From: hampday@earthlink.net
Date: Fri Jan 14 2005 - 19:53:20 GMT
Hello Ian, Platt, DMB -- and a hearty welcome to Matt Kundert!
> Ian - is mysticism just that which is not yet explained ?
> Platt - Yes
> DMB - No
At the risk of what will be considered a "self-serving" message, let me try
to answer your question using several paragraphs selected from my own
thesis. As you probably know, my principal complaint with the MOQ is that,
except for some oblique references to Zen mysticism, it doesn't provide an
epistemology for its multi-level Quality concept. (Matt has also noted this
inadequacy, and a recent reading of McWatt's PhD thesis on Pirsig's
metaphysics supports my conclusion.) The problem is compounded by the fact
that Oriental Mysticism is "all over the place" metaphysically (e.g., Chin's
eloquent ramblings) and lacks an empirical framework that is comprehensible
to the Western mentality.
If you'll carefully digest these five paragraphs, I think you may arrive at
a better understanding of the logic behind the mysical approach, and why it
can't be dismissed in any philosophy that purports to resolve the SOM
(duality) issue.
____________________________________________________________________________
______________
"Just what is Essentialism?
"In its broadest sense, Essentialism is any philosophy that acknowledges the
primacy of Essence. Many view it as an idealistic belief system with roots
that are traceable to the objective idealism of the early Greeks. Others,
myself included, see it as the inevitable reaction to scientific materialism
which in its methodological denial of subjective reality has virtually
rejected the possibility of an immanent Essence. To the scientist
everything is an "other" whose attributes are defined and measured in terms
of laws constructed by the human intellect-a *not* other. But because
Essentialism is a conceptual worldview that is not dependent on objective
facts and measurements, it is not limited to the scientific way of looking
at things. As the Eastern mystics have known for many centuries, reality is
more than what the rational mind can formulate differentially from its
empirical observations of "otherness". Essentialism puts this wisdom into a
logical framework or synthesis that is approachable (arguably for the first
time) by the Western mind. The Essentialist's perspective is not trapped by
self/other dualism; it reaches beyond otherness for the Value of undivided
Essence-the ineffable Oneness of Eastern Philosophy.
"Although the Greek philosophers believed that the true nature of the
universe was perfect, they were astute enough to attribute the observed
imperfections to man's limited perception. For Plato, this meant that there
had to be two different realities: the "essential" and the "perceived".
Plato's dialectical protégé Aristotle [384-322 B.C.] applied the term
"essence" to the one common characteristic that all things belonging to a
particular category have in common and without which they could not be
members of that category; hence, the idea of rationality as the essence of
man. This notion carried over into all facets of reality, including species
of living creatures. But it was the Egyptian-born philosopher Plotinus
[270-204 B.C.] who brought Greek Idealism to the Roman Empire as
Neo-Platonism, and with it the concept that all existents emanate from a
"subjective essence" and that the mind plays an active role in shaping or
ordering the objects of its perception rather than passively receiving the
data of sensory experience. With the Empire's fall to the Goths in A.D. 476
and the spread of Christianity in the Western World, Aristotle's empirical
view of essence was left unchallenged to dominate philosophical thought
throughout the Middle Ages.
"We've observed that objects come into existence by assuming perceptible
qualities, that is, by their being separated or differentiated from a
primary source. In the tradition of Occam's razor, as there is no reason to
presuppose an antecedent, I identify the a priori source as Essence and
attribute it directly to the Absolute Whole which, by the traditional
religio-philosophical parameters, is characterized as "uniform, unchanging
and limitless". Although Essence is incomprehensible from the finite
perspective, one may logically infer that Essence is "uncreated", which
eliminates creatio ex nihilo as well as the infinite regression of prior
causes. But any attributive description of the Absolute eludes the power of
logic. So the question for ontology is: How do we get from the immovable
absolute to the transitional relative?
"In an essay on Mysticism, Andrey Smimov of the Department of Oriental
Philosophy at Russia's Academy of Sciences, discusses how the mystics of
Europe and Islam got around the inadequacy of definitions in describing a
divinity or primary cause. "The mystics understood the indefinableness of
God in a far wider sense than did other medieval philosophers and thinkers.
Indefinableness, as the mystics put it, traverses the limits of the
indefinable in the sense of Aristotelian logic. For anything to be
indefinable *per genus et differentiam* does not exclude at all the
possibility of description, and description is, of course, stating something
definite about the thing described. But the indefinableness of God in a
mystical sense comes in fact to be *indefiniteness*; that is, it rules out
any definite proposition about the Divine essence. Any such proposition
means a sort of limitation imposed on the Divine, while the latter is
incompatible with any limit. The ontological *unlimitedness* of God entails
for a mystic an epistemological indefiniteness: any assertion about God
would then be only metaphorical and would not serve as an established basis
of knowledge."
"Faced with these descriptive limitations, Nicholas of Cusa [1401-1464]
developed an epistemology based on a theory of "not other" as a symbolic
connotation for God. Cusa's argument was that, although God is indefinable,
it can be stated that the world is not God but *is not anything other than
God*. Such reasoning was certainly not unknown to the Neo-Platonists and
medieval thinkers like Eckhart, but it was the mystical tradition that gave
the concept of a "negated other" logical credibility as a creational thesis.
What distinguished the mystics was their close linking of these two
assertions. I find it surprising that Western philosophers have shown
little interest in a not-other ontology and have virtually ignored a
negational Source as the primary cause. The rationale for negation is quite
simply that any created thing is a lesser entity than the whole. Since the
objects of creation are secondary and inferior to the undifferentiated
whole, they can arise only by negation of the whole."
____________________________________________________________________________
______________
Have I added any new insight to your dilemma, Ian?
Best regards,
Ham
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