Rational Mysticism

(For an introduction to Findlay's rational mysticism, see the article by Sanford L. Drob in "About" on this website)

 

“I have definitely ‘stuck my neck out’, and attempted to construct a picture of transcendental experiences and their objects based solely on the premises that such experiences must be such as to resolve, at a higher level, the many philosophical surds that plague us in this life: the philosophical perplexities, e.g., concerning universals and particulars, mind and body, knowledge and its objects, the knowledge of other minds, etc., etc. What I have tried to work out could have been documented and confirmed by an immense amount of mystical and religious literature and experience, but I have not appealed to such support. While I do not accept any form of the widely-held dichotomy between logical and empirical truth, I do not wish, as a philosopher, to contribute to the merely empirical treatment of anything. If there is not an element of necessity, of genuine logical structure, in the construction of higher spheres of experience and their objects, they are for me without interest or importance.” (The Transcendence of the Cave, preface)

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“The mysticism of these lectures differs from many other forms of mysticism in that it does not seek to do away with logic – nor indeed with ethics or science or anything else – but to round them off. The truly well-formed sentence, we may say, must involve some mystical terms and co-ordinates.” The Discipline of the Cave, p. 16.

On The Mystical In Ordinary Life

“[the] mystical way of looking at things, so far from being the special possession of peculiar people called mystics, rather enters into the experience of most men at many times, just as views of the horizon and open sky enter into most ordinary views of the world…the so-called great mystics, people like Plotinus, Jalalud’in Rumi, St Teresa, and so on, are merely people who carry to the point of genius an absolutely normal, ordinary, indispensable side of human experience…” (The Logic of Mysticism, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 164).

“The idea underlying the lectures is that what may be called the mystical and transcendental is an inescapable part of all experience, thought and diction, and that our most ordinary transactions of things, of persons, let alone our higher scientific, aesthetic, religious, technical, political, philosophical and symbolic activities, involve it throughout. It is not some rarefied speculative addition to our ordinary talk about the world or our dealings with it, without which they remain significant and self-sufficient: without it the most ordinary activities lose all point, and the plainest statement becomes ill-formed and ungrammatical.” The Discipline of the Cave, p. 13.

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“Possibly the queerest of all the queer things in this life is that we should find this life so very queer, and that we should even speak of it as this life, contrasting it by implication with some more normal state of which we none the less have no lucid view at all. That we do in fact find this life full of perplexities, absurdities, odd and arbitrary restrictions, things all pervasive that might none the less have been quite otherwise, does not admit of question. If we find even children capable of being thrown into a mood of wonder by the strange passing of time, shall we credit them with familiarity with the ways of eternity? If we wonder why, of all marvelous chances, we happen to be the individuals we actually are, does this argue acquaintance with the queer mechanics of becoming somebody else? If we find knowledge of other people’s minds hopelessly external and peripheral, does this point to knowledge of some more intimate way of penetrating privacy?”

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“Perhaps, however, the fact that we do thus find our present situation full of queer discomforts, and that it does seem to involve cramps, pressures, irruptions, strangenesses that are far from hiding a simple message or harbouring a discoverable sense, does point to some reversing, complementary, compensating situation of which we can not but have vague knowledge, and on which the precise character of out cramps and other difficulties can throw valuable light”.  The Discipline of the Cave, p. 13.

 

 

On Antinomies

“We here, however, come up against a central feature of life and experience: that the various directive ideas in terms of which the phenomena are ordered and articulated do not always square. That the patterns of order in which one of them sets before us as a guiding framework run athwart the patterns another sets before us, and that even in the pattern dictated by what may be called a single idea there are possibilities of alternative development, confusions of direction, that make orderly extensions difficult. Antimony, in other words, is an all-pervasive phenomenon in the experienced and interpreted world, and becomes more and more acute the more we attempt to focus phenomena clearly, to see them in their unshifting, fully revealing light. It is this all-pervasive presence of antinomy in the work of experience that makes us find the world a queer place and that led Plato and ourselves to describe it as a cave.” Transcendence of the Cave, p. 20.

On the Absolute

“The mystical centre of the universe must therefore be thought of as one of those points which by their fluxion generate a whole geometry: it must be as much everywhere as at the centre. Each existent individual, even a corrupt and distorted one, must represent some specification of it pure variability, and this is what we sometimes feel when we see some rather poor object or person suddenly bathed in ineffable glory: there is always something in everything that resists every attempt to batter or abuse it, and which reveals the Most High in propria persona.” (Transcendence of the Cave, p. 183)

 

“We have accepted the principle of the Germanic theology, held by a long line of thinkers from the mediaeval mystics to Hegel, that s a perfection that does not work itself out in creating and redeeming a world is a self-contradictory perfection, it is an empty and abstract thing and not a true perfection at all.” (Transcendence of the Cave, p.183)

 

“That the zeal at the world’s centre is absolutely and incorruptibly clean is, in fact, only possible because it becomes more and more sullied as it moves out towards the periphery, because in variously alienated, sundered forms it can depart more and more from its central self. It must fall away from itself in order to be able to bring itself back to itself. The shocking character of what we are saying reflects only the creaks and groans of our logic and our language as we approach the final truth of things. If there is, and must be, a vein of sublimated immorality in all men whom we deeply love and admire, there is, and must be, a similar vein in the absolute.” (Transcendence of the Cave, p. 196)

Wittgenstein and Kant on the Transcendental and Mystical

“The views that Wittgenstein is here putting forward are in many respects profoundly analogous to those of Kant, in that he locates a whole realm of unknowable, simple unities beneath the complex objects which appear before us empirically, and takes it that their relations are in some unknowable manner translated into the relations of empirical things.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 371.

“Wittgenstein, however, like Kant, has his various transcendentals which, in the sort of speech that enables us to state the relations of ordinary empirical objects, cannot be spoken of at all, but which, wince he does in fact speak of them, must be capable of being spoken of in some other manner.  Kant’s introduction of what can and must be thought of, but not known, is wholly parallel.  The Wittgensteinian subject, or cosmic speaker, is such a transcendental; and so is the whole world conceived as a whole, whether in the abstract guise of ‘everything that is the case’, the totality of the macro-facts or micro-facts that there are.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 373.

“Our freedom and deathlessness lie in another, non-factual dimension altogether. In the same way, the beauty of certain objects, and the excellence and blessedness of a certain way of life, and of the whole world seen in the light of these things, go beyond all the facts of the world, and belong to a mystical stratum that cannot be uttered as empirical facts are utterable.  Wittgenstein in all these utterances is providing a close analogue to the practical postulations of Kant.  It is an immense pity that those who have commented on the highly metaphysical and mystical Tractatus have, in the main, been deep-dyed barbarians as far as metaphysics and mysticism are concerned.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 374.

The Requirement of a Unitive Absolute

“…mystical unity at the limit or centre of things alone guarantees that coherence and continuity at the periphery which is involved in all our basic rational enterprises.”  Here Findlay cites questions about the “valid conception of the structure of all space and time from the small specimens given to us…the character and behavior of an individual from the small segment known to us [and our belief in] “that affinity with our minds and concepts that will enable us to plumb their secrets.”

“It is well-known that, on a metaphysic of radical independence and atomism, all these questions admit of no satisfactory answer.  Whereas, on a mystical basis, the profound fit and mutual accommodation of alienated, peripheral things is precisely what is to be expected…” (The Logic of Mysticism, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 180).

“…on a mystical basis, our understanding of others rests on the fact that they are not absolutely others, but only variously alienated forms of the same ultimate, pervasive unity…((The Logic of Mysticism, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 181).

“All our higher valuations of impersonal benevolence, of justice, of knowledge, of beauty, of virtue are…attitudes having their roots in a transcendence of the separate individual and his contingent interests, and in a rise to higher-order interests which make an appeal to everyone and consider the state of everyone. The supreme dignity and authority of these valuations is much more understandable on a mystical than on an unmystical basis: a moralist like Schopenhauer, for example, bases all morality on a profound suprapersonal identity” ((The Logic of Mysticism, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 181).

Mysticism and Alienation

“There are…forms of mysticism [e.g.  those of Meister Eckhart and Hegel] which make alienation and deep-identity mutually dependent: the absolute must alienate itself in limited, instantial forms so that it may steadily reduce and overcome their alienation, and in so doing truly possess and enjoy and recognize itself …I should go further in thinking that a fully developed working mysticism demands a developed other-worldly cosmology, in which numerous states of being are postulated which mediate between the extremes of alienation, characteristic of this world and the extreme of unity characteristic of a mystical ecstasy”  (The Logic of Mysticism, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 182).