Metaphysics and Mysticism

Yes, I know it's Thanksgiving, but what else am I supposed to do with myself? Besides, the mystery of being doesn't start and stop at our convenience. Timelessness waits for no man.

We're up to the third interview of Metaphysics for Everyone, called Metaphysics and Mysticism, the latter beginning where the former ends. Again, the boat of metaphysics takes us to the limits of the expressible, at which point comes the Leap. 

However, it seems that there is overlap, as Bérard speaks of "the metaphysics of mystics as well as the mysticism of metaphysicians." I want to say that one is necessarily present in the other, even if implicitly.

Why do you say that, Bob?

Because man qua man always partakes of two modes of thought, whatever we wish to call them: reason and intellect, knowing and understanding, empiricism and intuition, quantity and quality, appearance and reality, denotation and connotation, analysis and synthesis, surface and depth, Plato and Aristotle, L and R brain, etc. 

We are irreducibly stereoscopic and stereophonic, and the attempt to reduce our sound and vision to mono just doesn't work:

Philosophy ultimately fails because one has to speak of the whole in terms of the parts.

Except for this time, because we shall indeed endeavor to speak of the whole in terms of the parts, or rather, to articulate their complementarity. Expressed visually, it might look like so:

It's a bit like the old hermeneutical circle, whereby 

one's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. The circle is a metaphor for the procedure of transforming one's understanding of the part and the whole through iterative recontextualization.

Only in this case the text is called "reality" or "being." And it is indeed a text, otherwise what are we even talking about? 

In other words, if being weren't an intelligible text, then we couldn't say anything about it. But this is a holographic universe in which each part is interiorly related to the others and to the whole, so our conversation (literally "flowing together") with it never ends.

Conversely, any ideology fails precisely because it denies this primordial complementarity. In another book, Bérard characterizes ideologies as the "mythologies of the modern world." They "are merely rationalizations, mental constructs that can justify virtually anything, down to murders and infanticides." As such,

To reach its true objective philosophy must thus transcend its own constructs, relinquish its own logic and its very thought in order to take possession of that which is beyond logic, beyond all thought.

Gödel's wall?

Or window, depending on whether we look at or through it. 

Any "pure rationalism proves to be contradictory," revealing its "spurious nature" "when it is disconnected from its roots." "There is simply no rational alternative, no other way to escape from the 'monster' of self-contradiction" than to open ourselves to what transcends ratio, which is to say, intellectus:

reason is the act of discursive thinking, while intellect enables us to intuitively and inwardly fathom the truth.... it is one thing to reason, another to understand the reasoning.

Reason cannot understand itself without transcending reason, thus "the natural need of reason for an intellective, supernatural completion." Left to its own devices, reason is ineluctably absurcular and tautological, forever chasing its own entailments. We comprehend reason, not vice versa.

So, "the mind of man is endowed with two faculties." First there is ratio, the "organ of calculation" through which we "acquire hypothetico-deductive knowledge through discursive reason." 

Then there is the intellect properly so-called, which involves "the immediate cognitive process of intuitive apprehension."

"Every human being has these two faculties," but this "dual faculty" is not dualistic, rather, united in the person. "These two approaches are of course complementary, and any philosophy that does not participate in both cannot be, well, a philosophy..."

In a sense, there's nothing mysterious about mysticism, which for Schuon denotes "all inward contact... with realities that are directly or indirectly Divine." Any "association with the idea of the 'irrational' is clearly false; spiritual intuition is not irrational but suprarational."

Put more simply,

Mysticism is the empiricism of transcendent knowledge.

And

The objectivity of mystical experience cannot be demonstrated. Just like that of any other experience. 

Supposing you are capable of experiencing, say, beauty, it shouldn't be much of a leap to believe one may experience the divine source of beauty. 

Frankly, experience itself is weirder than experiencing God, especially if one tries to sever experience -- i.e., consciousness, subjectivity, interiority -- from God. Then you have no explanation for the experience of experience, something only an immaterial intellect could do, i.e., view itself from a position of transcendence.

But that's me ramblin' again. Let's try to finish this chapter in the allotted timelessness: "the dual approach is necessary for any integral thought." And a "'kernel of gnosis' is common to all people; otherwise nothing would make sense to anyone." 

I don't think we can wrap this chapter up this morning. Enjoy your Thanksgiving and come back tomorrow for more vertical adventures.