the philosophy of mysticism || mysticism and rationalistic metaphysics

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MYSTICISM AND RATIONALISTIC METAPHYSICSAuthor(s): Charles HartshorneSource: The Monist, Vol. 59, No. 4, The Philosophy of Mysticism (OCTOBER, 1976), pp. 463-469Published by: Hegeler InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27902441 .

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MYSTICISM AND RATIONALISTIC METAPHYSICS

"Mystics" are persons who say, or of whom it is said, that they have had immediate experience of God?or of the eminent, supreme, or unsurpassable Reality; but the term mystic is also used to denote a person who insists that this Reality is ineffable or can only be characterized in paradoxical or, at least seemingly, contradictory ways.1 The two aspects, immediate experience and ineffability, seem quite distinct and I shall discuss them separately.

So far from finding any severe paradox in the idea of direct experience of

deity, or the unsurpassable, it is in my view a paradox to suppose that such a

reality could be known or truly affirmed only on the basis of indirect evidence. The Unsurpassable must be unsurpassably pervasive, that is to say,

ubiquitous. It must be where anything is. Moreover, Its existence must be the essential factor in the existence of all lesser realities. Hence to be anywhere is to be in the right place to experience It; to experience anything is to ex

perience an X-related-to-It, thus to experience It. It cannot be merely behind, but must be in, everything; not merely in the reality which appears but in the

appearance itself; not merely in the world experienced but in the experience. Thus to claim not to experience God?or Brahman?is no less paradoxical than the contradictory claim.

The foregoing can be made more precise. I hold that the direct data of

experience coincide with its independent causes or grounds. Consciously detectable data are but a subclass of experienced data, and the wider class is defined as those factors necessary to the experience but independent of it. How far they are introspectively accessible depends upon several conditions,

including the level of awareness attained by the individual. Infants and sub human animals do little introspecting, and the rest of us are more like them in this than we usually admit. If my definition of givenness, or being a direct

datum, is accepted, then from this and most definitions of the divine or emi nent reality it follows that that reality is a datum of all experience. For the

unsurpassable is essential to all lesser realities, including nondivine ex

periences, but exists independently of them. The definition of givenness is simply the formal statement of the central

intuition of all realism, that things are experienced because they exist, they do



464 CHARLES HARTSHORNE

not exist because they are experienced. An experience depends upon a world or reality that does not depend upon it. Whitehead's concept of "prehension" is precisely this formalization of the central realistic tenet. I believe that the lack of a clear formal concept of this kind in nearly all modern epistemology is a radical defect, clearly exhibited in a variety of ways in the systems of

Berkeley, Leibniz, Kant, and many others. That the data of experience coincide with its independent causes is readi

ly overlooked for several reasons. There is the feebleness of human introspec tive powers, a feebleness some take satisfaction in denying. The obvious,

readily detectable data are those that are sometimes present and sometimes

not, thus, for instance, the sensation of red or of pain, or the appearance of an

elephant. What is always given tends to escape notice. Thus some claim not to experience spatial extension in sounds, although they experience it in colors. But in fact (as it seems to me) spatiality is given in all experience, in

cluding auditory, though in different aspects and degrees of distinctness. This furnishes at least a remote analogy for the difference between the mystic and the rest of us.

Another reason for the failure to detect the coincidence of causes and data of experience is the belief in naive realism just where that deviates from a

reasonably sophisticated form of realism. In vision, and to a lesser extent in

hearing and touch, we seem to experience directly the world outside the body. It is an open secret of genetic psychology that in fact this sense of extra

bodily reality is mediated by what we have learned in infancy and childhood about the meaning of inner-bodily changes. It is these bodily changes that are

given, but it is the extra-bodily processes or objects that are thought. Normal adult perception is as truly thought as it is direct experience. The inner-bodily changes are given, but not necessarily as inner bodily. Naive realism is in error, not in the realistic assumption that something independently real is

given, but in the spatial location of the something outside the body. This loca tion is learned and thought rather than directly given, and is partly an error insofar as the element of mediation is lost for introspection. True enough,

what we see is the extra-bodily world, but "see" is one function, "directly in tuit or experience" is another.

A third reason for confusion about causes and data is the assumption, natural enough but, I hold, unjustified, that the data of sensory experience are simultaneous with their being experienced. In that case they could not be causes of experience in the normal sense of "antecedent conditions." The

argument that what is intuited now must be happening now merely begs the

question about the temporal structure of experience, as can be seen by recall

ing that a parallel argument would entail that in memory there is no intuition of past experience, a consequence which opens the door to a "solipsism of the



MYSTICISM AND RATIONALISTIC METAPHYSICS 465

present moment" opens and is exposed to other objections. In Husserl we see a philosopher who, on the one hand, insists that past experience is immediate

ly given in present experience, but on the other hand denies that in perception the data are past. How he knows that they are not past is his secret. No time

lapse is clearly given as such; however, the failure to introspect a presence is not always the intuition of an absence.

I believe Whitehead to have been right, against an entire tradition, in

denying that any direct data of experience are simultaneous with the ex

perience for which they are data, or by which they are prehended. The way is thus opened for the immensely fruitful and illuminating principle: To be in

dependent, antecedent condition of an experience is to be immanent in the ex

perience, to qualify its objective content, whether or not introspection can detect its presence there. And then, insofar as divine reality is conceived as in

dependent cause of all things and all experiences it must also be conceived as

given in all experiences. I have discussed in many writings the need to dis

tinguish, in the idea of the Unsurpassable, between that in it which is cause and that which is effect, both in relation to things in general and in relation to

particular things or happenings. The divine reality which is given in this or that experience is not the entirety of all that has been or can ever be divine, but only so much of divinity as is antecedent condition of the experience.

There are ways of making somewhat more detectable the presence of

Deity in all experience. We are all naively aware that other people exist, that

they have their own feelings and thoughts, partly hidden from us at any given time. Our experience is somewhat paradoxical in respect to these "other minds." On the one hand, they seem mere background for our own existence,

important because we need and enjoy their presence; on the other hand, so far as we are rational or ethical we know that it is just as true that our impor tance is measured by what we contribute to the lives of others as that their im

portance is measured by what they contribute to our own lives. The relativity can be taken either way. This suggests that the true measure of importance is

Something that quite transcends "I" and "you." What is this Something? Is it the entire human group? There are reasons to the contrary. For one thing, the value of a group seems simply the sum of the values which life in the

group affords the individual members. Value, in the intrinsic sense, is enjoy ment, happiness, bliss, satisfaction; but only individuals literally enjoy or are

satisfied, not groups. And so the Something which measures importance can not be the group, for this would be circular. As Whitehead and the late Henry Simons (an economist I admired) almost alone in my experience have pointed out, the greatest happiness of the greatest number is not itself an actual hap piness of anyone, and so is not a value in a clearly intelligible sense, unless in relation to something other than human individuals or groups. The economist




suggested that only a theist, which I suspect he was not, could identify this ad ditional factor.

Whitehead, in a near-mystical passage, profoundly intimates that our

realization that solipsism is absurd is inseparable from the realization that our basic intuition of value, from which, he holds, our intuition of reality can not be radically distinguished, is also the intuition that "importance" is not

merely for ourselves or our neighbors, but for That which adequately and im

partially measures all reality and value, that is, Deity, with its primordial and

imperishable "Ideals" for the cosmos.2 Objectivity is the sense that we are "there" not merely for ourselves or for each other, but for the impartial, cosmically concerned, and eminent reality. Objectivity is also the sense of be

ing object for that for which all other subjects are likewise objects. One can also argue that spatiality, about which something was said

above, is, as Newton and Clarke held, intelligible only in terms of the all inclusive unity of the Divine Life, to which every lesser life is a contribution.

Whitehead's "objective immortality" makes this contribution explicit. It has often seemed to me, I think largely apart from any influence coming from the two writers just mentioned, that space and deity are somehow inseparable ideas. Thinking physicalistically we picture space as an emptiness in which

material processes go on. We tend to think of these processes in visual or tac tual terms. But not only has physics rejected the applicability of these images, they never did do justice to what space intuitively means for us. There con

fronting me in space are you. It has never seemed to me admissible to say, "What confronts me is but your body; your mind or soul, by contrast, is not in space." Rather, you, mind and body, or "minded body," are there in space. But materialistic images for this fail to fit even the bodily aspect, let alone the entire psychophysical reality. The only proper images or analogues for another's feelings or thoughts must themselves be feelings or thoughts. The

only way to imagine another's feelings is to empathize with the other, to par ticipate imaginatively in his feelings. So, there in space are your feelings and

thoughts. But then what is the difference between space occupied by human or animal feelings, or other psychical processes, and those empty of such

processes? Materialistic pictures do not adequately characterize this difference.

If space containing a certain kind of feeling differs from space not con

taining that kind, then we need a nonmaterialistic conception of space. I am not forgetting "identity theories." In their true version they concern only cer tain feelings, those we call sensations, which on my view belong, in the first

instance, to cellular or subcellular members of the body belong and become




our feelings only by a kind of innately grounded empathy on our part with these members.

With Peirce and Whitehead we can think of the extended cosmos as a

society of sentient creatures whose influences upon one another, via empathie prehensions, conform largely to the patterns traced by physics. We can then

say that space not occupied by human feelings is occupied by some other sort of feelings?unless there can be strictly empty space. But then questions arise about the self-sufficiency of such a society, if there is no supreme Socius to

impose limits upon mutual conflict and disorder, or to measure relative im

portance. And how is truth to be conceived? Inadequate partial perspectives do not add up to definite truths. I hold, with Peirce, Royce, and others, that neither "reality" nor "truth" can be defined except in relation to knowledge and that our always partial and fallible kind of knowledge presupposes a

higher kind as its measure. And so I incline to think of the pervasive unity of

space as somehow an aspect of the divine unity, sensitive to all feeling and

value, and the measure of its contribution. We do not merely infer space, we intuit it?not distinctly and completely in its geometrical structure, but still

directly and always. When I was a student at Harvard it occurred to me that solipsism con

tradicts the intuition of space. For according to solipsism it is false that "I am here and you are there" (you can be a subhuman creature). Rather, accord

ing to solipsism, I am everywhere; or, there is nowhere except where I am. But we directly experience space as ourselves and other things or creatures coexistent with us. Apart from this intuition "space" is but a word. I still believe that solipsism is incompatible with this intuition. And so I

suggest that deity as the inclusive, ordering, and definitive unity of coexisting things is the full reality of what is directly given as spatiality.

The well-known Quaker mystic and scholarly writer on mysticism, Rufus Jones, whom I knew as my teacher at Haverford, held that the difference between mystics and others was a relative not an absolute one. The

mystic is one who is aware of experiencing what we all do experience, whether aware of the fact or not. In mystics unconscious intuition, in the sense in which infants and the lower animals are unconscious, that is, without in

trospective judgments, becomes also conscious. It hardly seems possible that our common human nature could embrace so absolute a difference as that between the presence and the sheer absence of That without which there

could, if mysticism is valid, be nothing at all. The real problem about mysticism for the rationalistic metaphysician is

not the givenness but the alleged ineffability of what is given. Here too it




seems that absolute differences can hardly be involved. If we can speak of

Supreme Reality only in contradictions, shall we say that Supreme is also in

ferior, or vicious, reality, or that it is no more to be admired than to be

despised? Some Buddhists do talk almost in this way. But what limits, if any, to absurdity are here in order?

There is another consideration. Just how can direct experience rule out

every possible nonparadoxical description? While having the experience, has the mystic run through in his mind every possible nonparadoxical description and seen its inapplicability? This seems implausible. Has he, after the ex

perience, found that no description that he is familiar with fits his memory of the experience? But then perhaps either his memory or his knowledge of

possible descriptions is inadequate. Historically there have been certain rather pervasive biases in metaphysical traditions, and mystics show signs of

being limited by these biases. If Process Philosophers are right, it is only in the last few decades that an adequate metaphysics has been available.

If nonparadoxical descriptions are unsuitable, are they all equally so, or are some better than others? In the latter case, there must be some value in

knowing which are the least unsuitable accounts. We also have the problem of evaluating the contrasting mystical

traditions, e.g., Vedantism and Buddhism. How can these be evaluated unless

rationally? Or are they essentially the same? I incline to think that the differences are significant.

The older cultures that have depreciated rationalistic metaphysics, chiefly those of India, Southeast Asia, and Japan, have had to turn to more rationalistic cultures for much of their science and technology. Perhaps this

implies that mysticism alone is not enough. This seems all the more likely when we consider that China has turned to a radically nonmystical philosophy as basis for its striking advances in practical matters.

It is indeed true that the mystical (especially Buddhist) cultures have been less militaristic, with the temporary and problematic exception of

Japan, whose Shintoism is perhaps hard to classify in this regard. For this reason alone we should take seriously the possibility that we have something to learn from these cultures.

So far I have neglected an important distinction. If "ineffable" means, not exhaustively describable, then everything concrete or actual is ineffable in that sense. It follows that, a fortiori, the Eminent Actuality is describable

only in radically incomplete fashion. This has always been obvious from the idea of omniscience. If to know God is to know One Who Knows All, then to know God fully would simply mean to know all. Of course we do nothing like that when we describe God. In addition, language is only a powerful, not an

infinitely powerful or absolute means of expression, and human dis




criminations are in various respects imperfect. And so what we fail to know about the Eminent Actuality can scarcely be exaggerated.

There are grounds for distinguishing, as I have done in many writings, between the abstract, eternal, necessary essence of deity and the concrete,

contingent, partly temporal divine actuality. The abstract essence need not transcend language, at least not for the same reason as the actuality. Nor does referring to the essence as an object of thought reduce deity to a mere

object rather than subject, an it rather than a thou. God's eternal character is indeed an it, essentially an object. However, God is incomparably more than his mere eternal character, for that is an abstraction from his concrete and

developing Life. Any person, and anything at all comparable to a person, has a character distinguishable from his or her concrete experiences and actions. The thou is never the mere character but is the character as now embodied in

experiences and actions which express, but are not in their particularity necessary to, the character. (The previous sentence will not be acceptable to absolute determinists, Spinozists, or Leibnizians. But I do not regard this as a

defect of the sentence.) The challenge of mysticism needs to be taken seriously. Yet it seems to

me unlikely that metaphysicians attempting to be rational can be dispensed with. Merely to mediate between religion, however mystical, and science, or between widely different religions, or widely different sciences, such as

physics and psychology, we must have such metaphysicians. What is perhaps needed is that more of us moderns and Westerners should undergo forms of

disciplinary meditation, Buddhist or Vedantist. (Heidegger's recommen dations in this direction seem too lacking in any traditional disciplinary guides, especially of an ethical character, to be very promising, if they are not

downright dangerous.) Apart from such efforts, how shall we be sure we have not missed some "pearl of great price"? Possibly we need to devote more time to meditation and less (though at present it is no vast amount) to rationalistic

metaphysics. Charles Hartshorne

The University of Texas at Austin

NOTES

1. See W. T. Stace, Religion and the Modern Mind (Philadelphia, New York: J. B.

Lippincott Company, 1960), part III. 2. A.N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1938), pp.

140-42.



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