Argument For

The opponent offers a reductio ad absurdum:

a. It is not the case that everything is an object. (Assumption for reductio)
Therefore
b. Something is not an object. (From (a) by Quantifier Negation.)
c. 'Something' means some thing, some object.
Therefore
d. Some object is not an object.  Contradiction!
Therefore
e. Everything is an object.  (By reductio ad absurdum)

The argument could also be put as follows.  An object is anything that comes within the range of a logical quantifier.  So someone who denies that everything is an object must be affirming that something is not an object, which is tantamount to saying that some item that comes within the range of a quantifier -- 'some' in this instance -- does not come with the range of a quantifier. Contradiction. Therefore, everything is an object!

Argument Against

First, two subarguments for premises in my main argument against.

Subargument I

Every declarative sentence contains at least one predicate.
No predicate functioning as a predicate is a name.
Therefore
No declarative sentence consists of names only.

For example, 'Hillary is crooked' cannot be parsed as a concatenation of three names.  A sentence is not a list of names.  And the unity of a proposition expressed by a sentence is not the unity of a collection of objects.   A proposition attracts a truth-value, but no collection of objects attracts a truth-value.  The mereological sum Hillary + instantiation + crookedness is neither true nor false. But Hillary is crooked is true.  

Adding a further object will not transform the sum into a proposition for well-known Bradleyan reasons.

So what makes the difference between a mereological sum of sub-propositional (but proposition-appropriate) items and a proposition?  A noncompound proposition is clearly more than its sub-propositional constituents.  The proposition a is F is more than the sum a + F-ness.  The former is either true or false; the latter is neither.  (Bivalence is assumed.) What does this 'more' consist in? The 'more' is not nothing since it grounds the difference between sum and proposition.  The 'more' is evidently not objectifiable or reifiable.  

The ancient problem of the unity of the sentence/proposition was already sighted by the 'divine' Plato near the beginning of our tradition.  The problem points us beyond the realm of objects.

The paradox, of course, is that I cannot say what I mean, or am 'pointing to.'  For if I say: 'Something lies beyond the realm of objects,' then I say in effect: 'Some object is not an object.'  But I am getting ahead of myself.

Subargument II

Names refer to objects and predicate expressions refer to concepts.
Anything that can be quantified over can in principle be named.
Concepts cannot be named.
Therefore
Concepts cannot be quantified over.

In support of the second premise:   'Some horse is hungry' cannot be true unless there is a particular horse in the domain over which the existential/particular quantifier ranges, and this horse must in principle be nameable as, say, 'Harry' or 'Secretariat.'  There needn't be a name for the critter in question; but it must be possible that there be a name.

Now for the main argument contra:

A. There are declarative sentences.
B. No declarative sentence consists of names only; predicative expressions are also required.  (Conclusion of subargument I)
C. Predicates refer to concepts, not objects.
D. Concepts cannot be quantified over. (Conclusion of Subargment II)
Therefore
E. Concepts are real ingredients of propositions but they are not objects.
Therefore
F. Not everything real is an object among objects.

Summary

The unity of the sentence/proposition is one of several problems that point us beyond what I have been calling the Discursive Framework (DF).  These problems, properly understood, show the inadequacy of this framework and refute its claim to unrestricted applicability.  The unity of the sentence/proposition  needs accounting.  (There is also the unity of concrete truth-making facts or states of affairs that cries out for explanation.)  

Now we should try to account for sentential/propositional unity as parsimoniously as possible.  We shouldn't bring in any queer posits if we can avoid them, a point on which my opponent will insist, and in those very terms.  Unfortunately, we cannot eke by with objects alone.  To repeat:  a sentence is not a list; a proposition is not a collection of objects.  So we need to bring in some queer entities,whether Fregean unsaturated concepts, or Strawsonian nonrelational ties, or relational tropes, or some odd-ball Bergmannian nexus, even my very own Unifier. (See A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer, 2002.)

The problem, of course, is that these queer items entangle us in contradictions when we try to state the theories in which they figure.  The contradictions give aid and comfort to the Opponent who takes them as justifying his claim that the DF is unrestricted in its applicability.

Frege's paradox of the horse illustrates this very well.  Frege notoriously asserted, "The concept horse is not a concept."  Why not? Because 'the concept horse' names an object, and no object is a concept.  An application of existential/particular generalizattion to Frege's paradoxical sentence yields:  Some concepts are not concepts.  But that's a contradiction, as is the original sentence.

But Frege was no 'stoner' to use an expression of the Opponent.  His contradiction is, shall we say, motivated.  Indeed, it is rationally motivated by the noble attempt to understand the nature of the proposition and the nature of logic itself.

Why can't concepts be named?  Suppose we try to name the concept involved in 'Hillary is crooked.'  The name would have to be something like 'crookedness.'  The transformation of the predicate into an abstract substantive loses the verbal chararacter, the characterizing character of the predicate '___ is crooked' functioning as a predicate.  If 'crookedness' has a referent, then that referent is an object.  But as I said, the proposition Hillary is crooked is not the mereological sum Hillary + crookedness.  The former attracts a truth-value; the latter doesn't.

The unity of a proposition, without which it cannot be either true or false, is not the unity of an object or a collection of objects, which is just a higher-order object.  This peculiar truth-value attractive unity cannot be accounted for in terms of any object or collection of objects.  And yet it is real.  So not everything real is an object.  

Impasse?

We seem to be in an aporetic bind.  We need to bring in some queer elements to solve various problems that are plainly genuine and not pseudo.  But the queer items generate paradoxes which, from within the DF, are indistinguishable from bare-faced contradictions.  The paradoxes/contradictions arise when we attempt to state the theories in which the queer entities figure.  They arise when we attempt to talk about and theorize about the pre-objective or non-objectifiable.  I cannot state that no concept is an object, for example, without treating concepts as objects.  But doing so drains the concept of its predicative nature.  I cannot say what I mean.  I can't eff the ineffable.

One move the Opponent can make is to flatly deny that there is the Inexpressible, thereby defying the author of Tractatus 6.522. Das Mystische does not exist, and, not existing, it cannot show itself (sich zeigen).

If the Opponent is a theist, then his god must be a being among beings, a highest being, a most distinguished denizen of the Discursive Framework, but not ipsum esse subsistens.

How might the Opponent deal with the problem of the unity of the sentence/proposition?  Perhaps he will say that a noncompound proposition is a partially but not wholly analyzable unity of sense, but that the 'more' that makes the proposition more than the sum of its constituents has no Deep Meaning, it does not 'point' us anywhere, and certainly not into Cloud Cuckoo Land but is  merely a curious factum brutum for which there is no accounting, no philosophical explanation.

I don't think this would be a good answer, but this entry is already too long.

At the moment I would happy if I could get the Opponent to make a minimal concession, namely, that I have mounted  a strong, though not compelling, rational case for the thesis that reality is not exhausted by objects, and that I have not "destroyed all of logic" in so doing.

But I am undermining the claim of the DF to have universal applicability.  This undermining takes place within the DF by reflection of something essential to the DF, namely, propositions.  As long as I refrain from making positive assertions about the Transdiscursive, I avoid contradiction. 

Related articles

Is it Coherently Conceivable that One Person Have Two Natures?

Does the Potentiality Argument Prove Too Much?

Thinker, Thought, Sentence

The Discursive Framework, Logic, and Whether the Via Negativa is the Path to Nowhere

More on One Person-Two Natures: Response to Timothy Pawl

Existence and Divine Simplicity: A Stroll Along the Via Negativa with Maimonides

Here is an important passage from Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), The Guide to the Perplexed, Dover, p. 80:

It is known that existence is an accident appertaining to all things, and therefore an element superadded to their essence. This must evidently be the case as regards everything the existence of which is due to some cause: its existence is an element superadded to its essence. But as regards a being whose existence is not due to any cause -- God alone is that being, for His existence, as we have said, is absolute -- existence and essence are perfectly identical; He is not a substance to which existence is joined as an accident, as an additional element. His existence is always absolute, and has never been a new element or an accident in Him. Consequently God exists without possessing the attribute of existence. Similarly He lives, without possessing the attribute of life; knows, without possessing the attribute of knowledge; is omnipotent without possessing the attribute of omnipotence; is wise, without possessing the attribute of wisdom: all this reduces itself to one and the same entity; there is no plurality in Him, as will be shown.

God is the Absolute.  As such, he is radically other than creatures.  God is not just another thing that exists and possesses properties in the way creatures possess properties.  He differs from creatures in his mode of existence, his mode of property-possession, his mode of necessity, and his mode of uniqueness.  See the following recent posts: God is Uniquely Unique and The Anthropomorphism of Perfect-Being Theology.

Existence accedes to creatures; it is accidental to them.  As Maimonides says, existence is "superadded to their essence."  This implies a real composition of essence and existence in creatures.  But in God there can be no such composition.  God does not have existence; he is his existence.  As Maimonides puts it, "God exists without possessing the attribute of existence."  And similarly for properties such as wisdom and omniscience, etc.  God is wise without possessing the attribute of wisdom.

That is a hard saying.  Does it make sense?  And what sense does it make?

First we need to understand what is being maintained.  There are those who will say that there are no properties/attributes but that nonetheless there are true predications.  This is the position of the extreme nominalist.  Accordingly, 'Socrates is wise' is true but there is nothing in reality picked out by the predicate 'wise' or '___wise' that grounds the correctness of the application of the predicate to the individual.  There are predicates but no properties. That is to say: 'Wise' is correctly predicated of Socrates despite the fact that there is nothing in reality that Socrates instantiates or otherwise has in virtue of which Socrates is wise.  

This is not what Maimonides is saying.  He is not denying that there are properties/attributes.  I take him to be saying two things. First, God does not have or possess his attributes.  He does not have them by standing in a relation of instantiation to them, nor does he have them as ontological 'parts.'  Second, none of the divine attributes is an attribute of creatures.

As for the first point, God does not have his attributes; he is (identically) them.  God is radically One.  His unity is so 'tight' as to disallow any internal composition or stucturation.  And his absoluteness disallows his standing in relation to any properties or factors distinct from him on which he would be dependent for his nature or existence.  Thus God does not have existence and wisdom; he is existence and wisdom.  The second point, I think, follows from the first:  the wisdom of Socrates cannot be the same attribute as the wisdom of God.  

On the semantic plane, the two occurrences of the predicate 'wise' in 'Socrates is wise' and 'God is wise' cannot have the same sense. For if they have the same sense, then they pick out the same property; but there cannot be one and the same property of wisdom shared by God and Socrates given that God, but not Socrates, is identical to wisdom.  Therefore there is no univocity across the two sentences with respect to the predicate.  As I read Maimonides, he holds that 'wise' is equivocal in its human and divine uses.

Maimonides and his fellow travellers on the via negativa  are radical foes of even the most sophisticated forms of anthropomorphism.   Socrates is powerful.  The anthropomorphizer says that God too is powerful and in the very same sense; it is just that whereas the philosopher's power is limited, God's power is maximal.  Someone who thinks along these lines is placing God and Socrates on the same scale or order, when God, if absolute and truly transcendent, is "trans-ordinal" to borrow word from Henri Dumery.  What the anthropomorphizer does is take some of the attributes of humans  and think of God as having those very same attributes.  

But if we go the Maimonides route, what do we do with a sentence such as 'God is powerful'?  Must we say that it is nonsense?  We know what it means to say that Socrates is powerful.  But what could it mean to say that God is powerful if the predicate is equivocal across 'Socrates is powerful' and 'God is powerful'?  Note also that the subject-predicate form of 'God is powerful' implies a distinction in its truth maker between God and one of his attributes -- in violation of the divine simplicity.  How can we think or talk about the simple Absolute if all our thinking and talking must have  subject-predicate form (or relational or other forms that require distinctions not applicable to the simple God)?

One response would be to bite the bullet and admit that sentences like 'God is powerful' are, and must remain, strictly nonsensical to the discursive intellect.  But this nonsense is not mere gibberish, but a Higher Nonsense, an heuristic nonsense whose function is to point us beyond the limits of the discursive intellect while we are operating within it.  From the SEP entry:

As severe as Maimonides' position is, even this is not enough. Although negation is preferable to affirmation, even negation is objectionable to the degree that it introduces complexity: God is neither this nor that. What then? Maimonides' reply (GP 1.58) is that ultimately any kind of verbal expression fails us. Rather than provide a precise metaphysical account of the nature of God, the purpose of theological discourse is heuristic: to “conduct the mind toward the utmost reach that man may attain in the apprehension of Him.” Theological language is important to the degree that it eliminates error and sets us along the path of recognizing God's transcendence. Unless one could speak about God, she could easily fall into the trap of thinking that God is corporeal. But in the end, the only thing it reveals is that God is beyond the reach of any subject/predicate proposition. Thus GP 1.59:

Know that when you make an affirmation ascribing another thing to Him, you become more remote from Him in two respects: one of them is that everything You affirm is a perfection only with reference to us, And the other is that He does not possess a thing other than His essence …

Citing Psalm 65, Maimonides concludes that the highest form of praise we can give God is silence. 

Related articles

God and Socrates: Two Different Ways of Existing?

Comments on "Divine Fluidity"

Thinking and Speaking about the Absolute: Three Views

God as Uniquely Unique

The Anthropomorphism of Perfect-Being (Anselmian)Theology

Is the Real a Tricycle? Plantinga versus Hick, Round One

The Simple Atheist, the Classical Theist, and the Ontic Theist

God: A Being among Beings or Being Itself?

Maimonides Between Philosophy and Halachah: Lectures on the Guide of the Perplexed

The Discursive Framework, Logic, and Whether the Via Negativa is the Path to Nowhere

The Historian of Logic comments:

It seems to me that what you call the ‘Discursive Framework’ is what I and others call ‘logic’, and that it reflects a Kantian view of logic that prevailed before Russell and Frege, namely that logic reflects the ‘laws of thought’ only. Are you mooting the possibility of beings which defy conception under these laws, or realms where the laws do not apply?

I was re-reading Kant’s Logic last week and it is full of this stuff.

Logic.  I would define logic as the normative science of inference. Science: scientia, study of.  Inference:  the mental process of deriving a proposition (the conclusion) from one or more  propositions (the premises).  Normative: logic is not concerned with how people think as a matter of fact, which is a concern of psychology, but with how they ought to think if they are to arrive at truth and move from known truths to further truths.   The task of logic is to set forth the criteria whereby correct inferences may be distinguished from incorrect inferences. 

The above definition is neutral with respect to any number of ontological questions.  Thus I used 'proposition' above innocuously without presupposing any theory as to what propositions are.  I spoke of inference as a mental process, but this too is innocuous inasmuch as one could be a mind-brain identity theorist and agree with me about logic.  (But if you are an eliminativist about the mental, then you 'get the boot':  it is a Moorean fact that there are inferences.)

Discursive Framework.  This is not the same as logic, pace the Historian, even though it does contain such logical principles as LNC and LEM, and indeed the whole of standard logic.  (We can argue about 'standard' in the ComBox.)  The DF also contains principles that are not strictly logical -- they are not logical truths -- but are better classifiable as metaphysical, as propositions of metaphysica generalis.  Examples:

a. Everything exists: There are no nonexistent items.  Pace van Inwagen, the negation of this is not a logical contradiction.

b. Everything has properties.  (Partisans of bare or thin particulars do not deny this.)

c. Nothing has a property P by being identical to P.   (The 'is' of predication is not assimilable to the 'is' if formal identity.)

d. Principles of logic, such as For any x, x = x, are not just true of objects of thought qua objects of thought, but are also true  of mind-independentally real items.   Thus the principles of logic are not merely principles of thought but principles of reality as well. Not merely logical, they are also ontological.  There is a jump here, from the logical to the ontological, that Aristotle was aware of.  With that jump comes the problem of justifying it.

e. The thinking of ectypal intellects such as ourselves is necessarily such as to involve a distinction between subject and predicate. There are no simple thoughts/propositions if by that we mean thoughts/proposition lacking sub-propositional structure.  Every proposition is internally structured, e.g. Fa, Rab, (x)Fx, etc.  

Laws of Thought but No Psychologism.  Kant, Husserl, and Frege all rejected psychologism in logic.  Are the laws of logic laws of thought?  Yes, of course.  What else would they be?  But this is not to say that they are laws of human psychology.  They are laws that govern the thinking of any actual or possible ectypal intellect.  They might also be laws of reality, all reality, with no exceptions. But surely it would be uncritical simply to assume this.  It wants proof, or at least argument.  As I said, Aristotle had already seen the problem.

Are you mooting the possibility of beings which defy conception under these laws, or realms where the laws do not apply?

Yes, that is what I am doing, although I wouldn't speak of beings.  That's plural, and the singular-plural distinction is part and parcel of the Discursive Framework.  My aim is to make philosophy safe for mysticism.    My aim is to show that while remaining in philosophy, in the DF, one can come to descry the 'possibility' of a, or rather, THE transdiscursive realm.  I deny that the via negativa is the road to nowheresville or u-topia.

I am not attempting anything new; the novelty is merely in the way I go about it.  And there is nothing illogical about it.  Or can you find non sequiturs or other strictly logical mistakes in the above or in recent cognate posts?  If there is a suprarational realm would it not be sloppy thinking, and thus 'illogical,' to assume that it must be infrarational?

Nothing new:  we have seen this sort of thing in the Far East in Buddhist schools like that of Nagarjuna and in Taoism; in the ancient and medieval Western world, e.g., Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite, and in the modern period with Kant and then again in the early Wittgenstein.

The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DDS) Helps Focus The Issue.  Duality is unavoidable on the discursive plane.  To think is to judge, and to judge at the most basic level  is to judge of a that it is or is not F.  At a bare minimum, then, there is the duality of subject and property.  (Brentano transformations of  predications into existential sentences avail nothing: the duality of existence-nonexistence remains.) As I said above, no thought/proposition, no content of an act of thinking, is simple.  But God is simple according to DDS.  He is identical to his attributes, which implies that each attribute is identical to every other one.  If he weren't then he would be dependent on his attributes for his nature, and he would not be the absolute reality.  He could not possess aseity. He could not be uniquely unique. If God were unique only in the sense that he is necessarily one of a kind, then he would one of a class of such beings, and a greater could be conceived, namely, a being uniquely unique, i.e., unique in the sense of transcending the very distinction between instance and kind.

Now if God is simple, then how can our talk and thought, which is necessarily discursive, be literally true of him?  One response is that God talk is literal but analogical.  This needs exploring in a separate post.  But if we cannot accept the doctrine of analogy, then the simple God lies entirely beyond the DF. 

Related articles

a

Arguing with Kripke over Existence

Georg Lichtenberg, Aphoristically, on the Freedom of the Will, with Pedantic Commentary

Truth and God: How are they Related?

Bertrand Russell: Empiricism is Self-Refuting. Is He Right?

Language and Reality

Knowing God Through Experience

A mercifully short (9:17) but very good YouTube video  featuring commentary by name figures in the philosophy of religion including  Marilyn Adams, William Alston, William Wainwright, and William Lane Craig.  Craig recounts the experience that made a theist of him.  (HT: Keith Burgess-Jackson)

As Marilyn Adams correctly points out at the start of the presentation, the belief of many theists is not a result of religious experience. It comes from upbringing, tradition, and participation in what Wittgenstein called a "form of life" with its  associated "language game."  I myself, however, could not take religion seriously if it were not for the variety of religious, mystical, and paranormal experiences I have had, bolstered by philosophical reasoning both negative and positive.  Negative, as critique of the usual suspects: materialism, naturalism, scientism, secular humanism, and so on.  Positive, the impressive array of theistic arguments and considerations which, while they cannot establish theism as true, make a powerful case for it.

But my need for direct experience reflects my personality and, perhaps, limitations.  I am an introvert who looks askance at communal practices such as corporate prayer and church-going and much, if not all, of the externalities that go with it.  I am not a social animal.  I see socializing  as too often levelling and inimical to our ultimate purpose here below: to become individuals. Socializing superficializes.  Man in the mass is man degraded.  We need to be socialized out of the animal level, of course, but then we need solitude to achieve the truly human goal of individuation.  Individuation is not a given, but a task.  The social animal is still too much of an animal for my taste.

It is only recently that I have forced myself myself to engage in communal religious activities, but more as a form of self-denial than of anything else.  My recent five weeks at a remote monastery were more eremitic than cenobitic, but I did take part in the services.  And upon return I began attending mass with my wife.  Last Sunday a man sat down next to me, a friendly guy who extended to me his hand, but his breath stank to high heaven.  Behind me some guy was coughing his head off.  And then there are those who show up for mass in shorts, and I am not talking about kids.  The priest is a disaster at public speaking and his sermon is devoid of content.  Does he even understand the doctrine he is supposed to teach?  And then there are all the lousy liberals who want to reduce religion to a crapload of namby-pamby humanist nonsense.  And let's not forget the current clown of a pope who, ignorant of economics and climatology, speaks to us of the evils of capitalism and 'global warming' when he should be speaking of the Last Things.  (Could he name them off the top of his head?)

But then I reason with myself as follows.  "Look, man, you are always going on about how man is a fallen being in a fallen world.  Well, the church and its hierarchy and its members are part of the world and therefore fallen too.  So what did you expect?  And you know that the greatest sin of the intellectual is pride and that pride blinds the spiritual sight like nothing else.  So suck it up, be a man among men, humble yourself. It may do you some good." 

Related: Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to it

On Socializing

William James on Self-Denial

Addendum (31 October):  Joshua Orsak writes, 

I read about your recent experiences with communal
religion. Your self-reflection reminded me of something Rabbi Harold Kushner
writes about in his book WHO NEEDS GOD. He talks about visiting with a young man
who told him, "I hate churches and synagogues, they're full of nothing but
hypocrites and jerks"...Kushner says he had to fight the urge to say, 'yep, and
there is always room for one more'.  

Related articles

Generic and Specific Problems of Evil: The Nature and Tractability of the Problem Depends on the Type of Theism Espoused

Evil as it Appears to Theists and Atheists

Plantinga Reviews Philip Kitcher, Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism

The Simple Atheist, the Classical Theist, and the Ontic Theist

A Partial Philosophical Defense of the Monastic Life

Philosophy and Politics: Frege, Heidegger and Others

A Partial Philosophical Defense of the Monastic Life

The suggestion was made that I give a little talk to the monks of Christ in the Desert, a Benedictine monastery outside of Abiqui, New Mexico.  I thought I would offer a few words in defense of the monastic life, not that such an ancient and venerable tradition needs any defense from me, but just to clarify my own thoughts and perhaps help others clarify theirs either by way of agreement or disagreement with mine. I will attempt three things.  I will first list some convictions I hold to be of the essence of religion.  Then I will suggest that the monastic path is an excellent way to implement these convictions.  Finally I will ask myself why I am not a monk.

The Essence of Religion

There is much more to a religion than its beliefs and doctrines; there are also its practices.  The practices, however, are informed and guided by certain central convictions whose importance cannot be denied. Religion is not practice alone. Now it is not easy to define religion, and it may be impossible. (Religion may be a family-resemblance concept in Wittgenstein's sense.)  In any case I will not attempt to define religion by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions of the concept's application.  But as I see it,  most of the following are essential (necessary) to anything that deserves to be called a religion, and all of them are essential to Christianity.  What I offer is a characterization, not a definition.

1. In first place, and not just in the order of exposition, is the belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 53)  This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions.  It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection.  It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents.  So it lies beyond the discursive intellect, as it does beyond the senses. One can reason about it, and reason to it, but one cannot access it directly via the discursive intellect.  It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience.  An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out in the form of revelation.

Compare the first item in Simone Weil's Profession of Faith: "There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man's mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties."

2. The  belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)  The Unseen Order is thus not merely a realm of absolute reality, but also one of absolute value and an object of our highest and purest desire. 

Compare the second item in Weil's profession: "Corresponding to this reality, at the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world."

3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the Unseen Order.  Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the Order which alone is the source of his ultimate happiness and final good.  His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences. That is, our ability to know the saving truth has been impaired by our moral deficiency.

4. The conviction that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready, or perhaps any, access to the Unseen Order. Proximately, we need the help of others; ultimately, we need help from the Unseen Order.

5.  The conviction that adjustment to the Unseen Order requires moral purification/transformation.

6. The conviction that help from the side of the Unseen Order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.

7. The conviction that the sensible order, while not unreal, is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative, and as derivative defective.  It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the Unseen Order.

Each of these seven convictions is an element in my personal credo.  Can I prove them?  Of course not.  But then nothing of a substantive nature in philosophy, theology, or any controversial field, can be proven.  But each of the above convictions is rationally defensible.  So while not provable, they are not matters of mere faith either.  They can be argued for, their negations are rationally rejectable, and there are experiences that vouch for them. (See Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to It.)

The Monastic Path

I will now suggest that the monastic life is perhaps the best way to realize existentially the above convictions, but also to have the sorts of experiences that tend to provide evidence for the convictions.  One lives the convictions, and by living them is granted experiences and intimations that validate the convictions.

Let us suppose that you accept all or most of the above seven propositions, in their spirit if not in their letter, and that you also share with me the meta-conviction that these first-order convictions  are to be lived (existentially realized, realized in one's Existenz) and not merely thought about or talked about or argued over. 

Then it makes sense to go into the desert.  The negative reason is to escape the manifold distractions of the world which keep one scattered and enslaved to the ephemeral, while the positive reason is to live a life focused on the the absolute and unchanging Source of all reality and value.  The entrance into the monastery signals that one is truly convinced of the reality of the unseen (#1), it supreme value for us and our happiness (#2) and the relative unreality and insignificance of this world of time and change and vain ambition (#7).

To live such a focused existence, however, requires discipline. We have a fallen nature in at least two senses.  First, we are as if fallen from a higher state.  Second, we are ever falling against the objects of our world and losing ourselves in them, becoming absorbed in them.  (Compare Heidegger's Verfallenheit, fallingness.)  Here we find the ontological root of such sins of the flesh as avarice, gluttony, and lust.  Given our fallen and falling nature, a monastic institution can provide the moral discipline and guidance that might be difficult if not impossible to secure on the outside, especially in a secularized and sex-saturated society such as ours has become.  The weight of concupiscence is heavy and it drags us down.  We are sexual beings naturally, and oversexualized beings socially, and so we are largely unable to control our drives to the extent necessary to develop spiritual sight.  The thrust of desire confers final reality upon the sensuous while occluding one's spiritual sight.  Sensuous desire, especially inordinate sensuous desire, realizes the things of the senses while de-realizing the things of the spirit.

Here, as I see it, is the main reason for sexual continence.  We are not continent because we are undersexed, or prudes, or anti-natalists, or despisers of matter.  (Certainly no Christian could despise the material world, and a Christian such as Kierkegaard who at the end of his life waxed anti-natalist veered off into a personal idiosyncrasy.)  The continence of the loins subserves the continence of the mind and heart which in turn are probably necessary, though certainly not sufficient, for a Glimpse of spiritual realities.  (I say 'probably necessary' because divine grace may grant sight to the committed worldling nolens volens.)

And then there is the great problem of suggestibility. We are highly sensitive and responsive to social suggestions as to what is real and important and what is not.  In a society awash with secular suggestions, people find it hard to take religion seriously.  Here is another reason why a community of the like-minded may be necessary for most spiritual seekers.  They provide reinforcement and the requisite counter-suggestions.  (It is worth noting that if cults can 'brainwash' their members, whole societies can go off the rails and brainwash their members.)

Why Am I not a Monk?

"If you think so highly of the monastic life, what are you doing on the outside?" 

A fair question deserving a straight answer. I didn't come to religion; I was brought up Roman Catholic by a pious Italian mother and pre-Vatican II nuns and priests.  But I had a religious nature, so the training 'took.'  But I also had a strong intellectual bent and was inclined philosophically from an early age.  So I couldn't avoid asking, and not just intellectually, but existentially as well: how much of this is true and how do I know?  The ferment of the 1960s only intensified my cognitive dissonance as the religious upbringing clashed on the one side with my philosophical questioning, and on the other with the secular and counter-cultural suggestions of the 'sixties.  I remember in 1965 listening intently to the words of Bob Dylan's Gates of Eden and trying to discern its compatibility, if any, with Catholic teaching.  (By the way, attending a Dylan concert in those days was like going to church: the audience remained dead quiet, hanging on every word.)

So philosophy took over the role in the pious youth's life that religion had played. That kept me away from any conventional religious vocation.  And so it kept me out of the monastery.  For one cannot join a monastery in general; it must be either Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or Buddhist or whatever, and to do that in good faith and with a clear intellectual conscience one must accept the central doctrinal content of those religions.  But that content was exactly what to my mind needed examination. Athens at that point got the upper hand over Jerusalem.  So why am I not a monk?  Because of Athens.

But now, as I approach the end of the trail, I see ever more clearly the vanity of any philosophy that does not complete itself in something beyond it.  But what? The empty discursivity of reason needs to be filled and completed by a direct spiritual seeing.  Concepts without intuitions are empty. (Kant)  So philosophy needs completion by mystical intuition, but this is rare and sporadic and fragmentary here below, mere Glimpses;  to sustain us in the between times we need faith grounded in revelation. 

Related articles

Kierkegaard: "To Hell With the Pope!" and Monkishness. The Highest Life

Christ in the Desert Monastery

Incarnation Approached Subjectively: The Mystical Birth of God in the Soul

I have been, and will continue,  discussing Trinity and Incarnation objectively, that is, in an objectifying manner.  Now what do I mean by that?  Well, with respect to the Trinity, the central conundrum, to put it in a very crude and quick way is this:  How can three things be one thing?  With respect to the Incarnation, how can the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal and impassible Logos, be identical to a particular mortal man?  These puzzles get us thinking about identity and difference and set us hunting for analogies and models from the domain of  ordinary experience.  We seek intelligibility by an objective route.   We ought to consider that this objectifying approach might be wrongheaded and that we ought to examine a mystical and subjective approach, a 'Platonic' approach as opposed to an 'Aristotelian' one.  See my earlier quotation of Heinrich Heine.  A marvellous quotation.

1. The essence of Christianity is contained in the distinct but related doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Josef Pieper (Belief and Faith, p. 103) cites the following passages from the doctor angelicus: Duo nobis credenda proponuntur: scil. occultum Divinitatis . . . et mysterium humanitatis Christi. II, II, 1, 8. Fides nostra in duobus principaliter consistit: primo quidem in vera Dei cognitione . . . ; secundo in mysterio incarnationis Christi. II, II, 174, 6.

2. The doctrine of the Trinity spelled out in the Athanasian Creed, is that there is one God in three divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Each person is God, and yet there is exactly one God, despite the fact that the Persons are numerically distinct from one another. According to the doctrine of the Incarnation, the second person of the Trinity, the Son or Logos, became man in Jesus of Nazareth. There is a strong temptation to think of the doctrinal statements as recording (putative) objective facts and then to wonder how they are possible. I have touched upon some of the logical problems the objective approach encounters in previous posts.  The logical problems are thorny indeed and seem to require for their solution questionable logical innovations such as the notion (championed by Peter Geach) that identity is sortal-relative, or an equally dubious mysterianism which leaves us incapable of saying just what we would be accepting were we to accept the theological propositions in question.  The reader should review those problems in order to understand the motivation of what follows.

3. But it may be that the objective approach is radically mistaken. Is it an objective fact that God (or rather the second person of the Trinity) is identical to a particular man in the way it is an objective fact that the morning star is identical to the planet Venus?

Perhaps we need to explore a subjective approach. One such is the mystical approach illustrated in a surprising and presumably 'heretical' passage from St. John of the Cross' The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Collected Works, p. 149, tr. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, emphasis added):

. . . when a person has finished purifying and voiding himself of all forms and apprehensible images, he will abide in this pure and simple light, and be perfectly transformed into it. This light is never lacking to the soul, but because of creature forms and veils weighing upon and covering it, the light is never infused. If a person will eliminate these impediments and veils, and live in pure nakedness and poverty of spirit . . . his soul in its simplicity and purity will then be immediately transformed into simple and pure Wisdom, the Son of God.

The Son of God, the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, is 'born,' 'enters the world,' is 'incarnated,' in the soul of any man who attains the mystic vision of the divine light. This is the plain meaning of the passage. The problem, of course, is to reconcile this mystical subjectivism with the doctrinal objectivism according to which the Logos literally became man, uniquely, in Jesus of Nazareth when a certain baby was born in a manger in Bethlehem some 2000 years ago.

4. A somewhat less mystical but also subjective approach is suggested by an analogy that Josef Pieper offers in Belief and Faith, p. 89. I will explore his analogy in my own way. Suppose I sincerely and thoughtfully say 'I love you' to a person who is open and responsive to my address. Saying this, I do not report an objective fact which subsists independently of my verbal avowal and the beloved's reception of the avowal. There may be objective facts in the vicinity, but the I-Thou relation is not an objective fact antecedent to the address and the response. It is a personal relation of subjectivity to subjectivity. The reality of the I-Thou relation is brought about by the sincere verbal avowal and its sincere reception. The lover's speaking is a self-witnessing and "the witnessed subject matter is given reality solely by having been spoken in such a manner." (Pieper, p. 89) The speaking is a doing, a performance, a self-revelation that first establishes the love relationship.

5. The Incarnation is the primary instance of God's self-revelation to us. God reveals himself to us in the life and words of Jesus -- but only to those who are open to and accept his words and example. That God reveals himself (whether in Jesus' life and words or in the mystic's consciousness here and now) is not an objective fact independent of a free addressing and a free responding. It depends on a free communicating and a free receiving of a communication just as in the case of the lover avowing his love to the beloved. God speaks to man as lover to beloved. In the case of the Incarnation, God speaks to man though the man Jesus. Jesus is the Word of God spoken to man, which Word subsists only in the free reception of the divine communication. Thus it is not that a flesh and blood man is identical to a fleshless and bloodless person of the Trinity -- a putative identity that is hard to square with the discernibility of the identity relations' relata -- it is that God's Word to us is embodied in the life and teaching of a man when this life and teaching are apprehended and received as a divine communication. The Incarnation, as the prime instance of divine revelation, is doubly subjective in that subject speaks to subject, and that only in this speaking and hearing is the Incarnation realized.

6. Incarnation is not an objective fact or process by which one thing, the eternal Logos, becomes identical to a second thing, a certain man. Looked at in this objectivizing way, the logical difficulties become insuperable. Incarnation is perhaps better thought of as the prime instance of revelation, where revelation is, as Aquinas says at Summa Contra Gentiles, 3, 154, "accomplished by means of a certain interior and intelligible light, elevating the mind to the perception of things that the understanding cannot reach by its natural light." Revelation, so conceived, is not an objective fact. Incarnation is a mode of revelation. Ergo, the Incarnation is not an objective fact.

7. This is admittedly somewhat murky. More needs to be said about the exact sense of 'subjective' and 'objective.'

Peter Unger on Bertrand Russell on the Value of Philosophy

This from a reader:

In one portion of Grace Boey's interview of Peter Unger, Unger discusses what Russell had to say about the value of philosophy, and I was a bit taken aback because that particular quotation by Russell resonates with me a lot, and Unger's swift dismissal of it as garbage left me almost wounded.

What Unger appears to be saying is that claims about the value of philosophy are either quasi-mystical nonsense, or these are claims which can be empirically tested, and therefore should not be assumed a priori. We can only say philosophy has value if we take a bunch of philosophy students, measure parameters such as their dogmatism, creativity, rationality etc at the start and then at the end when they graduate, see if learning philosophy has improved these parameters, and whether this improvement is more than the graduates of other subjects like psychology and literature. Only then we can say that there is value in studying philosophy.

Your thoughts appreciated.

This is what Unger says: 

 

This quote is from a small book that Bertrand Russell wrote, from 1912, which is still used as a textbook today: a little book called The Problems of Philosophy. He talks here about the value of philosophy:

Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves. Because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all that because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

The second part, after the ‘above all’ seems like complete nonsense. What the heck does all that mean? It’s mystical nonsense, no? This from one of the two founders of modern logic, second only to Gottlob Frege in laying down the foundations of symbolic and mathematical logic.

Let’s go to the first part, before the ‘above all’. He says that these questions, and not questions about, say, chemistry, or ornothology, enlarge your conception of what is possible. I hardly even know what that means. But he goes on and says things which are less hard to understand, like, it enriches your intellectual imagination. And a second thing it does, which I take to be distinct, is it diminishes your dogmatic assurance.

These are things that can be tested for, as I said before! Whether it’s a treatment effect, or a selection effect. There are tests for how creative people are, or how dogmatic they are. You test them, at the end, the day after they graduate. And you see whether this is true.

Bertrand Russell never even bothers to think about whether, or what, these things might have to do with any test you can give to human people, or what’s going on. It’s so full of nonsense, the guy was always full of nonsense. He read up on relativity theory, but you would think he would think of some psychological testing that had some bearing on the smoke he was blowing. He never gave it a thought.

BV:  In dismissing mysticism as nonsense, Unger merely advertises his own ignorance and spiritual vacancy and falls to the tabloid level of an Ayn Rand who displays no more understanding of mysticism than he does.  Mysticism is a vast field of ancient yet ongoing human experience and endeavor and one that earlier American philosophers such as Josiah Royce, William James, and William Ernest Hocking, to mention just three philosophers of high distinction, took very seriously indeed.  See, respectively, The World and the Individual, First Series, 1899, lectures II, IV, and V; The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, lectures XVI and XVII; Types of Philosophy, 1929, chapters 30, 31, 32, 33.  It is worth noting that all three luminaries were professors at Harvard University.

In those days Harvard was still far from the over-specialization and hyper-professionalization of philosophy that breeds people like Peter Unger, who though "terribly" clever -- to use one of his favorite adjectives --appear to view philosophy as a highly rarefied academic game without roots in, or anything to say about, one's life as an "existing individual" (phrase from Kierkegaard, but I am thinking of all the existentialists, as well as  Augustine, Pascal, the Stoics, the ancient Skeptics, and indeed all philosophers from Plato to Aquinas to Kant and beyond for whom philosophy has something to do with the search for wisdom).

The institutionalization of philosophy in the 20th century, though not without some benefits, has led to the following.  Empty gamesmanship without existential anchorage.  Hypertrophy of the critical and analytic faculty with concomitant atrophy of the intuitive faculty. Philistinic dismissal of whole realms of human experience and endeavor.  Technicality and specialization taken to absurd lengths not justified by any actual results.  (If extreme specialization and narrowing of focus led to consensus among competent practioners, then that might count as a justification for the specialization.  But it hasn't and it doesn't. See here.)

Bertrand Russell, you will recall, published a collection of essays in October 1910 that in the second edition of December 1917 were given the title Mysticism and Logic.  The lead essay, "Mysticism and Logic," which originally appeared in the Hibbert Journal of July 1914, displays a serious engagement with what Unger the philistine dismisses as "complete nonsense."  What Russell writes about mysticism is penetrating enough to suggest that he may have had some mystical experiences of his own.  In the end Russell rejects the four main tenets that he takes as definitive of mysticism, but his rejection is reasoned and respectful.  He grants that "there is an element of wisdom to be learned from the mystical way of feeling, which does not seem to be attainable in any other way." (p. 11)

But of course that essay dates from the days of our grandfathers and great grandfathers.  Times have changed, and in philosophy not for the better.  The analytic philosophy that Russell did so much to promote has become sterile and ingrown and largely irrelevant to the wider culture.  There are of course exceptions, Thomas Nagel being one of them. 

There is a lot more to be said.  But for now I will simply oppose to Unger's nauseating view the following quotations:

The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man. (William James, Pragmatism, Harvard UP, 1975, p. 56)

Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.

Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great. (Augustine, Contra Academicos 1. 2. 6.)

See here for a different critical response to Unger.

Related articles

Solubility Skepticism, Religion, and Reason

Can One Copulate One's Way to Chastity? Notes on Wittgenstein and Unger

How Much Time Should be Spent on Philosophy?

Our Czech friend Vlastimil Vohanka writes,

You blogged that doing philosophy has great value in itself; even if philosophy is aporetic. But how often, or how long per day or month, should one devote to it? Doing philosophy seems (to me at least) to have diminishing returns, if philosophy is aporetic. Or has your experience been different?

My approach to philosophy could be called radically aporetic.  Thus I hold not only that philosophy is best approached aporetically, via its problems, but also that its central problems are insoluble.  Thus I tend, tentatively and on the basis of inductive evidence,  to the view that the central problems of philosophy, while genuine and thus not amenable to Wittgensteinian or other dissolution, are true aporiai, impasses.  It is clear that one could take a broadly aporetic approach without subscribing to the insolubility thesis.  But I go 'whole hog.'  Hence radically aporetic.

I won't explain this any further, having done so elsewhere, but proceed to V.'s question.

I take our friend to be asking the following.  How much time ought one devote to philosophy if philosophy is its problems and they are insoluble?  But there is a deeper and logically prior question lurking in the background:  Why do philosophy at all if its problems are insoluble? What good is philosophy aporetically pursued?

1. It is good in that it conduces to intellectual humility, to an appreciation of our actual predicament in this life, which is one of profound ignorance concerning what would be most worth knowing if we could know it. The aporetic philosopher is a Socratic philosopher, one who knows what he knows and knows what he does not know. The aporetic philosopher is a debunker of epistemic pretense. One sort of epistemic pretense is that of the positive scientists who, succumbing to the temptation to wax philosophical, overstep the bounds of their competence, proposing bogus solutions to philosophical problems, and making incoherent assertions. They often philosophize without knowing it, and they do it incompetently, without self-awareness and self-criticism.  I have given many examples of this in these pages.  Thus philosophy as I conceive it is an important antidote to scientism.  Scientism is an enemy of the humanities and I am a defender of the humanities.

There is also the threat emanating from political ideologies such as communism and leftism and Islamism and their various offshoots.  The critique of these and other pernicious worldviews is a task for philosophy.  And who is better suited for debunking operations than the aporetician?

2. Beyond its important debunking use, philosophy aporetically pursued has a spiritual point and purpose. If there are indeed absolutely insoluble problems, they mark the boundary of the discursive intellect and point beyond it.  Immersion in philosophical problems brings the discursive mind to an appreciation of its limits and raises the question of what, if anything, lies beyond the limits and how one may gain access to it.

I take the old-fashioned view that the ultimate purpose of human life, a purpose to which all others must be subordinated, is to search for, and if possible, participate in the Absolute.  There are several approaches to the Absolute, the main ones being philosophy, religion, and mysticism. 

The radical aporetician in philosophy goes as far as he can with philosophy, but hits a dead-end, and is intellectually hnest enough to admit that he is at his wit's end.  This motivates him to explore other paths to the Absolute, paths via faith/revelation and mystical intuition.  The denigration of the latter by most contemporary philosophers merely shows how spiritually benighted and shallow they are, how historically uniformed, and in some cases, how willfully stupid.

But once a philosopher always a philosopher. So the radical aporetician does not cease philosophizing while exploring the other paths; he uses philosophy to chasten the excess of those other paths.  And so he denigrates reason as little as he denigrates faith/revelation and mystical intuition.  He merely assigns to reason its proper place.

Now to V.'s actual question.  How much time for philosophy?  A good chunk of every day.  Just how much depending on the particular circumstances of one's particular life. But time must also be set aside for prayer and meditation, the reading of the great scriptures, and other religious/ mystical practices.

For one ought to be a truth-seeker above else. But if one is serious about seeking truth, then one cannot thoughtlessly assume that the only access to ultimate truth is via philosophy.   A person who refuses to explore other paths is like the churchmen who refused to look through Galileo's telescope.  They 'knew' that Aristotle had 'proven' the 'quintessential' perfection of celestial bodies, a perfection that would disallow any such 'blemishes' as craters.  So they refused to look and see.

One of my correspondents is a retired philosophy of professor and a Buddhist.  He maintains that one ought to spend  as much time meditating as one spends on philosophy.  So if one philosophizes for five hours per day, then one ought to meditate for five hours per day!  A hard saying indeed!   

Related articles

A Question for Benson Mates

Solubility Skepticism, Religion, and Reason

Ontic Versus Alterity Theism

There is a problem that has occupied me on and off for years. Mikael Stenmark's Prague paper, "Competing Conceptions of God: The Personal God versus the God beyond Being" got me thinking about it again.  What follows, however, is not intended as commentary on Stenmark's paper.

One way into the problem as I conceive it is via the following aporetic triad:

1. There are things other than God that exist, and they all depend on God for their existence.

2.  For any x, y,  if x depends for its existence on y, and x exists, then y exists. (This implies that nothing can depend on God for its existence unless God exists.)

3. God is not one of the many things that exist, and so God does not exist.

It is easy to see that the limbs of the triad cannot all be true. And yet each has some plausibility, at least 'in-house,' i.e., among theists.

(1) or something like it must be accepted by both ontic theists and alterity theists.  Roughly, an ontic theist is a theist who maintains that God is a being among beings while an alterity theist is one who maintains that God is radically transcendent, radically other, to such an extent that he cannot be identified with any being.

(2) won't be accepted by the alterity theists, but it is to my mind exceedingly plausible! 

(3) won't be accepted by the ontic theist, but many find it plausible. 

But since the limbs cannot all be true, one of them must be rejected.  (I am assuming, of course, that there cannot be true contradictions.)  There are therefore three main ways of solving the problem.

A. The quickest solution, call it Blanket Atheism, is by rejecting (1).  There is no God in any sense of the term.  No being is God, and there is no God 'beyond being.'   There is just the natural world (and perhaps abstracta) but nature is not God.

B.  The alterity theist rejects (2) while accepting (3).

C.  The ontic theist accepts (2) while rejecting (3).

But there are two other C-options, two other options involving the acceptance of (2) and the rejection of (3).

One could take a monistic tack, roughly along the lines of Spinoza.  Accordingly, (i) there is a sense in which God exists -- God is not natura naturata, but natura naturans -- ; (ii) God exists in the primary sense of 'exists'; (iii) God alone exists, hence is not one of many existents, and so does not exist in the sense in which Spinozistic modes exist.

This is what I used to think, back in the '80s.  See my "Two Faces of Theism," Idealistic Studies, vol. xx, no. 3 (September 1990), pp. 238-257.  But I moved away from this position in the '90s and took an onto-theological turn that found expression in my existence book.

That is the other C-option.  Accordingly, God is not an existent among existents as the ontic theist maintains.  Nor is God somehow real but nonexistent as the alterity theist maintains.  Nor is God the one and only existent as the monist maintains.  Rather, God is self-existent Existence, yet transcendent, pace monism.  This is roughly akin to the position of Aquinas.  Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.  So God is Being (esse) but God also is.  God is Being but also the prime 'case' -- not instance! -- of Being.  But God is in a mode of Being unlike the mode of Being of anything else. So God is not a being among beings, nor does he have properties in the way Socrates has properties.

But this too has its difficulties.  So now I am contemplating the final step: Into the Mystic.

Roughly, the above triad is an aporia, an insolubilium.  One has to blast through it, as through a koan, into the Transdiscursive.  The philosopher, however, hovers at the boundary of the Unsayable, marking it without overstepping it, incapable qua philosopher of effing the Ineffable, but able -- and this is his office --  to point to it while refuting both denials of it and bad theories about it.

Unusual Experiences and the Problem of Overbelief and Underbelief

One day, well over 30 years ago, I was deeply tormented by a swarm of negative thoughts and feelings that had arisen because of a dispute with a certain person.  Pacing around my apartment, I suddenly, without any forethought, raised my hands toward the ceiling and said, "Release me!"  It was a wholly spontaneous cri du coeur, a prayer if you will, but not intended as such.  I emphasize that it was wholly unpremeditated.    As soon as I had said the words and made the gesture, a wonderful peace descended upon my mind and the flood of negativity vanished. I became as calm as a Stoic sage.

That is an example of what I am calling an unusual experience.  Only some of us have such experiences, and those who do, only rarely.  I never had such an experience before or since, though I have had a wide variety of other types of unusual experiences of a religious, mystical and paranormal nature.

A second very memorable experience occurred while in deep formal meditation.  I had the strong sense that I was the object of a very powerful love.  I suddenly had the feeling that I was being loved by someone.  Unfortunately, my analytic mind went to work on the experience and it soon subsided. This is why, when the gifts of meditation arrive, one must surrender to them in utter passivity, something that intellectual types will find it very hard to do. 

The typical intellectual suffers from hypertrophy of the critical faculty, and in consequence, he suffers the blockage of the channels of intuition.  He hones his intellect on the whetstone of discursivity, and if he is not careful, he may hone it away to nothing, or else perfect the power of slicing while losing the power of splicing.

Now suppose one were to interpret an experience such as the first one described  as a reception of divine grace or as the answering of a prayer by a divine or angelic agent.  Such an interpretation would involve what William James calls overbelief.  Although the genial James uses the term several times in Varieties of Religious Experience and elsewhere, I don't believe he ever defines the term.  But I think it is is keeping with his use of the term to say that an  overbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained within it.

Similarly, if I came to believe that what I experienced in the second experience was the love of Christ (subjective genitive), that would be an overbelief.  The experience could not be doubted while I was having it, and now, a few years after having the experience, I have no practical doubts about it either:  I have the testimony of my journal account which was written right after the experience, testimony that is corroborated by my present memories. 

Unfortunately, experiences do not bear within themselves certificates of veridicality.  There are two questions that an experience qua experience leaves open.  First, is it of something real?  Second, even if it is of something real, is it of the particular thing the overbelief says it is of? 

Suppose a skeptic pipes up: "What you experienced was not the love of Christ, you gullible fool, but a random electro-chemical discharge in your brain."  But of course, that would be wrong, indeed absurd.  The experience was certainly not of that.  The experience had a definite and describable phenomenological content, a content not describable in electro-chemical or neural terms.

Indeed, it is arguable that the skeptic is trading in underbelief, a word I just now coined.  [Correction, 11 July: James uses 'under-belief' on p. 515 of The Varieties of Religious Experience.] If an  overbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained within it, then an underbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience less than is contained within it, or reading into it what manifestly is not contained within it. 

Pounding on such a boneheaded skeptic, however, does not get the length of a proof of the veridicality of my experience. 

We are on the point of becoming entangled in a thicket of thorny questions.  Are there perceptual beliefs?  If yes, are they not overbeliefs?  I see a bobcat sitting outside my study and I form the belief that there is a bobcat five feet from me.  But surely that existential claim goes beyond what the experience vouchsafes.  The existence of the cat cannot be read off from the experience . . . .

Or is it rather underbelief  if I refuse to grant that seeing a bobcat in normal conditions (good light, etc.) is proof that it exists in reality beyond my visual perception?

Should we perhaps define 'overbelief' and 'underbelief' in such a way that they pertain only to non-empirical matters?

Furthermore, is an overbelief a belief?  Might 'over' function here as an alienans adjective?  Beliefs are either true or false.  Perhaps overbeliefs are neither, being merely matters of attitude, merely subjective additions to experiences.  I think James would reject this.  For him, overbeliefs are genuine beliefs.  I'll dig up some passages later.

Sam Harris, you may remember, holds that the nonexistence of the self is something that one can learn from meditation.  But he too, I should think, is involved in overbelief.  One cannot observe the nonexistence of the self.  Harris' belief goes well beyond anything that meditation discloses.  The self does not turn up among the objects of experience as a separate object.  Granted.  It doesn't follow, however, that there is no self.  To get to that conclusion overbelief is necessary, along the lines of: Only that which can be singled out as an object of experience exists or is real.  How justify that on the basis of a close inspection of experience?  It is sometimes called the Principle of Acquaintance.  Are we acquainted with it?

The irony shouldn't be missed.  Harris, the febrile religion-basher, embraces a religious overbelief in his Buddhist rejection of the self.  Buddhism is a religion.   

Related articles

Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to It

What is Religion? How Does it Differ from Superstition?

Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism and Whether the Self is an Illusion

Mary Neal's Out-of-Body Experiences

Is Heaven Real? A Neurosurgeon's Near-Death Experience

Phenomenon and Existence

The Essence of Religion

Psychotropic Drugs, Veridicality, Criteria

Hitchens: No Understanding of Religion

The Atheist

Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism and Whether the Self is an Illusion

London Karl brings to my attention an article by Sam Harris touching upon themes dear to my heart. Harris is an impressive fellow, an excellent public speaker, a crusader of sorts who has some important and true things to say, but who is sometimes out beyond his depth, like many public intellectuals who make bold to speak about philosophical topics.  (But Harris is surely right clearly and courageously to point out that, among the ideologies extant at the present time, radical Islam is the most dangerous.)

In Rational Mysticism, Harris responds to critic Tom Flynn and in doing so offers characterizations of secularism, religion, and rational mysticism:

I used the words spirituality and mysticism affirmatively, in an attempt to put the range of human experience signified by these terms on a rational footing. It seems to me that the difficulty Flynn had with this enterprise is not a problem with my book, or merely with Flynn, but a larger problem with secularism itself.

As a worldview, secularism has defined itself in opposition to the whirling absurdity of religion. Like atheism (with which it is more or less interchangeable), secularism is a negative dispensation. Being secular is not a positive virtue like being reasonable, wise, or loving. To be secular, one need do nothing more than live in perpetual opposition to the unsubstantiated claims of religious dogmatists. Consequently, secularism has negligible appeal to the culture at large (a practical concern) and negligible content (an intellectual concern). There is, in fact, not much to secularism that should be of interest to anyone, apart from the fact that it is all that stands between sensible people like ourselves and the mad hordes of religious imbeciles who have balkanized our world, impeded the progress of science, and now place civilization itself in jeopardy. Criticizing religious irrationality is absolutely essential. But secularism, being nothing more than the totality of such criticism, can lead its practitioners to reject important features of human experience simply because they have been traditionally associated with religious practice.

The above can be distilled into three propositions:

1. Secularism is wholly defined by what it opposes, religion.

2. Religion is irrational, anti-science, and anti-civilization.

3. It would be a mistake to dismiss mysticism because of its traditional association with religious practice.

Harris continues:

The final chapter of my book, which gave Flynn the most trouble, is devoted to the subject of meditation. Meditation, in the sense that I use the term, is nothing more than a method of paying extraordinarily close attention to one’s moment-to-moment experience of the world. There is nothing irrational about doing this (and Flynn admits as much). In fact, such a practice constitutes the only rational basis for making detailed (first-person) claims about the nature of human subjectivity. Difficulties arise for secularists like Flynn, however, once we begin speaking about the kinds of experiences that diligent practitioners of meditation are apt to have. It is an empirical fact that sustained meditation can result in a variety of insights that intelligent people regularly find intellectually credible and personally transformative. The problem, however, is that these insights are almost always sought and expressed in a religious context. One such insight is that the feeling we call “I”—the sense that there is a thinker giving rise to our thoughts, an experiencer distinct from the mere flow of experience—can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. Our conventional sense of “self” is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation, analogous to the discovery of one’s optic blind spots.

To continue with the distillation:

4. Meditation, defined as careful attention to conscious experience, is the only basis for sustainable claims about subjectivity.  There is nothing irrational about it.

5. Deep meditation gives rise to unusual, and sometimes personally transformative, experiences or "insights."

6.  One such "insight" is that the "sense of self" or the "feeling called 'I'" can disappear when carefully searched for.

7. The sense of "self" is a cognitive illusion, and can be seen to be such by empirical observation: it is not a proposition to be accepted on faith.

There is much to agree with here.  Indeed, I wholeheartedly accept propositions (1), (3), (4), and (5).  Of course, I don't accept (2), but that is not what I want to discuss.  My present concerns are (6) and (7).

Let me say first that, for me, 'insight' is a noun of success, and in this regard it is like 'knowledge.' There cannot be false knowledge; there cannot be false insights.  Now does deep meditation disclose that there is, in truth, no self, no ego, no I, no subject of experience?  Harris does not say flat-out that the self is an illusion; he says that the "sense of self" is an illusion.  But I don't think he means that there is a self but that there is no sense of it in deep meditation.  I take him to be saying something quite familiar from (the religion?) Pali Buddhism, namely, that there is no self, period.  Anatta, you will recall, is one of the pillars of Pali and later Buddhism, along with anicca and dukkha.

So I will assume that Harris means to deny the the existence of the self as the subject of experience and to deny it on empirical grounds:  there is no self because no self is encountered when we carefully examine, in deep meditation, our conscious experience.

It seems to me, however, that the nonexistence of what I fail to find does not logically follow from my failing to find it. 

It may be that the self is the sort of thing that cannot turn up as an object of experience precisely because it is the subject of experience.

Here is an analogy.  An absent-minded old man went in search of his eyeglasses.  He searched  high and low, from morning til night.  Failing to find them after such a protracted effort, he concluded that he never had any in the first place.  His search, however, was made possible by the glasses sitting upon his nose!

The analogy works with the eyes as well.  From the fact that my eyes do not appear in my visual field (apart from mirrors), it does not follow that I have no eyes.  My eyes are a necessary condition of my having a visual field in the first place.  Their nonappearance in said field is no argument against them.

It could be something like that (though not exactly like that) with the self.  It could be that the self cannot, by its very nature, turn up as an object of experience, for the simple reason that it is the subject of experience, that which is experiencing.

It is simply false to say what Harris says in (7), namely that one empirically observes that there is no self.  That is not an observation but an inference from the failure to encounter the self as an object of experience.  It is an inference that is valid only in the presence of an auxiliary premise:

Only that which can be experienced as an object exists.
The self cannot be experienced as an object.
Therefore
The self does not exist.

This argument is valid, but is it sound?  The second premise is empirical: nothing we encounter in experience (inner or outer) counts as the subject of experience.  True for the standard Humean and Buddhist reasons.  But we cannot validly move from the second premise to the conclusion.  We need the help of the auxiliary premise, which is not empirical.  How then do we know that it is true? Must we take it on faith?  Whose faith? Harris's?

My point, then, is that (7) is false and that Harris is operating with a dogmatic, non-empirical assumption, the just-mentioned auxiliary premise.

Harris needs to be careful that in his war against "absurd religious certainties" he does not rely on absurd dogmatic certainties of his own. 

For a more detailed and rigiorous presentation, see Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self?

 

 

Related articles

Is Heaven Real? A Neurosurgeon's Near-Death Experience

The Atheist

Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to It

The Strange World of Simone Weil: God Does and Does Not Exist

In the chapter "Atheism as a Purification" in Gravity and Grace (Routledge 1995, tr. Emma Craufurd from the French, first pub. in 1947), the first entry reads as follows:

A case of contradictories which are true.  God exists: God does not exist.  Where is the problem?  I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am quite sure that my love is not illusory.  I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word.  But that which I cannot conceive is not an illusion. (103)

What are we to make of writing like this? Contradictories cannot both be true and they cannot both be false.  By their surface structure, God exists and God does not exist are contradictories. So, obviously, they cannot both be true if taken at face value.

Faced with an apparent contradiction, the time-tested method for relieving the tension is by making a distinction, thereby showing that the apparent contradiction is merely apparent.  Suppose we distinguish, as we must in any case, between the concept God and God.  Obviously, God is not a concept.  This is true even if God does not exist.  Interestingly, the truth that God is not a concept is itself a conceptual truth, one that we can know to be true by mere analysis of the concept God. For what we mean by 'God' is precisely a being that does not, like a concept, depend on the possibility or actuality of our mental operations, a being that exists in sublime independence of finite mind.

Now consider these translations:

 

 

God does not exist:  Nothing in reality falls under the concept God.

God exists:  There is an inconceivable reality, God, and it is the target of non-illusory love.

These translations seem to dispose of the contradiction.  One is not saying of one and the same thing, God, that he both exists and does not exist; one is saying of a concept that it is not instantiated and of a non-concept that it is inconceivable.  That is not a contradiction, or at least not an explicit contradiction.  Weil's thesis is that there is a divine reality, but it is inconceivable by us.  She is saying that access to the divine reality is possible through love, but not via the discursive intellect.  There is an inconceivable reality.

Analogy: just as there are nonsensible realities, there are inconceivable realities.  Just as there are realities beyond the reach of the outer senses (however extended via microscopes, etc.), there is a reality beyond the reach of the discursive intellect. Why not?

An objection readily suggests itself:

If you say that God is inconceivable, then you are conceiving God as inconceivable.  If you say that nothing can be said about him, then you say something about him, namely, that nothing can be said about him.  If you say that there exists an inconceivable reality, then that is different from saying that there does not exist such a reality; hence you are conceiving the inconceivable reality as included in what there is.  If you say that God is real, then you are conceiving him as real as opposed to illusory.  Long story short, you are contradicting yourself when you claim that there is an inconceivable reality or that God is an inconceivable reality, or that God is utterly beyond all of our concepts, or that no predications of him are true, or that he exists but has no attributes, or that he is real but inconceivable.

The gist of the objection is that my translation defense of Weil is itself contradictory:  I defuse the initial contradiction but only by embracing others.

Should we concede defeat and conclude that Weil's position is incoherent and to be rejected because it is incoherent?

Not so fast.  The objection is made on the discursive plane and presupposes the non-negotiable and ultimate validity of discursive reason.  The objection  is valid only if discursive reason is 'valid' as the ultimate approach to reality.  So there is a sense in which the objection begs the question, the question of the ultimate validity of the discursive intellect.  Weil's intention, however, is to break through the discursive plane.  It is therefore no surprise that 'There is an inconceivable reality' is self-contradictory.  It is -- but that is no objection to it unless one presupposes the ultimate validity of discursive reason and the Law of Non-Contradiction.

Mystic and logician seem to be at loggerheads. 

Mystic: "There is a transdiscursive, inconceivable reality."

Logician: "To claim as much is to embroil yourself in various contradictions."

Mystic: "Yes, but so what?"

Logician: "So what?! That which is or entails a contradiction cannot exist!  Absolutely everything is subject to LNC."

Mystic: "You're begging the question against me.  You are simply denying what I am asserting, namely, that there is something that is not subject to LNC.  Besides, how do you know that LNC is a law of all reality and not merely a law of your discursive thinking? What makes your thinking legislative as to the real and the unreal?"

Logician: "But doesn't it bother you that the very assertions you make, and must make if you are  verbally to communicate your view, entail logical contradictions?"

Mystic: "No.  That bothers you because you assume the ultimate and non-negotiable validity of the discursive intellect.  It doesn't both me because, while I respect the discursive intellect when confined to its proper sphere, I do not imperialistically proclaim it to be legislative for the whole of reality.  You go beyond logic proper when you make the metaphysical claim that all of reality is subject to LNC.  How are you going to justify that metaphysical leap in a non-circular way?"

Logician:  "It looks like we are at an impasse."

Mystic: "Indeed we are.  To proceed further you must stop thinking and see!"

How then interpret the Weilian sayings?    What Weil is saying is logically nonsense, but important nonsense.  It is nonsense in the way that a Zen koan is nonsense.  One does not solve a koan by making distinctions, distinctions that presuppose the validity of the Faculty of Distinctions, the discursive intellect; one solves a koan by "breaking through to the other side."  Mystical experience is the solution to a koan.  Visio intellectualis, not more ratiocination. 

A telling phrase from GG 210: "The void which we grasp with the pincers of contradiction . . . ."

But of course my writing and thinking is an operating upon the discursive plane.  Mystical philosophy is not mysticism.  It is, at best, the discursive propadeutic thereto.  One question is whether one can maintain logical coherence by the canons of the discursive  plane while introducing the possibility of its transcendence.

Or looking at it the other way round:  can the committed and dogmatic discursivist secure his position without simply assuming, groundlessly, its ultimate and non-negotiable validity -- in which event he has not secured it?  And if he has not secured it, why is it binding upon us -- by his own lights?

Meditation: How Long and What to Expect

A student from Northern Ireland writes,

I've recently been contemplating practising meditation. I decided to look up what you had to say on the subject, and I was happy to discover the "how to meditate" post. I was just wondering though, how long should a person meditate, and what should a first timer like myself expect to think or feel during the first few meditations?

How long? Between 15 and 30 minutes at first, working up gradually to an hour or more. What to expect?  Not much at first.  Mind control is extremely difficult and our minds are mostly out of control serving up an endless parade of  pointless memories, useless worries, and negative thoughts of all sorts.  In the beginning meditation is mostly hard work.  So you can expect to work hard at first for meager results.   

 

At a deeper level, expectation and striving to accomplish something are out of place.  Meditation is an interior listening that can occur only when the discursive mind with its thoughts, judgements, intentions, expectations, and the like has been silenced.  Meditation is not an inner discourse but an inner listening. 

 

Of course, there is a bit of a paradox here: at first one must intend resolutely to take up this practice, one must work at it every morning with no exceptions, one must strive to quiet the mind -- but all in quest of an effortless abiding in mental quiet wherein there is no intending, working, or striving.

 

Logic greatly aids, though  is not necessary for, disciplined thinking.  Meditation greatly aids, though is not necessary for, disciplined non-thinking.

 

Meditation is a battle against the mind's centrifugal tendency.  In virtue of its intentionality, mind is ever in flight from its center, so much so that some have denied that there is a center or a self.  The aim of meditation is centering.  To switch metaphors, the aim is to swim upstream to the thought-free source of thoughts.  Compare Emerson: "Man is a stream whose source is hidden."  Arrival at that hidden source is the ultimate goal of meditation.

 

 

Swimming upstream against a powerful current is not easy and for some impossible. So this is a good metaphor of the difficulty of meditation.  The more extroverted you are, the more difficult it will be. Why engage in this hard work?  Either you sense that your surface self has a depth dimension that calls to you or you don't. If you do, then this is the way to explore it. 

 

 

Meditation reduced to three steps: 

First, drive out all useless thoughts.  Then get rid of all useful but worldly thoughts.  Finally, achieve the cessation of all thoughts, including spiritual ones.  Now you are at the threshhold of meditation proper.  Unfortunately, a lifetime of work may not suffice to complete even these baby steps.  You may not even make it to the threshhold.  But if you can achieve even the first step, you will have done yourself a world of good.

The idea behind Step One is to cultivate the ability to suppress, at will, every useless, negative, weakening thought as soon as it arises.  Not easy!

Meditation won't bear fruits unless one lives in a way that is compatible with it and its goals.  So a certain amount of withdrawal from the world is needed.  One needs to 'unplug.'

The attainment of mental quiet is a very high and choice-worthy goal of human striving.  Anything that scatters or dis-tracts (literally: pulls apart) the mind makes it impossible to attain mental quiet as well as such lower attainments as ordinary concentration.  Now the mass media have the tendency to scatter and distract.  Therefore, if you value the attainment of mental quiet and such cognate states as tranquillitas animi, ataraxia, peace of mind, samadhi, concentration, 'personal presence,' etc., then you are well-advised to limit consumption of media dreck and cultivate the disciplines that lead to these states.

Realms of Experience Beyond the Natural

This from a reader:

I was reading your post on Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to It and was struck by a statement you made at the end regarding "mystical glimpses, religious vouchsafings, paranormal experiences."  By this you seem to confirm a developing series of thoughts I have had for a few years.  As a benefit of my modernist education my categories of thought roughly corresponded to natural and supernatural.  It seems to me that this type of thinking is wrong and there have been a lot of things crammed into the "supernatural" category by moderns just because they are not "natural."  It would be interesting to see how you break these things out and why they are different.  Specifically as someone who has the religious inclination.

The reader is right: a lot of rather different things have been lumped together under the rubric 'supernatural' just because they are beyond the natural.  But distinctions need to be made.  Now this is a huge topic, and I am not up to doing it justice. 

Corresponding to the phrase the reader quoted, "mystical glimpses, religious vouchsafings, paranormal experiences,"  I will say a little about mysticism, religion, and occultism.  Some of this is excerpted from a much longer post that discusses the relations among philosophy, mysticism, religion, and wisdom.

Mysticism 

Turning now to mysticism, we may define it as the activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need for direct contact with the Absolute, disgusted with verbiage and abstraction as well as with mere belief and empty rites and rituals, seeks to know the Absolute immediately, which is to say, neither philosophically through the mediation of concepts, judgments and arguments, nor religiously through the mediation of faith, trust, devotion, and adherence to tradition. The mystic does not want to know about the Absolute, that it exists, what its properties are, how it is related to the relative plane, etc.; nor does he want merely to believe or trust in it. He does not want knowledge by description, but knowledge by acquaintance. Nor is he willing, like the religionist, to postpone
his enjoyment of it. He wants it, he wants it whole, and he wants it now. He wants to verify its existence for himself here and now in the most direct way possible: by intuiting it. ‘Intuition’ is a terminus technicus: it refers to direct cognitive access to an object or state of affairs.  The intuition in question is of course not sensible but intellectual. Thus the mystical ‘faculty’ is that of intellectual intuition.

Religion

Religion (from L. religere, to bind) is not fundamentally a collection of rites, rituals, and dogmas, but an activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need to live in the truth, as opposed to know it objectively in propositional guise, seeks to establish a personal bond with the Absolute. Whereas philosophy operates with concepts, judgments, arguments and theories, religion proceeds by way of faith, trust, devotion, and love. It is bhaktic rather than jnanic, devotional rather than discriminative.  The philosophical project, predicated on the autonomy of reason, is one of relentless and thus endless inquiry in which nothing is immune from examination before reason’s bench. But the engine of inquiry is doubt, which sets philosophy at odds with religion with its appeal to revealed truth.  If the occupational hazard of the philospher is a life-inhibiting scepticism, the corresponding hazard for the religionist is a dogmatic certainty that can easily turn murderous. For a relatively recent example, consider the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. (This is why such zealots of the New Atheism as Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, Grayling, et al. are not completely mistaken.)

The philosopher objects to the religionist: "You believe things for which you have no proof!" The religionist replies to the philosopher: "You sew without a knot in your thread!" I am not engaging in Zen mondo, but alluding to Kierkegaard’s point that to philosophize without dogma is like sewing without a knot in one’s thread. The philosopher will of course reply that to philosophize with dogma is not to philosophize at all. Here we glimpse one form of the conflict beween philosophy and religion as routes to the Absolute. If the philosopher fails to attain the Absolute because discursive reason dissolves in scepticism, the religionist often attains what can only be called a pseudo-Absolute, an
idol.

The Difference Between Mysticism and Religion

Roughly, mysticism is monistic while religion is dualistic, presupposing the ineliminability of  what Martin Buber calls the 'I-Thou relation.' Here is a passage from his I and Thou:

Nor does he [Buddha] lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. His inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You . . . . All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of human spirit bent back into itself -- the delusion that spirit occurs in man. In truth it occurs from man - between man and what he is not. As the spirit bent back into itself renounces this sense, this sense of relation, he must draw into man that which is not man, he must psychologize world and God. This is the psychical delusion of the spirit.  ( pp.140-141 / part 3 : Tr.Kaufmann, Ed: T&T Clark Edinburgh 1970)

The context of the above quotations is a section of I and Thou that runs from pp. 131 to 143.  Here are some quickly composed thoughts on this stretch of text.

In this section Buber offers a critique of Buddhism, Hinduism and other forms of mysticism (including
Christian forms such as the one we find in Meister Eckhart) which relativize the I-Thou relation between man and God by re-ducing it (leading it back) to a primordial unity logically and ontologically prior to the terms of the relation.  According to these traditions, this  primordial unity  can be experienced directly in Versenkung, which Kaufmann translates, not incorrectly, as 'immersion,' but which I think is better rendered as 'meditation.'  As the German word suggests, one sinks down into the depths of the self and comes to the realization that, at bottom, there is no self or ego (Buddhism with its doctrine of anatta or anatman) or else that there is a Self, but that it is the eternal Atman ( = Brahman) of Hinduism, "the One that thinks and is." (131)

Either way duality is overcome and seen to be not ultimately real.  Buber rejects this because the I-Thou relation presupposes the ultimate ineliminability of duality, not only the man-God duality but also the duality of world and God.  Mysticism "annuls relationship" (132) psychologizing both world and God. (141).  Verseelen is the word Kaufmann translates as 'psychologize.'  A more suggestive translation might be 'soulifies.'  Mysticism drags both God and the world into the soul where they are supposedly to be found in their ultimate reality by meditation.   But spirit is not in man, Buber thinks, but between man and what is not man.  Spirit is thus actualized in the relation of man to man, man to world, man to God.

At this point I would put a question to Buber.  If spirit subsists only in relation, ought we conclude
that God needs man to be a spiritual being in the same way that finite persons need each other to be spiritual beings?  Is God dependent on man to be who he is?  If yes, then the aseity of God is compromised.  A Christian could say that the divine personhood subsists in intradivine relations, relations among and between the persons of the Trinity.  But as far as I know Trinitarian thought is foreign to Judaism.  Anyway, that is a question that occurs to me.

The "primal actuality of dialogue" (133) requires Two irreducible one to the other.  It is not a relation
internal to the self. 

Buber is not opposed to Versenkung as a preliminary  and indeed a prerequisite for encounter with the transcendent Other.  Meditative Versenkung leads to inner concentration, interior unification, recollectedness.  But this samadhi (which I think is etymologically related to the German sammeln) is not to be enjoyed for its own sake, but is properly preparatory for the encounter with the transcendent Other.  "Concentrated into a unity, a human being can proceed to his encounter -- wholly successful only now -- with mystery and perfection.  But he can also savor the bliss of his unity and, without incurring the supreme duty, return into distraction." (134)

Buber's point is that the mystic who, treading the inward path, arrives at the unitary ground of his soul and experiences sat-chit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss) shirks his supreme duty if he merely enjoys this state and then returns to the world of multiplicity and diremption.  The soulic unity must be used for the sake of the encounter with God.

Buber seems to be maintaining that Buddhist and other mysticism is an escape into illusion, an escape into a mere annihilation of dual awareness for the sake of an illusory nondual awareness:  "insofar as this doctrine contains directions for immersion in true being, it does not lead into lived actuality but into 'annihilation' in which there is no consciousness, from which no memory survives -- and the man
who has emerged from it may profess the experience by using the limit-word of non-duality, but without any right to proclaim this as unity." (136) 

Buber continues, "We, however, are resolved to tend with holy care the holy treasure of our actuality
that has been given us for this life and perhaps for no other life that might be closer to the truth." (136-7, emphasis added)

This prompts me to put a second question to Buber.  If there is no other life, no higher life, whether
accessible in this life via Versenkung or after the  death of the body, and we are stuck with this miserable crapstorm of a life, then what good is God?  What work does he do if he doesn't secure our redemption and our continuance beyond death?  This is what puzzles me about Judaism.  It is a
worldly religion, a religion for this life -- which is almost a contradiction in terms.  It offers no final solution as do the admittedly life-denying religions of Buddhism and Christianity.  Some will praise it for that very reason: it is not life-denying but life -affirming.  Jews love life, this life here and now,
and they don't seem too concerned about any afterlife.  But then they don't have the sort of soteriological interest that is definitive of religion.  "On whose definition?" you will object.  And you will have a point.

Occultism

Stay away from this stuff!  Everything reputable that I have read warns against it. The occult region is a sort of borderland between the natural and the properly supernatural which is the sphere of religion and mysticism.  One who meditates deeply and long enough will probably encounter 'items' from this region such as photisms and unearthly voices.  Certain paranormal powers may be released, the siddhis of the Hindus, such as pre-cognition. Don't get hung up on this and maintain a skeptical attitude. What's real will be able to withstand skepsis & scrutiny.  If you are trying to plumb the depths of the self, these are just more objects of consciousness, not consciousness itself in its innermost essence.  Hearing a sound, or seeing a light, inquire: who hears this sound, who sees this light?  Who is the subject for whom these strange appearances are objects?  That being said, photisms and such are signs that you are attaining meditative depth.  There may also be, for all you know, Horatio, angels and demons and disembodied souls hanging around  in this border region, and some of these 'entities' you don't want to mess with.  Some of them are stronger than you are.  So you might begin your session on the black mat by asking for the assistance of any guardians you think there might be. 

In any case, meditation is not a hunt for weird experiences or for paranormal powers.  The pursuit of the latter is a corruption of meditation just as crass petitionary prayer is a corruption of genuine prayer.  Grades of Prayer fills this out a bit. 

The Inexpressible

The Tractarian Wittgenstein says that there is the Inexpressible.   But what is inexpressible?  Presumably, if there is the Inexpressible then there must be a quid answering to the est.  Could there be truths that cannot be expressed? A truth is a true truth-bearer, a true sentence, proposition, judgment, statement, assertion, belief, asseveration, belief, claim, etc.  But these all -- different as they are among themselves -- involve expression, articulation, objectification.  An inexpressible truth amounts to an inexpressible expression.  More precisely: an inexpressible truth is something that is both expressible inasmuch as it is a truth but also inexpressible inasmuch as it is -- inexpressible.

And therein lies a problem for our mystical positivist.  In this connection Theodor Adorno speaks of Wittgenstein's indescribable spiritual vulgarity.

Desert Light Draws Us into the Mystical

Just as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like the lambent light of the desert. The low humidity, the sparseness of vegetation that even in its arboreal forms hugs the ground, the long, long vistas that draw the eye out to shimmering buttes and mesas -- all of these contribute to the illusion that the light is alive.

 
Light as phenomenon, as appearance, is not something merely physical. It is as much mind as matter. Without its appearance to mind it would not be what it phenomenologically is. But the light that allows rocks and coyotes to appear, itself appears. This seen light is seen within a clearing, eine Lichtung (Heidegger), which is light in a transcendental sense. But this transcendental light in whose light both illuminated objects and physical light appear, points back to the onto-theological Source of this transcendental light. Heidegger would not approve of my last move, but so be it.

Augustine claims to have glimpsed this eternal Source Light upon entering into his "inmost being." Entering there, he saw with his soul's eye, "above that same eye of my soul, above my mind, an
unchangeable light." He continues:

     It was not this common light, plain to all flesh, nor a greater
     light of the same kind . . . Not such was that light, but
     different, far different from all other lights. Nor was it above my
     mind, as oil is above water, or sky above earth. It was above my
     mind, because it made me, and I was beneath it, because I was made
     by it. He who knows the truth, knows that light, and he who knows
     it knows eternity. (Confessions, Book VII, Chapter 10)

'Light,' then, has several senses. There is the light of physics. There is physical light as we see it, whether in the form of illuminated things such as yonder mesa, or sources of illumination such as the sun, or the lambent space between them. There is the transcendental light of mind without which nothing at all would appear. There is, above this transcendental light, its Source.

Sudduth, Simplicity, and the Plotinian One

Dave Lull has once again pointed me to a fascinating post, Michael Sudduth Follows His Monad Back to Vaishnava Vedanta. Excerpt:

A major problem with Scholasticism is the innate desire that all men have to participate directly and ontologically in their God. We all want that real connection. Sudduth explains, “I pondered this experience for several minutes, while at the same time continuing to experience a most blissful serenity and feeling of oneness with God”.

The fact is Van Tilism and Scholasticism, its Grandfather, can never give man real and ontological connection because like the fools they were, they tried to take the Ultimate Principle of Plotinus and the Pagans and somehow get a Christian worldview out of it with their theory of Absolute Divine Simplicity. This leaves only a pagan ecstatic trance state for Christian men to seek in their attempts to connect to their creator. Thus Sudduth, was in my opinion, simply following his monad back to its Pagan source. He is being consistent. Sudduth says, “I had gone so far in my Christian faith, but it was now necessary for me to relate to God as Lord Krishna.” Notice he doesn’t say, “through Lord Krishna” but “as” Lord Krishna. In Plotinus’ construction hierarchies of being emanated from the One which represent levels of composition , and at each hierarchy was an intermediary. In different versions of this metaphysical construction, the gods are intermediaries on this chain of being. As one move up the chain of being one becomes ontologically identified with the intermediary. Sudduth says, “Since this time I have experienced Krishna’s presence in the air, mountains, ocean, trees, cows, and equally within myself. I experience Him in the outer and inner worlds, and my heart is regularly filled with serenity and bliss.” You see on his view, God is in the state of mind not the proposition.

In conclusion, I commend Sudduth for his logical consistency. When will the rest of the Scholastic Reformed have the courage to do the same? My Scholastic reader, Sudduth is taking Absolute Divine Simplicity to its logical end. I have two options for you.

1. Follow Sudduth

2. Leave Scholastic Neoplatonism for Gordon Clark’s Scripturalism: An absolute Triad: Three ontologically distinct persons; three distinct complex-non-simple eternal divine minds who find their hypostatic origin in the person of the Father.

I'd love to comment, but I have a dentist appointment.  Man does not live by bread alone, but without bread and the properly maintained tools of mastication, no philosophy gets done, leastways, not here below.

Afternoon Update:  I now have time to hazard some brief and off-the-cuff bloggity-blog commentary. 

Earlier in the post, the author writes, "Once someone believes that truth and God cannot be found in a proposition, but in a psychological state, truth by definition becomes something subjective and arbitrary." The full flavor of this no doubt escapes me since I haven't read Van Til or Gordon Clark.   Not that surprising given my background, which is Roman Catholic, though as 'Maverick Philosopher' suggests, I aim to follow the arguments where they lead, roaming over the intellectual landscape bare of a brand,  and free of institutional tie-downs  and dogmatic ballast.  The lack of the latter may cause my vessel to capsize, but it's a risk I knowingly run. 

But speaking for myself, and not for Sudduth, though I expect he will agree with me, I do not understand how anyone could think that the ultimate truth or God (who is arguably the ultimate truth) could be found in a proposition or a body of propositions. Doctrine surely cannot be of paramount importance in religion.  That is a bare assertion, so far, and on this occasion I cannot do much to support it. But I should think that doctrine is but a "necessary makeshift" (to borrow a phrase from F. H. Bradley) to help us in our  "Ascent to the Absolute" (to borrow the title of a book by my teacher  J. N. Findlay).  The name-dropping gives me away and indicates that I nail my colors to the mast of experience in religion over doctrine. (Practice is also important, but that's a separate topic.)

Thoughts lead to thoughts and more thoughts and never beyond the circle of  thoughts.  But I should like to experience the THINKER behind the thoughts, which thinker can no doubt be thought about but can never be reduced to a thought or proposition.  Philosophy operates on the discursive plane, cannot do otherwise, and so is limited, which is why we need religion which in my view, and perhaps in Sudduths', is completed in mystical experience.

The path to the ultimate subject that cannot be objectified, but is both transcendentally  and ontologically the condition of all objectivity, is an inner path.  I needn't leave my own tradition and make the journey to the East  to find support.  I find it in Augustine:  Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi. In interiore homine habitat veritas .  "Do not wander far and wide but return into yourself. The truth resides in man's interiority."  The way to God is through the self.  The way is not by way of propositions or thoughts or doctrines, and certainly not by fighting over doctrines or condemning the other guy to hell for holding a different doctrine, or a doctrine that plays down the importance of doctrine.

The ultimate truth is not propositional truth, which is merely representational, nor the ontic true of things represented, but the ontological truth of God. (This tripartition can be found in both Heidegger and in Thomas.)   Now if I find God, but not "in a proposition," but by experience (in fitful glimpses as if through a glass darkly here below, in the visio beata yonder) does it follow that that I have merely realized "an arbitrary and subjective psychological  state"?  That is a false alternative.  Not that I wish to deny that some mystical experiences are nonveridical and misleading.  Humans are subject to deception and self-deception in all areas of life.

There is also the matter of the divine simplicity.  Here I will just baldly state that a God worthy of worship must be an absolute,  and that no decent absolute can be anything other than ontologically simple.  For more, I refer you to my Stanford Encylopedia article and the divine simplicity category of this weblog.

This is hotly contested, of course.  Athens and Jerusalem are in tension, and you can see that my ties to Athens -- and to Benares! -- are strong and unbreakable.  There are deep, deep issues here.  I am not a master of them; they master me.  One issue has to do with the role of reason and the power of reason.  While confessing reason's infirmity, as I have on many occasions in these pages, I must also admit that it is a god-like faculty in us and part of what the imago Dei must consist in -- and this despite what I have said about the discursive path being non-ultimate.

I grant that the Fall has (not just had) noetic consequences: our reason is weaker than it would be in a prelapsarian state.  But we need it to protect us from blind dogmatism, fundamentalism and the forms of idolatry and superstition that reside within religion herself such as bibliolatry and ecclesiolatry.

We should not paper over the deep tensions within Christianity but live them in the hope that an honest confrontation with them will lead to deeper insight.

And a little Christian charity can't be a bad idea either, especially towards such 'apostates' as Michael Sudduth.

Intimations of Elsewhere Ignored

A colleague once reported an out-of-body experience.  He had been resting on his back on a couch when he came suddenly to view himself from the perspective of the ceiling.   He dismissed the experience. He had too much class to use the phrase 'brain fart,' but that is what I suspect he thought it was: a weird occurrence of no significance.  Vouchsafed a hint of what might have been a reality beyond the ordinary, he chose to ignore it as if it were not worth the trouble of investigating.  That sort of dismissive attitude is one I have trouble understanding.

It would be as if the prisoner in Plato's Cave who was freed of his shackles and was able to turn his head and see an opening and a light suggestive of a route out of  the enclosure wherein he found himself were simply to have dismissed the sight as an insignificant illusion and then went back to 'reality,' the shadows on the wall.

I have no trouble understanding someone who, never having had any religious or mystical experiences, cannot bring himself to take religion seriously.  And I have no trouble understanding someone who, having had such experiences, and having seriously examined their epistemic credentials, comes to the conclusion that they are none of them veridical.  But to have the experiences, and not think them worth investigating -- that puzzles me.

So maybe some things human are foreign to me after all.

Moksha: Soteriological Riddles

Over lunch Friday the topic of moksha (release or liberation from samsara; enlightenment) came up in the context of Advaita Vedanta.  Moksha is attained when the identity of Atman and Brahman is realized.  My interlocutor wanted to know how such realization is possible.  If I realize my identity with the Absolute, then I cease to exist as something separate from the Absolute.  In that case, however, there is nothing left to realize anything.  How could the state of enlightenment be anything for me if there is no 'me' left after enlightenment?  How is moksha different from deep dreamless sleep or from utter nonexistence?  A form of salvation that amounts to personal annihilation seems not to be a salvation worth wanting. 

Any soteriology worth its salt must answer three questions:  Salvation of what? To what?  From what?  Brahman does not need salvation.  It is this indigent samsaric entity that I take myself to be that needs salvation.  But if what is saved is destroyed in being saved, by being merged into Brahman, then it is at best paradoxical to call this salvation.

Ramanuja is supposed to have said to Shankara, "I don't want to be sugar; I want to taste sugar."

If I were taking Shankara's side of the argument, I might say something like the following to Ramanuja and my friend:

If I am right and you really are sugar/Brahman in your innermost essence, and you merely taste it, then you are removed from it and haven't yet attained the goal.  It is just one more object over against you as subject. Your inquiry into the self, into who or what you really are, has not yet come to an end. The goal is to realize or become aware of your true self.  To do that you must ruthlessly disengage from everything  that is not-self.  If Brahman is your true self, and you realize your identity with it, then you haven't lost your self, but found your self.  You cannot be said to dissolve into the ocean of Brahman if Brahman is the true you.  To think that you you lose your self when you merge with Brahman presupposes a false identification of the self with something finite.  The self you lose is merely an object that you have wrongly identified as your true self; the self you gain is your true self.

This response is not quite satisfactory.  Consider the following aporetic triad:

1. Brahman does not need salvation.
2. I am Brahman.
3. My need for salvation is a real (not merely a samsaric, illusory) need.

The first two limbs are parts of the doctrine (Advaita Vedanta) that is the context of our soteriological discussion.  So they are nonnegotiable unless we shift out of this context.  But (3) also seems true.  The three propositions cannot, however, all be true: the conjunction of the first two limbs entails the negation of the third.

So it looks as if the advaitin has to bite the bullet and reject (3).  He has to say something like:  the very need for release from this hell of an existence itself belongs to maya, the realm of illusion.  So both the need for moksha and the one who seeks it  are illusory.   But this seems to conflict with the starting point of this whole soteriological scheme, namely, that the suffering and unsatisfactoriness of this life are  real. 

Here is another puzzle.

Using the method of Neti, Neti (not this, not this),  we end up with the result that the subject who is seeking is no object, no thing, nothing. Pursuing the question: Who or what am I? I come to the insight that I cannot be identical to any object, whether my car, my house, my clothes, my curriculum vitae, my body, any part of my body, my memories, thoughts, feelings, etc.  Any and all objects -- inner, outer, concrete, abstract --  are to be disengaged from the subject for whom they are objects. The upshot seems to be that any self or subject so disengaged from every object is nothing at all.

On the other hand, I cannot be nothing at all since I am pursuing this investigation. Coming to realize that I am not this, that, or the other thing, I must be something, not nothing. So we bang into a logical contradiction: I am nothing and I am not nothing.

As long as we remain on the discursive/dualistic plane we will get tangled up like this. So one could take these insolubilia as pointing us beyond the discursive intellect.  This is what I suggested to my friend.  I want him to take up meditation so as to explore the non-dual source of duality.  But meditation is insanely hard, and the fruits are few and far between.  It can seem like an utter waste of time.  Pointless navel-gazing!  (But see my plea for omphaloscopy .)

Besides, one can take the insolubilia -- if insolubilia they are -- as referring us, not into the transdiscursive, but back into Plato's Cave, in particular, into that especially dark corner wherein the Wittgensteinian therapists ply their trade. 

Was Moses High on Mount Sinai? If Yes, What Follows?

Benny Shanon is quoted by The Guardian as saying:

     As far as Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a
     supernatural cosmic event, which I don't believe, or a legend,
     which I don't believe either. Or finally, and this is very
     probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under
     the effect of narcotics.

   and

     The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of
     Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the
     imaginings of a people in an altered state of awareness . . . In
     advanced forms of ayahuasca inebriation, the seeing of light is
     accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings.

These speculations of Professor Shanon raise some interesting questions. I take Shanon to be saying that Moses on Sinai (i) really did have an unusual experience, and that therefore there is nothing   legendary about the report in Exodus of this experience, but that (ii) this experience was not supernaturally caused, but caused by Moses' ingestion of a psychotropic drug, and that the etiology of the experience shows that the experience was nonveridical. Thus God did not reveal the Torah to Moses on Sinai; Moses had a drug-induced nonveridical experience of God revealing the Torah to him.

Question One

One question concerns the validity of the inference from

   1. Subject S under the influence of drug D experiences that p

   to

   2. S's experience that p is nonveridical.

Simply put, the question is whether one can validly infer the nonveridicality of an experience if the experience was had while the subject of the experience was under the influence of a drug.

Surely this is a non sequitur. Right now, under the influence of caffeine, I note that my coffee cup is empty. This is consistent with the perceptual experience of the cup's being empty being veridical,   which it is. So from the mere fact that a subject is 'on drugs,' it does not follow that that any of the subject's experiences are nonveridical. Now caffeine is a very mild drug. But suppose I was I was on a combination of caffeine, nicotine, marijuana, and methampehtamine. Even then one could not infer that the perception in question was nonveridical. Even on a dose of LSD-25 most of one's perceptual experiences remain veridical. In the case of Moses, from the fact, if it is a fact, that he was under the influence of a psychotropic drug while on Sinai, it does not follow that his experience of being addressed by God and being given the Decalogue was nonveridical.

(And anyway, aren't we always on 'drugs'?  The consciousness we enjoy in this life is brain-mediated, and the brain is the site of innumerable electro-chemical reactions.  In this life at least, 'No consciousness without chemistry.'  Our brains are always 'on drugs.'  But we don't take this fact as ruling out veridical perceptions, valid reasonings, true judgments, correct moral intuitions, etc.)

Returning to the case at hand, if you begin by assuming that there is no God, then it is plausible to explain the Sinai experience by saying that it was drug-induced. But that simply begs the question against the theist.

The crucial point is that a subject's being on drugs is logically consistent with the veridicality of his experiences; therefore, one cannot infer from the fact, if it is a fact, that Moses was under the   influence of a psychedelic or psychotropic drug that his experience was nonveridical. And that holds true for anyone's mystical or religious experience. 

If, however, there were independent reasons for believing that a certain experience was nonveridical, then one could explain the occurrence of the experience in terms of the influence of the drug.  But the occurrence/nonoccurrence of an experience is not to be confused with the veridicality/nonveridicality of the content of an experience.  So questions about how an experience arose, whether by normal or abnormal means, are distinct from questions about the content of the experience.  To fail to observe this distinction may lead one to commit the Genetic Fallacy.  It is so-called to highlight the fact that questions about origin or genesis are logically independent of questions about truth and falsehood.  If it has been antecedently established that the content of an experience is nonveridical, then it is legitimate to inquire into the origins of the experience.  But one cannot demonstrate  that the content of the experience is nonveridical by adducing facts about its origin.

So even if Shanon could prove that Moses and the people around him were under the influence of powerful drugs, that would not support his contention that nothing supernatural occurred on Sinai. It would not because it is consistent with theism. How does Shanon know that the drugs Moses supposedly took did not open "the doors of perception" (in Aldous Huxley's phrase) allowing him access to the transcendent, as opposed to shutting him up among figments of his own imagination?

Question Two

There is a second question whose full discussion should be reserved for a subsequent post. It is clear that mathematical and other truths can be grasped whether one is awake or dreaming, sober or drunk, on drugs or not. Sometimes when I dream I know that I am dreaming.  This awareness that I am dreaming is veridical despite the fact that I have it while dreaming.  After all, I am not dreaming that I am dreaming.  Or if a valid proof occurs to a mathematician in a dream, it is no less valid because the mathematician is dreaming. Why should not the same hold for moral truths? If it is true that it is morally obligatory not to kill human beings, then the experiencing of this truth is veridical whether or not the subject is awake or sleeping, sober or drunk, on drugs or not. So even if it could be proven that  Moses was under the influence of powerful drugs on Sinai, what  relevance would that have? At the very most it might cast doubt on the  veridicality of Moses' perception of God, but not on the veridicality of his experiencing of the content of the Decalogue. If it is true that one ought not kill, then it is true whether or not God exists.  And if it is true that one ought not kill, then one's intuiting that  it is true is veridical whether one is awake of dreaming, sober or drunk, on drugs or not, or a brain in a vat as opposed to a brain in a skull.

Suppose that all of Moses' perceptions of unusual physical phenomena while he was on Mt. Sinai were hallucinatory and thus nonveridical as the result of his ingestion of a drug.  Suppose there was no burning bush, etc.  It could still have been the case that he had veridical insights into objective moral truths. 

Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism, and Wisdom

Dennis E. Bradford sent me three comments via e-mail on my recent Butchvarov post.  I omit the first and the third which are more technical in nature, and which I may address in later posts.    Bradford writes,

Second, and this separates me from Butch, Larry [Blackman], and you, I reject your assumption concerning the narrowness of philosophy.  You mention a conceptual impasse that is “insoluble on the plane of the discursive intellect, which of course is where philosophy must operate.”  I object to the “of course.”  To be a philosopher is to be a lover of wisdom and who says that our only access to wisdom is via the discursive intellect?   In fact, I deny that.  As far as I can tell, the Buddha was the greatest philosopher and the wisest human who ever lived, and his view was that limiting our examination only to the domain of the discursive intellect prevents one from becoming wise.

Actually, I don't disagree with this comment.  It is a matter of terminology, of how we should use the word 'philosophy.'  For me there are at least four ways to the Absolute, philosophy, religion, mysticism, and morality.  This post provides rough sketches of how I view the first three.  I end by suggesting that the pursuit of wisdom involves all three 'postures.'  (Compare the physical postures in the three pictures below.)

 

Philosophy

Philosophy is not fundamentally a set of views but an activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need to know the truth, applies discursive reason to the data of life in an attempt to arrive at the ultimate truth about them. Discursive reason is reason insofar as it articulates itself in concepts, judgments, arguments, and systems of argument. As the etymology of the term suggests (L. currere, to run), discursive reason is roundabout rather than direct -- as intuitive reason would be if there is such a thing. Discursive reason gets at its object indirectly via concepts, judgments, and arguments. This feature of discursive reason makes for objectivity and communicability; but it exacts a price, and the price must be paid in the coin of loss of concreteness. Thus the oft-heard complaint about the abstractness of philosophy is not entirely without merit.

Note that I define philosophy in terms of the activity of discursive reason: any route to the truth that does not make use of this ‘faculty’ is simply not philosophy. You may take this as a stipulation if you like, but it is of course more than this, grounded as it is in historical facts. if you want to know what philosophy is, read Plato.  As Ralph Waldo Emerson says somewhere, "Philosophy is Plato, and Plato philosophy."  (I quote from memory!)  And there is this from  Keith's blog. 

The nearest thing to a safe definition of the word "philosophy", if we wish to include all that has been and will be correctly so called, is that it means the activity of Plato in his dialogues and every activity that has arisen or will arise out of that.

(Richard Robinson, "Is Psychical Research Relevant to Philosophy?" The Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 24 [1950]: 189-206, at 192.)

This is in line with my masthead motto which alludes to the famous observation of Alfred North Whitehead:

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.  I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings.  I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.  [. . .] Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. (Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press, 1978, p. 39)

Discursivity, then, is essential to philosophy as a matter of definition, a definition that is not merely stipulative but grounded in a possibility of our nature that was best realized in Plato and what he gave rise to.

Thus Jesus of Nazareth was not a philosopher, pace George Bush. If you insist that he was, then I will challenge you to show me the arguments whereby he established such dicta as "I and the Father are one," etc. I will demand the premises whence he arrived at this ‘conclusion.’ Argument and counterargument before the tribunal of reason are the sine qua non of philosophy, its veritable lifeblood. The truth is that Jesus gave no arguments, made no conjectures, refuted no competing theories. There is no dialectic in the Gospels such as we find in the Platonic dialogues. This is not an objection to Jesus’ life and message, but simply an underscoring of the fact that he was not a  philosopher. (But I have a nagging sense that Dallas Willard says something to the contrary somewhere.)  Believing himself to be one with the Father, Jesus of course believed himself to be one with the ultimate truth. Clearly, no such person is a mere philo-sopher, etymologically, a lover of wisdom; he is rather (one who makes a claim to being) a possessor of it. The love of the philosopher, as Plato’s Symposium made clear, is erothetic love, a love predicated on lack; it is not agapic love, love predicated on plenitude. The philosopher is an indigent fellow, grubbing his way forward bit by bit as best he can, by applying discursive reason to the data of experience. God is no philosopher, thank God!

Agreeing with Bradford that a philosopher is a lover of wisdom, I yet insist that he is a lover and pursuer of wisdom by dialectical means, assuming we are going to use 'philosopher' strictly.  This use of terms does not rule out other routes to wisdom, routes that may prove more efficacious.

Indeed, since philosophy examines everything, including itself  (its goals, its methods, its claim to cognitivity), philosophy must also examine whether it is perhaps an inferior route to truth or no route to truth at all!

Religion

Religion (from L. religere, to bind) is not fundamentally a collection of rites, rituals, and dogmas, but an activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need to live in the truth, as opposed to know it objectively in propositional guise, seeks to establish a personal bond with the Absolute. Whereas philosophy operates with concepts, judgments, arguments and theories, religion proceeds by way of faith, trust, devotion, and love. It is bhaktic rather than jnanic, devotional rather than discriminative.  The philosophical project, predicated on the autonomy of reason, is one of relentless and thus endless inquiry in which nothing is immune from examination before the reason’s bench. But the engine of inquiry is doubt, which sets philosophy at odds with religion with its appeal to revealed truth.  If the occupational hazard of the philospher is a life-inhibiting scepticism, the corresponding hazard for the religionist is a dogmatic certainty that can easily turn murderous. For a relatively recent example, consider the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. (This is why such zealots of the New Atheism as Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, Grayling, et al. are not completely mistaken.)

The philosopher objects to the religionist: "You believe things for which you have no proof!" The religionist replies to the philosopher: "You sew without a knot in your thread!" I am not engaging in Zen mondo, but alluding to Kierkegaard’s point that to philosophize without dogma is like sewing without a knot in one’s thread. The philosopher will of course reply that to philosophize with dogma is not to philosophize at all. Here we glimpse one form of the conflict beween philosophy and religion as routes to the Absolute. If the philosopher fails to attain the Absolute because discursive reason dissolves in scepticism, the religionist often attains what can only be called a pseudo-Absolute, an idol.

The reader must of course take these schematic  remarks cum grano salis. It would be simple-minded to think that cold impersonal reason (philosophy) stands in simple and stark confrontation to warm personal love (religion). For philosophy is itself a form of love –- erothetic love -- of the Absolute, and without the inspiring fervor of this longing love, the philosopher would not submit himself to the rigorous logical discipline, the mental asceticism, without which serious philosophy is impossible. (I speak of real philosophers, of course, and not mere paid professors of it.) Good philosophy is necessarily technical, often mind-numbingly so. (The reader may verify that the converse of this proposition does not hold.) Only a lover of truth will put up with what Hegel called die Anstrengung des Begriffs, the exertion of the concept. On the other hand, religious sentiments and practices occur in a context of beliefs that are formulated and defended in rational terms, including those beliefs that cannot be known by unaided reason but are vouchsafed to us by revelation. So in pursuit of taxonomy we must not fall into crude compartmentalization. The philosopher has his devotions and the religionist has his reasonings.

Mysticism

Turning now to mysticism, we may define it as the activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need for direct contact with the Absolute, disgusted with verbiage and abstraction as well as with mere belief and empty rites and rituals, seeks to know the Absolute immediately, which is to say, neither philosophically through the mediation of concepts, judgments and arguments, nor religiously through the mediation of faith, trust, devotion, and adherence to tradition. The mystic does not want to know about the Absolute, that it exists, what its properties are, how it is related to the relative plane, etc.; nor does he want merely to believe or trust in it. He does not want knowledge by description, but knowledge by acquaintance. Nor is he willing, like the religionist, to postpone his enjoyment of it. He wants it, he wants it whole, and he wants it now. He wants to verify its existence for himself here and now in the most direct way possible: by intuiting it. ‘Intuition’ is a terminus technicus: it refers to direct cognitive access to an object or state of affairs. You should think of the the Latin intuitus as used by Descartes, and the German Anschauung as used by Kant. The intuition in question is of course not sensible but intellectual. Thus the mystical ‘faculty’ is that of intellectual intuition. The possibility of intellektuelle Anschauung was of course famously denied by Kant.

 Wisdom

The ultimate goal for a human being is wisdom which could be characterized as knowledge of, and participation in, the saving truth.  One who attains this goal is a sage.  No philosopher is a sage, by definition.  For a philosopher, as a lover (seeker) of wisdom, is not a possessor of it.  One does not seek what one possesses.  The philosopher's love is eros, love predicated on lack.    At most, the philosopher is a would-be sage, one for whom philosophy (as characterized above) is a means to the end of becoming a sage.  If a philosopher attains the Goal, then he ceases to be a philosopher.  If a philosopher gets a Glimpse of the Goal, in that moment he ceases to be a philosopher, but then, after having lost the Glimpse (which is what usually happens) he is back to being as philosopher again.

At this point a difficult question arises.  Is philosophy a means to sagehood, or a distraction from it?  I grant that the ultimate Goal cannot be located on the discursive plane.  What one ultimately wants is not an empty conceptual knowledge but a fulfilled knowledge.  Some say that when a philosopher seeks God, he attains only a 'God of the philosophers,' an abstraction.  (See my Pascal and Buber on the God of the Philosophers.)  The kernel of truth in this is that discursive operations typically do not bring one beyond the plane of discursivity.  One thought leads to another, and another, and another . . . and never to the Thinker 'behind' them or the divine Other. 

And so one might decide that philosophy is useless -- "not worth an hour's trouble" as Pascal once said -- and that one ought  either to follow the path of religion or that of mysticism.  That is not my view, for reasons I will need a separate post to explain.

For now I will say only this.  Philosophy is not enough.  It needs supplementation by the other paths mentioned.    Analogy.  You go to a restaurant to eat, not to study the menu.  But reading the menu is a means to the end of ordering and enjoying the meal.  Philosophy is like reading the menu; eating is like attaining the Goal. 

But it is also the case that religion and mysticism require the discipline of philosophy.  There is a lot to be said on these topics, and it will be the philosopher who will do the saying.  The integration of the faculties falls to philosophy, and an integrated life is what we aspire to, is it not?  We seek to avoid the onesidedness of the philosopher, but also the onesidedness of the mystic, of the religionist, of the moralist, not to mention the onesidedness of  the moneygrubber, the physical fitness fanatic, etc.

Buber on Buddhism and Other Forms of Mysticism

Robert Gray e-mails:

Dear Bill,

I am appreciating Kerouac month. Here is something on Buddhism in Buber's I and Thou that may be of use.

Nor does he [Buddha] lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. His inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You . . . . All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of human spirit bent back into itself -- the delusion that spirit occurs in man. In truth it occurs from man - between man and what he is not. As the spirit bent back into itself renounces this sense, this sense of relation, he must draw into man that which is not man, he must psychologize world and God. This is the psychical delusion of the spirit.  ( pp.140-141 / part 3 : Tr.Kaufmann, Ed: T&T Clark Edinburgh 1970)

Thank you for reminding me of these Buber passages which I had planned eventually to discuss.  The context of the above quotations is a section of I and Thou that runs from pp. 131 to 143.  Here are some quickly composed thoughts on this stretch of text.

In this section Buber offers a critique of Buddhism, Hinduism and other forms of mysticism (including Christian forms such as the one we find in Meister Eckhart) which relativize the I-Thou relation between man and God by re-ducing it (leading it back) to a primordial unity logically and ontologically prior to the terms of the relation.  According to these traditions, this  primordial unity  can be experienced directly in Versenkung, which Kaufmann translates, not incorrectly, as 'immersion,' but which I think is better rendered as 'meditation.'  As the German word suggests, one sinks down into the depths of the self and comes to the realization that, at bottom, there is no self or ego (Buddhism with its doctrine of anatta or anatman) or else that there is a Self, but that it is the eternal Atman ( = Brahman) of Hinduism, "the One that thinks and is." (131)

Either way duality is overcome and seen to be not ultimately real.  Buber rejects this because the I-Thou relation presupposes the ultimate ineliminability of duality, not only the man-God duality but also the duality of world and God.  Mysticism "annuls relationship" (132) psychologizing both world and God. (141).  Verseelen is the word Kaufmann translates as 'psychologize.'  A more suggestive translation might be 'soulifies.'  Mysticism drags both God and the world into the soul where they are supposedly to be found in their ultimate reality by meditation.   But spirit is not in man, Buber thinks, but between man and what is not man.  Spirit is thus actualized in the relation of man to man, man to world, man to God.

At this point I would put a question to Buber.  If spirit subsists only in relation, ought we conclude that God needs man to be a spiritual being in the same way that finite persons need each other to be spiritual beings?  Is God dependent on man to be who he is?  If yes, then the aseity of God is compromised.  A Christian could say that the divine personhood subsists in intradivine relations, relations among and between the persons of the Trinity.  But as far as I know Trinitarian thought is foreign to Judaism.  Anyway, that is a question that occurs to me.

The "primal actuality of dialogue" (133) requires Two irreducible one to the other.  It is not a relation internal to the self. 

Buber is not opposed to Versenkung as a preliminary  and indeed a prerequisite for encounter with the transcendent Other.  Meditative Versenkung leads to inner concentration, interior unification, recollectedness.  But this samadhi (which I think is etymologically related to the German sammeln) is not to be enjoyed for its own sake, but is properly preparatory for the encounter with the transcendent Other.  "Concentrated into a unity, a human being can proceed to his encounter -- wholly successful only now -- with mystery and perfection.  But he can also savor the bliss of his unity and, without incurring the supreme duty, return into distraction." (134)

Buber's point is that the mystic who, treading the inward path, arrives at the unitary ground of his soul and experiences sat-chit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss) shirks his supreme duty if he merely enjoys this state and then returns to the world of multiplicity and diremption.  The soulic unity must be used for the sake of the encounter with God.

Buber seems to be maintaining that Buddhist and other mysticism is an escape into illusion, an escape into a mere annihilation of dual awareness for the sake of an illusory nondual awareness:  "insofar as this doctrine contains directions for immersion in true being, it does not lead into lived actuality but into 'annihilation' in which there is no consciousness, from which no memory survives -- and the man who has emerged from it may profess the experience by using the limit-word of non-duality, but without any right to proclaim this as unity." (136) 

Buber continues, "We, however, are resolved to tend with holy care the holy treasure of our actuality that has been given us for this life and perhaps for no other life that might be closer to the truth." (136-7, emphasis added)

This prompts me to put a second question to Buber.  If there is no other life, no higher life, whether accessible in this life via Versenkung or after the  death of the body, and we are stuck with this miserable crapstorm of a life, then what good is God?  What work does he do if he doesn't secure our redemption and our continuance beyond death?  This is what puzzles me about Judaism.  It is a worldly religion, a religion for this life -- which is almost a contradiction in terms.  It offers no final solution as do the admittedly life-denying religions of Buddhism and Christianity.  Some will praise it for that very reason: it is not life-denying but life -affirming.  Jews love life, this life here and now, and they don't seem too concerned about any afterlife.  But then they don't have the sort of soteriological interest that is definitive of religion.  "On whose definition?" you will object.  And you will have a point.

 
When I think of the vibrant bond between Sal and Dean, I am reminded of Buber's I-You .
Kerouac's restless spirit sought always to renew the I-You in Neal and in life; Both became submerged in I-It.  (Minding the final paragraphs of On the Road)

Well, both Kerouac and Cassady were brought up Catholic and so were steeped in the ultimate duality of man and God; but both occupied themselves with mysticism with its dissolution of the ultimacy of I-Thou.  And so perhaps we can say that the spiritual lives of both involved an oscillation between I-Thou and I-It.

 

 

Hitchens on Mother Teresa's Dark Night of the Soul

In some measure one must admire that professional contrarian, Christopher Hitchens, whose mind is incandescent in its brilliance, and whose speech is preternatural in its articulateness, and who has the audacity to go after anyone, including Mother Teresa. In a  piece in Newsweek he comments on her Dark Night of the Soul.

But what are his qualifications for such commentary?

Hitchens, like the other members of the 'Dawkins Gang' as I like to call them, does not have a religious bone in his body. He simply does not understand religion, and has no sympathy for it, so much so that he must dismiss it as nonsense.

Lack of religious sensibility is like lack of aesthetic sensibility.  There are people who lack entirely any feel for poetry and music. They lack the 'spiritual organ' to appreciate them, and so their comments on them are of little interest except as indicative of the critics' own limitations. Others are bereft of philosophical sensibility.  I have met mathematicians and scientists who have zero philosophical aptitude and sense and for whom philosophy cannot be anything other than empty verbiage. These people do not lack intelligence, they lack a certain 'spiritual organ,' a certain depth of personality. And of course there are those with no inkling of the austere beauty of mathematics and logic and (let's not leave out) chess. To speak of their beauty to such people would be a waste of time. They lack the requisite appreciative organs.

Hitchens, who remains a man of the Left in his total lack of understanding of religion, doesn't seem to appreciate that Teresa was a mystic and that her dark night of the soul was not a crisis of faith, where faith is construed as intellectual assent to certain dogmas, but an experiencing of the divine withdrawal, an experiencing of God as deus absconditus. A believing non-mystic might lose his faith after applying his reason to his religion's dogmatic content and then finding it impossible rationally to accept. Although I haven't read Teresa's letters, I suspect that this is not what happened in her case. After the fullness of her mystical experience, she experienced desolation when the mystical experiences subsided. So, contra   Hitchens, it was not a realization of the "crushing unreasonableness"  of Roman Catholic dogma that triggered Teresa's dark night, but her experience of the divine absence, an absence that is an expression of the divine transcendence.

I suggest that an atheist like Hitchens, for whom theism is simply not a live existential option, cannot understand the spititual life of a person like Mother Teresa. He can understand it only by caricaturing
it.

And the same goes for the whole gang (Dawkins,Dennett, Hitchens, Harris.)

Incarnation: A Mystical Approach?

I have been, and will continue,  discussing Trinity and Incarnation objectively, that is, in an objectifying manner.  Now what do I mean by that?  Well, with respect to the Trinity, the central conundrum, to put it in a very crude and quick way is this:  How can three things be one thing?  With respect to the Incarnation, how can the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal and impassible Logos, be identical to a particular mortal man?  These puzzles get us thinking about identity and difference and set us hunting for analogies and models from the domain of  ordinary experience.  We seek intelligibility by an objective route.   We ought to consider that this objectifying approach might be wrongheaded and that we ought to examine a mystical and subjective approach, a 'Platonic' approach as opposed to an 'Aristotelian' one.  See my earlier quotation of Heinrich Heine.

1. The essence of Christianity is contained in the distinct but related doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Josef Pieper (Belief and Faith, p. 103) cites the following passages from the doctor angelicus: Duo nobis credenda proponuntur: scil. occultum Divinitatis . . . et mysterium humanitatis Christi. II, II, 1, 8. Fides nostra in duobus principaliter consistit: primo quidem in vera Dei cognitione . . . ; secundo in mysterio incarnationis Christi. II, II, 174, 6.

How to Become Wealthy Overnight

John Blofeld, Beyond the Gods: Buddhist and Taoist Mysticism (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974), p. 153:

For the sake of wealth, people already well above the poverty line slave all their lives, not realising that withdrawal from the rat-race would immediately increase rather than diminish their wealth. Obviously anyone who finds the full satisfaction of all his material desires well within his means can be said to be wealthy; it follows that, except by the truly poor, wealth can be achieved overnight by a change of mental attitude that will set bounds to desires. As Laotzu put it, "He who is contented always has enough."