Kind Of Mysticism Research Articles

Blue Black Ecstasy: Ellen Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic, Oceanic Feeling, and Mysticism in the Flesh

Abstract Since 2001, visual artist Ellen Gallagher has been working on “Watery Ecstatic,” an ongoing, expansive project that depicts real and imaginary underwater life through drawings, films, reliefs, and paintings. Thus far, this series—indeed, Gallagher’s oeuvre—has not been studied by scholars of religion. Arguing that the series provokes an extended conversation about mysticism, (para)religion, and constructions of blackness, humanness, and animality, this article addresses this lacuna. Placing the series in conversation with Sigmund Freud and Fred Moten, I argue that “Watery Ecstatic” displays a particular kind of mysticism that I call blue black mysticism: an experience of sociality that, in and through the oceanic, refuses the categorical distinctions and modes of identification that ground and mark normative and racialized ideations of humanness and subjectivity. I suggest, further, that blue black mysticism, because it engages the alterity of the ocean, offers a prime site to trouble the racialized, hierarchical boundary between human and nonhuman animals.

Kabała a mistycyzm

The article "Kabbalah and mysticism" is divided into three parts, in which the general understanding of Kabbalah based on mysticism is presented. The first is devoted to the general definition of mysticism, wanting to reflect on this: Is Kabbalah one? In order to be able to answer this question, the author gives voice to the more important scholars of Judaism who have dealt with this issue or are still dealing with it. They are clearly characterizing what mysticism is, they try to create an equivalent explanation of Kabbalah, thus showing its specificity. Once confirmed that Kabbalah can be considered a kind of mysticism, the author moves on to the second part, in which she presents the basic sources of mysticism of Kabbalah. It discusses the most important items of rabbinic and non-rabbinic literature, showing how the non-rabbinic is continuator of the rabbinic. The third part of the article focuses on a deeper description of the initial types of mysticism: creation, chariot and body, which form the foundation for the later mysticism of word and letter. The mysticism of words and letters is kabbalah, that is, the hermeneutical art of biblical exegesis, based on the properties of the Hebrew alphabet and language, as God's tool for knowing Him. The article is based on the considerations of such authors as: Gershom Scholem, Roland Goetschel, Joseph Dan, Charles Mopsik, Marc-Alain Ouaknin, or the controversial Moshe Idel.

The ‘Return of Religion’ in Martin Heidegger’s Work: Overview and Criticism

Martin Heidegger’s thought is often seen in the context of its opposition to the traditional notion of religion as expressed especially in Christianity. Since Heidegger became not only estranged from, but even inimical to Christianity at least from his mid-period, some interpretations label his thought atheistic. However, as was pointed out among others by John Caputo or Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, the relationship between religion and Heidegger’s thought is complex. As a young person preparing for Catholic priesthood, Heidegger had a deep understanding of religion on the spiritual as well as the theological level. This essay attempts to show the general background of Heidegger’s attitude concerning religion in the tradition of the medieval writing entitled German Theology and also in the age when Heidegger developed his insights. It argues that, especially from his mid-period, Heidegger developed a peculiar kind of mysticism, which can be conceived in the context of the critical tradition of previous forms of religious mysticism. This tradition is even more critical if we leave the realm of German ‘titanism’ and seek for alternative philosophical expressions not arising from that linguistic context. The essay concludes that it is possible to understand Heidegger’s proposals as instrumental to a new understanding of the continuously changing forms and contents of religion if and only if one is prepared to apply the necessary amount of critical reflection.

Careful becomings: Foucault, Deleuze, and Bergson

Abstract This essay argues for a convergence between, on the one side, Foucault’s characterization of the care of the self as a way of overcoming the traps of anthropological sleep, and on the other side, Deleuze’s characterization of initiating becomings as a way of fleeing the traps of organization, a line of flight, becoming becoming. This convergence is defended on the basis of a Bergsonian ontology of becoming, and in particular, Bergson’s opposition to what he calls the retrograde motion of truth. One result of this convergence is that a Wittgensteinian approach to the sense of life floats to the surface. A kind of mysticism.

Anti Bohr — Quantum Theory and Causality

The political attitude and the ideology of a very small elite of physicists (Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born and view other) played a major role in the construction of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. Lastly, the hegemonic standard acausal Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics abandoned the principle of causality in quantum mechanics and opened a very wide door to mysticism, logical fallacies and wishful thinking in physics and in science as such. Historically, the Second International Congress for the Unity of Science (Copenhagen, June 21-26, 1936) tried to solve the problem of causality within physics but without a success. Thus far, 80 years after the Second International Congress for the Unity of Science this contribution at the Linnaeus University in 2016 in Vaxjo Sweden will make an end too Bohr's and Heisenberg's dogma of non-causality within quantum mechanics and re-establish the unrestricted validity of the principle of causality at quantum level and under conditions of relativity theory by mathematizing the relationship between cause and effect in the form of the mathematical formula of the causal relationship k. In contrast to Bohr, Heisenberg and other representatives of the Copenhagen interpretation quantum mechanics, a realistic interpretation of quantum theory grounded on the unrestricted validity of the principle of causality will expel any kind of mysticism from physics and enable a quantization of the gravitational field.

Ibn Sīnā. A Philosophical Mysticism or a Philosophy of Mysticism?

It is a well-known fact that Ibn Sīnā in the final part of his work al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt, Pointers and Reminders, extensively uses a mystical vocabulary. Given this fact some scholars have judged that he in this – in all likelihood rather late – work adheres to a kind of mysticism, either religious or, at least, philosophical. Based on a detailed analysis of some of the most significant passages, the present paper offers evidence that such an interpretation does not pay enough attention to the very way in which Ibn Sīnā interprets the mystical notions that are undeniably present in the last three sections of the Ishārāt. In fact, Ibn Sīnā’s use of them reveals to have nothing, or almost nothing in common with the meaning attributed to them in Sufi-writings, or in (mainly Neoplatonic) ‘mystical’ philosophy. It is concluded that Ibn Sīnā, in the final part of the Ishārāt, offers what may be labelled a ‘philosophical project that rationally interprets mystical terms, expressions, and phenomena’, rather than as ‘a philosophical mysticism’.

Bergson lettore del misticismo plotiniano. Note autografe inedite

Abstract Bergson interprets Plotinian mysticism in the light of his distinction between two different kinds of mysticism: one which translates union with God into action, the other which translates it into contemplation. Plotinus embodies the highest expression of the latter, intellectual mysticism. This thesis runs through Bergson’s oeuvre from his early works to Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion. The present study traces its origins back to a reading of Ennead VI 9 on the basis of notes in the philosopher’s own hand, in all likelihood pertaining to the lecture course he delivered at the Collège de Fance in 1901-1902. These notes, here published for the first time, show that a careful engagement with the Plotinian text led Bergson to stress the continuity between two forms of ecstasy, regarded as stages in the soul’s return to its source: in the first stage, the soul reverts to the intelligible and identifies with it (intellectual ecstasy); in the second, the intellect, united with itself, attains ultimate unity (supra-intellectual ecstasy). In both cases, the soul does not identify with God’s creative will and hence the ecstasy it experiences is still a theoretical, or intellectual, one.

Henologie bei Platon und Plotin

Aristotle construed metaphysics primarily in terms of ontology, whereas Plato had developed a different approach to the philosophy of principles. The main task of the metaphysical theory of principles is the quest for the absolute. For Plato, however, the absolute is the one; and this idea – most influentially advocated by Plotinus – is the foundation of a tradition that construes metaphysics mainly in terms of henology. The central aspects of this doctrine are the idea of the transcendence of the absolute one, the perspective of negative theology, and – in Plotinus – a genuinely philosophical kind of mysticism.

From A Swedish Point of View

92 Reviews FROM A SWEDISH POINT OF VIEW STEFAN ANDERSSON Bredgaran 17B 222 21 Lund, Sweden SANDERSS@CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Gunnar Fredriksson. Wittgenstein. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Forlag, 1993. Pp. 274. 60 kronor. Svante N?rdin. Fi~osofernas Krig [The Philosopher's War: European Philosophy dunng the FIrst World War]. Nora: Bokforlaget Nya Doxa, 1998. Pp. 265. 170 kronor. Bertrand Rus~ell pl.ays an i:npor~ant ~art in. Gunnar Fredriksson's book about LudWIg Wlttgenstem; thIS reVIew w111 concentrate on what the author has to say about their relationship. Fredriksson wrote a book about Ru~sell i~ 1984 called Bertrand Russell,' en intellektuell i politiken, which I re~Iewed l.n Russell (n.s. 5 [1985]). In it he showed that he is no stranger to phl1osophlcal thought. Fredriksson studied philosophy at Lund University and at Oxford in the early '60S, when he met Russell and had an interview with him. Instead of pursuing an academic career, Fredriksson went into journalism.. ~e wrote a book in 1962 called Det politiska spraket [The Language of PolltIcs] that has become something of a minor classic in its field in Sweden. Twenty years later he wrote a book about Joseph Conrad, and after the book about Wittgenstein one about Arthur Schopenhauer. Fredriksson is a rare phenomenon in Swedish cultural journalism. His book about Wittgenst~inshows that he is capable ofexplaining complicated philosophical problems In a way that a non-specialist can understand. Reviews 93 Fredriksson keeps emphasizing that much of what Wittgenstein wrote should be considered as mystical poetry rather than as attempts to solve philosophical problems in the traditional sense. In Wittgenstein's thinking there is an important connection between logic, ethics and mysticism; what they amount to cannot be said--it can only show itself Fredriksson claims that Russell never really understood the importance of this distinction between what can be said about the world and what can only be shown. I think Russell understood what Wittgenstein was trying to say. He realized that if Wittgenstein was right, much of what he himself had written was an attempt to say the unsayable. Instead of allowing different hierarchies of language and thus opening up the possibility of an infinite progress, Wittgenstein outlawed all levels of metalanguages. Russell preferred some kind of type theory and meta-talk to silence and did not think that Wittgenstein's solution to the problem of the relationship between language and reality was valid. He thought there was something paradoxical in Wittgenstein's theory, since he had succeeded in saying quite a lot about what cannot be talked about. When they met after the First World War Russell thought,that Wittgenstein had turned into a "complete mystic". It's hard to say exactly what Russell had in mind when he referred to Wittgenstein as "a mystic", but it must have been a somewhat different kind of mysticism than the one Russell had outlined in his essay "Mysticism and Logic", where he gives it four defining characteristics (a special way of knowing, the unity of the world, the unreality of time and of evil) that in parts fit well with his chosen examples of Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Spinoza, Hegel and Bergson, but would not fit well with Wittgenstein except for some parallels with Spinoza's views. I have written about the difference between Wittgenstein and Russell's mysticism earlier (Russell, n.s. 18 [1998]) and will not repeat that discussion except by emphasizing some similarities in their different approaches. Neither of them saw traditional Christian mysticism as an answer to their questions about God and the meaning of life, but neither of them could totally free himself from the anthropomorphism of Christian theology. The major difference was that while Wittgenstein kept struggling with religious and existential questions, trying to find ways of somehow expressing his deepest insights, Russell did not have much more to say about his mysticism after 1914 and instead did what he could to create a more peacefUl and loving world. Mysticism and the importance of seeing Wittgenstein as a literary writer, a poet and a mystic rather than a traditional philosopher, run through Fredriksson's book. He has many interesting comments to make. The...

Fichte and Schelling

Intellectual historians have often remarked that German thought from its earliest beginnings is marked by two major features that distinguish it from the greater part of the remainder of Western European thought. These are, first, the tendency to seek some kind of participatory relationship with nature and the universe conceived in quasi-animistic terms, which represents a kind of reversion to a much older, much more primitive way of conceiving the world and man's place in it, and has led to all kinds of mysticism. It is a strain in the history of German thought which has been brought out very clearly by Lévy-Bruhl and others.

Colossians And Barbelo

The nature of the ‘Colossian heresy’ remains obscure. It has gnostic features, but ChristianGnosticism is usually dated to the second century. It has elements of Judaism, but we know nothingof first-century Jewish gnosis. It may be a syncretistic ‘philosophy’, but such a description is barren, and explains nothing. It may be a kind of mysticism, but again the idea is difficult todefine, and the picture is left vague. I am proposing in this article to draw a comparison with anearly Gnostic document, the Apocryphon Johannis, which has clear Jewish roots; and to explain Colossians as Paul's response to a Jewish-Christian countermission which preached a myth close to, but distinct from, that in Apoc. Joh.

The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (review)

Reviewed by: The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism Alan Wilde Judith Ryan . The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. x + 267 pp. $29.95. In the current critical climate, Judith Ryan's examination of modernism is bound to seem somewhat old-fashioned. Untouched by the confusing crosswinds of postmodernism or by more recent gusts from the direction of New Historical studies, The Vanishing Subject honors both clarity and discrimination. Determined not to leap to conclusions or to indulge in premature generalization, it seeks precision above all. Ryan's statement of purpose—"to rediscover a lost element in the genesis of modernism, not to construct a theory about the period as a whole"—suggests her tone and methodology as well as her project. It has to be said, however, that the modesty with which she conducts her investigation underplays the excitement of what she has discovered. The "lost element" she refers to is empiricist psychology as illustrated in the works of Brentano, Mach, and William James, although its relation to the literary empiricism of the years 1880-1940, her major concern, has to do, as she repeatedly insists, not with simple "influence" but with "complex intertextuality." [End Page 427] Empiricist psychology, as Ryan defines it early on, "meant that the only admissible evidence for the existence of something was that of our senses; the only reality was that of our consciousness"—both of which beliefs lead, in turn, to the rejection of metaphysics and dualism. Although one of the four sections that house her fifteen writers deals specifically with "authors who took issue with empiricism and sought new ways of consolidating the self," Ryan points out in her conclusion that "few of the authors actually agreed with the new psychologies" and that "there is scarcely an author who is not deeply disturbed by the conflict between empiricism and more familiar modes of thought." Not surprisingly, given the sometimes tortuous refinements that underlie her discussions of such subjects as "the role of sensory perception in the constitution of the self" and "attempts to revalorize the empiricist vision and develop a new kind of mysticism," and given too the ambivalences that her conclusion acknowledges, there is a good deal of to-ing and fro-ing in The Vanishing Self, and readers are advised to keep their eye on the larger picture. Those who do are likely to find persuasive (and even moving) Ryan's portraits of writers reacting to "the sense of dissolution and fragmentation" to which "the new psychologies" gave rise. Nevertheless, convincing though she may be in her general argument, Ryan's method has its drawbacks. As literary hostess, she offers a buffet that is more various than bountiful, a kind of critical cuisine minceur. Certainly, the range is impressive as we are invited to focus in turn on, among others, Pater, Huysmans, Rilke, Alice and Henry James, Stein, Kafka, Schnitzler, Broch, Proust, and Musil; but as they are served up, one after another, in their smallish chapters, the helping seems just a bit on the skimpy side. Ungratefully, perhaps, one wants more—wants not only the cogent and perceptive demonstrations of how all the writers relate to empiricist psychology (and validate Ryan's thesis) but further, detailed illumination of their writings as these come into new focus under the empiricist lens. (One can argue about particulars too, about Joyce's inclusion, for example, or about the fact that the chapter on Woolf underplays her concern with depth—especially in the discussion of Jacob's Room —and, more generally, her belief in a persisting core of being.) Ryan's scholarly, rhetorically low-keyed, punctilious handling of her topic leads her at the last and "on balance" to reject the notion of "the literature inspired by empiricism as a movement in its own right." And it keeps her as well from mapping out those more recently settled territories in which the embattled self threatens finally (or yet again) to enact its long-threatened disintegration. The "Freudian solution," as the best known of "a number of concerted attempts to consolidate the self," stands as the book's terminus ad quem, and The Vanishing Self...

Stephen A. Kent and the mysticism of the early Quakers

Abstract Kent's ( Religion 1987, 17 , 251–274) contention that William James reduces mysticism to psychology rests on partial evidence; Kent underestimates the mysticism of George Fox and the early Quakers; the same kind of mysticism that occurs among early Quakers can be found in St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), Pascal (1623–1662) and the Sufis. Consequently, the content of the mysticism of the early Quakers is not culturally bound by the context of mid-17th-century England as Kent suggests. Moreover, these instances render it unlikely that the mysticism of the early Quakers is due to relative deprivation. The Quaker meeting for worship as a vehicle for mysticism and prophecy, and mysticism as a factor in the spread of early Quakerism are discussed.

Katherine Mansfield, Gurdjieff, and Lawrence's "Mother and Daughter"

It has long been known that D. H. Lawrence wrote three satiric stories about John Middleton Murry-The Border Line (1924), Jimmy and the Desperate Woman (1924), and The Last Laugh (1928)-and that Smile (1926) is a portrait of Murry after the death of Katherine Mansfield. It is also known that Mabel Luhan, a disciple of George Gurdjieff in the 1920s,l was the model for Mrs. Witt in St. Mawr (1925); and that Mrs. Bodoin, the mother in Mother and Daughter (1929), is very similar to Mrs. Witt and therefore to Mabel Luhan. It has not been noticed, however, that Lawrence's late and little-known story, Mother and Daughter, is much more than a bitter tale of a young woman's desperate attempt to escape from her bitchy and dominating mother, and that it is also an allegory of Katherine Mansfield's seduction by the mysticism of Gurdjieff.2 There is a great deal of evidence that Lawrence, though sympathetic to certain kinds of mysticism, was hostile to the ideas of Gurdjieff and his principal disciple, P. D. Ouspensky. Lawrence's hostility was not purely intellectual and was influenced by the fact that his friend Katherine Mansfield had been converted to Gurdjieff's ideas in the summer of 1922 by A. R. Orage, her former editor at the New Age, had entered the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Priory in Fontainebleau in October 1922, and had died there after a tubercular hemorrhage in January 1923.

Art as Communication

concepts to practical living. Its visible, tactile, end products have provided man with one of his most powerful tools for the dissemination of knowledge over the entire history of human development. In the evolution of a reasonably sophisticated educational system, our contemporary architects of educational doctrine seem to have ignored the potential of art as an instructional vehicle and relegated it to a minor satellite position. The subconscious retention of the Biblical connotation of imagery and sinfulness may be the hang up that obscures a broader application of art to oureducation. The role of art in the learning cycle could be of basic importance, once there is an understanding of what takes place during the process of the production of any piece of art-when the process is dissected and its structure or evolution explained in simple terms, and the relationship between that process and all other learning processes can be made evident. Despite the historic tendency to consider art as an effete or extraneous pursuit, a kind of mysticism has been attributed to the artist and sustained by popular legend and implication in many people's minds. The words talent and creativity are often used in a way that heightens the aura of mystery or implies some magical gift or occult visions. While the artist may find this attribution of mystical powers an asset, there is little truth in the assumption. The artist's talents and his creative capabilities are in reality the deliberate development of a fairly specific combination of basic skills, skills that exist to some degree in most of us. The fundamental skills of the artist are observation, recognition, transposition, and technical implementation. Three of these are basic _ This content downloaded from 207.46.13.98 on Wed, 29 Jun 2016 05:36:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Greek Myths and Christian Mysteries by Hugo Rahner

254 BOOK REVIEWS most apparent is in their discussion of presence-a question which obviously is central to both works. Schillebeeckx is obviously very aware of the importance of this notion and his treatment of it is very clear and incisive, yet (as evidenced on page 61) he approaches an understanding of presence from the point of view of St. Thomas' analysis of causality, thus immediately classifying and delimiting the basic reality of presence. Rahner, on the other hand, grounds his whole treatment on the notion of divine presence in human history, and allows this notion to re-evaluate the ordinary causal analysis of the Church's life and Sacramental expression . To this extent it would seem that there is greater amplitude in Rahner's treatment, greater possibility of opening up new avenues of insight. Pointing to the difference of approach is not intended to indicate the superiority of either contribution but rather to highlight a tension which exists and must always exist in really creative theological endeavor. For this very reason the simultaneous appearance of these two first-rate examples of theological thought marks a major contribution to our present day development of theology. BERNARD CooKE, S. J. Marquette University Milwaukee, Wisconsin Greek Myths and Christian Mysteries. By HuGO RAHNER. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Pp. xxii + 399. $10.00. It was surely not outside the intention of the author of this fascinating work to contribute to a subsidiary, yet radical, debate going on among Christian scholars on the subject of the tension between hebraic and hellenic modes of thought, of the roles they have played in the formulation of Christian doctrine and Christian culture, of their usefulness in the contemporary renewal of the Catholic Church. Champions of the hebraic modes of thought disdainfully dismiss the hellenic modes by reducing them to Plato, and even then, to the weaknesses of his thought, as though the Christian Fathers had been completely unaware of these. Is it with these men in mind that Fr. Rahner writes: "The eighteenth century was guilty of a disastrous misunderstanding of the nature of Greek piety when it projected its own ' enlightenment ' into the Greek soul. Such illuminati, for whom every kind of mysticism, everything that is dark and sinful, everything that expresses a yearning for redemption , is ' an alien drop in Greek blood,' are even today not wholly out of supply. Yet if they were right how could we explain the hidden longing in myth and mystery? How could we even grasp the secret meanings behind the Odyssey? " (p. xx). BOOK REVIEWS 255 Indirectly, Fr. Rahner pays tribute also to the role of the rational elements in Greek thought in the formation of Christian doctrine and culture , when he stresses the point that the Church freely employed the Greek myths and mysteries only after she was in firm possession of her own teaching. It was the reflective and rational modes of Greek thought that were used by her to come into this possession. (Coincidentally, Lucien Legrand, in an article entitled: "Creation as a Cosmic Victory of Yahweh," digested in Theology Digest, XI, 3, 154-158, makes the same point in regard to the freer use of mythical elements in the later books of the 0. T. These were the books that also betray the influence of hellenic modes of thought.) Fr. Rahner's direct concern is with the religious modes of Greek thought and the rich part they played in the expression of Christian thought. He expresses it so finely and so pointedly for our day: " What is here contained is a gift to that living round-table, made up of men who believe that our Western civilization has broken down only in order that it may be born anew, to the Eranos of those who dimly perceive the truth, as did Plato in his immortal seventh letter, and can behold the kingdom of eternity through the ruins. These are the men who know the comforting law of the spirit, that the demon in man is only permitted to tear down so that the angel in man with faltering hand may trace out the sources of new life. Palaces only collapse so that treasures may be...

What Nature Is An Outline of Scientific Naturalism

A WELL-WRITTEN argument for “scientific naturalism”as against the argument from design, which sees intelligence in nature, inferring therefrom a creator. Mr. Franklin rejects anthropomorphic theism, also idealism, but seems to finish up in a kind of mysticism. “It is the character and quality of matter and energy to develop” man and the social process, just as it is for them to manifest themselves in the inorganic and organic processes. New thoughts, feelings, volitions, religion, &c, are merely manifestations of “radiant and gravitant energy.”But somehow we shall eventually “be able to comprehend what the universe is, conceive infinite time and infinite space by looking in upon ourselves and seeing the infinite repeated in us, and understand the inmost nature of things. Just as the time was when life was not self-conscious, then became self-conscious and class-conscious, and to-day is imperfectly socially conscious; and so the time will come when we shall be universally conscious ”(pp. 77-72).