In your opinion, what is the point at which mysticism and philosophy meet or even overlap? Where do they diverge beyond that point?

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I saw that you’re asking Dimitris, Claire, but this is a topic near and dear to my heart so I’ll give my take on it. I hope you like it, or at least forgive the intrusion if you don’t.

Both of these can be analogized as forms for human knowledge and expression to take. Mysticism points inward, in that it takes advantage of the unique ability the human mind has to represent and manipulate literally any thinkable thought or concept and drive some kind of truth from that.

Philosophy, on the other hand, seeks to move the mind away from this unique ability, in order to find something much more valuable, transmissable truth. If I do some mysticism, then the fruits of that mysticism are not going to be readily accessible to most people. If I want to articulate the insights I gleaned from it, then the language I use is going to be circular and hard to follow.

This is simply because I’m not throwing away thoughts that other, more rational, people would simply because they don’t relate to the topic or the conclusion. If in the course of contemplating the role of ethics in Heaven, I suddenly have a vision of the Pink Panther, I’m not going to just reject it, I might take a little side trip into Pink Pantherdom and see if I can find neat correspondences.

Philosophy, on the other hand, starts rational and stays rational. Side trips aren’t allowed, things must be firmly rooted in first principles otherwise each little tangent has to be justified, increasing complexity. As a mystic, I am free to contemplate God, or a world without God, and build on the ambiguity. Philosophy often has to choose one or the other, unifying the two is solely the realm of metaphysics.

Where they overlap is this aforementioned rationalism. Mysticism can take sharp turns away from full rationalism, but you can’t stay irrational forever. I might start out wanting to explore ethics in Heaven, but after my Pink Panther detour, I might then suddenly have an epiphany about something in my personal life that I had been ignorant of or hiding from. My desire from there is to wonder why this ignorance led me towards exploring ethics in Heaven.

Because in mysticism, all truth is ultimately circular. Sharp detours and logical leaps can all be fit inside a narrative that ultimately feeds back into itself, and understanding the feedback process better is the lesson that is driven out by the process. Mysticism can tolerate jumps and seeming non-sequiturs because if you’re on your game, it’ll all work out in the end. And exploring the ‘terrain’ created by your mind trying to make sense out of the conceptual space will lead you to the edges of the circular truth, and following the truth around the circle and seeing where you started gives you a full vision of what you’re looking at.

Whereas philosophy is ultimately teleological, it seeks an end. It’s pointed. You build on something considered to be true, in order to find another hallowed truth. You keep stacking infallible brick on top of infallible brick until you find something that truly upends the whole field, like Edmund Gettier did to epistemology. Then you do your best to retrench because you can’t just throw out a thousand years of careful work.