1. This is a translation of Gustav Richter, Persiens Mystiker Dschelál-eddin Rumi: Eine Stildeutung in drel Vortraegen, Breslau: Frankes Verlag uind Druckerei, Otto Borgmeyer 1933, chapter 2: Ǖber Rumis Lehrgedicht, pp. 27-49. His German translations have been replaced by English equivalents. The work began life as a lecture. All the footnotes are the work of the editor as the original has no references. The English translation was carried out by The Institute of Islamic Studies-London.

2. For an excellent overview of R£m¢, see Franklin Lewis, Rumi, Past and Present, Oxford: Oneworld 2000. On stylistics in his poetry, see Fateme Keshavarz, Reading mystical lyric: The case of Jalal al-Din Rumi, Studies in Comparative Literature, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press 1998. On the structure of the poetry, see J.C. Burgel, "Ecstasy and order: the structural principles in the ghazal poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi," in The heritage of Persian Sufism vol. II, ed. L. Lewisohn, rpt., Oxford: Oneworld 1999, pp. 61-74.

3. Lewis, Rumi, p. 561 says that this is because of the Qur’¡nic style of the text. He quotes Fur£z¡nfar, Shar¦-i mathnaw¢, Tehran: Tehran University Press 1967-69, vol. I, p. ii:

   The Mathnaw¢ is not divided into chapters and sections like other books; it has a style similar to the noble Qur’¡n, in which spiritual insights, articles of belief, the laws and principles of the faith, and exhortations are set forth and mixed together according to divine wisdom. Like the book of creation, it has no particular order.

4. On this important lyricist, see J.T.P. de Bruijn, Of piety and poetry: The interaction of religion and literature in the life and works of °ak¢m San¡’¢ of Ghazna, Leiden: Brill 1984; Anne-Marie Schimmel, Mystical dimensions of Islam, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1975, pp. 301-9.

5. Mathnaw¢-yi ma‘naw¢, ed./tr. R.A. Nicholson, London: Gibb Memorial Trust 1925-40, vol. I, verses 1913-30, modified.

6. On this theme, William Chittick, The Sufi path of love, Albany: State University of New York Press 1983.

7. Mathnaw¢-yi ma‘naw¢, ed./tr. R.A. Nicholson, Vol. I, verses 1951-2011, modified.

8. Mathnaw¢-yi ma‘naw¢, ed./tr. R.A. Nicholson, Vol. I, verses 1947-48, modified.

9. On this metre in Arabic poetry from which it derives, see W. Wright, A grammar of the Arabic language, rpt., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995, vol. II, pp. 366-67.

10. Von der Porten’s free translation of the Mathnaw¢, the text he called the ‘Book of the Reed-pipe’ in reference to the first verse, is Aus dem Rohrfloetenbuch des Scheich Dschelal ed-Din Rumi, Hallerau: J. Hegner 1930.

11. Of course, this is no longer the case.

On the Four Journeys (Ris¡lat ta¦q¢q f¢ l-Asf¡r al-Arba‘a)

Know that the wayfarers (sull¡k) among the mystics (al-‘uraf¡’) and saints (al-awliy¡’) undergo four journeys.
The first journey is from the creation to the Truth (min al-khalq ilá l-°aqq).
The second journey is through the Truth in the Truth (bi l-°aqq f¢ l-°aqq).
The third journey is the opposite of the first because it is from the Truth to creation (min al-°aqq ilá l-khalq).
The fourth journey is the opposite of the second in a sense because it is by the Truth in creation (bi l-°aqq f¢ l-khalq).
I have arranged the order of this book of mine, according to their movement through the (higher) lights and the effects, into four journeys. I have called it the Transcendent Philosophy (al-°ikma al-muta‘¡liya) of the four journeys of the intellect; and I shall pour forth (my words) on my subject with the help of the existent eternally worshipped Truth (al-°aqq al-ma‘b£d al-¥amad al-mawj£d). ¹

Most commentators on this work have begun with the discussion of the meaning of this passage as a way of understanding how the text works and discerning its aims and method. The edition of the work includes the three renown philosophers of the Qajar period, namely, ªq¡ Mu¦ammad Ri¤¡ Qumsheh¢ (d. 1889), M¢rz¡ Mu¦ammad °asan N£r¢ and the most famous of them all Mull¡ H¡d¢ Sabzav¡r¢ (d. 1873). ² The glosses of Qumsheh¢ and Sabzav¡r¢ are eloquent expositions of philosophical inquiry in Sufi language and locate the Sadrian enterprise within the theoretical Sufi framework of the mystic’s path. N£r¢’s glosses, appropriately for a renown logician, are more in keeping with a discursive method of exposition.³

My translation is based on the Arabic text published in a collection of treatises of Sayyid Ab£ l-°asan Raf¢‘¢ called Ghaw¥¢ dar ba¦r-i ma‘rifat or Plunging in the sea of gnosis. ⁴ The eminent contemporary philosopher-mystic of Qum, ªyatull¡h °asan °asanz¡da ªmul¢ transcribed the text. Square brackets indicate the place in the Arabic text. The translation will be in italics, interspersed with my commentary.

The author clearly juxtaposes the multiplicity and spatio-temporal aspects of this phenomenal world of ours with the noetic world of reality that is beyond that is devoid of space and time. The journey of the mystic therefore takes places in that noetic sphere and in that sense is ‘non-locative’. It is the ‘journey of the heart’. ⁵ It is the way of union that the mystic seeks. ⁶ This noetic journey has clear Platonic and Neoplatonic precedents and the premiss that this world of multiplicity is lesser and less perfect than the archetypal noetic world of unity is also a common Platonic assumption. The ability for the soul to ‘doff’ the body and ascend to the realm of the nous and experience beatific vision is similarly assumed. Plotinus articulates this doffing metaphor in Enneads IV.8.1, a text that found its way into the Arabic epitome and paraphrase of Enneads IV-VI better known as the ‘Theologia Aristotelis’ (Ūth£l£j¢y¡). ⁷

Earlier Sufi writings allude to the four journeys. Ibn ‘Arab¢ (d. 1240) in his al-Fut£¦¡t al-Makkiyya refers to them in chapter sixty-nine on the secrets of prayer as the ‘spiritual ascent of man’. ⁸ Although they do not map onto the Sadrian journeys perfectly, they have the same motifs. ⁹ Two of his commentators, however, retain concepts of these journeys that bear a closer resemblance and influence on Mull¡ ¯adr¡. ‘Abd al-Razz¡q K¡sh¡n¢ (d. 1330) in his influential lexicon of Sufi terms, al-I¥§il¡¦¡t al-¯£fiyya, discusses these four journeys.¹⁰  Sabzav¡r¢ is his gloss makes the direct connection and quotes the whole section:

[A] journey is the attention of the heart towards the Truth, the Most High. There are four journeys. The first is the journey to God from the waystations of the soul (man¡zil al-nafs), arriving at the Clear Horizon (al-ufuq al-mub¢n).  ¹¹ This is the culmination of the station of the heart (maq¡m al-qalb) and the beginning of the self-disclosures of the [divine] Names (al-tajalliy¡t al-asm¡’iyya).
The second is the journey in God with regard to His attributes and realising His Names, [ascending] to the Highest Horizon (al-ufuq al-a‘lá) and the culmination of the presence of singularity (al-¦a¤ra al-w¡¦idiyya).
The third is the ascent to Union (al-jam‘) and the presence of unicity (al-¦a¤ra al-a¦adiyya). This is the station of the ‘two bows’ length’, and if he is raised further, then it is the station of ‘or less’  ¹² and that is the culmination of sanctity (al-wil¡ya).
The fourth is the journey from God through God to achieve perfection and it is the station of subsistence after annihilation and the separation after the union (al-farq ba‘d al-jam‘). ¹³

Sayyid °ayder ªmul¢ (d. after 1385), a major conduit for the school of Ibn ‘Arab¢ in Shi‘i intellectual circles, also talks of these four journeys in his magnum opus, J¡mi‘ al-asr¡r^.14 Commentators on the Asf¡r have made the connection with this Sufi tradition. Indeed the connection between philosophy and mysticism in the metaphor of ‘journey’ might even pre-date Mull¡ ¯adr¡ in the work of the sixteenth century thinker, Shams al-D¢n Khafar¢. ¹⁵

One final point concerns the term ‘waystation’ (manzil). This is a technical Sufi term and more generally as Qumsheh¢ asserts a term for a stop along a path, a fleeting moment to pass beyond. ¹⁶

The author juxtaposes the level of unicity (al-a¦adiyya) and singularity (al-w¡¦idiyya), terms used within the contexts of the theory of divine presences (al-¦a¤ar¡t) in the thought of Ibn ‘Arab¢. ¹⁷ Sabzav¡r¢ explains the distinction:

The level of unicity describes the divine essence negated of the divine names and attributes. But the level of singularity describes the divine essence deployed with the divine names and attributes manifest in the permanent archetypes (al-a‘y¡n al-th¡bita) of things. ¹⁸

Two other themes are prominent. First, the Sufi language of stations is used to describe points along the path to God. The names of these stations are standard as used in Sufi manuals such as al-Ris¡la of al-Qushayr¢ (d. 1074). ¹⁹ They also intersect with the cosmology of subtle substances (la§¡’if) or levels of the self from the awareness of the human self ascending up to the True Self who is the One. Sabzav¡r¢ makes this connection explicit in his discussion of the seven subtle substances as stations along the spiritual path. He further connects them to an interpretation of the level of disclosure in the famous light verse of the Qur’¡n 24: 25. ²⁰ Second, yin and yang aspects of God, jal¡l (mysterium tremendum) and jam¡l (mysterium fascinans). are compared. His grace and wrath are juxtaposed. This theology of balance suggests that all contrariety and balance in the cosmos emanates from the ‘tao’ of God’s attributes.²¹

A key feature of mystical language is the use of coincidentia oppositorum, the juxtaposition of paradoxical language, which can clearly be noticed here. Corbin drew attention to its use in Sufism and later Islamic philosophy in Iran. ²²

This is pure self-effacement (al-ma¦w al-ma¦¤) and sheer obliteration (al-§amas al-¥irf) and the culmination of the station of the heart and the beginning of the manifestation of (the station) of the spirit (al-r£¦) in the words of the mystics. Thus he perceives divine providence (al-‘in¡ya al-‘il¡hiyya) and reverts to self-consciousness (al-¥a¦w) after the self-effacement. ²³ He contemplates the creation and the contingent realm but with another eye and a different vision and a contemplation that is unlike the contemplation of the veiled ones. Rather, he contemplates contingent quiddities (al-m¡hiyy¡t al-imk¡niyya) as manifestations of His names and as theophanies of His attributes and reflections of His essence. This is the (third) journey from the Truth to creation. This is the station of sanctity (al-wil¡ya), ²⁴ of authority of deployment (al-ta¥arruf) and of union (jam‘). The contemplation of the creation does not veil the Truth from him, nor does the contemplation of the Truth veil the contemplation of the creation. Rather, he sees unity manifest in multiplicity and multiplicity rolled up in the Unseen Unity.

This is the culmination of the third journey that is the rank of sanctity (al-wil¡ya) and since he is everlasting after becoming annihilated, he has arrived at the station of complete contentment (al-tamk¢n al-t¡mm). ‘His breast has been expanded’  ²⁵ insofar as he is not so immersed in the rules of the realm of [235] multiplicity to neglect the contemplation of pure unity. Rather, he sits between the two limits and is placed in the station of union between annihilation in the very essence of everlasting subsistence and everlasting subsistence in the very essence of annihilation. This is the fourth journey in creation through the Truth.

The key term raised in this section is sanctity (wil¡ya) a key Sufi concept that concerns both spiritual authority and intimacy with the One. K¡sh¡n¢ describes sanctity as the station of annihilation in the One, contentment and intimacy with Him. ²⁶ It is also at this point that ªmul¢ broaches the question current in the school of Ibn ‘Arab¢ concerning the seal of sanctity and the definition of the Pole of reality with specific individuals. ²⁷ The seal is the Perfect Man (al-ins¡n al-k¡mil), the true vicegerent of God on earth.

Prophecy establishes the criterion both of the Law and distinction between good and evil. As such, ªmul¢ describes the culmination of the fourth journey as the station of the criterion and of the division. ²⁸

The first journey therefore concerns onto-theology or rather provides both a semantics and an adequate metaphysics for sound ‘God-talk’. Thus appropriately both ontological and cosmological proofs for the existence of God are first expounded here.²⁹

The mystics who have completed the four journeys are like prophets because they have seen the Truth and know the end of man, the return to the One. Thus they are best equipped to engage in moral exhortation and commanding the good. ³⁰ Islamic philosophers have held that the perfection of philosophy is prophecy. ³¹ The enlightened philosopher is in that sense like a prophet because he knows reality but lives in this world. He thus has responsibilities with respect to his fellow man and should concern himself with the organisation of society and social relationships. The need for prophecy in this sense always remains and is a function carried out often by a saint. The legislative function as such of prophecy, however, remains sealed and completed with the Prophet of Islam. The culmination of the journeys of the mystic and the philosopher lies in this world, in the ethics and politics of this world and in striving to achieve spiritual success in thus world by recognising the underlying unity in the cosmos that reflects and pays homage to the unity of God.

1. Mull¡ ¯adr¡, al-°ikma al-muta‘¡liya f¢ l-Asf¡r al-‘aqliyya al-arba‘a, eds. R. Lu§f¢ et al, 3^rd edn., Beirut: D¡r i¦y¡’ al-tur¡th al-‘arab¢ 1981, vol. I, p. 13.

2. Mull¡ ¯adr¡, al-Asf¡r, vol. I, pp. 13-18.

3. The only scholar, to my knowledge, who has considers these glosses is Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ¯adr al-D¢n Sh¢r¡z¢ and his transcendent theosophy, Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy 1977, pp. 57-61.

4. Sayyid Ab£ l-°asan Raf¢‘¢ Qazv¢n¢, Ghaw¥¢ dar ba¦r-i ma‘rifat, Tehran: Intish¡r¡t-i Isl¡m 1376 shams¢, pp. 232-36.

5. Cf. ‘Al¢ al-Jurj¡n¢, Kit¡b al-ta‘r¢f¡t, ed. A. Sprenger, rpt. Beirut: Maktabat Lubn¡n 1969, p. 124; J.W. Morris, "‘He moves you through the land and sea…’" in The Journey of the Heart, ed. J. Mercer, Oxford: Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society 1996, pp. 41-69.

6. R.C. Zaehner, Mysticism sacred and profane, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1957, pp. 87, 150ff.

7. Afl£§¢n ‘ind al-‘arab: Ūth£l£j¢y¡, ed. ‘A. Badaw¢, rpt, Qum: Intish¡r¡t- B¢d¡r 1413 qamar¢, p. 22; tr. G. Lewis in Plotini Opera, eds. P. Henry & H. Schwyzer, Brussels: Desclée de Brouwer 1951-73, vol. II, p. 225. For discussion, see Fritz Zimmermann, "The origins of the Theology of Aristotle," in Pseudo-Aristotle in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Kraye et al, London: The Warburg Institute 1986, pp. 138-39. On the doffing metaphor as the quest for the true self, see Lloyd Gerson, Plotinus, London: Routledge 1994, p. 271. Instances of the use of this metaphor and quotation include Ibn ‘Arab¢, al-Fut£¦¡t al-Makkiyya, ed. O. Yahia, Cairo: IFAO 1972, vol. II, p. 219.

8. Cf. Morris, " ‘He moves you…’" p. 59.

9. In another work consonant with his monism, he insists that there are only three journeys: from Him (min ‘indihi), to Him (ilayhi) and in Him (f¢hi). See Ibn ‘Arab¢, Kit¡b al-isf¡r ‘an nat¡’ij al-asf¡r in Ras¡’il, rpt., Beirut: D¡r ¯¡dir 1997, p. 457.

10. Q¡sh¡n¢ (sic!), al-I¥§il¡¦¡t al-¯£fiyya, ed. A. Sprenger, rpt. with tr. N. Safwat as A glossary of Sufi technical terms, London: The Octagon Press 1991, p. 87 (Arabic), p. 62 (English).

11. A reference to al-Qur’¡n al-Najm (The Star) 53: 7.

12. These two terms refer to al-Qur’¡n al-Najm (The Star) 53: 8.

13. Mull¡ ¯adr¡, al-Asf¡r, vol. I, p. 18.

14. ªmul¢, J¡mi‘ al-asr¡r, eds. H. Corbin & O. Yahia, Tehran: Institut Franco-Iranien 1969, pp. 147, 339-40, 494, 402.

15. Referring to a manuscript in Tehran University Central Library 2401/2 mentioned by D¡nishpazh£h, Fihrist-i nushka-h¡-yi kha§§¢ dar Kit¡bkh¡na-yi markaz¢-yi D¡nishg¡h-i Tehran, Tehran: Tehran University Press 1339- shams¢, vol. IX, pp. 1012-13.

16. Mull¡ ¯adr¡, al-Asf¡r, vol. I, p. 13.

17. Cf. W. Chittick, The Sufi path of Knowledge: Ibn ‘Arab¢’s metaphysics of imagination, Albany: State University of New York Press 1989, pp. 5, 122, 185, 204.

18. Mull¡ ¯adr¡, al-Asf¡r, vol. I, p. 18.

19. Al-Qushayr¢, al-Ris¡la, ed. ‘A. Ma¦m£d, Cairo: D¡r al-ma‘¡rif n.d., vol. I, pp. 153-82.

20. Mull¡ ¯adr¡, al-Asf¡r, vol. I, p. 18. On subtle substances, see Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical dimensions of Islam, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1975, pp. 174, 389.

21. See the excellent discussion in Sachiko Murata, The Tao of Islam, Albany: State University of New York Press 1993.

22. Cf. Steven Wasserstrom, Religion after religion, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1999, pp. 66ff; M. Sells, Mystical languages of Unsaying, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1994, p. 21.

23. Cf. Qumsheh¢ in Mull¡ ¯adr¡, al-Asf¡r, vol. I, p. 14.

24. ªmul¢, J¡mi‘ al-asr¡r, p. 394 considers sanctity to begin at the culmination of the first journey since one has traversed the waystations and stages and become annihilated in the Truth.

25. Reference to al-Qur’¡n al-Inshir¡¦ (Expansion) 94: 1.

26. K¡sh¡n¢, I¥§il¡¦¡t, p. 23 (Arabic), 24 (English).

27. ªmul¢, J¡mi‘ al-asr¡r, p. 402.

28. ªmul¢, J¡mi‘ al-asr¡r, p. 546.

29. Mull¡ ¯adr¡, al-Asf¡r, vol. I, pp. 92ff.

30. Cf. Qumsheh¢ in Mull¡ ¯adr¡, al-Asf¡r, vol. I, p. 16.

31. Cf. D. Black, "al-F¡r¡b¢," in History of Islamic Philosophy, eds. S.H. Nasr & O. Leaman, London: Routledge 1996, vol. I, pp. 190-92.

Eckhart, Luther, and the Buddha in the Marketplace: Heidegger's Great Synthesis of the Mystical and the Existential

Jonathan Weidenbaum, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA

Abstract

Heidegger’s existentialist phenomenology is one of the key contributions to twentieth century philosophy. He uses the concept of an Augustinian ‘inner man’ to convey a situated and embodied account of human experience that is later described by phenomenologists and existentialists such as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. The author shows show how Heidegger borrows one understanding of human experience from the scholastic and mystical tradition (that of self-transcendence), another understanding from the existential and anti-mystical tradition of Luther and Kierkegaard (that of intense self-individuation), and synthesizes these into a single and coherent picture of existence; a vision far more inclusive and far-reaching than the purely existentialist philosophies of his supposed successors. He suggests that such a synthesis has been prefigured several times in the history of the West, though often incompletely, and that Heidegger has achieved an adequate and well-grounded presentation of this synthesis for the modern era

Without this theological background, I would never have come onto the path of thinking. ²

Heidegger distills from these traditions a specific ontological core, a certain structure for conceiving the nature of the self and its comportment to reality as a whole. His personal and intellectual relationship to theology, from his seminary training through his interest in early Christianity and so on, has already been examined as a subject in its own right. ³ It is not the purpose of this essay to explore a territory which has already been so well traversed, but to shed light on a specific contribution that Heidegger’s philosophy offers to the ontology of selfhood, ontology in general, and, perhaps, the philosophy of religion. This synthesis of the mystical and the existential in Heidegger’s thought has been previously overlooked, barely noticed, or outright denied. Indeed, Kiesel suggests that Heidegger never accomplishes it. ⁴ I argue that he does.

This is the place of the infinite spirit;
achieving it, one is freed from delusion;
abiding in it even at the time of death;
one finds the pure calm of infinity.

Bhagavad-Gita.⁵

It comes as no surprise that the image of the chariot with its corresponding symbolism is found in the writings of Plato, for a similar worldview stands at the heart of the Near East as it does the East. The soul may either identify with its worldly needs and thus disperse itself over the flux of sense experience, or it may immerse itself within the eternal and unchanging principle behind appearances. This metaphysical ethics soon spread to the West and remained vividly present throughout the entirety of medieval intellectual history. From Augustine and Anselm through the mystics of the fourteenth century, philosophical reason was still far from degenerating into a mere tool for calculative thinking as it would during the course of modern philosophy. Heidegger is therefore correct in stressing the commonalities between scholasticism and mysticism, for the mystic just actualizes in life what the philosopher discovers in thought: that the true goal of reason is a ‘transcendent primal relationship of the soul to God’, wherein the self is finally released from its infatuation with particular beings to stand in the presence of Being itself. ⁶

Heidegger originally looked to scholastic philosophy and mysticism for a fresh perspective upon the nature of intentionality, particularly with the intent of weaning from the medieval tradition a reconciliation of subject and object, where the intentional act, or directedness of consciousness somehow bridges the gap between the perceiving mind and perceived object without reducing the latter to the former. From an early work on Duns Scotus to his course on the Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism, Heidegger hoped such research would lead to the establishment of a deeper metaphysics free from the objectifying tendencies of traditional metaphysics and epistemology. ⁷ To help accomplish this task, the living side of the medieval world-view would have to be placed over the dogmatic side, and a mysticism of living experience preferred over the more academic and scholarly work of the philosophers. ⁸ While Heidegger planned to use the work of the German mystic Meister Eckhart for this early project, his intellectual preoccupation with medieval thought was soon replaced with a passion for the tenets of early Christianity and Luther. However, the Neoplatonic mysticism of Eckhart would never leave Heidegger’s interest completely. Perpetually lurking beneath the surface of his philosophy throughout each stage, Eckhart’s mysticism would re-emerge most visibly in the essays of his later work. Caputo claims Heidegger actually makes reference to Eckhart in What is Metaphysics? and What is Called Thinking?. ⁹

‘The man of eternal renunciation...’ Krishna instructs Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, ‘...is one who neither hates or desires; beyond dualities, he is easily freed from bondage.’ ¹⁰ In bondage to its worldly wants and desires, the self faces an environment of objects and entities to be coveted, ignored or feared. Let the self assert complete dominion over the world leaving nothing for it to fear, it remains a victim to its own need for control like a petty tyrant in a small country. Thus tightening its own boundaries, the self alienates itself from the ground of its own being in which no such borders exist and all dualities like that of ego and other have yet to arise. This primal condition, the ‘still desert’ of the soul, is available only to the self who has renounced the need for asserting itself over the world. The experience of selflessness then brings with it an understanding of reality in which the world is no longer a mere collection of things to be used or conquered.

Great mystics from different cultures and languages have often invented their own unique terms for this principle of renunciation. Eckhart's own notion of Gelassenheit, or detachment, has made such a powerful mark on the German language that a philosopher living six hundred years later would feel compelled to employ the very same term, a philosopher well-known for coining his own words to express his thoughts. Then again, part of Heidegger’s originality with language consisted not so much of coining new words but of tracing key terms back to their original meaning. The one addition that Heidegger would contribute to the concept of Gelassenheit after all was the idea that to free oneself from attachment to the ‘public superficies of existence’ is to allow one to tap into historical possibilities of existing, possibilities long since forgotten. ¹¹ The historical possibility in this instance is the Contemplative belief that truth enters the soul of one who has renounced the self to ‘become a nothingness’. ¹²

The activity of intellectual discrimination is suspended along with the will to master in the practice of Gelassenheit. Our tendency to neutralize the richness of existence by categorizing it into small conceptual boxes has proven just as vexing as the need to conquer it; hence the Contemplatives of the Middle Ages emphasized the activity of ‘unknowing’ at least as much as ascetic self-renunciation. ¹³ Heidegger likewise warned of the forgetting of Being for the acknowledgment of only particular beings. The danger, here, is not merely the dicing of the world into units for our material utilization, but the sectioning off of reality for the numerous intellectual sub-disciplines which typically make up the sciences and humanities. And it is not science and technology themselves which have ever been guilty (Heidegger is not asking us to live in caves), but the taking of these regions of inquiry as the most basic understanding of existence. As a corrective to this, and in the manner of mystical traditions spanning from monastic Contemplation to Taoism, Heidegger prescribes the placing of one’s mind and volition in abeyance in order to allow uncategorized Being itself to enter our view. Like the Contemplative view that the unblemished truth is received only by those divested of self, Heidegger continually insists that it is the contingent and groundless nature of human existence, which allows Being to show itself in the first place. Human existence, as a project continually pitted over its possibilities, is not so much a thing at all, but an event; a stretch of open space or ‘clearing’ by which the totality of Being is made visible.

The whole universe is pervaded by my unmanifest form; all creatures exist in me, but I do not exist in them. ¹⁴

He who sees me everywhere and sees everything in me will not be lost to me, and I will not be lost to him. ¹⁵

While the Absolute is not exhausted or identified with any particular thing, everything manifests the Absolute to the one who perceives the world in the right way. For the absolute, as no particular thing, is everything, ‘...being, nonbeing, and beyond’.¹⁶

Such a panentheistic conception of deity is so removed from the transcendent God of traditional theism, that medieval mystics like Eckhart have typically felt the need to distinguish between ‘God’ on the one hand and the true God or Godhead on the other. The former is the prime mover or first cause of the theologians and scholars, the God who hangs over and above creation like a silver ball and sends out rewards and punishments to the earth below. God’s most naked being, however, the Godhead of the mystics, is less of a personal God than an impartial ground of all being, the field and primordial unity from which all things derive their source and existence. In the true spirit of the Contemplative tradition, Eckhart asks us to unknow the transcendent God in order to prepare ourselves for the ‘eternal abyss of divine being’, the God beyond words. ¹⁷ Like Brahma, the Godhead is no particular thing, not even the greatest of all things or ‘that-which-nothing-greater-than-can-be-conceived’.¹⁸

does not remain the indeterminate opposite of beings but reveals itself as belonging to the Being of beings. ¹⁹

nearer to man then every being, be it a rock, a beast, a work of art, a machine, be it an angel or God. ²⁰

Heidegger alerts us to the prejudice of treating Being as simply the ‘most universal concept’ superimposed upon the data of experience in an intellectual fashion; for it is because Being is the very medium in which we actually live that it first appears to us as so conceptual and arcane. 21 It is therefore instructive to see how Heidegger’s unique rediscovery of Being finds expression among the more literary existentialists, philosophers who emphasize the concrete through particularized characters and realistic settings. Sartre here speaks through the mouth of his protagonist in Nausea:

Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of ‘existence’. I was like the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their spring finery. I said, like them, "The ocean is green; that white speck up there is a seagull," but I didn’t feel that it existed or that the seagull was an ‘existing seagull’; usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it.

...If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form which was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. ²²

Where the hero of Sartre’s novel reacts to the empty nature of the self and the inescapable presence of Being with confusion and disgust, Heidegger sees in these things the source of all value and meaning. Heidegger presents in his own peculiar way the same principles heralded by the world's mystical traditions. First, that one of the pinnacle moments of human existence is to serve as an empty container or open window through which an appropriation with a reality greater than ourselves is made possible. Second, that the reality to be encountered is no existing thing at all, but the ground and plenum of all existence and non-existence; that out of which all things, including ourselves, are nothing but transient parts. To debate whether Heidegger’s thought can be likened to mysticism in actual content or structure only is beside the point; that the secular writings of a contemporary thinker can allude to the very same things described by the mystics serves as a wonderful testimony to the truths spoken about by both. ²³ In fact, it is Heidegger’s fresh and non-traditional style of philosophizing, which enables him to capture both principles in one elegant expression: ‘Man is the shepherd of Being’. ²⁴

There seems to be the same difference between hell, purgatory, and heaven as between despair, uncertainty, and assurance. ²⁵

Luther, Thesis Sixteen

Enter Luther. Though his well-known Ninety-Five Theses is little more than a protest against a specific church practice (the sale of indulgences), thesis number sixteen embodies the very shift of focus Luther would bring to the development of religion and culture in the West, namely the move from cosmology to phenomenology, from abstract speculation concerning the nature of reality to a psychology of the spiritual life. In contrast to the systematic and integrated metaphysics of a Thomas Aquinas or a Meister Eckhart, Luther’s ‘anthropocentric theology’ ²⁶  remains centered upon the self as it actually exists: as a kind of desperate tightrope walk over the possibility of infinite condemnation on the one hand and that of infinite salvation on the other. Luther’s challenge to the philosophical and mystical legacies of the Middle Ages then contains both principles of the existential turn in world culture: the stress on stark individuation in opposition to the immersion of the self under a larger envelope of significance, and the self's continued acceptance and even will-full affirmation of its perpetually incompleted and ungrounded nature.

Luther’s theological revolution did not occur in a vacuum; Bainton, in fact, labels Luther's thought as ‘the theology of Paul heightened, intensified, and clarified’. ²⁷ It is this reinvigorated Pauline theology which set the stage for the ‘inner-mind’ of Luther and greatest of the existentialists, Soren Kierkegaard, as well as the foundation for the Neo-orthodox theology of the twentieth century (Barth, Brunner, Niebuhr...etc.). It is in this last movement in which some of the themes of the previous thinkers find their most explicit formulation: that the individual must shipwreck his/her own efforts to establish the meaning of their life, and that the individual must enter alone into a spiritual crisis through which he becomes a new person. This is an experiential philosophy quite different then that of the mystics; for the pantheistic and Neoplatonic conception of reality oversteps the great divide between the transcendence of God and the finitude of man so necessary for the violence and rigor of true faith. There is a ‘Basic opposition’, explains Emil Brunner, ‘between the Biblical and the idealist, pantheist, and mystical thought concerning God’^.28

It is this finite, creaturely understanding of man found in the Bible which Heidegger found so useful for a phenomenology of lived experience. His interest in religion thus moved from Eckhart and medieval philosophy to Paul and early Christianity (with the influence of the historicist philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey). Heidegger’s obsession with Paul is evident in his Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion course, and his subsequent interest in Luther is found in his Augustine and Neoplatonism course in which Luther’s theology is employed as a corrective to Augustine’s Neoplatonic influence. ²⁹ Heidegger's reading of Kierkegaard would play an unparalleled role in Being and Time, and his infatuation with this brand of theology was most evident throughout his extensive work with Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich at Marburg.

We have seen that the ecstatic self is the one who has escaped the narrow boundaries of the ego, the one who has left behind the need to maintain an identity and preserve it through a world, which stands opposite to it. We have also seen that this state of selflessness is accompanied by an understanding of things as parts of an undifferentiated whole, an Ultimate beyond dualities. Such a vision of reality is the goal of intellectual mysticism as well as religious mysticism, the practice of philosophical idealism and Contemplative piety alike. ‘The systematic Idea,’ says Kierkegaard, ‘is the identity of subject and object, the unity of thought and being’. ³⁰ Both pantheism and philosophical schematization attempt to swallow the individual into a closed system, an arrangement with nothing left out, ‘not even such a little minikin as the existing Herr Professor who writes the system’. ³¹ But concrete existence, for Kierkegaard, means the facing of our future possibilities. Human life is essentially an open-ended affair, never to be understood in a closed system unless in a joke only. The person who would attempt to incorporate the existing person in the system, be it the dialectical system of Hegel or the acosmistic system of the Vedas, is seen by Kierkegaard as similar to the man who would build a great palace and yet live in a doghouse next door. ³² Mysticism is therefore to be counted alongside Idealism as another way we ignore our existence, a way we dodge the passion and personal involvement which are the true hallmarks of the religious life, what in fact, for Kierkegaard, constitutes the very definition of spiritlessness.

To distance ourselves from our first person perspective on reality is to make no sense of the passion and commitment required for authentic living. A genuine relationship, whether to God, a work of art, or another human being, requires a flesh and blood I to respond to a Thou, since a disembodied and undiscriminating love for everyone is really a love for no-one at all. This is why a social existentialist like Buber warns us against a mysticism which would dissolve the I into the Thou, for it was with his whole being with which Job, the great fore-father of existentialism, brought himself before God in hope and anguish. ³³ A true ethics, certainly an existentialist ethics, is simply impossible without the total person.

Heidegger never formulated an explicit ethics; his philosophical task from the beginning to the end of his career was devoted to the knowledge of Being. Nevertheless, Being for Heidegger is only known through the entity in whom the question is made possible; it is an existing, concernful creature whose own life is at issue for itself and whose existence is found inseparable from a culture and environment (without being reducible to either). Here we have come as far from the armchair metaphysics of traditional philosophy as possible, for the true nature of objects, world, time, and history, are known in the third person in their derivative form only. This early and most influential of Heidegger’s attempts to uncover the nature of Being begins with the context in which Being is first made intelligible, namely through a finite being who projects itself into the future while inheriting a past, who either succumbs or transcends the status-quo of the herd, and who either flees or bravely anticipates its own death. The methodology of Being and Time thus consists of bottom-up approach in which the experiential structures of the individual are of primary concern, for this gritty phenomenology of human existence constitutes the window through which Being can appear. Even before the writing of Being and Time, it was on these grounds that Heidegger criticized Rudolf Otto’s Idea of the Holy, a popular study of the mystical experience. Heidegger claims that Otto’s singling out of the numinous, or the non-rational character of the holy over and above its moral elements, is a metaphysical distinction unrooted from the personal and historical phenomenology of the individual. ³⁴

There is a speech given at the end of Bergman’s Winter Light to the distraught priest who serves as the film’s protagonist. In this second of the supposed ‘silence of God’ film trilogy, a minor character recounts the passion and suffering of Christ to help place the priest’s crisis of faith into perspective. ³⁵ Christ’s physical pain during the crucifixion, explains the character, was short. The real pain was the moment of extreme alienation and loneliness experienced by Christ on the cross, the feeling of being deserted by both his disciples and God, and the prospect that all of his life's work and martyrdom had been in vain. This was Christ's darkest moment, where the Gospels record his famous utterance: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ ³⁶ The gravity of this dialogue is accentuated visually with a carving of the tormented Christ hanging over the altar, a symbolic portrait of the priest's own state of desperation.

Central to genuine spiritual existence for Luther is an inner trial called Anfechtung; the utter despair of the self in its alienation from God, the mood of living precariously without the certainty of redemption. ³⁷ Far from the mystic who rests absorbed and completed within the Absolute like a child in its womb, it is in our identification with the suffering Christ where we are finally vindicated before God. An adherent of Luther's ‘theology of the cross’ may then state with Kierkegaard that the greater the anxiety ‘the greater is the man’. Anxiety is the yoke of authentic living, the terrible freedom faced by the self who accepts itself as it really is: a project pitted over its future possibilities, the highest of which is the leap of faith in which its own efforts to justify its existence are crushed. ³⁸ This dying and rebirth of the ego, inner movements of the self which parallel the passion and resurrection of Christ, is a process to be renewed without end. Indeed, Kierkegaard compares this highest possibility of human existence to the repetitive strokes of a swimmer or the strides of a dancer. ³⁹ The stirring last words of Winter Light are spoken as our troubled priest turns to face his congregation: ‘Holy, holy holy Lord of Hosts...’ One gets the sense that this is an affirmation he will need to relive throughout the course of his life.

The writings of Kierkegaard are replete with rich depictions of personality-types who run from this uncomfortable condition of genuine selfhood. Instead of taking will-full responsibility over the contingent and open-ended nature of experience, the majority of the human race attempts to escape themselves for some kind of universal existence, perhaps an objectified social role, or the basking in some pantheistic conception of deity or Hegelian Absolute Spirit. ⁴⁰ This was perhaps the thinking of Paul whose admonition for the early Christian community to await the Parousia or Day of Judgment was designed to shake the early Christians away from just this sense of security and complacency. The second coming, Paul believes, will inevitably catch us by surprise, for ‘...the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night’. ⁴¹ Paul thus adds a strong temporal element to the role of anxiety in the spiritual life, a futural, anticipatory one in particular. This kairological ⁴² character of lived time plays an unparalleled role in Being and Time.

It is predominately in Being and Time in which Heidegger would synthesize most all of the themes mentioned above, though purifying them from any explicitly theological content. Human existence, when fully actualized, is an anxious and future-oriented affair, a resolute acceptance of mortality and the fleeting nature of one’s life, along with a connection and responsibility to a history and a generation. When approached in an intimate sense as a possibility, which can occur at any time, death is a frightening and unsettling thing. The masses of people try to sidestep the uncomfortable awareness of their own contingency by throwing themselves into a shallow and public existence. Here, the gossip and distraction of everyday life is used to achieve a safe state of selfless anonymity in which the personal implications of death, guilt, and commitment are never experienced. In an interesting but rare display of his religious influences, Heidegger labels this latter possibility of human existence fallenness, and the switch to the former more resolute and kairological possibility, Augenblick or ‘the moment of vision’, an open reference to Kierkegaard. ⁴³

Nowhere in any of Heidegger’s works is there a description of a state quite like that of the completion of the soul in mystical union. In Being and Time, Dasein, as existing being-in-the-world, is always incomplete, always lacking and striving. If it were to gain the completion in which mystical union consists, it would no longer be Dasein, would no longer be there (see SZ, 236). In fact, in mystical union, ‘human being’ is no longer there and so such union is often described as a form of death, although this death is supposed to equal absolute fulfillment, not the end, in the sense of cutting off, of possibility. If such death dies into any kind of life, it then cannot be the life of this world, since absolute fulfillment cannot belong to being-in-the-world. ⁴⁴

It is telling that a few of the existentialists who have built off of Heidegger's work were outright atheists. Sartre for instance held God to be a contradiction, the impossible goal of a consciousness, which yearns to discover a secure foundation for itself while simultaneously preserving its own freedom. But consciousness is doomed to be free, a perpetual state of becoming which can never be reconciled with a stable ground of any kind without its free and project-like character then congealing and collapsing into a static mass or finished set of meaning. For Sartre, there is the density and meaninglessness of Being on the one hand, the uprooted and meaning-seeking nature of consciousness on the other, and nothing in-between. Man is a ‘useless passion’, and to introduce any Absolute whatsoever into the picture would kill the ambiguous and open-ended nature of the human condition. ⁴⁵

Bare-chested and bare-footed, he comes out into the market-place;
Daubed with mud and ashes, how broadly he smile!
There is no need for the miraculous power of the gods,
For he touches, and lo! the dead trees are in bloom.

Kaku-an.⁴⁶

Carrying a gourd he goes out into the market, leaning against a staff he comes home. He is found in company with wine-bibbers and butchers, he and they are all converted into Buddhas. ⁴⁷

And whoever truly possesses God in the right way, possesses him in all places: on the street, in any company, as well as in a church or a remote place or in their cell. ⁴⁸

This projection and lift of the self out of Being creates an expanse or stretch of non-being through which Being can surface. There is then a hole created in the distancing of the self from its base, a void or nothingness, which parallels the nothingness of Being itself (since Being is not any particular being). ⁵⁰ Nothingness, for Heidegger, is then an essential part of both: the open and transcending nature of the self through which Being is made manifest, and the very transcendental and non-objectifiable reality of Being. We are a free and existing creation standing out of our ground in something greater than ourselves, a situation in which neither self nor ground precludes the existence of the other. Sartre is therefore wrong. The self in its search for an Absolute in no way seeks to mediate the risk and freedom of living, nor is there a contradiction between these things and our inherence in Being. In the words of Alan Watts, the inconceivable is ‘not so much the abyss into which we are falling; it is rather that out of which we act and live, think and feel’. ⁵¹ Kierkegaard’s complaints about pantheistic-style systems are no longer a worry, since the ground does not at all swallow up the self but instead presents it with a measure of buoyancy and support (something not entirely different from Kierkegaard’s own notion of personal salvation). Buber’s complaints about mysticism also have no bearing here, since there is a flesh and blood ‘I’ to relate to a ‘Thou’ after all.

Intimately related to the nothing, the experience of angst is another connection between the mystical and existential sides of Heidegger’s synthesis. On the one hand, anxiety reveals the decisive and insecure nature of genuine living; the experience of the self who retrieves his or her possibilities from the complacency and safety of the herd, and who faces his or her mortality in a state of fortitude and responsibility. On the other hand, anxiety, as that which reveals the groundless nature of our being, is the mood from which we attempt to flee by running to the world for support. But just as anxiety is connected to the center of our existence and not to anything in the world, such attempts are fruitless. Our hold on the things of the world then begins to ‘slip away’, ⁵² stranding us before the naked and inexpressible presence of Being which hangs, dreamlike, as no particular being at all. It is helpful here to recall Holden Caulfield’s breakdown in the Catcher in the Rye, whose frustrations climax in his hallucination of falling through a sidewalk. When his tenacious attempts to cling on to reality finally collapse, he experiences not the chaos of insanity but sheer wonder at existence, awe at something as unimportant and nonsensical as the sight of his little sister revolving around a carousel. The impression of reverence and amazement that anything is at all and is not completely nothing; this is the experience from which, according to Heidegger, true metaphysics begins. ⁵³

Heidegger’s use of things like mood and emotion as types of knowledge has already been mentioned in section I. But now we finally know why. Being is not something that stands opposed to us like the conservative God of the neo-orthodox theologians, but is instead the foundation from which we arise like a spark from a fire. But Being is not something we then automatically ‘have’. As the very medium of our existence, Being is closer to us than we are to ourselves, yet "the near remains farthest from man". ⁵⁴ And it remains farthest from ourselves not only by way of our need to categorize and manipulate, but in our tendency to avoid our own life extremities. The alternative to this, also mentioned earlier, is the more genuine but dreadful form of living in which we freely take up our personal and cultural history while anticipating death. This individualized and unmediated acceptance of our freedom and finitude cleaves us away from the petty occupations of the present by pointing us toward the future and adjoining us with the past. Our existence thus has a stretched quality, and it is this fundamentally lived and futural form of temporality through which Being itself is brought to light. The point is that in genuine existence we become transparent to Being; that is, we have the ability to actualize the ground through our life in the way a glass of water allows itself to be permeated through and through by a colored dye. A shallow, distracted existence conceals our ground in Being. A genuine, resolute existence serves as its conduit.

The self as a finite project standing out of its ground in Being and as either transparent or opaque to this ground is the one picture running consistently throughout Heidegger’s philosophical career. A large part of the Kehre or ‘turn’ between the early and later Heidegger consists of a change of perspective on this same picture. The Heidegger of Being and Time uses human existence as the vantage point for understanding Being, and the later Heidegger looks at Being more directly; seeing human existence as the window supplied by Being in order to make itself known. ⁵⁵ Being is truly the most fundamental theme on both sides of the Kehre, and human existence is seen equally on both sides as the project whose activities and ways of life either help or hinder its unfolding into view. This is Heidegger’s great synthesis of the mystical and the existential.

This synthesis, as a true synthesis, incorporates the essential and defining feature of both ontologies. It is notable that the existentialist wing of Heidegger’s synthesis goes even further than the moment of return in traditional mysticism. While the Buddhist saint and Christian contemplative carry on with their existence even while reconciled with the Absolute or God-head, nowhere in the literature of either form of mysticism is there the same importance placed upon the contingent and creaturely qualities of that which stands on the hither side of the appropriation. And certainly is there nothing near the investigation Heidegger presents into the earthbound nature of our existence; for the Heideggarian self is essentially strewn across an environment of equipmental and social artifacts, and partially defined by this environment and its history. ⁵⁶ This is an investigation conducted with such precision that it remains one of the most respected influences on practically every scientific and philosophical inquiry into the situated and embodied nature of the human self; from the ‘existentialist phenomenology’ of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, to contemporary work in psychology and cognitive science. ⁵⁷

The idea that important truths are made present through a mode or state of our own being, what I have called transparency, is the kernel of Heidegger’s synthesis of the mystical and the existential. Whether transparency can be achieved by our own volition or not is beside the question. 58 What is more interesting is the similar use of the term by one of Heidegger’s major influences. For Kierkegaard, genuine selfhood is the state in which ‘...in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it’. 59 That is, the self must accept itself as the singular and concrete project that it is, while founding itself upon the rich mysteries of faith. A century before Sartre’s analysis of theism as the belief in a hopeless contradiction, Kierkegaard effectively created all of the major tenets of existentialism while remaining a deep Christian theist. Yet the ground to which the self is made transparent is a narrow one, and too far above the world from which we live, work, and breathe. Kierkegaard, good existentialist that he was, exiles us from our root in Being by violently opposing the notion that existence can be a spiritual home for us in any way. Even while proving the consistency of existentialism and theism, Kierkegaard, as shown earlier, maintains a strict exclusiveness between existentialism and anything resembling mysticism.

If there is any historical figure who most closely approximates the synthesis, it is Paul, the common ancestor from which both Augustine and Kierkegaard spread out into two opposite historical and ideological poles. It is in Paul’s writing in which joyful mysticism (‘...it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who liveth in me.’ ⁶⁰) and anxious freedom find their first major synthesis in the West. Such a synthesis would not be as fully established again until the twentieth century with the writing of Heidegger. Heidegger thus resembles a secularized Paul for the modern world.

1. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. xi.

2. Kiesel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, p. 70.

3. For instance, in the writing of Kiesel and Caputo. I make use of their work throughout this essay.

4. Kiesel, The genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, p. 218. He labels the self's transparency and dependence upon God as the childlike sense of religion, and the more active and resolute self as the adult sense of religion:

   Of course, these two, the childlike and adult senses of religion, are not incompatible, but Heidegger never quite gets around to resolving the Pauline paradox of trust and confidence on the one hand, and the despair of decision on the other...

5. The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna’s Council in Time of War, p. 39.

6. Heidegger quoted by Kiesel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, p. 71.

7. Kiesel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, pp. 71-75.

8. John Caputo, "Heidegger and Theology," pp. 271-72.

9. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, pp. 28-29 and 154.

10. The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna’s Council in Time of War, p. 57. The yoga of renunciation has been labeled elsewhere as Karma Yoga. The self still works and acts in the world, but non-egotistically. It instead dedicates the fruits of its activities to God.

11. Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? p. 106.

12. Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, p. 145.

13. One important work of medieval mysticism is titled The Cloud of Unknowing, written by an unknown monk of the fourteenth century.

14. Bhagavad-Gita, p. 83.

15. Bhagavad-Gita, p. 67.

16. Bhagavad-Gita, p. 105.

17. Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, p. 205.

18. To Anselm’s famous argument for God’s existence in his Proslogion, Paul Tillich replies that the proof presupposes a derivative conception of deity, namely that it objectifies God by portraying Him as an object among other objects, a thing among other things. It is interesting that Tillich bases his objections on his view of God as ‘being itself’, and in strikingly similar fashion to Eckhart, the ‘God beyond God’. These remarks are found in Tillich, Systematic Theology volume I, Chicago: Chicago University Press 1951, and the Courage to Be, New Haven: Yale University Press 1952. Tillich was, of course, highly influenced by Heidegger.

19. Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? p. 110.

20. Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, p. 210. Heidegger is referring here to the transcendent God of the scholars and philosophers, not, say, to Eckhart’s concept of the Godhead.

21. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 2.

22. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, tr. L. Alexander, New Directions 1964, p. 127.

23. In The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, Caputo claims that Heidegger’s writing, in its non-theistic and non-denominational character, resembles mysticism in the structure of its ontology but not in its content. Sikka, Forms of Transcendence, pp. 266-67 disagrees.

24. Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, p. 210.

25. Martin Luther, Ninety-Five Theses, in Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings, p. 491.

26. I borrow this term from Paul Hacker's study of Luther's theology: The Ego in Faith.

27. Roland Bainton, Here I Stand, p. 51.

28. Emil Brunner, Truth as Encounter, p. 89.

29. See Kiesel’s enlightening chapter on the ‘The Religion Courses’ in The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time.

30. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. R. Bretall, New York: The Modern Library 1946, p. 205.

31. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in A Kierkegaard Anthology, p. 204.

32. This is one of Kierkegaard’s most famous analogies. See The Sickness Unto Death, pp. 43-44.

33. Many of Buber’s remarks against otherworldly styles of mysticism are found in Between Man and Man, tr. M. Friedman, New York: Macmillan Publishing 1965. As an interpreter of Hasidic Judaism, Buber was always quick to stress the ethical and this-worldly nature of this mystical movement.

34. Kiesel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, pp. 96-97.

35. In his second biography, Images: my life in Film, Bergman denies that this trilogy is really a trilogy at all. But this is irrelevant to this essay.

36. Matthew, 27:46.

37. Bainton, Here I Stand, p. 31.

38. The Concept of Dread, p. 155.

39. See Fear and Trembling.

40. Kierkegaard calls this form of existence despair, and sums them up nicely in the Sickness Unto Death.

41. Thessalonians, 5:2-11. See Kiesel’s chapter on ‘The Religion Courses’ in The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time.

42. The Kairos is the Greek and New Testament term for time as it is taken up in this decisive and non-objective sense

43. Bruce Ballard claims that Heidegger simply takes the early Christian anticipation of the Day of Judgment and replaces it with death. See The Role of Mood in Heidegger’s Ontology, p. 110.

44. Sonya Sikka, Forms of Transcendence, p. 221.

45. Sartre is, in the opinion of the present author, among the most despairing of the existentialists, as well as one of the most rewarding. The whole second half of Being and Nothingness, tr. H. Barnes, New York: Washington Square Press 1956, according to Sartre can be boiled down to man’s fruitless attempt to become God.

46. From ‘The Ten Ox-herding Pictures,’ tr. D. T. Suzuki, Manual of Zen Buddhism, p. 134.

47. Ibid. In some interpretations of this passage, the gourd represents emptiness, or the self in a state of non-attachment. This is the interpretation of Suzuki among others. In other interpretations it is a wine gourd, an open defiance of the prohibition of alcohol in monastic Buddhism. This is a typical feature of Mahayana Buddhism, a tradition that attempts to vanquish the line between monastic and lay Buddhist practice.

48. Eckhart, Selected Writings, p. 9. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegge’s Thought, p. 138 contains an interesting discussion of Eckhart’s use of a passage from the New Testament to illustrate exactly this theme.

49. Heidegger, Letter on humanism, in Basic Writings, pp. 208-9.

50. Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? in Basic Writings, p. 105, states:

This state of being ‘beyond beings’ reveals Being.

51. Watts, The Way of Liberation, p. 18.

52. Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? in Basic Writings, p. 103.

53. Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? in Basic Writings, p. 112, expresses this more formally as: "Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?"

54. Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, in Basic Writings, p. 210.

55. Sikka, Forms of Transcendence, p. 154, comes very close to making the same observation:

...whereas the early Heidegger tends to think of the being of beings in terms of a project of Dasein, the later Heidegger, after the so-called Kehre, is more inclined to think of Dasein as a project of being and to think the being of beings accordingly...

Though her stating of Heidegger’s earlier notion of Being as "a project of Dasein" seems to relativize Being to man, instead of seeing the project of Dasein as what it really is in Being and Time: the context of intelligibility through which Being appears.

56. One of Heidegger’s terms for human existence is "Being-in-the-world."

57. For instance, the work of Andy Clark, Hubert Dreyfus, George Lakoff, and others.

58. There is no substantial difference between either side of the kehre even on this issue. In Being and Time, an involuntary call to conscience serves as a necessary condition for a genuine, resolute existence.

59. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, p. 131.

60. Galations, 2:19-20.

Abstract

This paper will discuss the possibility of the state being a neutral entity inside of a plural society. One of the pillars of liberal ideology is the belief that the liberal state will be neutral and fair towards all competing ideologies, even non-liberal ones. The liberal state, it is argued, has no other role than to guarantee that its citizens are able to freely express themselves, and have an equal role inside of political discourse. Such a belief is fraught with problems, in so far as the idea of a neutral state would be akin to a non-ideological state. But precisely because it is a liberal state, it is an ideological state that makes the same sorts of claims to morality and socio-political ethics as any other ideology. In this sense, then, it is impossible for the liberal state to be neutral in any meaningful sense.
The justifications used for neutrality are problematic as well. The benefits of having a neutral state are usually framed within concepts of utilitarianism, individualism, and majoritarianism that are themselves filled with contradictions. These justifications will also be discussed and criticized.
From this discussion, we will conclude that the liberal state is better described as a system of tolerance, rather than neutrality. The liberal state accepts the presence of competing ideologies, while still giving liberal ideology and ethics the primary role in shaping society.

Modern societies are characterised by variation of norms, values, beliefs and moralities. Unlike traditional communities, urban societies contain interests and loyalties, which are not only diverse, but also conflicting and contradictory. ¹ The main sources of this diversity of cultures and values in modern societies include those related to 1) original nations seeking to uphold their traditional way of life, 2) communities that are territorially concentrated and seek to maintain their own languages and cultures, 3) immigrants, 4) indigenous ethnic minorities, 5) religious communities, 6) sub-cultures such as gays and lesbians, ² and 7) the individual’s various tastes and preferences. ³ Consequently, on the one hand, we confront divergence between groups and communities with each other in what they value. On the other, there are clashes, too, between different groups and institutions, which are expected to meet the requirements of social groups. So far as the political systems are concerned, we confront the question of whether or not it is possible that the state respond successfully to the conflicting interests, concerns, demands and orientations of social groups. The main concern here is whether there any shared bases, upon which reasonable people with contradictory ideas about the good life can live together justly and peacefully. ⁴ To put it in a more relevant form, can the state be neutral with respect to the conception of the good life so that people who possess contradictory convictions about the good life would accept its legitimacy?

Liberals are often proud that they offer the only feasible and plausible solution to this problem. ⁵

Liberals often characterise themselves as tolerant people, who pave the way for ideas and actions they do not approve of. This is due to their prioritisation of freedom of choice over all other human values. They assert that there must be no imposition of a certain conception of the good life on citizens in a liberal society. ⁶ Liberalism suggests that the main purpose of government is to protect individual rights and to increase freedom of choice, ⁷ but not to define the contents of the good life.

Their assertion has two sides. On the one hand, different persons and groups have to respect each other’s attitudes and orientations. On the other, so far as the state is concerned, it must be neutral with respect to diversity of beliefs and actions of different persons and groups entrusting the selection of the good life to equal and free persons. Neutrality is not an intrinsic value appreciable per se. It is favourable because it can be used as a means to guarantee some intrinsic liberal values; i.e., neutrality is an ‘instrumental principle’ and a ‘second-order value’.⁸ Therefore, we have to justify neutrality by one reason or another. Here are some reasons to support neutrality of the state.

One justification in favouring neutrality of the state is posed by relativists. They assume that we can never make sure that what we understand and realise as truth is the very truth. As Peirce put it, ‘our knowledge is never absolute but always swims’. The consequence of fallibilism for liberalism is significant. ⁹ Since one cannot justifiably assert in any case to possess the absolute truth, the reason for advocating freedom of choice is strong. ¹⁰ Consequently, the state would lack any justification for imposing its specific conception of the good life on citizens; that is, the state should be neutral.

In another attempt, presupposing that the freedom is the way to happiness, pleasure, satisfaction, goodness and so forth, liberals maintain that the rationale entails that we maximise utility and general welfare by neutrality of the state. ¹¹ In this argument, neutrality of the state is supposed to guarantee non-interference of the state into the private sphere. This is called ‘negative freedom’. ¹² In this sense, freedom is an ‘instrumental value’ for the main goal of liberalism; i.e., utility.

To put it in another way, what liberals give dominance to is not the content of a citizen’s view about the good life. Instead, the most significant liberal value is that citizens be free to pursue what they choose as their goals and ideals. ¹³ Liberals individualise man and isolate him from all relationship with other people and the nature. Since they view the man as chooser they hold that he owns his life and the products of his work. Consequently, he should be free to manage his life and actions as he wishes. ¹⁴ The source of value, for liberals, is man’s choice. Every way of life is valuable if, and only if, we understand them as valuable and choose them. The political consequence of this belief is that the state must not advance any particular conception of the good life at the expense of others. All citizens should be treated equally and independent. ¹⁵ Therefore, to provide the greatest number of citizens with utility the state must not support one conception of the good life that deprives non-loyal to that conception of his utility.

Freedom should not be only thought of in a negative sense. Rather, ‘positive freedom,’ meaning autonomy and self-determination, is another liberal value. One might even consider this sort of freedom as the more favourable goal for liberals. Since without autonomy human beings are not distinguishable from other creatures, which lack the ability to develop themselves, autonomy may be characterised as an intrinsic value that is worth considering per se. ¹⁶

To put it in another way, in the absence of autonomy, citizens would be treated as children and their position as qualified persons able to conduct their own affairs would be denied, as Dahl maintains. ¹⁷ In other words, if the state force a citizen against his will it would treat that person as a mere means and would deprive him of being an end.¹⁸

From the liberal point of view, the plausibility of freedom and autonomy prevent us from depriving anyone of reaching this basic right, which is related to the nature of human beings. Therefore, it is taken for granted by liberals that all adults are equal, in the sense that ‘the good or interests of each person must be given equal consideration’. This is called ‘Principle of Equal Consideration of Interests’. ¹⁹ To reach this goal, it is maintained that the most effective, or the only feasible, way is neutrality of the state with respect to various conceptions of the good life. Otherwise, if the state adopts one conception of the good life, according to which to conduct the public affairs, it would discriminate against those whose preferences of the good life is not advocated.²⁰

Literally, neutrality means that the state does not support or help either side in a dispute, contest, war, and the like.²¹ In political philosophy, neutrality is considered as an indispensable part of the spirit of liberalism. Here we shall examine some significant attempts at explaining and justifying the neutrality of the state.

One may suppose that liberalism is ‘neutral with respect to morality’; that is to say, "liberalism is a non-moral idea". However, this conception is not compatible with the liberal stance. Liberals are committed to justifying their preferred way of life with appeal to moral values. ²² Therefore, neutrality as an epistemological principle, rather than a moral value is irrelevant;  ²³ that is, "impartiality of state policy" is impossible.²⁴

As Parekh explains it, every government has a certain political system: it may be organised in accord with the principle of separation of powers or it may concentrate all authorities in one body; the electoral system might be direct or indirect; the party system might be one party, two parties or multi-parties. Each of these features is based on a specific conception of the good. With respect to policies, no government can be neutral about matters such as ‘slavery, polygamy, public hanging, suicide, capital punishment, abortion, violent sports, divorce, lesbian and homosexual marriages and so on’. The act of prohibiting or permitting any of these issues is based on a specific conception of the good. Parekh concludes that ‘a morally neutral state is logically incoherent’. ²⁵

The term may be used to indicate a "neutral conception of the good life", which is agreed upon by all disagreeing citizens of a society. The greatest utility for the largest number of people is suggested as a neutral conception,  ²⁶ which is the lowest common denominator. This view is J. S. Mill’s approach in On Liberty. ²⁷

Utilitarianism consists of the following premises. First, we human beings all agree that happiness is valuable, regardless of any specific idea about the nature of man or any conviction about the world. In addition, reason entails that we try to maximise utility in the society. ²⁸ Finally, to avoid partiality we have to equally consider the utility of every person in the society. One proposal for establishing a neutral state is put forward by utilitarians. Rather than goodness, pleasure, happiness or the like, they define utility as want-satisfaction. This conception is a ‘second-order’ conception that accommodates all contradictory notions of the good life. ²⁹ Therefore, it is a universally acceptable cornerstone for establishing the state. This concept does not exclude any conceivable conviction about the good life. In fact, the conception of utility as want-satisfaction reduces all substantive conceptions of the good life to a common ground acceptable to all. It is worth noticing that although this conception is a specific conception of the good, it is neutral and impartial that is compatible with all contradictory conceptions of the good. ³⁰ This view seems to be consistent with the liberal intent to be neutral and tolerant, since aggregating citizens’ wants does not involve any judgment about their values. When citizens go to the ballot box, the state’s role is just to count their votes through majority rule, rather than evaluating their opinions. ³¹ In this way, since the unanimity is impossible and we should choose, at least, between two options if more voters choose (a) to (b) then by adopting (a) we can obtain more utility than when (b) would be adopted.³²

1) So far as maximising utility is concerned, this view suffers from some considerable defects. Firstly, this view presupposes that the sum of the benefit each member in the majority will obtain is equal to the sum of the benefit each member in the minority will lose. ³³ Not only is this presupposition unjustifiable, but also it is conceivable that even sometimes the whole benefit majority obtains is far less than the whole deprivation the minority suffers from. ³⁴ Moreover, it includes the assumption that the majority’s want is consistent with the majority’s interest. ³⁵ In this respect, Elster noticed the difference between real interest and ‘standing passion’ by asserting that no one can convincingly guarantee that whatever a majority decides upon is really to its benefit. Hence, if the majority decides under the influence of manipulation or standing passion even the least utility is lost. ³⁶

2) Another criticism is posed by Kant with respect to the morality of utilitarianism. To maximise the whole happiness in the society, utilitarianism treats some persons as means to maximise happiness for the whole. This view, therefore, fails to respect all citizens as ends. In other words, this view assumes the society to be one unit with one interest, where any loss of a particular person’s interests is counterbalanced by a net gain’. ³⁷ This approach, you may say, ignores individualism in the sense of atomism that is crucial to liberals. ³⁸  Consequently, it cannot be invoked as a moral low, neither as a comprehensive moral philosophy nor as a political morality.

3) Another defect is recognised by communitarians with regard to individualism this view involves. They criticise individualists’ assumptions that 1) man is nothing more than a "free chooser" and 2) the worth of any idea or action is due to our choice. Firstly, they emphasise that the choice is not the only source of value, since some things are worthwhile because they constitute traditions and customs that we belong to, not because we choose them. Moreover, it is difficult to deny universal validity of some norms even if we do not view them as valuable, such as keeping one’s promises and avoiding doing harm to others. ³⁹ These norms seem not only to be worthwhile per se, but also they are the bases of other moral values whatever they are. In this way, the bases of utilitarianism fall down.

4) As for neutrality, one may pose that majority principle can certainly result in creating a distinguishable ‘permanent minority’ that live under the domination of a permanent majority.⁴⁰  In such a situation, the assumption that the majority and the minority agree upon a common denominator, that is, the greatest want-satisfaction for the largest number of the population is misleading. For, the substantive utility of the majority always contradicts the substantive utility of the minority. Therefore, the minority does not surely agree on the policies made in accord with the majority’s preferences. In other words, utilitarianism as want-satisfaction is always biased against that conception of the good life, which advocated by the permanent minority. For example, an established liberal society and government based on secular principles, which has settled in ignorance about, or with denial of, the existence of God and the Divine Will ⁴¹ cannot be neutral towards religious values. Rather, the liberal mode of life is entrenched in all the major institutions so as to have culminated in bias against religious values advocated by religious minorities.⁴²

We may build liberalism on a "neutral procedure" for collective decision-making, ⁴³ as Charles Larmore in The Morals of Modernity suggests. ⁴⁴

Acknowledging the deficiency of ‘substantive liberalism’, ⁴⁵ Larmore suggests a version of political liberalism to establish a neutral state in accord with liberal principles. His suggestion is to construct the liberal state on the basis of "neutral principles" for collective decision-making, which can justifiably prevail over reasonable disagreeing citizens about the substantive conception of the good life. ⁴⁶ What he offers as political liberalism includes two principles: 1) ‘the norm of rational dialogue’ and 2) ‘the norm of equal respect’. ⁴⁷

Although what Larmore suggests resembles principles that Rawls describes as a "procedure based on neutral values", (such as impartiality, equal opportunity and generality of principles to all similar cases), ⁴⁸ Larmore avoids calling his offered principles as being neutral values. Rather, he explicitly maintains that they are moral values, albeit minimal, which need justification. ⁴⁹ Therefore, political liberalism is not, as he describes, absolutely neutral; rather, it is neutral in relation to contentious views of the good. ⁵⁰ Moreover, it is not neutral in relation to the conceptions of the good whatever they are; instead, his preferred liberal principles are neutral as far as to accommodate individualist liberals and communitarians. ⁵¹ It is confined to the people, who 1) accept the worth of the principles of rational dialogue and equal respect for establishing the political organisation and 2) give dominance to them over their other commitments, when they conflict with each other.⁵²

Larmore, thus, explicitly announces that ‘liberal thought can [not] keep its promise of offering a political conception acceptable to people having very different views about the human good’.⁵³

These principles resemble what deliberative democrats suggest as the procedure of collective decision-making. In a deliberative democracy, each member of the community can propose and reason in favour of his/her idea, with the aim to choose the best alternative to serve the public good. ⁵⁴ Cohen calls his proposal of deliberation as an 'ideal deliberative procedure', by which he aims to offer a procedure for decision-making that can best justify collective decision-making and legitimise the outcome of public choice, no matter what the outcome would be.⁵⁵

On the other hand, however, Larmore’s suggestion diverges from deliberative democracy in that he aims at establishing the political order on a common ground through rational dialogue and equal respect; rather than conducting public affairs in everyday life. ⁵⁶ To fulfil such a duty, he maintains that liberals take pride in seeking relationally neutral principles.

1) One may assert that due to the inequality of people with regard to the ability of discussing and reasoning, 'weaker people may sheepishly acquiesce to the stronger'. ⁵⁷ Consequently, rational dialogue and equal respect can better serve those privileged people and their interest; ⁵⁸  that is, it would be biased against weaker people in practice, albeit neutral in theory.

2) Moreover, we should consider that the process of rational dialogue can normally be implemented at the level of representative assemblies, rather than the whole population of a society that are too numerous to assemble for public decision-making. ⁵⁹ Consequently, the feasibility of his project is doubtful.

Rawls in Political Liberalism laid out two meanings of neutrality based on substantive conception of the good, which are consistent with the principles of justice as fairness that he suggests. One acceptable meaning of neutrality is that the state should guarantee "equal opportunity" for all citizens to freely promote any permissible conception of the good. By permissible, he means those conceptions that are compatible with the principles of justice as fairness. Another possibility, Rawls argues, is that the state should not favour intentionally any comprehensive view about the good life; i.e., "legality of all comprehensive doctrine".⁶⁰

1) Priority of right to good; Kantian liberals, including Rawls, distinguish between right and good, between a structure of fundamental rights and freedoms, and the conceptions of the good, which citizens might adopt to follow within that structure. They maintain that the right takes precedent to the good. ⁶¹

2) Original position; Rawls proposes an imaginary situation in which participants in a collective decision-making with the following characteristics are to organise their society and determine the structure of their government. 1) They are all equal and free to make decisions. 2) They are all capable of reasoning. 3) They are located in a position of ignorance of their mental and physical abilities. 4) No one knows what his/her future position in the society would be. 5) Finally, all ignore their own specific conception of the good. ⁶² He imagines these conditions to provide the ground for resorting to a pure reasoning about the good and prevent the influence of selfishness.

3) Primary goods; Rawls, then, maintains that people in original position, in which they can make decisions in accord with the principles of justice would agree on a certain collection of the primary goods to determine the framework of political order. Those principles, Rawls argues, are neutral with respect to their divergent conceptions of the good life. Those primary goods include a) basic rights and equal liberties for all; b) minimum wealth and income for all; c) equal opportunity for everyone to reach political and economic positions, through fair competition; d) the social bases of self-respect. ⁶³

Why do they choose such principles? Basic liberties are obviously necessary to safeguard each one’s following of his/her own conception of the good life. Moreover, no one can pursue his/her own specific conception of the good life, if he/she does not possess sufficient wealth and health care. Furthermore, a sense of self-respect gives meaning to the conception of the good life. ⁶⁴ In addition, the assumption of freedom and equality of people entails that they enjoy equal opportunity to wield unequal economic, social and political positions through fair competition. ⁶⁵ In this aspect, they would adopt such a condition, according to which the advantage of the worst-off people could be guaranteed. ⁶⁶

Rawls himself acknowledges that neither philosophical nor political liberalism succeed in keeping their promise not to favour any conception of the good. ⁶⁷ So far as his project is concerned, it presupposes, as he admittedly mentions, substantive and moral values with respect to the nature of man, social conditions and the principles of justice. ⁶⁸ Distinguishing procedural neutrality from neutrality of aim, what he asserts his proposal would provide in relation to neutrality is that

Justice as fairness hopes to satisfy neutrality of aim in the sense that basic institutions and public policy are not to be designed to favour any particular comprehensive doctrine. It is important to emphasise that it may still affirm the superiority of certain forms of moral character and encourage certain moral virtues. The crucial point is that this does not lead to the perfectionist state of a comprehensive doctrine. ⁶⁹

1) As far as priority of right to good is concerned, far from being a neutral principle it is a controversial issue, since we cannot find a collection of rights accepted by all liberals. Whereas egalitarian liberals favour some economic and social rights, such as education, health care and welfare, Libertarian liberals support a strict system of private property rights and civil freedoms. ⁷⁰ Therefore, this theory should choose one of these two strands, which leads to bias against the other. Furthermore, it is biased against non-liberal conceptions of the good, which might offer a very different collection of rights. When we consider the possibility that some reasonable persons in the original position might believe that the right to salvation in the eternal world, for example, is a principal right, the scope of disagreement, and thus the bias, appears to be more significant.

2) In addition, this theory presupposes the equality of members of the community in original position, which is itself a specific substantive attitude about the social condition that needs a justification. ⁷¹ It is based on equality of all people in reasoning, which might be strongly denied. Again, there appears an issue for disagreement that prevents neutrality.

3) As far as the minimum of wealth is concerned, it depends upon an assumption about human nature. It supposes that when the future is uncertain, each one prefers to guarantee the minimum income for himself/herself, ⁷² whereas one may assert that some people in original position would be keen to take a risk and prefer a society with more inequality in the hope that to become amongst the most advantaged groups. ⁷³ In other words, we might not equate reasonableness with prudence to conclude that reasonable people would avoid risk-taking.

1. Bhikhu Parekh, "Cultural Diversity and Liberal Democracy", in David Beetham (ed.), Defining and Measuring Democracy, (London: SAGE Publications, 1994), p. 199.

2. Ibid., pp. 199, 200.

3. Bhikhu Parekh, "The Cultural Particularity of Liberal Democracy", in D. Held (ed.), Prospects for Democracy, (UK: Polity Press, 1993), pp. 158, 159.

4. Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 154.

5. Michael J. Sandel, "Morality and the liberal Ideal", in The New Republic, No. 7, (May 1984), p. 15.

6. Ibid.

7. Iain McLean (ed.), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 286.

8. David Thunder, "A Refutation of Anti-Perfectionist or Neutralist Liberalism", http://homepage.tinet.ie/ ~philosophy/Articles/Article1.html>, 03/04/01, p. 1.

9. Michael Saward, "Democratic Theory and Indices of Democratisation", in David Beetham (ed.), Op. Cit., p. 9.

10. Michael J. Sandel, Op. Cit.

11. Ibid.

12. Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 123.