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)