Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present

Robert M. Wallace

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350082885
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Philosophie
• Sous-sujet: Philosophie de la religion

Few twenty-first century academics take seriously mysticism's claim that we have direct knowledge of a higher or more "inner" reality or God. But Philosophical Mysticism argues that such leading philosophers of earlier epochs as Plato, G. W. F. Hegel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Alfred North Whitehead were, in fact, all philosophical mystics. This book discusses major versions of philosophical mysticism beginning with Plato. It shows how the framework of mysticism's higher or more inner reality allows nature, freedom, science, ethics, the arts, and a rational religion-in-the-making to work together rather than conflicting with one another. This is how philosophical mysticism understands the relationships of fact to value, rationality to ethics, and the rest. And this is why Plato's notion of ascent or turning inward to a higher or more inner reality has strongly attracted such major figures in philosophy, religion, and literature as Aristotle, Plotinus, St Augustine, Dante Alighieri, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein. Wallace's Philosophical Mysticism brings this central strand of western philosophy and culture into focus in a way unique in recent scholarship.

1 “A Worm! A God!”

Helpless immortal! insect infinite!

A worm! a god!—I tremble at myself,

And in myself am lost.

Edward Young, Night Thoughts

How could we “know God,” whether directly or indirectly? What would that even mean? Are there real values, or does it all boil down to what we’re programmed to want? Is there a sense in which we actually are “one” with each other? What do my inner life and my freedom, as I experience them, have to do with my body, my neurons, and the natural world, which I and others can observe?

To explore these questions, I begin by asking another question: Who are we, really? Most of us, I suggest, are in an ongoing identity crisis.¹ A higher reality of inner freedom (which means making up our own minds) and truth and love and beauty is in this world and us, and we experience it directly when we remember it and try to live up to it.² This higher reality of inner freedom, truth, love, and beauty inspires us, while lower goals merely attract us. But of course we also have a huge capacity for temporarily forgetting the higher reality, and pursuing lower goals without regard to inner freedom and the rest.

We usually assume that this familiar conflict of goals has nothing to do with who someone is. We suppose that someone is the same person regardless of whether the goals that she pursues are, in anyone’s opinion, “higher” or “lower.” But a contrasting view is in fact influential in the philosophical tradition beginning with Socrates and Plato. This tradition argues that pursuing inner freedom and truth makes a person more real, more herself, and more of a person, in a way that (say) simply pursuing money or fame does not.

The examined life

Plato suggests that this is why Socrates promoted the “examined life.” Someone who examines her life, Plato suggests, by thinking about what’s really worth doing and what’s really true rather than just doing whatever she initially feels drawn to, is more fully herself.³ If, in the example that I mentioned, I lost my desire for money or my desire for fame, I myself would presumably still be all there. I would still be the same person. But if, on the other hand, I lost my thinking and was left with nothing but unexamined desires and opinions, I would be, in effect, an automaton rather than a person. So at least part of what makes me a person, and thus makes me fully myself, is my examining or thinking about what’s really worth doing and what’s really true: my “making up my own mind.”

This is why rather than just attracting us, inner freedom or making up our own minds, and truth, love, and beauty (insofar as love and beauty embody inner freedom and truth) inspire us. They represent our full presence, our being fully ourselves. This also explains the fact that having to choose between the higher and the lower, between what inspires us and what merely attracts us, is a “crisis” rather than just an ordinary decision. In choosing between the higher and the lower, we decide what kind of being we are going to be.

Higher and lower identities

This notion of a crisis in which we have to choose between higher and lower identities may remind us of traditional religious themes having to do with higher and lower: the sacred and the profane, God and our sinful nature, conversion from the lower and salvation by the higher. It also pervades the writing of philosophers and poets who don’t appear to be motivated by (at least) conventional forms of religion. Philosophers from Plato to Rödl explain how through inner freedom, truth, love, and beauty we experience something higher in the world and in ourselves. Poets and creative writers such as Edward Young, Jelaluddin Rumi, Walt Whitman, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, and Mary Oliver conjure up this same experience.

Much of Asian thought, likewise, speaks of something higher which we can experience in ourselves and in the world, whether it’s the “Tao that cannot be named,” or “Brahman” that’s identical to our soul, or the “Buddha nature” that’s in everything but at the same time is truer and thus higher than what it’s in. There is more overlap between Asian and Western thought on these issues than we generally realize.⁴

Both Asian teachers and the Plato/Hegel tradition tell us that the central issue is not, as we in the West often suppose, about a separate “supreme being” that a person may or may not “believe in.” Rather, the central issue is the nature of the world of which we’re a part. Is it, as we tend to assume, essentially “all on one level,” or does it have a “vertical” dimension by which some aspects of it really are “higher,” through inner freedom, truth, love, and beauty?

The higher as the divine

If some aspects of the world really are higher, one might well think that these are the core of truth in the traditional notions of the sacred, God, conversion, salvation, and worship. In that case, the higher authority of inner freedom, truth, love, and beauty might be the reality that believers in a separate “supreme being” are trying, with only partial success, to get into focus.

We do usually imagine God as a being that’s separate from the world. But there may be a surprise in store here, for someone who considers the question carefully. It turns out that a God who’s separate from the world can’t really transcend (go beyond) the world. This is because a God who’s separate from the world would be, as the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner put it, “a member of the larger household of all reality,” which would be composed of these two separate objects, God and the world.⁵ But a God who had the same kind of reality as the other members of a larger household wouldn’t be truly “higher” than them, or transcendent. However much more “powerful” than the world this “God” might be, it would still be, in an important way, the same kind of thing as the world, and to that extent it wouldn’t transcend the world—or deserve to have authority over it.

Transcendence through innerness

How can God transcend the world and deserve to have authority over it, if not by being a separate and very powerful being? The answer that’s suggested by Plato and a long line of reli gious thinkers is that a God who’s not a separate being can be distinguished from the world and higher than it by being more “inner” than it, more free, self-governing, loving, and beautiful. God could be the “inside” of the world.⁶ Since such a God isn’t alongside the world as its equal in a larger household of all reality, such a God can truly go beyond the world (transcend it). Rather than failing to transcend, by being separate and alongside, it transcends by being more inner, free, self-governing, loving, and beautiful.

In which case, it’s clear how God has a kind of authority that’s entirely distinct from “power” as we usually conceive of it. And it’s through this authority, and only through it, that God transcends everything. In our earliest encounters with something radically different and awe-inspiring, we might not have come up with a better word than “power.” But sheer physical power, which isn’t oriented to any conception of the good, integrates nothing and thus achieves nothing that’s “itself,” fully real, or (indeed) truly different. By contrast, selfhood, freedom, love, beauty, and rational authority integrate to a maximum degree and thus make it clear how rather than being something merely to fear and placate, God deserves worship (that is, reverence and devotion) as something that’s truly higher (more authoritative) than us.

We are conditioned to think of the “creator” as distinguished primarily by the sheer “power” that the act of creation implies, while we bow occasionally toward the notion that this power is somehow mysteriously combined with love and other admirable qualities. In doing this we fail to give this creator any authority over its creation beyond the authority of its power to “punish and reward.” We forget that a power of that kind deserves no reverence or devotion, being no different in principle from the power of a tyrant.

Whereas the ability to integrate, to be whole through freedom, love, and beauty, gives its possessor a kind of reality, through self-integration, that tyrants don’t begin to possess. The possessor of this integration deserves authority over the world that seeks integration and only intermittently achieves it. But it’s precisely not “separate” from that world, because what’s separate is in a crucial way the same as what it’s separate from; it exists “alongside,” belongs to the same “household” as the world. Whereas integration, by going “within,” truly achieves something that the world, regarded merely as such, as “external” and “side-by-side,” does not achieve.

Although conceptions of God as in some way “internal” rather than “separate” don’t play much of a role in public discussion today, they have in fact been quite common in Western religious thought. Figures like St Paul (in God “we live and move and have our being”), St Athanasius (God “became man that we might become God”), and St Augustine (“You were more inward [to me] than my most inward part”) can be cited in early Christianity. In modern times, Hegel, Alfred North Whitehead, Paul Tillich, and Karl Rahner likewise speak of God in ways that aren’t consistent with God’s being a separate being.⁷ Because they don’t identify God with the world but retain a distinction between them, these views are not “pantheistic.” Distinct and higher but not separate and not “a being,” their God may “create” the world by making it self-determined and fully real, rather than by existing before the world in time and “deciding” to create it.

An objection to this conception

Could it be that since many people do think of God as a separate being, someone who describes God as “distinct but not separate” is really just changing the subject, by not discussing what many people call “God”?

What’s important for my purposes is simply that what we’re talking about is truly transcendent, deserves to have authority, and is free, loving, beautiful, and accessible to us. The conception of “God” as a separate being, on the other hand, resembles the earlier habits of thinking of God as like a human being or like an animal, in that it makes God resemble something that we’re familiar with. These conceptions prevent God from really transcending, really going beyond the ordinary world, and from having the authority that such transcendence would carry with it. So anyone who wants their God to transcend the world and have the authority that goes with that will want to consider the Plato/Hegel God seriously.

Here’s a comparison. In recent times we have learned something new about the substance that we call “water,” which for a long time we described as a simple “element.” Water, it turns out, is actually a composite, made up of atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. Similarly, we may learn something new about the “God” whom many of us habitually describe as a separate being. We may learn that this “God” is actually distinct but not separate from the “lower” beings that make up the world. We wouldn’t learn this by empirical investigation, as we did in the case of water, but we would learn it. These stories show how we are able to talk about the same thing, essentially, while our conception of what that thing is, is undergoing change.

Just as we were correct in thinking that water flows, is capable of freezing and boiling, is transparent, and so forth, so we have also been correct in thinking that “God” transcends ordinary beings like us and has great authority as a result of that transcendence. In both cases, we have also been mistaken about significant features of what we’re talking about, but that doesn’t prevent us from talking, throughout our learning process, of what is essentially the same thing. In this way, it should be possible to compare differing conceptions of “God” without throwing up our hands and saying that we’re just not discussing the same subject.

This is my reply to critics of the “philosophers’ God” who assert, like Henri Bergson, that “religion . . . regards [God], above all, as a Being who can hold communication with us,” so that philosophers like Plato and Aristotle “are speaking to us of something else” (Bergson [1935], p. 241). Bergson doesn’t address the question of how God can deserve to have authority over us, nor does he perceive how the Plato/Aristotle/Hegel God is free, loving, beautiful, and deeply involved in our lives at every point.

We have certainly learned in the course of time that our “communication” with this “Being” (to use these terms for a moment) is different from our communication with each other. If it weren’t different, the “Being” wouldn’t be infinite and wouldn’t have the authority that it does. This would likewise be my reply to objections that the Plato/Aristotle/Hegel God doesn’t seem like a “person.” (I’ll say some more about this issue in Chapter 2.) Regarding the notion of God as “an existing thing” (or “a Being,” as Bergson puts it), Iris Murdoch says, “No existing thing could be what we have meant by God. Any existing God would be less than God. . . . But what led us to conceive of [God] does exist and is constantly experienced and pictured” (Murdoch [1993], p. 508).

I am also impressed, of course, by the fact that central thinkers in Christianity and in other religious traditions have taught a concept of God which does not make God a separate being. For all of these reasons, I propose to use the term “God” for something that transcends by being more inner, free, and loving rather than by being separate. If you prefer to use the word “God” for something else, that’s fine. We just need to be clear about what each of us is talking about, at any point in our discussion.

A God whom we can know

Besides being free, loving, the source of all full reality, and truly transcendent because it doesn’t fall like us into the category of a separate being, a God who is distinct but not separate is accessible to us; it’s a God whom we can know. If this God is distinct from the world by being more “inner” than it, more free, true, loving, and beautiful, but isn’t a separate being, then this God’s innerness, its freedom, truth, an...