From Mysticism, which was published last month by New York Review Books.

“Mysticism” is the word for what we modern, critical philosophers are meant to distrust in the name of enlightenment. It is all that is weak-minded and lazy, a pseudophilosophy that avoids the labor of proper philosophical thinking. This view is why philosophers like to identify themselves with workers: Locke sees the philosopher as the under-laborer to science; Husserl has a bizarre conception of philosophers as civil servants; and the one really good joke in Heidegger’s work (not intended to be funny) suggests that philosophers are the police force in the procession of the sciences. By contrast, mysticism is suspicious and possibly criminal. All claims to visions, inspired visitations, ecstatic experiences, and spirit-seeing must be rooted out from philosophy and, even more importantly, from public life. To let mystics into this realm leads to error, disorder, and insurrection—to government by fanatics, maniacs, and despots claiming divinity.

Philosophers’ bloodless duty of critique in the service of enlightenment blinds us to what is rich, strange, and provocative about the tradition of thinking and experience that we label as mystical. The obsession with rigor ossifies into rigor mortis, an inflexible unwillingness or an obsessional rigidity that refuses to acknowledge vast swaths of human experience that are felt to be undeniably real but cannot defend themselves readily in the tribunal of reason. This stubborn insistence on the sobriety of thought blinds us to the kind of intoxication we find in mystical texts. We forget that we become mystics every time we fall asleep, when our visions are experienced as dreams, which call not for legislation or medication, but narration and interpretation.

Philosophy, in its ancient form, recognized this. Its aim was the bios theoretikos, the contemplative life, which was compared persistently to the life of the gods—divine life. This idea can be found throughout the works of Plato, at the end of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, in Epicurus and Plotinus. It arguably echoes down to Spinoza, whom Novalis famously described as “the God-drunken man,” and down to Hegel’s trinitarian dialectic, in which God becomes us in the form of a community of spirit.

Many practices of reading and scriptural hermeneutics associated with mysticism arose within the context of medieval Christianity, particularly monasticism. The same can be said of the affective and subjective characteristics that we associate with mystical experience: inspired speech, intense emotion, the heights of ecstasy, and the depths of dereliction. But what happens when that context is dramatically weakened or even erased, as it has been in much of Western Europe after the Reformation? What becomes of mysticism in the burgeoning modern world?

In his 2009 essay “Mysticism, Modernity, and the Invention of Aesthetic Experience,” Niklaus Largier tells the story of how, increasingly isolated from its institutional context, mystical practice reemerges in a new realm of enchantment, namely a world of aesthetic experience. Concepts like love, suffering, sweetness, and pain move out from the institutional confines of the church to a feeling of wonderment often connected with the experience of nature. It is no longer intimacy with Christ but poetry that gives an ecstatic experience of self and world—a foretaste of heaven.

Examples of this transformation are legion. Think of Blake’s childhood vision of a tree full of angels, Wordsworth’s intimation of the sublimity of nature in the ascent of Mount Snowdon in The Prelude, Emerson’s perception of himself as a vast “transparent eyeball” absorbing the all of nature while crossing an open field, or Whitman’s vision of the flood-tide crowds on the Brooklyn Ferry. Think too of the way in which the word “mystical” pops up in Melville’s Moby-Dick, from the opening scene of the water-gazers who come down to the edge of the “insular city of the Manhattoes” and on throughout that oceanic book. Melville goes on—as only Melville can—to ponder the connection between human beings and the sea: “Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity. . . ?” He concludes that we witness something mysterious about ourselves and our origins in the contemplation of the sea, something vast, sublime, and incomprehensible. “It is,” Melville writes, “the image of the ungraspable phantom of life.”

Notably, this translation of the mystical to the aesthetic domain has come at a considerable cost. Consider the case of Martin Luther. He opened the Pandora’s box of the Reformation and made the Bible available in the revolutionary new medium of print. But Luther was deeply worried about the consequences of free and inspired Bible reading and the way in which mystical tropes and visions can have dangerous political consequences. A case in point was the German Peasants’ War of 1524–25 and what Luther saw as the revolutionary excesses of the Radical Reformation—in particular with figures like Thomas Müntzer and movements like that of the Anabaptists, a subset of whom believed that the end of the world was at hand and that ordinary people had the sacred right to take up arms and violently overthrow the existing structures of power. Faced with the problem of political enthusiasm informed by free Bible reading, particularly the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelation, Luther sided with the princes and notoriously wrote a pamphlet in 1525 called Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, in which he argued that the peasants be struck down like rabid dogs. Against this insurrectionary threat, Luther argued that a Christian is “free inside” but “bound outside,” free in faith and in the reading of Scripture but bound by the worldly legal order.

Luther’s division between the spiritual and the secular is echoed in the distinction between private and public reason in Kant’s 1784 essay “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant, especially in late texts like “On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy,” sees the adaptation of mystical tropes to public life as a “pretension of philosophy” born from “natural laziness.” When reason falls back on enthusiasm there is the risk, Kant says, that governments “misunderstand their own function” and veer toward fanaticism. Mystical practices are thus excluded from the prosaic and public use of reason. Their authority can be no more than aesthetic. This perfectly prefigures the great compromise of the modern liberal order: privately we can do and think pretty much what we want, but publicly we have to obey the ruler and the rule of law.

There’s the rub: in moving from the narrowly religious to the broadly aesthetic, mysticism is both generalized and marginalized. In losing its institutional and political power, mystical practice becomes peripheral to socioeconomic and commercial life. Artists can do what they like because, ultimately, it does not matter. We might expect to be moved by a work of art and perhaps even be encouraged to see artworks as quasi-sacred objects. We might also expect or tolerate visions and hallucinations in artworks of which we might otherwise be skeptical. The religious visionary thus becomes the Romantic poet. Yet poets are sideshow entertainers. Of course, they can be influential and attractive figures—genial geniuses—but they are ultimately harmless and marginal.

I propose something less depressing: to accept the thought that mystical experience lives on for us in art and poetry but to refuse the privatization and secularization of aesthetic experience. Art is never just art. What if poetry did not just give us ideas about the thing, as Wallace Stevens puts it, but was the thing itself?

A sense of what I have in mind here is captured by Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet:

To receive from the mystic state only the undemanding pleasures of that state; to be the ecstatic devotee of no god, the uninitiated mystic or epopt: to spend one’s day meditating on a paradise in which one does not believe—all those things please the soul, if the soul knows what it is not to know.

The silent clouds drift by high above me, this body trapped inside a shadow, just as the unknowable truths drift by high above me too, this soul captive in a body . . . Everything is drifting by high above . . .

Pessoa’s words give voice to a metaphysical pessimism, being the devotee of no god, yet at the same time gazing at the silent clouds drifting high above as they convey a feeling of environmental ecstasy. I think of Stevens’s seemingly gnomic remark that the way to get beyond nihilism is to look through a window and see what is really there.

To write is to try to set oneself on fire. Either the writer’s life goes up in flames in the work or it does not. If it does not, then the work is a failure. A life of writing is a nonlife devoted to the possibility of fire. To write is to get yourself out of the way, as much as possible, in order to reveal Stevens’s thing itself: the moth, the herring, the peregrine, the rose garden, the godhead.

Put another way, T. S. Eliot insists that the poetry does not matter. What matters is what the poem points at, allows us to see, feel, and most of all, hear: “ . . . but you are the music / While the music lasts.” If poetry were ever to reach its goal, find what it aims at, then this would lead to the annihilation of poetry. The thing itself can find voice only when words break.

This idea can be connected to Artaud’s mystical notion that what is at stake in art is the breaking through of language in order to access the naked flame of life. It is a question of burning off the patina of civilization and moving toward an intensity of experience, the vitality of existence.

Artaud has a nice formulation: “To chew flowers = to philosophize.” Modern philosophy has spent far too much time chewing flowers and too little watering them, cultivating them, watching them grow, and breeding new, strange, and gorgeous hybrids. For Artaud, true culture operates through exaltation and force, an extremity of experience that breaks through the tedium and wakes us up. We have to learn to signal through the flames that consume us.