jaspers's critique of mysticism

American Academy of Religion

Jaspers's Critique of MysticismAuthor(s): Alan M. OlsonSource: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Jun., 1983), pp. 251-266Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1463637 .

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LI/2

Jaspers's Critique of Mysticism Alan M. Olson

Saspers's

relation to mysticism is both fascinating and frustrating. On the one hand, Jaspers seems to be never more himself than when he is providing extended commentary and exposition on such spiritual

giants as Jesus, Socrates, and the Buddha. And when he provides mono- graph or book-length treatment of mystical philosophers such as Plotinus, Cusanus, and Spinoza, one has the distinct impression that Jaspers finds himself mirrored almost perfectly in these thinkers-so much so, in fact, that it is sometimes very difficult to ascertain who is speaking, Jaspers or his subject. Thus, when Jaspers says that "prayer," for Plotinus, "is a philosophizing self-movement toward God" and that "the love of man for God," in Plotinus and Spinoza, "is the foundation of all authentic life" (GP:II,50ff.), the reader of Jaspers knows instinctively that such utterances are descriptive avowals and not merely statements of fact. But while the depth of Jaspers's self-identification with mystical thinkers is fascinating, it is simultaneously the feature of his work which invites suspicion on the part of those who question the validity of highly existential historiography, since Jaspers, as we will see, is rather selective about what he chooses to accept and to reject in certain mystics.

Jaspers's critique of mysticism, therefore, may be viewed as following a strategy somewhat analogous to what Ricoeur has called the hermeneutics of "sympathetic reenactment" (SE:3ff.). But Jaspers is not as methodologically self-conscious as Ricoeur, and herein lies the primary reason for what I will argue is a cause of inconsistency in Jaspers's understanding of the nature, meaning, and value of mysticism. In saying this, I am not implying that the meaning of mysticism is self-evident or that it is "unconfused," for it is one of the most supremely confusing subjects one can ever explore. I do believe, however, with J. N. Findlay, and against someone like Bertrand Russell (1917:1-32), that "what characterizes myticism is a refusal to accept and use the notions of identity

Alan M. Olson (Ph.D., Boston University) is chairman of the Department of Religion at Boston University. He is the author of Transcendence and Herme- neutics (1979) and of journal articles, the coauthor of The Seeing Eye: Herme- neutic Phenomenology in the Study of Religion (1982), and the editor of Myth, Symbol, and Reality (1980).



252 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

and diversity which ordinary logic applies so confidently, whether in the relation of finite objects to the Absolute or of finite objects to one another" (LM:154). "While the theorems of the propositional calculus can be understood without passion, being adjusted to our normal state of alienation," Findlay goes on to assert, "the theorems of mysticism can

only be understood with passion; one must oneself live through, consum- mate the identity which they postulate" (155).

Jaspers is unable ultimately to "live through" a great deal of the mysticism about which he writes. One of the reasons for Jaspers's resistance in the face of certain types of mysticism (especially the "devotional" forms about which I will speak) may be located in his predilection for the radical worldlessness of certain Buddhist thinkers, such as Nagarjuna, or the radical Transcendence of the "One" in Plotinus which is epekeina in every sense of the word. While Jaspers, in other contexts, vehemently opposes "world-denying, world-negating" formt of mysticism, it is nevertheless this "One" beyond all ciphers-this still center of nirvana which is hongaku with dharma from eternity-which seems to be, for him, the magnetic origin and the goal of transcending-thinking. Indeed, Jaspers's discussion of mysticism may be viewed as a kind of wavering between the two possi- bilities he describes. There are two basic ways of "thinking beyond all ciphers": on the one hand, there is the "meditative transformation of consciousness" and, on the other, "speculative thinking which the intellect performs but cannot fathom" (PFR:276). Ontologically he prefers the worldlessness and the wordlessness of the Buddha and Plotinus; morally he prefers the world-transforming and world-affirming positions of certain Christian mystics such as Eckhart and Cusanus. The reason is simple enough, for by the meditative tradition Jaspers usually has in mind East- ern forms of spirituality, especially Buddhism, where the purest forms of meditation are always "objectless." In Christianity, by contrast, we encounter a highly "objective" meditative-contemplative tradition ultimately focused upon the incarnate Christ. But Jaspers's radical insistence that Transcendence must not be corporealized in any manner and his critique of the more orthodox christological formulations based on revelation and/or theories of instantiation prevent him from being at home in Christian mysticism as such.

In what follows, I try to ascertain more clearly the nature of Jaspers's relation to mysticism by trying to locate what it is about mysticism, in his view, which prevents him from more candid self-identification with mysticism as such. In the first part, I focus on his understanding of mysticism by discussing his views in relation to what I view as the two basic types of mysticism, viz., devotional and speculative. In the second.part, I suggest that his highly suggestive theory of ciphers opens a way to a more productive understanding of mysticism, and that Ricoeur's most recent work in hermeneutics may be viewed both as a response to Jaspers's mystical intent



Olson: Jaspers's Critique 253

and as a far more adequate differentiation of his approach. Finally, I con- clude by indicating that when Jaspers's theory of ciphers is fully developed, as it is in Ricoeur, a great deal of the apparent tension between devotional and speculative forms of mysticism is overcome.

I

While Jaspers's views on mysticism are scattered throughout his works, some of his most sustained treatment (in addition to his exposition of individual mystics in The Great Philosophers) can be found in the mature work Philosophical Faith and Revelation. This work is moti- vated, in large part, not only by Jaspers's desire to indicate the proper place of the language of "faith" in the modern "godless" age of science and technology, but also to indicate how he might himself be located vis- a-vis the religious philosophies with which he has been persistently and sometimes erroneously identified. In this work, Jaspers says that mysticism has to do with the ultimate elucidation of the reality of Transcen- dence "beyond all ciphers." As such, mysticism represents the ultimate stage of "human liberation" through the "transcending-thinking" that characterizes his entire Existenzphilosophie: "The liberation of man pro- ceeds from dark, savage forces to personal gods beyond good and evil to mortal gods, from the gods to the one God, and on to the ultimate Free- dom of recognizing the one personal God as a cipher. We may call this last liberation as the ascent from God to the Godhead, from the ciphers to what makes them speak. It is our liberation from the hobbles with which our own conceptions and thoughts prevent us from reaching the truth that halts all thinking" (284).

This path of ultimate transcending (so obviously parallel to Plato's "transcendence of the cave" or Hegel's dynamic phenomenology of spirit) is authentic, for Jaspers, when it has the following positive consequences: (a) the end of religious exclusivism; (b) the end of God-talk as a form of self-justification in matters of truth and value; and (c) the end of rational- ism, i.e., the identification of Transcendence-Itself (God) and human reason (284-85). In this definition and its consequent conditions, we note several features about Jaspers's understanding of mysticism. First, Jaspers clearly is oriented towards a decidedly speculative, as opposed to a devotional, form of mysticism; that is, mysticism is viewed, by Jaspers as by medieval thinkers such as Bonaventure, as the culmination or "crown" of metaphysics and the fulfillment of self-being. Second, Jaspers does not wish, like Hegel, to render the mysterious "other worldly" essence of mysticism as completely "this worldly" by identifying reason and the Absolute. He insists, like Heidegger, on a kind of "reserve" for the Holy within the domain of ciphers (even though Jaspers's language is largely teleological with respect to the reality and value of this reserve, whereas Heidegger's is




primordialistic). Third, Jaspers always retains a highly humanistic notion of Lebenspraxis as the final test of the truth of mysticism or, for that mat- ter, the truth of any other mode of awareness and knowledge. Jaspers does not, however, develop any kind of axiology to demonstrate the truth of ultimate notions of value, such as can be found, for example, in Scheler or Findlay.

In the remainder of this section, I will address this cluster of issues by discussing further the differences between speculative and devotional forms of mysticism, both formally and in relation to Jaspers's views.

By devotional mysticism, I understand intensive and highly disciplined types of spirituality which have as the object (or objects) and even the end of devotion some thing or entity. Such "things" or phenomena are usually symbols of revelation or manifestation that are officially sanctioned by a religious group or cult; for example, Jesus, the Blessed Virgin, or special saints as depicted in the figurative and iconographic art of Christi- anity; Shiva and Vishnu in Hinduism and the numerous avatars of the latter, especially Krishna; or specific representations of the Buddha in his various moods and functions in Mahayana, especially the Buddha of the Future in Amida or "Pure Land" Buddhism. All of these examples, and so many others, fall very neatly into what the Eastern philosopher would term bhakti yoga, the aim of which is a metamorphosis of the subject by total devotion to, identification with, and transformation through the object of devotion. Evidence of such transformation can be found in St. Paul's Christ mysticism-"It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives through me" and "Have this mind among yourselves that you have through Christ Jesus," etc.; the stigmatic transformation of Saint Francis; the ecstasies of Julian of Norwich, or even the iconic mandala of Cusanus in his famous devotional treatise, The Vision of God.

Speculative mysticism, on the other hand, has to do with transcending through thinking itself: sustained or disciplined thinking about the "unthinkable" Transcendence-Itself before which all thought finally van- ishes. In the West this kind of mysticism has its first definitive form in Plotinus, who devotes his entire life to the cultivation of Plato's dialectic as "the way" to the knowledge of the One. Through dialectic, it is argued, reason has the power to go beyond the contradictions in human experience through or by means of reason's own oppositions, negations, and sublations, to an All-Encompassing Reality utterly free of all depra- vation and deficiency. It is out of Plotinus that a dialectical-speculative metaphysics flows into distinctively Christian forms of mysticism: first, as fused with the narrative-historical images of biblical literature in someone like Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in late-classical, early medieval Christianity, and then into its most sublime examples in German speculative mystics such as Eckhart and Cusanus.

These are precisely the thinkers with whom Jaspers most closely




identifies himself, and in each instance (namely, the Pythagorean- Platonic-Hegelian tradition of logic Russell identifies as responsible for the philosophical ills of the West) we have a conception of a dialectical

logic able to mount up oppositions and paradoxes in consciousness and to steer a course through and beyond them to a vision of the Absolute. But as in the jna-nic traditions of yoga (especially the most radical schools of Buddhism), the Absolute Transcendence of Jaspers cannot be spoken for there is nothing to say. Indeed, for Jaspers, as for Nagarjuna's prijiha- pdramitw, the distinctively authentic feature of transcending in the

ciphers of speculative metaphysics is a "foundering" on the shoals of the

reality which is "as much Being as Nothingness" (PFR:255). Thus, it is not surprising that Jaspers should find Cusanus's notion of

the coincidentia oppositorum so congenial, for just as the lines of infinity are encased within and transcended by that Infinite-Itself beyond all mathematical conceptions of infinity, so also the modes of transcending- thinking, for Jaspers, converge in an Encompassing which contains but is neither exhausted nor diminished by any of them. Because he adheres so

strictly to docta ignorantia, (viz., the strictly negative dialectical notion that "all our knowledge of God is the knowledge of our ignorance of God "), Jaspers finds in the speculative mysticism of Cusanus the foresha-

dowing of his own periechontology, namely, the "basic knowledge" that can be discerned about reality through "being in the situation of possible Existenz" or what he might regard as a kind of prudent mystical sobriety (PFR:202). As Jaspers puts it:

Purely, soberly, simply, Cusanus thinks his way through the world under a speculative empyrean. He does not polemicize against the mystical union that would remove him from the world, but he is factually unready for it. Nor is he ready to think himself into God's nature as if one might set foot there, as if the gulf between the finite and the infinite might be vaulted directly. There is only one possibility of an indirect leap: formal transcending in the pure concepts that rescind their definitions in the coincidentia oppositorum.

Cusanus thinks in a direction where nothing is conceivable, definable, imaginable any more, in the direction of that which really is-and which is nothing as well. (PGR:261)

For Jaspers, then, Cusanus is willing to philosophize from the penulti- mate situation of Kant and not the ultimate situation of either Hegel or revealed theology: "To think one's way through the world under" and not beyond "a speculative empyrean"-this is all the human condition permits.

Thus, there are for Jaspers two fundamentally different kinds of mysticism, just as there are two kinds of metaphysics. On the one hand,




there is a purely "intellectual" form of metaphysics and, on the other hand, an "existential" form (GP:II,5-6). The former has the dubious quality of being a kind of academic sport, whereas the latter has the

religious or near-religious function of being a kind of philosophical ordo salutis culminating in the kinds of transformations or conversions I men- tioned at the beginning of this section. The latter type attempts "to real- ize the meaning of life as a way to Transcendence by our actions in the world, as Existenz in the realm of ambiguous ciphers," whereas the former type "steps out of the world . . . through a meditative ascent to Transcendence" (PFR:355-56).

Ideally, it would seem that the most adequate kind of mystical philosophizing should be a combination of both these types: the austere, potentially worldless mental-physics of jnnic gnosis should be blent with a healthy, practical dose of karmic resolve; and the potential fanati- cism of bhAkti devotion should be neutralized through the self- annihilating teleology of sunyatw. Jaspers himself identifies this paradox as the contradiction inherent to mysticism; for, as he puts it, on the one hand there are the phenomenal "visions" understood to come from the "supersensory" realm whereas, on the other hand, there is unio mystica in which everything, subject and object, self and Divine Other, are "blent into one" (PFR:280). The way to control, if not overcome, this contradiction, according to Jaspers, is through the "disciplined thinking on Being" as in Cusanus.

II

A "disciplined thinking on Being," for Jaspers, is very much bound to his theory of ciphers. But because his theory of ciphers is itself highly enigmatic, some might be prone to question in what sense this kind of thinking is "disciplined." It is of the nature of cipher, for Jaspers, to remain evanescent-"floating" or "hovering," so to speak, and it is impossible, in the final analysis, to contain or account for ciphers by any formal theory of analysis and explanation. The validity of ciphers, he maintains again and again, is for possible Existenz and this alone. Indeed, a formal containment of cipher through some scheme of objectivation is the "death" of the cipher, just as it is the death of Existenz.

The problem with this largely neo-Kantian approach is that it effectively neutralizes the ontological ground mystics presuppose and consequently also what they assert. Here again I think that one must agree with Findlay when he says that, whatever one's personal or philosophical attitude, "mystical moods and persons are above all assertive, and they put something before us as true, as real, whether anyone thinks so or not" (LM:148). Jaspers, however, cannot ultimately uphold this notion because he cannot accept the grounds upon which mystical assertions are




proffered. In each of the speculative mystics named thus far (with the

exception of classical Buddhists such as Ndgdrjuna) we have assertions

regarding an ultimate mystical reality grounded in substantialistic or quasi-substantialistic notions of the soul. Whether in the case of Plotinus (with whom Jaspers probably has more in common than any other thinker since theism, as such, is not an issue), Eckhart, or Cusanus, we find operative notions of anamnesis upon which speculative transcending is based and from which images of the One or the Absolute derive their power. To be sure, Jaspers, perhaps more than any other recent thinker, has done everything possible (through the language of Existenz) to rein- vest the meaning of the self with traditional dignity in a posttraditional world. But a nonsubstantialistic doctrine of the self it remains and hence one fraught with all the ambiguity that characterizes contemporary philosophical anthropology.

In fact, it might be said that the anthropocentrism of Jaspers is the most vexing aspect of his critique of mysticism. For example, Jaspers says that much of the "confusion" surrounding his notion of cipher has to do with the tendency of many (especially in Christianity) to view them as instances of "embodied Transcendence," which, for him, they most emphatically are not (PFR:100). It is rather the reality of "freedom" and its mystery that ultimately underlies the truth of ciphers: "The truth of the cipher . . . depends on whether that moment's decision will be forever acknowledged and accepted as my own, whether I identify with it and renew it in repetition" (107). The truth of ciphers, therefore, cannot be demonstrated either from "below" through a doctrine of the soul, or from "above" through a doctrine of revelation. The only suitable logic of demonstration is the metaxy of possible Existenz in the concrete life situation. Yet this attitude greatly perplexed Bultmann, for it was against Bultmann, in the famous demythologizing debate of the 1950s, that Jaspers seemed to hold out for more than a mere existential reduction of the meaning of ciphers even though he was hard-pressed to account for what that "more" might be./1/ Insisting upon what Peter Berger would term a "rumor of angels" in the mythic-symbolic expressions of religion but being deeply critical of Bultmann's confessional loyalties, Jaspers was charged by Bultmann with clinging to an undifferentiated "magical language" of cipher. And, of course, it was in a similar vein that Ricoeur leveled at Jaspers the charge of a certain "aestheticism" of cipher, of playing court, like Don Juan, to every conceivable symbol system but committing himself to none./2/

Such comments were characteristic of Ricoeur in the earlier days when he was, perhaps, very much under the sway of Barth. And while it may be argued that the religious side of Ricoeur is still conservative, it must also be recognized that Jaspers is a major source of inspiration- and challenge; for Ricoeur's philosophical project of his statement on




Transcendence (in the projected Poetics of the Will, vol. 3 of Philoso-

phie de la volonte) is to be sharper than Jaspers's in Metaphysik, (Philosophie, book 3). Hence, Ricoeur's exceptionally fine work on hermeneutics and the symbolic, metaphoric, and narrative structures of

language and meaning during the past two decades may be viewed, both directly and indirectly, as a continuing attempt to differentiate Jaspers's theory of ciphers in view of this challenge./3/ This attempt is highly manifest in some of Ricoeur's most recent work: first in his insistence upon the uncompromising specificity of religious language and, second, in his attention to ascertaining more precisely how it is that the "symbol gives rise to thought" through a detailed examination of Hegel's understanding of Vorstellung. Through a brief discussion of both these aspects of Ricoeur's work, it may be possible to obtain a closer understanding of Jaspers's theory of ciphers as it relates to his critique of mysticism.

With respect to the "specificity" of religious language,/4/ we see a continuation of the theme introduced with The Symbolism of Evil (1960), namely, that a philosophical-hermeneutical exposition of the meaning of evil must commence, if possible, from a position characterized by the "fullness of language." With this insistence, Ricoeur is also picking up on the work of Jaspers's successor at Heidelberg, Hans-Georg Gadamer; for it is Gadamer who maintains that religious "speaking" or discourse cannot be identified with or split between the domains of "philosophic-scientific" discourse on the one hand and "poetical" discourse on the other. Religious discourse is not merely about the object qua object, nor is it simply the expression of the subject qua subject. It does not have the universal inter- changeability of science, a validity irrespective of location in space and time, nor does it have what Gadamer calls the mode of "anonymous" address characteristic of poetic utterances./5/ To the contrary, religious speaking (especially of the type one associates with the Bible) is homolo- gous in the sense that it is spoken from faith to faith, from witnesses to witnesses or from the "witnesses of witnesses" to those who believe or wish to do so. Thus, religious speaking can be identified very clearly in its "form of address as 'testimony,'" but it can also be identified more univer- sally, Ricoeur points out, as having the quality of "manifestation." Here Ricoeur (out of Jean Nabert) picks up on a theme highly developed in phenomenology of religion (especially van der Leeuw): "In testimony there is an immediacy of the absolute without which there would be nothing to interpret. This immediacy functions as origin, as initium, on this side of which we can go no further. Beginning there, interpretation will be the endless mediation of this immediacy. But without it, interpretation will forever be only an interpretation of interpretation. There is a time when interpretation is the exegesis of one or many testimonies. Testimony is the anagke stenai (fixed necessity) of interpretation. A hermeneutic without testimony is condemned to an infinite regress in a perspectivism




with neither beginning nor end" (HT:4). It goes without saying that Ricoeur's contempt for what Jaspers also

termed "the dead end of interpreting interpretations" is a shared view

regarding our present state of affairs. But how, more precisely, does the "manifestation" or immediacy of the Absolute present to the discourse of

"testimony" take place? Here Ricoeur turns to Hegel (which suggests that his "post-Hegelian return to Kant" is ever more by way of Hegel), since it was Hegel, in Ricoeur's view, who most effectively mapped out a dialectical hermeneutics of Vorstellung which is accurate in relation to the unique case represented by religious discourse./6/ On Ricoeur's view, Vorstell-

ung, in Hegel, should not be characterized as "idea," as in Kant, but very strictly as "figurative" or "picture thinking," i.e., as the imagistic re-

presentation of immediate experience or Anschauung. As such, it is a kind of thinking that is not yet conceptual even though it already harbors within itself the speculative moment. The problem, of course, is that as mythic-symbolic Vorstellungen yield to the speculative moment, that is, to clarification in the life of the concept, there is a progressive loss of the manifestation of immediacy in experience giving rise to the discursive utterances of testimony. Thus, the double-danger implicit in the dialectic of Vorstellung: either (a) the danger of remaining with an undifferentiated experiential "surplus of meaning" or (b) the danger of yielding to Begriff and a progressive loss of immediacy culminating in highly abstract forms of alienation. H6lderlin (as I have argued elsewhere) may be properly viewed as remaining with the bottom side of this dialectic, whereas Hegel exemplifies the top side of this dialectic in extremis./7/

So it is that if we are to fully acknowledge and appreciate the autonomy of religious discourse as a kind of speaking that is neither merely scientific nor merely poetic, but both and more, what is required is what Ricoeur calls depouillement, or a "divestment" of autonomy, especially when highly voluntaristic philosophies of reflection are the bases of adjudicating the truth of mystical assertions. It is a notion very close to Heidegger's views on Gelassenheit, which, as we know, are grounded in the mysticism of Eckhart./8/ Such a position, obviously, strikes rather directly at Jaspers's anthropocentric repudiation of revelation. For without this act of active renunciation, precisely that renunciation which Jaspers finds so unpalatable as a "denial of world," it is impossible in Ricoeur's view to fully appropriate the meaning of those instantiations of the Absolute which may be present in specific ciphers of transcendence, not least in the focal cipher of Christianity, Jesus as the Christ.

III

In this brief essay I have suggested the following regarding Jaspers's relationship to mysticism:




1. Even though Jaspers does not regard himself as being a mystic, and while his philosophizing does not satisfy the conventional criteria as to what constitutes mysticism, the general tenor of his work is mystical throughout. This quality is especially evidenced where Jaspers deals with mysticism as such wherein he follows a hermeneutical strategy somewhat similar to what Ricoeur defines as "sympathetic reenactment."

2. The mystics with whom Jaspers most easily identifies himself are those whom I have termed "speculative" as opposed to "devotional" mystics; that is, Jaspers feels most comfortable with the Plotinian tradition of transcending speculative dialectic (inclusive of such Christian mystics as Eckhart and Cusanus) and is rather ill at ease with devotional types such as Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, or Juan de la Cruz.

3. What distinguishes devotional from speculative mystics within Christianity is a radical incarnationalism in the former as distinct from the primacy of a disincarnate, noetic emphasis in the latter. Of course, it is precisely the incarnationalistic-revelational emphasis within devotional mysticism which provides warrants and sanctions for canonization in the eyes of the church, whereas its lack of emphasis or absence, in the case of the speculative mystic, is the basis of suspicion and even charges of heresy.

4. Jaspers's theory of cipher is both informed by and accommodates the speculative mystic, whereas it tends to exclude or compromise the devotional type. From a theological perspective, Jaspers's theory of cipher may be almost perfectly aligned with post-Kantian moral interpretations of Christology and may be viewed as excluding not only substantial or forensic interpretations of the atonement but also the mythical.

5. One of the major problems, however, with aligning Jaspers with speculative mysticism is that he does not, like Plotinus, have a notion of dialectic that is grounded in the soul; he does not, like Bonaventure, have a conception of speculative metaphysics as "affective rationality" grounded in an emanationalistic exemplarism; he does not, like Eckhart, have a notion of the Godhead grounded primordially in the soul; nor does he have, with Cusanus, a notion of infinity grounded in a "revealed" system of mediation which is avowed unconditionally. As a result, when these antecedent grounding conditions are removed or bracketed, when the ontological or ecclesiological "substance," so to speak, is removed, a great deal of the power implicit in traditional forms of mystical philosophizing is lost. This, of course, is the problem with all modern forms of mysticism or, at least, with those forms that would be both mystical and epistemologically self-critical.

6. Conversely, what Jaspers finds objectionable in Buddhist metaphysics, on the one hand, and in Kant and Hegel, on the other, is a loss of the mystery implicit in the experience of world; in Buddhism, because the consistency of world is annihilated in samAdhi; in Kant because the




numinous is excluded through an uncompromising theory of phenomena; in Hegel, because the numinous is absorbed by a notion of Begriff viewed as one with the Absolute of Vernunft. Consequently, we are left with a theory of ciphers "hovering," as it were, between these two domains of the devotional and the speculative types of mystical philosophizing. It may be said that this is precisely where one would want to remain (Voegelin's philosophy of metaxy being a prime example). But then there is the issue of specificity, namely, what remains of mysticism as such?

7. Therefore, I suggest that, as a critique, Jaspers's treatment of mysticism, while highly sympathetic, is ultimately inconclusive in so far as it is incapable (a) of doing more than describing mysticism or (b) of being incorporated as a historical foundation for this "philosophy of freedom." Indeed, Jaspers leaps over the centuries with very little attention to contex- tual considerations that might modify either his critique or his appropriation of certain mystical notions. Through his theory of ciphers, however, Jaspers has opened a path of understanding which is potentially very productive. One of the primary lines of this productiveness can be located in Paul Ricoeur's continuing work on mythic-symbolic- metaphoric language, the work which has preoccupied him for the past twenty years and is directly inspired by Jaspers's theory of ciphers.

8. Ricoeur's work in this area may be viewed as an attempt to radi- cally differentiate the structure of ciphers in terms both of what they are and of what they mean. Here Ricoeur insists (a) that a unique characteristic of religious discourse and symbolization is "specificity" and a "surplus of meaning" (here agreeing with Gadamer, Heidegger, and Otto). He also insists (b) that the fullest possible appropriation of the meaning of this "specificity" and "surplus" depends upon the "disengagement" or depouillement (following Nabert and, to a degree, also Barth) of the reflective ego and its autonomous claim to authority. Both conditions obviously strike at the idealistic and the voluntaristic aspects of Jaspers's theory of ciphers, but both conditions simultaneously affirm Jaspers's view of Grenzsituationen as being characteristic of all philosophical projects.

9. Ricoeur, by way of Hegel, provides an epistemological structure that accommodates the material and existential dynamics outlined in (8), and with it a way to mediate effectively between the devotional and the speculative types of mysticism present to all religious and philosophical traditions. The key, according to Ricoeur, lies in Hegel's concept of Vorstellung. Vorstellung in Hegel, according to Ricoeur, should not be translated as "eidetic representation," as in Kant, but as "visual" or "picto- rial thinking." As such, Vorstellungen occupy that middle ground between Anschauung and Begriff, that is, between the undifferentiated experience of epiphany or immediate manifestation, and a logical, dogmatic




"ontotheological" clarification of the meaning of experience in the life of the concept. As such, we have a dialectical differentiation of the nature of cipher both from "below," so to speak, and from "above." Ciphers as Vorstellungen owe their semicognitive mysterious "hovering" quality to a dialectic between immediate experience and imagistic representations of this experience; and they owe their cognitive and "moral" quality to a dialectic between imagistic representation and the logic of the concept. Thus Ricoeur locates symbol, with its prelinguistic, presemantic features, in the midst of these first level dialectical interactions, whereas myth (and the metaphoric) is at the second level of these dialectical interactions; for myth and metaphor, Ricoeur insists, are "already in the realm of logos"- myths being an interpretation of the meaning of experience/existence./9/

10. From this perspective (see diagram) we see that what I have identified as "devotional" mysticism is properly placed at the intersection between Anschauung and Vorstellung, whereas speculative mysticism is properly placed between Vorstellung and Begriff. What is critical is a maintenance of the validity of the entire structure, for such a preserva- tion is identical with a phenomenological insistence on the integrity of experience in its fullness. From this perspective we can see complementarity and not contradiction between the devotional and the speculative, between the symbolic and the metaphoric, between the experiential and the notional. While the weakness in the lower level is nondifferentiation, its strength is an experiential surplus. While the strength of the higher level is abstract notional differentiation, its weakness is a progressive distantiation from immediate experience. Indeed, as Ricoeur insists, "the concept is the endless death of the representation" upon which is it parasitical. This is why, Ricoeur continues, any hermeneutics of religious discourse must "keep starting from, and returning to, the moment of immediacy in religion, be it called religious experience, Word-Event, or Kerygmatic moment" (SV:87).

11. Why then, and finally, does this epistemic complementarity so frequently become, in practice, a dichotomy or a "polarity," as Peter Berger has suggested recently, between "interior" and "confrontational" forms of religiousness?/10/ The existential reality of what Ricoeur calls depouillement (and what I have elsewhere developed as "renunciation") plays a critical role: it denies the autonomous ego or will, whereas the tendency of all philosophies of reflection is to claim absolute status even within preacknowledged limits./11/ Such "renunciation" or "disengagement" or "divestment," whatever it be termed, is fundamental to the mystical traditions of both Eastern and Western religions; and, apart from its active deployment, all talk about union with or enlightenment through Absolutes remains empty and spurious. It is precisely such a movement, through renunciation, that is implied in the well-known phrases of Ricoeur and Findlay, namely, the necessity of a "dimming of




reflection and returning to the tragic," and that all "speleological" attempts to elucidate the "furnishings of the cave" through projects of "transcendence" require, in the end, a "return to the cave."/12/ It is

precisely this kind of movement that is required if Jaspers's question "Can the two faiths [philosophical and religious] meet?" is to be answered affirmatively./13/

SCHEMATISM ON MYSTICISM AND LANGUAGE/14/

(Ricoeur) (Jaspers) (Hegel)

Transzendenz

Ideality Limits Begriff (Voluntary) (Conceptual Differentiation)

!

1

Met/aphor Geist i - < [Speculative Mysticism]

Me~aphr•,,,

f de.. /

Myth < - Ciphers < - Weltsein, Vorstellung %

b/

(Imagistic Representation)

SymbolDasein I <

- [Devotional Mysticism]

Obscurity Limits Anschauung (Involuntary) (Experiential Manifestation)

Existenz

NOTES

/1/ See Jaspers's spirited debate with Bultmann (MC).

/2/ See Leonard Ehrlich's development of this objection (72f.).

/3/ I have argued for this connection and extension (TH:156f.).

/4/ See David Pellauer's fine development of this notion in Ricoeur.

/5/ Gadamer has argued this point in various contexts, as has his student, Wolfhart Pannenberg. One of the more compact treatments is the essay "Reli- gious and Poetical Speaking."

/6/ This careful and critical examination of Hegel is important not only




because it elucidates the hermeneutical character of Hegel's philosophy of reli-

gion, but also because it shows how Hegel's position informs that of Ricoeur (SV). /7/ I have developed this in some detail (1982).

/8/ For two exceptionally good studies in this connection see John Caputo and Reinar Schurmann.

/9/ See Ricoeur's succinct treatment of symbol and metaphor (HT).

/10/ This typology and its limitations are worked out very effectively in

Berger.

/11/ See my essay (MR).

/12/ See Ricoeur (CI:304ff.) and Findlay (TC:356ff.).

/13/ This is the title of the final section in Jaspers (PFR).

/14/ This schematism is extrapolated from the "Diagram of Being" in Karl Jaspers (VW:142), with my parallel applications to Ricoeur and to Hegel. The reader may wish to compare this epistemic-linguistic schematism with the chart prepared by Stephen Dunning (405). In Dunning's example we have a schematism organized in the principle of depth rather than height (as I have indicated, especially in relation to Hegel); thus, the metaphoric inversion of Hegel typically asso- ciated with Marx (as the material level) and with Kierkegaard (as the psychological level). Viewing these two schematisms comparatively, we can see the parallel between the emotive-visual immediacy of music and drama, and the reflective- conceptual mediacy of drama and poetry, in Kierkegaard, with what I have des- cribed as the "devotional" and the "speculative" forms of mysticism in Hegel, Jaspers, and Ricoeur respectively. In Hegel the movement of dialectic is very strictly "upward" whereas in Kierkegaard it is "downward." In Jaspers, and even more so in Ricoeur, these dialectical modalities are balanced both materially and formally. What all have in common is a view of the metaxy-to use Voegelin's term out of Plato-as the midpoint of differentiation regarding both noetic height and apeirontic depth with respect to the meaning of Vorstellungen, whether this be the cipher language of Jaspers or mythic-symbolic-metaphoric language as in Ricoeur. Thus construed, the metaxy represents the nodal point of what the medi- evals termed the double dialectic of credo ut intelligam and intelligo ut credam.

REFERENCES

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Caputo, John 1978 The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought. Athens:

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Dunning, Stephen 1981 "The Dialectic of Contradiction in Kierkegaard's Aesthetic

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jaspers's critique of mysticism

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