Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!akgua!mcnc!ecsvax!unbent
From: unbent@ecsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re:mysticism vs. rationalism
Message-ID: <1957@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 6-Feb-84 09:44:22 EST
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.1957
Posted: Mon Feb  6 09:44:22 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 9-Feb-84 03:58:04 EST
Lines: 36

<>
	Ah yes.  "Let us define our terms".

	Well, 'rational' at least has something to do with
*reasons*, and a reason is something other than what it's a
reason *for*.  'Rational', then, has to do with a discursive
synthesis, a relationship among *several* items (beliefs,
judgments, propositions, hypotheses, pieces of evidence, or
what have you).

	'Mysticism', on the other hand--at least as I'm
familiar with it--is constantly sending the message that
plurality or multiplicity is somehow an *illusion*.  Mysticism
insists on a *non-discursive* holism, a "whole" which is *not*
a synthesis of parts, but somehow given "all at once" and
*falsified* by analysis.

	The upshot is that it's kind of hard to have a
*discussion* with a mystic.  Discussion, conversation,
argument, and the like are, by their natures, discursive
enterprises.  What classical mystical literature keeps telling
us, however, is "don't talk; just be"--meditate, contemplate,
"feel the oneness", "grok essences", etc.  *Pace* the colonel,
one needn't be Baconian, mechanistic, or deterministic to be
'rational' (a 'rationalist').  One simply needs to be open to
engaging in discursive *reasoning*.  Some avowed mystics are.
Indeed, some avowed mystics purport to arrive at their
mysticism as the *conclusion* of reasoning or argumentation.
I love chatting with such chaps, but I can't pretend that I
understand them.  It always looks to me as though they're
contradicting themselves.  (And sometimes they even agree that
they *are*--but then, what's contradiction to a mystic?)

Yours for clearer concepts,
				--Jay Rosenberg
				(ecsvax!unbent)