On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy review – in the presence of a higher power
Philosopher Simon Critchley’s painstaking attempt to explore transcendent experience provides a fascinating overview of Christianity’s great outliers
I sometimes think of mysticism – the name we give to ecstatic, transformative experiences of absorption into absolute reality or, if you will, into God – as the subject that fascinates where all others merely interest. And yet it denotes something singularly hard to talk or write about, indeed virtually defined by its ineffability. On Mysticism, the philosopher Simon Critchley’s stab at effing the ineffable, feels oddly timely. As he notes: “There is an awful lot of mysticism about. More than ever in recent years.” He doesn’t speculate, but the widespread interest may point to that metaphysical restlessness that wells up during periods of acute cultural change – the return of the transcendental to a reality system no longer adequate for the times.
Among the more widely read and prolific of modern academic philosophers, Critchley has written books on topics as disparate as football, suicide and David Bowie. In a faintly defensive account of his interest in his current subject, he rightly points out that mysticism has been relegated and ignored within modern philosophy (with rare exceptions such as Nietzsche and Georges Bataille), whose rationalist bias favours critique, sobriety, laboriousness and rigour. He sees his book as a bid to push back against this epochal neglect.
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