Open access
THE PROBLEM OF THE CONCEPTION „MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE”. A FEW WORDS ON THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF MYSTICISM
Dorota Brylla1
PHILOSOPHY – PERCEPTION AND VISUALIZATION OF WORLD AND LIFE
Publication language: Polish
Journal article
Transformations No. 1–2 (88–89) 2016, Publication date: 10 May 2016
Keywords: mystical event, God, being, monistic solipsism, Karl Albert, Rudolf Otto
Abstract This article proposes an alternative understanding for the conception of „mystical experience”, i.e. it presents a viewpoint of being in contrast to the commonly held one. It suggests namely that it ishard to keep the conception of experience in general in the case of the „mystical happening” – due to its peak, i.e. unitive, phase (unio mystica). Instead, the text propounds to use – when talking about mysticism (religious and philosophical) – the expression „mystical event”. This can be seen as a kind of transformation of the dominant interpretation and understanding of this matter. Such optics have been determined by the fact that the mystic is in the mystical event (in its final state) no longer experiencing anything. The subject is not even experiencing being (Being) in its totality – it is then one with it (not even its „part”), because it has dissolved in it. The mystical self does not perceive, experience the wholeness, the totality of being (God) as non-different from himself (and from anything else), because he is this something (although unconsciously). Hence, the conception of „experience” as something that maintains the separateness of subject and object, that keeps the dialectics and the epistemic dichotomy, does not correspond to the actual character of the mystical event itself.
Uniwersytet Zielonogórski, Wydział Humanistyczny
E-mail: d.bryll@ifil.uz.zgora.pl