the philosophy of mysticism || mysticism and philosophy

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MYSTICISM AND PHILOSOPHYAuthor(s): Asher MooreSource: The Monist, Vol. 59, No. 4, The Philosophy of Mysticism (OCTOBER, 1976), pp. 493-506Published by: Hegeler InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27902443 .

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MYSTICISM AND PHILOSOPHY

1. The Ontology

It is difficult to find a writing on mysticism (as distinct from an expres sion of it) which does not suppose that mystics of all ages, cultures, and

religious persuasions have said essentially the same thing. When the claim is not explicit, it is reflected in the bringing together of materials from the most

disparate sources to elicit their common core. Such cross-cultural identity is

apparently intended to lend respectability to what might otherwise be put down as a regional peculiarity, although in fact it is hard to see what imputa tion the alleged unanimity is supposed to counter. Perhaps it is the idea that

anything which does not fit into positive philosophy must be an invention of the local power structure. But surely that idea is as dead as a horse can be.

What does the common core of mysticism turn out to be? The Eternal One is the only true reality. That is not nothing, but it is not much. And when we ask for something

more specific, when we ask what, then, we are to make of the many and successive, mystics have not all said the same thing, even essentially. There are those who, when they say that only the Eternal One is truly real, mean

just that: that nothing else is real in any sense whatever, even as appearances, or negations, even "untruly." Others, less radical, mean that all other realities are immanent in, derivative from, moments of, the Eternal One.11 will comment first on the former, more startling thesis.

There is obviously some straightforward sense of "exists," in which it is correct to say that unicorns do not exist. But the whole history of philosophy shows us that if we say in the same straightforward sense that bears do not ex ist (because they are copies, or composites, or logical constructions, or some

such) we enter muddy waters. And if, heedless, we plunge on to the assertion that nothing whatever exists except the All, we are not only in deep logical trouble (since we made an assertion while denying the existence of assertions) but we fly in the face of experience. One wants to expostulate, as many have

expostulated, "But heavens to Betsy! Even if bears don't exist, my belief that



494 ASHER MOORE

they do surely does! And even if / am eternal (being one with the One), my belief that I am comes and goes many times a day!"

The only way anyone could arrive at such an experientially outrageous and logically incoherent conclusion is in exactly the way the mystic does arrive at it, by an experience which is admitted, which is indeed proclaimed, to contradict all ordinary experience and to be immune to logical strictures.

Through one or another form of discipline, the mystic eliminates multiplicity and successiveness from his experience: he does not discount them or inter

pret them, he abolishes them. Since multiplicity and successiveness are the

principia individuationis which distinguish one experience from another, the

mystic no longer has ideas or judgments to which logic could be applied and he no longer has the experiences which collectively constitute ordinary ex

perience. In fact, he no longer has experience, since in eliminating multiplici ty and successiveness from his experience, he has eliminated any experience of a distinction between himself and what is not himself, and without this dis

tinction, the term "experience" (and of course the terms "has" and "I") loses its sense. Lacking all distinction, what is left is one and all.2

But while we can see up to a point how the "radical" mystic arrives at this position, the position is obviously wrong. Its wrongness is demonstrated

by two considerations which have been urged so many times that I am em barrassed to repeat them.

(a) There at least seem to be many things and successive happenings. One may put these down as only seemings, but one cannot deny that there are

many such seemings, none of them eternal. One may put down the many as an illusion, but it is an illusion. It may cease to delude, but it did delude. After the mystic trance, one may no longer be deluded, but that is after the trance.

Every word the mystic utters shows that, whatever may be true of his

mystical experience, his ordinary experience contains the same divisions as

anyone else's. Yet his ontological position is that there are no such distinc

tions, even distinctions between one illusion and another. If we credit his account, the mystic can, after awhile and for awhile,

eliminate change and manyness from his experience. He can even eliminate from his awareness the fact that he did once experience them and will ex

perience them again. But in so doing, he is restricting his consciousness, not

expanding it. There is considerable evidence that a consciousness restricted

along the lines recommended by the mystic is happier, and more b?n?ficient in its effects, than ordinary consciousness. But that is a different question. So far as ontology goes, one does not simplify the facts by simplifying one's con sciousness or empty the universe by emptying one's mind.

(b) A term is significant if it has a significant alternative, i.e., if there is some conceivable circumstance in which the term would not be correctly



MYSTICISM AND PHILOSOPHY 495

usable. Radical mysticism, however, holds as its essential and seemingly sole

ontological tenet that there are no alternatives, that the One is Alone in the sense that nothing else can either be or be conceived. Thus the plausibility I tried to give the position by describing the mystic's alleged power to empty his mind of all but the One was specious: One is significant only as the cor

relative of Many. If One' is construed as a predicable, there must either be a case in which

its predication is false or else such a case must be conceived. If the former, the case itself is an alternative; if the latter, the conception is the alternative; in either case, the One is one of two. If One' is taken as a name, on the other

hand, then either there is (or is conceived to be) something of which it is not the name, so that again we have more than one, or else, since it does not serve to distinguish the thing it names, it is equivalent, as Plotinus saw, to 'It', in which case it is not a name but a placeholder for a name. I suppose that a

mystic might urge that 'One' is neither a predicable nor a name, but

something which includes but transcends both. That, however, would surely take us in the direction of reason or science, in Hegel's sense, and hence towards a degree of discrimination and specification quite foreign to radical

mysticism. None of this, I think, need be, although it may be, understood as a

requirement of language. The point could be restated in the conceptualist language of concepts, judgments, and inferences, or in the realist language of

things and facts. My own view is that it is all a rather complex way of in

sisting that to say something is always to say something specific. "Having a significant alternative" is analysts' talk. We could put the

same point in Hegelian terms: the radical mystic is stuck fast in the thetic

position of the dialectic. The radical mystic takes the One to be Alone in the sense of having no other ?r correlative, either internal (as in the relation of whole to parts or inside to outside) or external (as in the relation of one thing or event to another). He takes the One to be All not in the sense of implying, and in this sense including, its other, but in the sense of being distinct from

nothing. He speaks of Being but forgets that Being is relative to specific moments of Being and to the Nothing which specifies them. When Nothing enters his picture at all, it is identified with Being. Thus he can only iterate that the All is indeed the All, while occasionally, to relieve the tedium, saying that the All is the Void, or, realizing the uninformativeness of that statement, choose silence, wrapping himself in ineffability.

One may of course be at peace (one) without thinking of peace, and when one is, one may also be thoughtless of distraction (many). And it may well be

that that is a happier, better state than thinking. Certainly the mystics themselves assure us that it is infinitely more important to be a mystic?i.e., to live the mystical experience?than it is to hold a philosophic view called



496 ASHER MOORE

mysticism. But again, that is a different question. Ontology is a science?a discourse?and when one enters the realm of discourse one must make sense

in it. Radical mysticicism fails to enter that realm. When I turn to the less radical form of mysticism, I encounter quite the

opposite, an embarrassment of riches. The Eternal One is the Ground, or

Source, or True Being, of the myriad realities which live, move, and have their being. It is the Truth of which the successive many is the image and the appearance, perhaps the illusory appearance. It is the Perfection, the

Fullness, which each particular lacks in its particular way. It is Totality, Community, whether of consubstantiality or of system. It is the Inescapable which everything chases, the Never-Absent which everything awaits. It is the Life which animates and the Good which lures. Light, it is the visibility and

intelligibility of things. It is the Irrefrangible which space reflects in a thou sand mirrors and the Now which stretches over eons of time.

This is not the Being of the thesis but the Absolute of the Synthesis. It has its significant altermative: in one sense, it stands opposed to its

"creatures"; in another sense, it stands opposed to the Nothing which par ticularizes and temporalizes it. Speaking loosely, one may say that it is the

only Reality, but of course "non-Being doth also be." Nor does this view try to abolish even the appearance of plurality and change. Our experiences are not denied but understood in their relation to God or Nature. In particular, / am neither denied nor "immediately" identified with the All. I am less than the All: I am one perspective, one person, one life, limited in understanding, power, and love. In this sense, I am not one with the One but a negation of it. Yet what I am is the All. And even the fact that I am not the One but only one among many is a distinction internal to the one.

The last two paragraphs, while only a small sampling of the riches of

mysticism, are as applicable to Plato, Thomas, Spinoza, and Hegel as to

Plotinus, Eckhart, or Boehme. I suggest, indeed, although I cannot here

argue, that they are applicable to Lucretius, Hobbes, Kant, and Hume?in

short, to philosophy as such. And what they show is that those who have iden tified this more accommodating, more plausible, form of mysticism with the Perennial Philosophy have been right.

In my conclusion I shall say something about the signifiance of that fact.

2. The Evidence

One reason mystics insist that the One must be directly experienced is because direct experience, and only direct experience, is supposed able to

provide sufficient and certain evidence of the reality of the One and of the




identity (in one or the other of the two senses just discussed) of all things with

it. Because the Eternal One is not a matter of judgment but of direct ex

perience, external confirmation is unnecessary and external refutation im

possible. Commentators on mysticism generally distinguish between the mystic

experience itself and interpretations placed upon that experience. The ex

perience is said to be common to all mystics, while Buddhist interpretations, for example, are admitted to be markedly different from Christian ones.

Furthermore, while they would not bother to write about mysticism unless

they were, generally speaking, prepared to concede the reality of the ex

perience, they feel free to reject any of the interpretations which mystics themselves subscribe to, often preferring a psychological, or dietary, or some

other interpretation.3 Interpreting an experience is generally supposed to involve (and often in

fact involves) making some claim which is suggested but not fully supported by that experience. Additional evidence is needed because the claim concerns an object which is not given, or not adequately given, in the experience itself. In mystical experience, on the contrary, there are not two things, the ex

perience and the object which it reveals inadequately or not at all, but one, the union of experience and object.4 Mystic experience is not a "psychological fact" distinct from the One, so that, given the experience, the One might still

be in doubt. The experience is the presence of the One. To accept the reality of the experience while doubting the One is a contradiction.

The Commentator: The experience of presence is granted, just as we all

grant that the dreamer experiences, and does not simply conjecture, the monsters of which he dreams. But actual presence is as little implied in the one case as in the other.

The Mystic: You are still thinking of experience as if it were something

subjective which purports to be, or is judged to be, related in some infor mative way to an external object. But the experience we mystics have de

scribed, and which you only pretend to accept, is not an experience of

anything external. In fact, it is not an experience of anything; it is not even an

experience in the sense you mean. It is something, namely, a merging into un

ity of subject and object, of experience and reality. The One is and I am the

One: that is neither an interpretation of my experience nor an object of it; it is

the "experience" itself. True, there is a revelation, but it is a .^//-revelation: the One which all things are is self-revelation. There is here no distinction

between being and knowledge. The Commentator: But you just claimed that the One is and that you are

the One, and a claim requires evidence. The fact that you experience the truth



498 ASHER MOORE

of that claim is of exactly the same evidential weight as the fact that the dreamer believes in the reality of his dreams.

The Mystic: I have made no claim, unless of course you are now

questioning my memory of actually having had the experience I have de

scribed, something you said you did not question. The experience does not claim that something is real, nor is such a claim based on the experience: the

experience is the reality, I am the One. And since the reality is self-revelation, it essentially involves its own adequate evidence. The reason you see a

problem in this is that you insist on distinguishing what in fact is one: reality from experience, the One from I. The problem is not how to know, but how to

become, the One. This exchange is getting nowhere. Each side is persuasive in its own

terms and able to counter all objections. Yet each misses the other's point. Why?

I suggest it is because each is a complete philosophical perspective. As

such, each is self-sustaining, bearing within it the criteria of its own truth. From within, there is nothing mysterious about mysticism: all is clarity and

light. From another perspective, with other criteria, it seems a stubborn

attempt to blend all distinctions into baby food. Being impregnable in their own terms and scarcely intelligible in other terms is characteristic of

philosophies: it follows from their completeness. Rationalists, for example, appeal to the self-evidence of certain axiomatic truths and are unable to un derstand why empiricists take them to be talking about a psychological state?the lack of doubt or the presence of irresistible conviction. Em

piricists, on the other hand, appeal to given experience and are puzzled that rationalists think they are talking about sensible and sensuous duress.

What is striking about mysticism as compared with other philosophies is the extent to which its philosophical perspective is embodied not in abstract

thought or in language but in concrete experience. I say "the extent to which" because no philosophy is content to remain completely isolated from con crete experience, a mere theory. Every satisfactory philosophy manages to in carnate itself somehow in experience, as structure and meaning. But most

philosophies are incarnated first in language, and in experience by means of

language. Mysticism, on the other hand, seems, at least in the privileged moments on which the viewpoint rests, to live in an experience close to the

nonverbal, an experience in which language is hardly more than a chant in a

meaningless tongue, in which what counts is not the meaning of a language but its reality. Like any philosophy, it is self-validating, but its touchstone is an archtypal experience, not an abstract criterion, and in general it is un

usually forceful and vivacious, unusually there in flesh and bone. It is accord




ingly more obviously true of mysticism than of most philosophies that it is

really not a theory of something but the world which its devotees inhabit. In one way, therefore, it might be more enlightening to compare it not to other

philosophies but to a form of experience, dreaming, for example, or insanity. Like a dream or insanity, (or, for that matter, sanity) it is complete, consis

tent, and obviously real if it is your world, only an illusion or a "psychological state" or an "interpretation" if it is someone else's world. This could be said of any experience of course, even of a sensation. When you are having it, it neither makes a claim nor is the object of a claim; it escapes the

epistemological question altogether; it simply is. From without, on the other

hand, one can only make claims about it?that it did indeed occur, that its correct interpretation is such and such. And these claims, since they place the

experience in doubt, as the object of inquiry, cannot be fully supported by references to that experience. But in the case of mysticism (as in the case of a

dream, of insanity, and of ordinary experience) we have not an experience, which one passes beyond and then brings into question, and of which, even while one "has" it, one remains to some degree critical, but a quasi-world in which most paths, even quite long ones, turn upon themselves. Mysticism is indeed ineffable to a degree that is not true of most philosophies. To an ex

ceptional degree, it cannot be judged without entering its world.

Granting all that, we must affirm that it is a matter of degree. Like dreams and insanity, like nausea, like drugged states, like being in love, like moods and sensations, mysticism resists but does not defy understanding and evaluation from without. The dreamer and the schizoid may convince us that

they see more than we do, although not in the same way; or we may convince them of their aberration. The worlds of the madman and the dreamer are not after all wholly without communication with the ordinary world. It has been remarked that in fact mystics talk more than their claim of ineffability gives them any right to: for all its concreteness, the mystic's world is not devoid of

language. And the mystic is not the only person who has trouble explaining himself: every philosopher knows the impossibility of explaining his terms

adequately in someone else's terms. To the romantic in us, direct experience seems more filling, more soul

satisfying, more elemental and generally available, than thought or language, and this is a temptation to which mysticism, because of the strength of its determination to realize the Good concretely, is peculiarly vulnerable.5 But what is essentially Ground can be experienced only mediately, through what it

grounds, typically through the experiencer himself, and the claim that a creature can either see, or be, the Ground is, as the Church has insisted, arrogant. It is also at the heart of the foolish hope that a being who is the



500 ASHER MOORE

offspring of both Poverty and Plenty can be wholly filled and transported: in

quest of such immediate infinitude, men drown themselves in feeling until

they become, as the Romans said of the Christians, enemies of the human race.

But if mysticism exaggerates the value of immediate feeling, it has the

virtue of its vice, for it helps us to avoid the temptation, to which philosophers are generally more susceptible, to suppose that the divine essence can be

grasped in clear rational categories. If the mystic, clutching to the doctrine of

ineffability as urgently as a child to his security blanket, is one extreme, the

distinguished philosophers whom I once heard, at a meeting of the

Metaphysical Society, debating with great seriousness, before a respectful audience, whether God has two natures or three, are another. As

philosophers as diverse as Ryle and Marcel have remarked, our most abstract terms struggle unsuccessfully to rid themselves of the experience in which

they originated. Despite themselves, they remain metaphors. In my earlier characterization of mysticism, every term was dense and

figurative: Ground, Source, Fullness, Community, Inescapable, Life, Light, Irrefrangible. The rich metaphors of the mystic remind us that we need not

choose between the immediacy of feeling and the immediacy of abstract

thought, that there is the tertium via of analogy. Not in ordinary experience but by analogy with it we gain some understanding of what is essectially beyond. By analogy, the One is revealed to us as not revealed. The mystic has no privileged access to the One nor are the rest of us excluded. To all, the One is veiled.

3. The Way

Philosophers have perennially urged that our end and good is to achieve in life a true and proper relation between the mind and the whole of Nature, and they have agreed that this relation consists in transmuting our passions for the particular and passing into a passion for the universal and

lasting?Spinoza called it the love of God. But while philosophers have sketched the goal, they have not been out

standingly successful in mapping the Way?or even, one suspects, in finding it themselves. It is hard to judge another's life, of course, especially if he is

dead, and it may be that we live in a peculiarly corrupt age, but it has not

been my experience that those who have followed Plato's advice to devote their years to astronomy, mathematics, and dialectic have generally achieved

the largeness of mind which he thought would follow from such devotions. Nor does Spinoza's judgment that the more we understand things by the se

cond and third kinds of knowledge, the greater will be the part of our mind




which is common and eternal, seem to have worked in practice: at least, it seems not to have worked with the second kind of knowledge, and one wonders whether the third kind of knowledge should not rather be called

mystical experience and whether Spinoza is not mistaken in thinking that the

Way to it leads via the second kind. The voice of duty, which Kant and others

emphasized, seems to have led less often to a free submission of private caprice to the law of reason than (as Hegel saw) to the "law of the heart," the

arrogant tyranny of private conscience. And Hegel's own Way, leading through identification with the "objective ethical order" of the state and the actual march of history, has not seemed to lead to self-fulfillment through filling the duties of one's station in life as much as to moral callousness and the banality of evil. Philosophers do seem to have put too exclusive an

emphasis upon intellect and will, and Schopenhauer's conclusion that saints have made out better than philosophers has the sting of truth. It is not in on

tology or epistemology that mystics have made their contribution, but in

ethics, in marking the Way. How can a finite individual achieve union with the infinite All? Not, it

would seem, just by understanding the relation between individuals and their

ground, or by accommodating himself justly to the good of the whole, or by charity towards others. Not by suicide either: death removes the problem but does not solve it. Union of the individual with the One, if it can be achieved at

all, must involve the sort of thing the mystics have described: the blending, melting, or diffusing of the individual into the One as a drop of water is dif fused into the sea, in one common metaphor. The drop becomes no longer a

drop, but neither does it cease to be: it merges with the larger whole. Union is achieved by the individual's relaxing, first his body and mind and will, but in the end himself, so that he no longer holds himself together, no longer hordes and protects himself, but, loosening his hold, lets himself go, lets himself be in-finite.

Perhaps metaphor is the best that can be done. If individuality is un derstood in terms of particularity, then it is the best that can be done. But there is another view: that particularity has to be understood through in

dividuality and individuality through the self-identiy of a subject. On this view, I am I, not because I satisfy the general definition of a particular but because of what I exclude: I identify myself as the being who excludes just that. (For example, in the philosophy of Leibniz, if I understand it rightly, the

"spiritual" exclusiveness and hence self-identity of the monads is the reality of which the externality of spatial locations is the well-founded phenomenon.) This means that individuality is not something one either has or does not

have, but is, like immortality for Plato or for Spinoza, something which



502 ASHER MOORE

everyone has to some degree and which may vary from person to person and time to time. Furthermore, individuality is something over which one has a measure of control. The more one excludes, the more one rejects and refuses, hates and condemns, the more self-protective one is, the more one dis

tinguishes oneself from the other in wariness, competition, and distrust, the more one is distinct from the other. The more one acknowledges and loves, on the other hand, the more innocently one risks, the more one is available, the more trustfully one places oneself in the care of the other, the less preoc cupied one is with self, the less one is self. Or rather, the less one is this

jealous, exclusive self, and the more one is that unique individual which defines itself by excluding exclusiveness. If I could really love the AU as I love myself, I would not cease to be myself but I would become the All.

Among philosophers, I am sure that Plato and Spinoza, at least, were saying something like this, but mystics have said it more unabashedly. Perhaps some few have been able to do it.

Pain is nine-tenths fear and readiness to fend off: this is the insight behind natural childbirth and other forms of so-called self-hypnosis. We are

taught fear and wariness from earliest childhood: Watch out for the car! Be

careful, don't fall! Don't play with matches! The ego is acquired, I suggest, at the same time as fear and is fear: the self is what one is fearful for, what one has learnt to protect. Or perhaps fear is too narrow a term. Perhaps it would be better to say that one's sense of oneself as a particular, threatened in dividual is a certain sort of tension. Consider Freud's characterization of

libido, pleasure, and pain, all three, in terms of tension. Consider also the connection some existentialists have seen between authenticity, that is, in

dividuality, and caring, concern, and anxiety. If individuality (in the sense in which both mystics and philosophers think we should overcome it) is tension, then it is literally and not just metaphorically true that we can relax into the

All. And terms like melting, blending, and diffusing, while still metaphors, will remind us not of ice cubes and osterizers but of the draining away of

orgasm.

Relaxing, since it suspends the vigilance we have been taught and which is even perhaps to some extent instinctual, is threatening, and we seem to find the quasi-religious aspects of mysticism, its rituals and formulas, its traditions and accoutrements, more reassuring than the writings of

philosophers. It does not seem to matter much what ritual one goes through (Wordsworth repeated his own name), but some ritual seems important. The

authority of tradition and ritual helps us overcome another obstacle too. It takes an act of will to relax the will. Abstractly, this is a paradox, and prac tically it normally seems an insoluble dilemma, as anyone will testify who has




lain in bed trying to sleep or to shut off a compulsive round of thought. One can relax the will by an act of will, but since one cannot understand how that is possible, one needs the testimony of those who have done it and the humili

ty of following a senseless routine.

Mystics help us along the Way better than philosophers do, but if we

forget the safeguards and limitations they will help us straight to Hell. And

here, Vergil is a better guide than Beatrice. Mystics are of course not unaware of the dangers of transcending everyday rationality, but the safeguards they supply reflect very parochial creeds: religious transcendence is good, drug induced transcendence is bad; Christian mysticism is of God but neo-Platonic

mysticism is of the devil. After all, going out of one's mind is going out of one's mind, and it is not clear to me that Jesus-freaking is less destructive than drug-freaking. Philosophers, on the other hand, say some very sensible

things about the difference between salvation and damnation. Plato explained why an unlimited passion for philosophy is good, an unlimited passion for

young boys destructive; Plotinus explained why icons and sects are

dangerous; Aldous Huxley weighed with some judiciousness the uses and mis uses of drugs.

The philosopher's ability to see where the limits must be is one fruit of the fact that his perspective is in the end more comprehensive than the

mystic's. The mystic unites with the One, but he does so only concretely, only "experientially," only in feeling. Another fruit is that while the philosopher often inadvertently omits or underplays the role of feeling, the mystic quite deliberately and as a matter of principle excludes will and intellect and

thereby all universality and lastingness except felt universality and

lastingness. But union with the universal and lasting may involve?indeed I think must involve?scientific objectivity and the duties of one's station as well as feeling and concrete experience. These alone are not sufficient, but neither is mystical experience. The philosopher's advantage is that he knows this.

Finally, we must beware of the claim that the mystic's experience is ab

solutely discontinuous with any other experience. Philosophers have tended to think of the Way as a continuous progress towards an end which, while

surpassing the intermediate stages, would be continuous with them.6 In Plato, for example, the vision of the Good seems to be only the final achievement of

something which has been slowly approached through music and gymnastic, love and politics, astronomy, geometry, and dialectic. And mystics have been

right to call attention to the fact that the Way is not that smooth, that it in volves intellectual and spiritual shocks so severe that the a quo and ad quern seem like two worlds, and the transition like a sudden awakening. The koan,



504 ASHER MOORE

for example, suddenly whisks the apparently solid ground from beneath us:

realizing that we have all along been walking on air, we suddenly fall, like characters in cartoons. Or, congratulating ourselves on seeing that all things are illusions, creations of our own brain, it suddenly dawns on us that that

applies to brains as well: there is a lurch, a slippage?in science fiction it is called a time warp?and for an instant we almost stop thinking. In the series of Zen drawings in which, as the subject approaches enlightenment, his ox, his house, the landscape, and finally he himself, disappear one by one until the last drawing is simply a blank, the blank is so incomprehensible that, un

less one is in the know, one assumes that it is not a drawing but just an empty space from which the last drawing has been lost or stolen. Such placing back to back of incommensurables is important, I am sure: the Way to enlighten

ment is not more continuous than the way from the finite to infinity. But when the claim is made that the final enlightenment is absolutely unlike and

totally disconnected from the stages on the Way, this goes too far. For one thing, it destroys the notion of a Way. A way every stage of

which is equally distant (incommensurably distant) from the destination is no

way at all: any step is as likely to be right as any other, no preparation is

possible. If no ordinary thought, idea, image, or word is closer than another to enlightenment, then no mystical writing is of the slightest help; if no human gesture is more correct than another, no teaching can be of any benefit; one cannot even be told "Start here!"

Mystical union is not, furthermore, an obliteration of intellect and will

any more than it is an obliteration of ordinary life. It is a relaxation of them, a withdrawal from multiplicity and change, not a forgetting of them. It is a

loosing, not a losing, of self. The infinite is incommensurable with the finite, but it is correlative to it. The attainment is correlative to the seeking, the

possession to the wanting. Mystical union is correlative to, at the same time that it is a surpassing of, life in this world, and we have no reason to think it could exist in the absence of such a life. The mystic takes his ball of yarn with him.7

4. Conclusion

The insistence that union is radically discontinuous with ordinary life is

isomorphic with the ontological claim that only the One is real and with the

evidential claim that the mystic's truth can be grasped only by entering it.

Mysticism confronts a dilemma. If, in its radical form, it emphasizes its ex

clusiveness, that is, its categorical repudiation of any form of manyness and

change, whether of being or truth or salvation, it ships the gangways over

which even the mystic, and assuredly the rest of us, must pass. If the One is




that unique, it is not only unspeakable and unknowable but unlovable, un

seekable, and unmemorable. If, on the contrary, in a more moderate form, mysticism acknowledges the passing many, affirming only that it is grounded in the Eternal One, acknowledges that ordinary experience also speaks of the

highest things, although metaphorically, acknowledges different modes and

degrees of enlightenment?if, in short, it urges not denial but detachment, not disconnection but transcendence?it is no longer the radical alternative it

thought itself to be, but a variation of the perennial philosophy. Possibly any philosophy is involved in the same dilemma, but certainly mysticism is. And if I seem to have mistaken mysticism for Hegelianism, the mistake lies in the nature of the case. Even William James, although he somehow managed to be for the one and against the other, saw the family resemblance:

What reader of Hegel can doubt that that sense of a perfected Being with all its otherness soaked up into itself, which dominates his whole philosophy, must have come from the prominence in his consciousness of mystical moods... ? The notion is thoroughly characteristic of the mystical level, and the Aufgabe of mak ing it articulate was surely set to Hegel's intellect by mystical feeling.8

Asher Moore

University of New Hampshire

NOTES 1. The distinction overlaps that made by Stace (The Teachings of the Mystics

[New York, The New American Library, I960]), pp. 15?23, between "extrovertive" and "introvertive" mysticism. Stace, however, saw a connection which escapes me between this distinction and what seems the quite different distinction from which he derives his rubrics.

The surmise that the radical claim is more characteristic of Eastern than of Western thought would be consistent with my own reading as well as with the generalization that the West tends to be more pluralistic than the East.

2. I shall take account in the next section of the allegation that mystical ex perience is less negative than I have here presented it. What is usually held of course is that while some or all stages on the way consist in eliminating distinction, enlighten

ment itself is a positive revelation of its own completeness, i.e., of the fact that in truth nothing has been eliminated. All I have tried to do here is to give a semblance of verisimilitude to an ontological position which lacks all prima facie plausibility.

3. "To deny or doubt that it exists as a psychological fact is not a reputable opin ion. It is ignorance. Whether it has any value or significance beyond itself, and if so what?these, of course, are matters regarding which there can be legitimate differences of opinion." Stace, Teachings of the Mystics, p. 14.

4. Compare Berkeley's insistence that there are not two things, sensing and its ob ject, but just sensation. Sensation, of course, is prior to the subject-object distinction whereas mystical experience is said to be "beyond" it.

5. "... self-consciousness has got beyond the substantial fullness of life ... to the opposite extreme of insubstantial reflection of self into self, but beyond this too. It has



506 ASHER MOORE

not merely lost its essential and concrete life, it is also conscious of this loss and of the transitory finitude characteristic of its content. Turning away from the husks it has to feed on... it... now desires from philosophy not so much to bring it to a knowledge of what it is, as to obtain once again through philosophy the restoration of that sense of solidity and substantiality of existence it has lost. Philosophy is thus expected... not so much to bring chaotic conscious life back to the orderly ways of thought, and the simplicity of the notion, as to run together what thought has divided asunder, suppress the notion with its distinctions, and restore the feeling of existence. What it wants from philosophy is not so much insight as edification." Hegel: Phenomenology of

Mind, Preface.

Or, as Warren Lindsay once said to me, it is all a question of whether you want to understand or to be saved.

6. The Stoic contention that there is no middle ground between the wise man and the fool is one obvious exception to this generalization.

7. "He who truly attains awakening knows that deliverance is to be found right where he is. There is no need to retire to the mountain cave. If he is a fisherman, he becomes a real fisherman. If he is a butcher, he becomes a real butcher. The farmer becomes a real farmer and the merchant a real merchant.

He lives his life in awakened awareness. His every act from morning to evening is his religion."

Sokei-an: "Three Types of Religious Awareness," in The World of Zen, ed., Nancy W. Ross (New York: Random House, 1960).

8. Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Random House, 1902), Lecture XVI.



the philosophy of mysticism || mysticism and philosophy

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