Richard H Jones - Philosophy of Mysticism: Raids on the Ineffable

Raids on the Ineffable

Richard H. Jones

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2016 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jones, Richard H., 1951

Philosophy of mysticism : raids on the ineffable / Richard H. Jones.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4384-6119-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4384-6120-5 (e-book)

1. Mysticism. I. Title.

B828.J73 2016

204.2201dc23 2015027728

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The greatest blessings come to us through madness, when it is sent as a gift of the gods. Heaven-sent madness is superior to man-made sanity.

Plato

There are forces pulling and pushing against the study of mysticism today. On the one hand, the rise of spirituality has drawn attention to mysticism, and empirical research has suggested that mystical experiences may be much more common than is generally accepted (Hardy 1983; Hood 2006). Mystical experiences that occur either through cultivation or spontaneously are often considered by the experiencers as the defining moments of their lives. There also has been a recent surge of scientific interest in meditators and in the neural and pharmacological bases and causes of mystical experiences. On the other hand, there have been recent sex and money scandals involving enlightened Zen and Hindu teachers, and there is the general academic suspicion that mysticism is only a matter of subjectivity, deliberate obscurantism, and irrationality.

In Anglo-American philosophy, mysticism has remained a constant if minor topic within philosophy of religion. Not all questions in philosophy of mysticism are pertinent to more general philosophy, but many are important to philosophy of religion and to philosophy more generally. What is unique about mysticism is the purported contribution of exotic experiences to mystical claims. Are these experiences objective in the sense of revealing something about reality outside of the subjective individual mind? Do mystical experiences reveal truths about the universe that are not obtainable through science or reasoning about what other experiences reveal to us? Do they reinforce scientific truths? Or do they conflict with scientific truths? Or are they noncognitive and only a matter of emotion? How is it possible to claim that a fundamental reality is experienced when there is allegedly no experiencing subject or object experienced? Why do mystics have trouble expressing what is allegedly experienced in these experiences and not in ordinary cognitive experiences? Are mystics blatantly irrational, speaking what turns out to be only gibberish? Is morality ultimately grounded in mystical experiences, or are mystics necessarily selfish and thus not moral at all? With such questions as these, mysticism introduces issues not found in considering nonmystical experiences and general religious ways of life by themselves.

A current comprehensive treatment of the basic problems in this field is long overdue. No major comprehensive book on philosophy of mysticism has been published since Walter Staces Mysticism and Philosophy in 1960. The closest is the important collection of essays published by William Wainwright in 1981. Since then, a number of developments and new issues have arisenin particular, those raised by postmodernism and scientific research.

One new issue is the postmodern questioning of the very term mysticism as a useful or even valid category. The term is not common to all cultures but was invented only in the modern era in the West. This has led postmodernists to question whether the term can be used to classify phenomena from any other culture or era. (Wilfred Cantwell Smith spent a generation trying to banish the term religion from academic discourse on similar grounds. And a generation before that, Gilbert Ryle asserted the same of science: There is no such animal as Science i.e., there is no science in the abstract but only scores of sciences [1954: 71].) However, although the terms mysticism and mystics are relatively new Western inventions, it does not follow that no phenomena that existed earlier in the West or in other cultures can be labeled mystical. All claims are made from particular perspectives that are set up by culturally-dependent ideas and conceptualizations, but this does not mean that they cannot capture something significant about reality, any more than the fact that scientific claims are made from points of views dictated by particular scientific interests and specific theories means that scientific claims must be groundless. This is true for any term: the invention of a concept does not invent the phenomena in the world that the concept covers. The natural historian Richard Owen invented the term dinosaur in the 1830s to classify certain fossils he was studying. However, to make the startling claim Dinosaurs did not exist before 1830 would at best only be a confusing way of stating the obvious fact that classifying fossils with this concept was not possible before the concept was devised if dinosaurs existed, they existed much earlier, and their existence did not depend on our concepts in any fashion. (Claiming Dinosaurs did not exist before 1830 may sound silly, but a postmodernist has made the claim that scientists invented quarks. And postmodernists do regularly claim that there was no religion or Buddhism or Hinduism before modern times.)

The same applies to our concepts about human phenomena such as mysticism. Even if there are no equivalents of mysticism, mystics, or mystical experiences in Sanskrit, Chinese, or any other language, this does not rule out that scholars may find phenomena in other cultures to which the terms apply and reveal something important about them. Nor does using a Western term mean that we need not try to understand phenomena from other cultures in their own terms: classifying something from India or China as mystical in the modern sense does not make it Western or modern any more than classifying Sanskrit or Chinese as a languageanother term of Western origin with its own historymakes them into Western phenomena or mashes all languages into one. A few scholars deny that there is any languages in reality (e.g., Noam Chomsky and Donald Davidson), but few advocate expunging the word language from English or deny that the cross-cultural study of languages may reveal something of the nature of all languages. In sum, introducing the modern comparative category of mysticism does not change the character of the phenomena of a particular culture; it only focuses attention on certain aspects of cultural phenomena, and this may lead to insights about them.

A second line of postmodern attack is that the use of the term mysticism suggests some unchanging essence to all mystical phenomena when there is none. As discussed in animals. A term can indicate defining characteristics, and the phenomena can still be constantly changing. The borders of what is and is not a dog may or may not be clear, and the same applies to any classificatory term: there may not be hard and fast boundaries between mystical experiences and other types of experiences or between mysticism and other cultural phenomena. Such terms in fact may only work in terms of what Ludwig Wittgenstein called family resemblances, but this does not mean that they are not useful for classifying some phenomena or that the classification may not reveal something significant about the nature of such phenomena. (So too, claiming that concepts from different cultures fall into the general category of transcendent realities does not mean that they all mean the same thing or that they all are referring to one reality.)