The Uses of Paradox: Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd 9780231511858

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Paradox Without Piety
2. Credo Quia Absurdum: Cognitive Asceticism and Kierkegaard
3. Mystics and Ascetics
4. Absolute Transcendence
5. Skepticism and Mysticism
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

THE USES OF PARADOX

MATTHEW BAGGER



the uses of paradox  Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd 

columbia university press new york

columbia university press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2007 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bagger, Matthew C. The uses of paradox : religion, self-transformation, and the absurd / Matthew Bagger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-14082-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-51185-8 (ebook) 1. Paradox. 2. Religion. 3. Philosophy. I. Title. BC199.P2B34 2007 200—dc22 2007013971

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Designed by Lisa Hamm c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For chapter 4, grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint material previously published in slightly different form in Matthew Bagger, “The Uses of Mysticism,” Religious Studies Review 25.4 (October 1999): 369–75. Reprinted by permission.

For Isabel and Will

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

 1  Introduction: Paradox Without Piety 1  2  Credo Quia Absurdum: Cognitive Asceticism and Kierkegaard 15  3  Mystics and Ascetics 30  4  Absolute Transcendence 59  5  Skepticism and Mysticism 74 Conclusion 107

Notes 111 Bibliography 123 Index 129

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

n the ordinary course of our practical and theoretical affairs, we tend to shun paradox. This aversion to paradox is a general fact about humans, Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s discredited claims about so-called primitive mentality notwithstanding. In whimsical or literary moods we may appreciate a rhetorical paradox, but we usually take great pains to avoid a literal paradox. As scholars have recognized for centuries, however, one of the most noteworthy features of religious discourse is that it seems exempt from this tendency to shun paradox. In a wide variety of diverse historical contexts, religious thought and practice have perpetuated, celebrated, and sublimed paradox. The prestige that religion frequently accords to paradox has figured prominently in modern polemics about religion. Much Enlightenment criticism of Christianity, for instance, targets its allegedly self-contradictory and unintelligible doctrines. Some of the American Founders were outspoken in indicting the absurdity of Christian doctrine. Thomas Paine complained that “of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none . . . more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself than this thing called Christianity.” Thomas Jefferson for his part decried “the mystery and jargon unintelligible to all mankind” that priests nefariously impose upon the populace. He ridiculed the Trinity as “Abracadabra” and “hocus-pocus . . . so incomprehensible to the human mind that no candid man can say he has any idea of it.” For

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these thinkers and others besides, the paradoxicality of Christian doctrine presents a potent objection to belief. Responding to Enlightenment criticism of orthodox Christianity, the influential Prussian thinker Johann Hamann (1730–1788) gives paradox a very different valuation, and in so doing he cast the die for modern religious apologetics. Hamann emphasized the contradictory perspectives from which we can regard ourselves and our circumstances, as well as the mysteries, contradictions, and riddles of our existence. He adopted the medieval mystical notion of the coincidence of opposites (the coincidentia oppositorum), gave it his own interpretation, and claimed to prefer it to the principle of non-contradiction. He draws an analogy between reason and the Pauline interpretation of biblical law. Just as the law was not given to make men righteous, reason was not given to make men wise. The law serves to reveal sinfulness and reason serves to reveal ignorance. Hamann appeals to Hume to show that the philosopher, even with respect to the most mundane topics, must resort to a kind of belief (glaube) that he cannot rationally vindicate. If reason must itself appeal to unjustified belief, it cannot gainsay the religious appeal to faith (glaube). The shortcomings of reason indicate both the necessity of faith and that faith transcends reason. Hamann portrays faith as a kind of feeling or sensibility that opens one to God’s revelation in nature, history, or the Bible. If paradox represents an objection to religion for some, ever since Hamann retooled the coincidentia oppositorum for apologetic purposes, paradox has served for others as a defense of religion, or even a positive inducement to religion. Much modern religious apologetic takes its cues from Hamann. Various forms of modern fideism, on the one hand, pursue the ideas that reason rests on a kind of faith, and/or that faith transcends reason. Proponents of religious experience, on the other hand, have argued that it provides an immediate source of religious knowledge that precedes discursive rationality. Religious paradox has figured prominently in both sorts of apologetic. In the first instance, paradox is taken to signal that faith transcends

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reason. In the second instance apologists have argued that the paradoxes in mystical texts are best understood as describing an experience that eludes discursive rationality. These apologetic moves have proven wildly successful. The man on the street takes it for granted that faith is the legitimate province of paradox, and that mysticism consists in extraordinary consciousness that discloses suprarational truths. Given the importance of paradox in the modern religious drama, it is ironic (if not paradoxical) that paradox has received so little scholarly attention outside these apologetic contexts. In this book I try to break free from the perspectives bequeathed to us by the apologetic debates to consider afresh the puzzle I noted at the outset. Why does religion display this peculiar propensity for paradox? I approach the problem in the naturalistic, humanistic spirit in which religion is studied in Departments of Religious Studies within the Arts and Sciences in secular universities. That is to say, I employ the resources of the social sciences and humanities with the intention of revealing everything I can about the human purveyors of religious paradox. Because I seek a fresh perspective on religious paradox, this book does not directly contribute to any ongoing scholarly debates. My conclusions do, nevertheless, bear negative implications for the old apologetic moves. At times I make this fact explicit. For this reason and because of my methodological naturalism, the book does have a polemical edge. The primary intention behind the book is, however, not to offer a new twist to the old debates, but rather to think anew about the religious propensity for paradox, and use the best available tools to understand and explain it. I argue that when faced with paradoxes they are unable or unwilling to resolve, religious thinkers endow paradox with a role in the religious life. Religion celebrates paradox because it forms the basis for techniques of self-transformation. I distinguish two different techniques of self-transformation that employ paradox, and look to a given religious thinker’s social attitudes to explain his or her tendency toward one or the other technique. To illustrate my

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claims I adduce examples drawn from widely disparate contexts. Finally, throughout the course of my analysis, I critically evaluate the various paradoxes that spawn these religious practices.

R in writing this book there is one proposition that I have come to learn is no paradox: one can incur as many debts in writing a short book as one might writing a long one. The number of individuals who have helped me to conceive and execute this book is humbling. The ideas that form its basis were developed in teaching theory and method to undergraduates over several years at Columbia and Brown universities. Some of those same classes wrestled with various drafts of the book. My colleagues at Brown have been patient and supportive. Additionally, some have shared their expertise; Wendell Dietrich, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Ross Kraemer, Jock Reeder, Hal Roth, and Stan Stowers all read at least some of the manuscript and all offered valuable suggestions. Their wise counsel has improved this book in innumerable ways. Matthew Kapstein, Andrew Louth, Jim Gubbins, Amy Hollywood, Kevin Schilbrack, Charles Taliaferro, Blake Spitz, Curtis Hutt, Jim Swan Tuite, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Jim Wetzel, Andrew Dole, David Wills, and Bob Somerville commented helpfully on my ideas. Ann Taves taught the manuscript in a graduate seminar. Her students and she supplied useful critique. Nancy Frankenberry, Barney Twiss, and anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press and Columbia University Press provided detailed responses to the manuscript and demonstrated the need for significant revisions. Wayne Proudfoot was (as always) generous with his advice on matters both practical and intellectual. Amy Langenberg’s contributions to the project were not only direct and explicit, but in equal measure, indirect and implicit. I owe thanks to my research assistant and conversation partner, Matt Redovan. Becky Cremona displayed incredible patience in compiling the index and formatting the text. Kathleen Pappas provided indispensable help preparing the

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manuscript for submission. The Columbia University Council for Research in the Humanities supported early work on the project. Some of the research and writing were completed in residence at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University. Audiences at Brown, New York University, Amherst College, and the 2001 meeting of the American Academy of Religion have heard portions of the argument. An early version of a few pages of chapter 4 appeared in Religious Studies Review (1999).

THE USES OF PARADOX

1 INTRODUCTION Paradox Without Piety

F

rom the very inception of the naturalistic study of religion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, students of religion have remarked on the prevalence of contradiction and paradox in religious discourse. Hobbes, for instance, wryly observes, “That which taketh away the reputation of Wisdome, in him that formeth a Religion, or addeth to it when it is already formed, is the enjoyning of a belief of contradictories.” A century later Hume, giving the topic more attention, claims in The Natural History of Religion that “all popular theology” [i.e., all theology except philosophical deism] exhibits “a kind of appetite for absurdity and contradiction.” Both Hobbes and Hume have specific contradictions in mind, of course; their comments have polemical intent directed at Christian scholasticism. Nevertheless, both believed that Christian history instances a more universal generalization, and both (to different degrees) sought to explain the causes and describe the effects of religion’s predilection for what in more recent parlance we call paradox. Robin Horton has argued conversely that religious discourse is generally no more paradoxical than scientific discourse, and that the pronounced glorification of paradox in Christianity represents a local exception. Scholars since Hobbes and Hume, however, have amply documented the prominence of paradox in much nonWestern religious reflection. They also concur that, unlike scientific thought which always regards paradox as a weakness of a the-

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ory, religious thought often revels or rejoices in paradox. Two hundred and fifty years’ growth in scholarly understanding has not entirely invalidated Hume’s facetious remarks about religion’s singular propensity for paradox: When a [theological] controversy is started, some people always pretend with certainty to foretell the issue. Whichever opinion, they say, is most contrary to plain sense is sure to prevail; even where the general interest of the system requires not that decision. Though the reproach of heresy may, for some time, be bandied about among the disputants, it always rests at last on the side of reason.

That non-Western religious discourse often exploits paradox redeems the task attempted by Hobbes and Hume: a general explanation of the prevalence of theological paradox. When paradox entered the English language sometime in the sixteenth century, it simply meant an eccentric opinion. John Bullokar’s English Expositor (1616) defines paradox as “an Opinion maintained contrary to the commonly allowed Opinion, as if one affirms that the Earth doth move round and the Heavens stand still.” In contemporary English the word refers to a more curious kind of doxastic anomaly. When one describes a statement as paradoxical, one generally perceives it as in some respect selfcontradictory or self-refuting, but to some extent compelling nonetheless. My use of paradox in this book conforms to the contemporary usage. Anglo-American philosophers have analyzed paradox in a variety of ways: as the puzzling (because seemingly unacceptable) conclusion of a (seemingly acceptable) argument, as a (seemingly acceptable) argument with a puzzling (because seemingly unacceptable) conclusion, as a set of individually plausible but jointly inconsistent propositions, as a statement that is formally incompatible with a conceptual truth, and as a riddle with too many good answers. Precising definitions like these that seek to discipline or improve on ordinary usage can only find their justifi-

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cation in a theoretical or practical project to which their definitional delimitations contribute. The point of precising definitions, in other words, is to facilitate theory or formulate policy. In the absence of any explicit theoretical or practical purpose guiding these analyses of paradox, they can seem utterly arbitrary. To define paradox as a riddle, for instance, broadens the definition to include many conundra that other, narrower analyses (as well as ordinary usage) do not classify as paradoxes. To then defend this definition on the grounds that the other analyses are too narrow is simply to beg the question against the other analyses. Many of these analyses also exhibit a philosopher’s bias. They give argument too prominent a place in the definition of paradox. The influential twentieth-century American philosopher Willard van Orman Quine, for example, famously defines paradox as “just any conclusion that at first sounds absurd but that has an argument to sustain it.” This definition laudably recognizes that what distinguishes paradoxical statements from unambiguously absurd statements is that paradoxical statements enjoy epistemic support and so make some appeal to credence, but it assumes that the epistemic support must take the form of an argument. As the history of religious paradox evinces, however, some paradoxes are sustained not by argument but by other forms of epistemic authority. The nineteenth-century Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard, as if responding to Quine, even goes so far as to insist that there is no argument which could assuage the absurdity of Christian paradox. For my theoretical purposes, therefore, I stipulatively define paradox as an apparently absurd claim, i.e., a claim that apparently entails a self-contradiction (either formally, materially, or performatively), to which one feels at least some inclination to assent because it is supported by at least one form of epistemic authority that one recognizes. This definition retains the common notion that paradoxes involve some sort of seeming self-contradiction, but distinguishes three ways a claim can produce a self-contradiction. Unlike a claim that formally entails a self-contradiction, a claim that materially entails a self-contradiction does not entail the selfcontradiction merely by virtue of its form. To recognize that a claim

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materially entails a self-contradiction, one must have some knowledge of the objects and properties named in the assertion. A rudimentary knowledge of chemistry, for instance, is necessary to recognize that “Electrolyte solutions do not conduct electricity” entails “Solutions that conduct electricity do not conduct electricity.” Because claims that materially entail a self-contradiction cannot be sharply distinguished from mere materially erroneous claims—Is “The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States sits at the head of the Executive Branch” a claim that materially entails a self-contradiction or simply a claim that contradicts what one knows?—this definition of paradox cannot sharply distinguish between paradox proper (a claim that apparently entails a selfcontradiction, to which one feels some inclination to assent) and a claim that appears incompatible with one’s other beliefs, to which one feels some inclination to assent. Borderline cases of paradox notwithstanding, the paradigm cases will involve a claim that seems self-contradictory to the one entertaining it, and not merely puzzling in light of his or her other beliefs. Finally, a claim that performatively entails a self-contradiction involves an inconsistency between one’s claim and the very act of asserting it (e.g., “I am dead”). This definition also preserves the etymological emphasis on belief. Epistemic authority is the power selectively to privilege candidates for belief. In other words, epistemic authority lends (at least some) credibility to a claim. Reason, of course, is one form of epistemic authority, but testimony, tradition, the verdicts of recognized specialists or masters, revelation, and divination also have the power to render claims credible. Epistemic authority is relative; the catalogue of accepted epistemic authorities and their order of precedence differ widely from person to person and epistemic context to epistemic context. A paradox as I define it is an apparently absurd claim supported by at least one of these forms of authority. Paradoxes are not mere wordplay. Neither are they primarily exercises in logic. They only remain paradoxes so long as they tempt our assent. A paradox that has been conclusively resolved or disarmed can only continue to be called a paradox in recognition of its potential to snare the uninstructed.

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The two elements of my definition—the apparent selfcontradiction and the epistemic authority—point to the two conventional ways that a paradox can be resolved, so as to eliminate it. Either: one eliminates a paradox by concluding that the appearance of self-contradiction is deceiving, that the apparent selfcontradiction is not, in fact, an actual self-contradiction. In the case of a paradox that materially entails a self-contradiction, this resolution can result from revising one’s beliefs and/or adopting new beliefs bearing on the objects or properties at issue. The early Christian convert, for instance, resolved the paradox that true marriage consists in remaining a virgin by adopting certain beliefs about human nature, Christ, and God’s plan. Or: one eliminates a paradox by subverting the epistemic authority that supports what one now views as a straightforward self-contradiction. In this case, one finds the flaw in the argument, rejects the testimony, repudiates tradition, concludes the master made a mistake, determines the revelation has been corrupted, and so on. The early apostate resolved the paradox of virgin marriage by denying the authority of scripture and the Church Fathers. Apropos of logical paradox Anatol Rapoport once observed, “Faced with a contradiction that seems fundamentally irreconcilable, one can ignore it or deny it, worship it or try to remove it.” To say that one can venerate a paradox sounds less arch than to say one can “worship” it. Nevertheless, Rapoport correctly reports that in religious contexts paradox can assume a holy or sacred mien. Religious thinkers seem rarely to ignore or deny contradictions, often try to remove them, but frequently venerate them. In this book I explain and evaluate two relatively distinct types of religious response to paradox, both of which can in a very loose sense be described as veneration. Unlike Hobbes and Hume, who think the veneration of contradiction requires explanation, many scholars of religion indulge in special pleading on behalf of religious paradox. Some adopt an essentially religious attitude regarding the purported limits of language and reason. They affect humility or reverence in the face of the allegedly inexpressible or inconceivable. Herbert Spencer and

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Max Müller both considered such beliefs and attitudes central to religion. Spencer argued that the “most abstract belief . . . common to all religions” is “the omnipresence of something which passes comprehension,” and Müller viewed religion as a mental faculty that “yearns for something that neither sense nor reason can supply” and struggles “to conceive the inconceivable, to utter the unutterable.” Without going so far as to define religion in terms of such beliefs and attitudes (which is to say that Spencer and Müller go too far), it is nevertheless safe to label them religious beliefs and attitudes. Other scholars propose a variety of ad hoc strategies for distinguishing properly religious paradox from mere logical contradiction. Yet others, in the name of elucidating the “logic” of religious discourse, devise torturous hermeneutics designed to soften the paradoxes and make them appear less peculiar—this attempt despite the fact that the religious texts themselves often try to heighten the paradoxes’ peculiarity. Adhering to the non-apologetic tradition of Hobbes and Hume, by contrast, one can simply inquire why and how religious thinkers venerate contradictions. Why do religious thinkers venerate paradoxes? In standard cases they venerate paradoxes, rather than ignoring or removing them, when a metaphysical doctrine that generates paradox is constitutive of religious beliefs or practices in which the thinkers are heavily invested. Jon Elster has claimed that for the social scientist the “vastly more interesting” cases of paradox concern contradictions deduced from a single belief or desire because, “When the contradiction or inconsistency follows from a single unitary project, it may be constitutive of the personality as a whole and far from easily given up.” Paradox-generating religious doctrines are often too important either to escape scrutiny or to undergo revision or elimination. Hobbes’s remark proves astute. Unless a religion is well established or “already formed,” paradox will generally be avoided. If it is well established, paradox will be accorded respect. The veneration of paradox, moreover, serves religious purposes. It has religious uses. Paradox functions as a means of worship— not the object of worship as Rapoport’s quip suggests—when it

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comes to inform various sorts of (what I call) cognitive practice. Cognitive practices are techniques of self-transformation. Although not all cognitive practices promote a religious end (indeed, in chapter 5 I discuss a nonreligious cognitive practice), religious cognitive practices effect religiously motivated self-transformation. They work to alter the individual’s volitional complex—his or her beliefs, emotions, attitudes, perspective, and desires—in accord with a religious end. Specifically cognitive practices, as distinct from other practices that effect self-transformation, do not receive their due in the literature on self-management. Elster, who has written as much and as perceptively on these subjects as anyone, presents a case in point. In his widely influential Ulysses and the Sirens he analyzes strategies for combating weakness of the will. Although overcoming weakness of the will need not require full-scale self-transformation, Elster discusses techniques of self-manipulation pertinent to the latter. He focuses on what he calls “pre-commitment” strategies. Illustrated by Ulysses, who bound himself to the mast to ensure that he could not succumb to the Sirens’ singing, pre-commitment strategies bind one through causal mechanisms one sets up in the world. Elster provides an extensive catalogue of pre-commitment strategies. Some raise the stakes for failure (e.g., wagering with a roommate that one will exercise every morning before work, or risking derision by publicly predicting easy adherence to a diet). Others restrict one’s exposure to temptation (e. g., avoiding one’s old drinking buddies) or opportunities for failure (e.g., hiking where one will not have access to cigarettes). Yet others work directly to change one’s volitional complex (e.g., taking cold showers to strengthen the will, working to develop habits, or, like Pascal’s example of taking holy water to foster belief, committing to behavioral patterns in the hopes of bringing one’s beliefs into line). Elster contrasts these pre-commitment strategies with strategies that rearrange the person’s inner space without benefit of causal mechanisms in the external world. He mentions mentally raising the stakes of failure (telling oneself, “If I succumb to temptation now, I’ll likewise fail whenever tempted and where would that leave

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me?”) and adopting a new descriptive vocabulary in an act of selfredefinition (“saying makes it so”). Elster accords varying degrees of efficacy to the different types of pre-commitment, but nevertheless concludes that pre-commitment is the “privileged” technique of self-manipulation because self-manipulation through a rearrangement of inner space has narrow limits of effectiveness. A survey of religious literature indicates that Elster has both overlooked prominent strategies for rearranging inner space and underestimated their effectiveness. Manuals of spiritual discipline advocate all the pre-commitment techniques Elster enumerates, but also recommend a rich variety of techniques for rearranging inner space. To the extent that these latter techniques require dedication over time and aim at self-transformation, I call them cognitive practices. The most obvious cognitive practices are meditation regimens. Meditation takes many forms. Some types of meditation exploit the intellect. The Buddhist monk engaged in “mental culture” (bhāvanā) aims to appropriate the truth of Buddhist doctrine subjectively. Through vipassanā or “insight” meditation he discerns the real by applying Buddhist doctrine to his own personal experience. In this way he gradually comes to adhere to the “right view” in the deepest sense, the sense in which Buddhist doctrine has fundamentally transformed his volitional complex. Other types of meditation exploit the imagination. Teresa of Avila continually implores her nuns to meditate on the humanity of Christ, to gaze at his beautiful face, to witness his suffering for their sakes, to see the love for them in his eyes. Such a practice counters selfish reluctance to do his will. Shantideva similarly harnesses the imagination when he counsels that one plagued by lust should imagine the object of one’s lust as a sack of excrement. Some of the cognitive practices I describe in this book involve some manner of meditation, but what they all share is the purposeful cultivation of paradox or contradiction in the service of self-transformation. Alluding to Hadot‘s catchphrase, one might say they regard paradox “as a way of life.” What I call “religiously motivated self-transformation” religious texts sometimes describe in a different argot: the idiom of detach-

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ment and union. That paradox can foster detachment from disfavored affections and judgments, and/or promote identification with a wider perspective, explains why religious texts sometimes seem to revel in paradox, rather than simply tolerating it as a theoretical physicist might. In this book I aim to examine critically the material grounds for some prominent religious paradoxes (i.e., “the reasons why the two [apparently contradictory] arms of a paradox are jointly asserted”), distinguish, explain, and illustrate two types of religious use of paradox, contrast them with a well-known nonreligious use of contradiction, and venture a social psychological hypothesis about the circumstances in which one or another of these cognitive practices is likely to appear. I begin my typology in chapter 2, where I describe what I call cognitive asceticism. Cognitive ascetics harness the discomfort of cognitive dissonance and hitch it to an ascetic regimen. Their cognitive practice consists in cultivating cognitive dissonance and employing it ascetically. Presumably, cognitive ascetics can exploit cognitive dissonance deriving from sources other than paradox, but I will focus on cognitive ascetics who capitalize on the ascetic potential of paradox. In their hands paradox becomes a tool of ascetic self-transformation. Søren Kierkegaard is the cognitive ascetic I discuss in greatest detail. He takes cognitive self-torment to heights rarely found elsewhere. In chapter 3 I contrast cognitive asceticism to my second type of religious response to paradox: mysticism. During the last two or three centuries we have come to think of mysticism in terms of extraordinary experiences or altered states of consciousness. When I use the term mysticism to denote a kind of response to paradox, I use the term more broadly. I take inspiration from the premodern, Christian concept of mystical theology, which concerns ineffable, suprarational cognition beyond the paradoxes to which rational reflection on God leads. In my usage a mystic purports to attain ineffable superknowledge on the far side of paradox. For a mystic, paradox does not mark the limit of human cognition; rather, paradox opens out onto a plane of exceptional cognition. Under this definition a mystic may, but need not, experience extraordinary

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states of consciousness. As a cognitive practice mystical apprehension serves to refashion the perspective and attitudes composing the self. It promotes identification with a wider perspective. I offer extremely brief accounts of Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa’s mystical theologies and contrast them to John of the Cross, who uses paradox ascetically. The prevalence of mysticism and cognitive asceticism as responses to the paradoxes that arise in religious discourse bears out Hume’s remark about religion’s “appetite for absurdity and contradiction,” but their distinctiveness indicates that paradox satisfies different cravings in different circumstances. In this same chapter I try to explain this distinctiveness. Averil Cameron has argued that late-fourth-century Christian writers cultivate paradox to resist the assimilation of Christian discourse to traditional public rhetoric. I too see a relationship between paradox and boundary management, but offer a theory both more general and more attuned to different attitudes toward boundaries. Tailoring Mary Douglas’s sociological theory about taxonomic anomalies, I argue that a religious thinker’s attitude toward paradox reflects his or her attitude toward the external boundary of whatever social group most preoccupies him or her. Concern about the threat posed by outsiders produces a view that the outer limits of the understanding are impermeable. The greater the emphasis on excluding outsiders, the more rigid and impregnable become the bounds of reason. To a thinker apprehensive about the integrity of the external social boundary, paradox will appear irreconcilably dissonant, suitable for an ascetic use. Conversely, the greater the value seen in incorporating outsiders, the more rich become the possibilities for cognition beyond the bounds of reason. My variation on Douglas’s theory helps explain, furthermore, how cognitive asceticism and mysticism effect self-transformation. Reactions to paradox gain emotional force from their basis in attitudes toward social relations. To a thinker who feels his group threatened by outsiders, paradox will offend and horrify. If this thinker uses cognitive dissonance ascetically, these affects exacerbate the discomfort. To a thinker invested in bringing outsiders

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across the external boundary of the group, paradox will evoke awe and reverence. The mystic’s belief that he has attained ineffable superknowledge dispels the cognitive dissonance attendant on paradox, while these strong affects lend the doctrine that begets paradox the vivacity to impel a change in his volitional complex. Although my account of the causal relationships between mysticism, emotion, and volition ranges over the same terrain as William James’s influential theory in The Varieties of Religious Experience, it contrasts sharply with James’s position. James includes in his catalogue of the saintly emotions a feeling that he sometimes calls “mystical emotion”: an “immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining selfhood melt down.” The “practical consequence” of this excitement is charity. James here describes the emotional arousal and identification with a wider perspective that I have argued results from mysticism as a cognitive practice. Emphatically, James insists that the saintly emotions etiologically precede theologies. In fact he specifically makes a point of arguing that one cannot derive the state of mind “in which the sand and grit of the selfhood incline to disappear” from belief or cosmological reflection (225). Elsewhere in the Varieties, he describes “philosophic and theological formulas” as “secondary products” building on religious feeling (337–38). “The fact is,” he writes in yet another passage, “that the mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no special intellectual content whatever of its own. It is capable of forming matrimonial alliances with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies, provided only they can find a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood” (333–34). Likewise, James views the saintly emotions as “more fundamental” than “ecclesiasticism” (42). Others have conclusively argued that emotions are thoroughly (in fact essentially) cognitive and that James, therefore, is mistaken to distinguish religious emotions and feelings so sharply from theology and beliefs. Attending to cognitive practices supplements this criticism of James by explaining how theological doctrines can come to bear the emotional intensity capable of transforming the self. The emotional arousal and transformed volitional complex

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that James describes depend, despite James’s assertion to the contrary, on metaphysical reflection and ecclesiasticism. Theological doctrines that generate paradox will, given the right ecclesiastical attitudes, produce strongly felt awe and reverence that effect self-transformation. In chapter 4 I examine the concept of transcendence, a notion at the heart of so much mysticism. I try to show that transcendence frequently has cosmogonic inspiration. The very posing of the cosmogonic question—Why is there something, rather than nothing?—promotes an emphasis on absolute transcendence. Any limited something capable of description fails to answer the question. Only that which transcends all limitation and description as a something satisfies the demands of the question. The very concept of absolute transcendence, however, generates paradox. To characterize the transcendent as beyond all limited and describable things is to limit it and describe it as a something in relation to all other limited things. The absolutely transcendent must, therefore, paradoxically be within all things as well as beyond them. This paradox of immanence and transcendence appears repeatedly in the world’s religious literature, and helps account for the conjunction of mysticism, as I use the term, and extraordinary states of consciousness. If the transcendent paradoxically subsists within all things, the transcendent must subsist within humans as well. Some mystics and mystical traditions come to view altered states of consciousness as the experiential vehicle for ineffable cognition of the immanent transcendent. In this chapter I also attempt to take some air out from under the wings on which much mystical speculation soars. If the cosmogonic question generates the concept of absolute transcendence, then mysticism predicated on the paradoxes of transcendence loses its compellingness when one perceives the flaw at work in the cosmogonic question. Although it is well formed both syntactically and semantically, the cosmogonic question fails to satisfy the necessary pragmatic conditions for a successful request for an explanation. This fact enables one to turn the tables on the mystic. Whereas the mystic takes flight because the idea of an absolutely

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transcendent cause produces paradox, the cosmogonic question’s failure with respect to the pragmatics of explanation enables one simply to reject the idea of an absolutely transcendent cause on the very grounds that such an idea breeds paradox. In chapter 5 I consider ancient Greek Skepticism, a cognitive practice that, strictly speaking, is neither religious nor exploits paradox. The skeptics can be described as religious only under the most liberal construal of the term, and although they did pursue a cognitive practice based on contradiction, they did not traffic in paradoxes per se. For two reasons I, nonetheless, traverse this terrain. First, a study of Skepticism reveals a general limit or constraint on what cognitive practices can achieve. Second, a comparison of Skepticism to the cognitive practices of some mystics clarifies mysticism and sets it in higher relief. In pursuit of tranquility, at least some of the Pyrrhonian Skeptics attempted to live a life devoid of belief. Their discipline cultivated the appearance of contradiction. By adducing contradictory evidences, they sought to force themselves to suspend judgment on all questions of fact and value. Adapting the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce’s early essays, I argue that the skeptic misrepresents the culmination of his discipline when he describes it as a life without beliefs. My analysis of the skeptic’s cognitive practice indicates that thoroughgoing cognitive detachment is not an option. As a rule, cognitive detachment is parasitic on belief. In the second and third sections of this chapter, respectively, I compare Greek Skepticism to Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakārikā and the Chuang-tzu. Both Nāgārjuna and Chuang-tzu have been described as skeptics because, among other reasons, they, like the Skeptics, emphasize the shortcomings of reason. I claim that, despite similarities to the Skeptics in strategy and argument, Chuang-tzu and Nāgārjuna are mystics, not skeptics. They deploy skeptical arguments to promote extraordinary, mystical insight. Although I am, of course, solicitous about the various components of my argument, my paramount concern in this book is to illustrate how leaving piety to one side pays dividends for an investigation into religious paradox. Too often in the study of religion

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paradox functions as the final preserve for pious attitudes that block the path of inquiry. I try here to demonstrate that naturalistic inquiry of a sort that fully integrates philosophy of religion and social scientific theory proves well suited to explaining the peculiar exaltation of paradox in religious discourse. Even if my substantive conclusions fail to convince, I hope my general methodological orientation persuades.

2 CREDO QUIA ABSURDUM Cognitive Asceticism and Kierkegaard

I

n The Natural History of Religion Hume assigns the same cause to theology’s “appetite for absurdity and contradiction” that he does to asceticism. Both “the belief of the most unintelligible sophisms” and “the monkish virtues of mortification, penance, humility, and passive suffering” stem from an attempt to serve an infinite deity and thereby allay superstitious terrors. The natural inclinations to reason and virtue seem, he argues, insufficient service to the deity. To placate the deity a superstitious person embraces, therefore, “any practice, recommended to him, which either serves to no purpose in life, or offers the strongest violence to his natural inclinations” (72). These superstitious practices include both unnatural, ascetic observances and irrational “belief of mysterious and absurd opinions” (70). Hume notes, furthermore, the extraordinary persistence of theological paradox, even in the face of rational criticism. “To oppose the torrent of scholastic religion by such feeble maxims as these, that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be, that the whole is greater than a part, that two and three make five; is pretending to stop the ocean with a bullrush” (54; italics in original). Hume believes that the causal source of theological absurdity in human nature (fear) explains its strange imperviousness to the basic principles of logic. The problems with Hume’s theory of religion are too well known to recount. The close connection he pos-

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ited between asceticism and paradox is suggestive nevertheless, as is his conclusion that the explanation of theological paradox lies in a universal feature of human psychology. Scholars have recognized that the paradoxes found in mystical texts baffle and serve to arouse a religious response. They can work to evoke religious experiences of awe and mystery. Much remains to be said below about the mystical response to paradox. Reflection on Hume’s remarks, however, alerts us to another possible religious response to paradox. Whereas Hume believed that asceticism and paradox result from the same cause, perhaps to say that paradox sometimes functions in religious texts as an instrument of asceticism more accurately captures the connection he perceived. The paradoxes present in theological texts can work ascetically, by frustrating the intellect in order to induce suffering or effect abnegation. Taking inspiration from Hume, in what follows I will try to distinguish the ascetical uses of theological paradox from the better known mystical uses. The term asceticism (much more so than many other analytic terms) seems not to have a settled denotation. Some writers employ the word in very broad senses that largely strip it of its usefulness for the study of religion. Nietzsche, for instance, applies the term to so many diverse phenomena that commentators have difficulty answering Nietzsche’s own question as to what qualifies as its opposite. Following Nietzsche’s lead, Geoffrey Harpham renders “asceticism” and “culture” coextensive. His use of the term brings to mind Kierkegaard’s remark about that omnibus concept of nineteenth-century theory, selfishness. “If a concept is brought that far, it might just as well lie down and, if possible, sleep off its drunkenness and become sober again. In this respect, our age has been untiring in its efforts to make everything signify all things.” In an effort to keep the term asceticism sober, I will stipulatively define it as religiously motivated self-denial and/or suffering, often undertaken in a systematic pursuit of self-transformation. This definition limits the phenomenon so as to retain its usefulness as an analytic category in the study of religion.

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When scholars discuss asceticism (construed in this way), they usually focus on physical practices such as fasting, celibacy, flagellation, sleep deprivation, and so forth. Occasionally, they will mention meditative practices designed to induce fear or disgust. The cultivation of unintelligible, contradictory, or paradoxical beliefs can also, however, serve as an ascetic practice and can, in principle, be put in the service of widely divergent religious motivations found both within and across the many religious traditions.

R cognitive dissonance theory assumes as its fundamental premise that having cognitions in a dissonant relationship produces a psychological tension or discomfort of variable magnitude. The fascination of cognitive dissonance theory resides in the extraordinary (and sometimes counterintuitive) measures humans take to reduce or avoid the psychological discomfort of dissonance. Leon Festinger, the psychologist who devised the theory, compares this motivation to the motivation to avoid or reduce the discomfort of hunger. Scholars of religion have made fruitful use of cognitive dissonance theory to explain various religious phenomena. The explanations rely on this strong motivation to reduce or avoid the discomfort of dissonance. John Gager, for instance, employs the theory to explain Christianity’s early success. Christianity spread more rapidly than other late antique millennial movements because of activity Christians undertook to reduce the cognitive dissonance occasioned by disappointed expectations. Alan Segal uses the theory to explain the dynamics of religious conversion. Converts sometimes behave in ways best explained as means of reducing the dissonance produced by a lingering attraction to the life they have renounced. Though not explicitly indebted to Festinger’s work, Erving Goffman relies on premises similar to cognitive dissonance theory. He uses them to explain the “mortification of the self ,” which occurs in total institutions (like

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monasteries). Inmates revise their opinions of themselves to reduce the dissonance between, on the one hand, their initial selfknowledge and self-evaluation and, on the other, their new appearance, circumstances, and behavior. Goffman’s research contributes to an understanding of asceticism because it explains how the motivation to reduce the dissonance aroused by certain unpleasant or renunciative behaviors can effectively transform the self. Scholars of religion have overlooked, however, the potential for the discomfort of cognitive dissonance to serve in itself as an ascetic practice (rather than simply as the mechanism which renders some ascetic practices effective). In the same way that some ascetics resist the motivation to avoid or reduce hunger and, in fact, cultivate hunger through fasting, some ascetics resist the motivation to avoid or reduce cognitive dissonance and, in fact, cultivate dissonance and seek to increase its magnitude. These ascetics find paradox surpassingly well suited to this end. Like the ascetically inclined Tertullian, they believe because it is absurd. I will call such a practice cognitive asceticism. Though I will focus my attention on Christian cognitive asceticism, cognitive asceticism is not an exclusively Christian phenomenon. Just as the motivation to reduce or avoid hunger renders fasting available as an ascetic practice in principle universally, though fasting is by no means practiced universally, the motivation to reduce or avoid cognitive dissonance renders cognitive asceticism available in principle universally, though it too is not practiced universally. The k’an-hua Ch’an Buddhism of Ta-hui Tsungkao (1089–1163) serves as one evident non-Christian instance of cognitive asceticism. Ta-hui advocates meditation on the “critical phrase” of an inscrutable Ch’an kung-an to generate “the sensation of doubt” (i-ch’ing). Although he glossed other kung-an, Ta-hui most frequently assigned to his students the wu of Chao-chou Ts’ung-shen (778–897): Once a monk asked Chao-chou, “Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?” Chao-chou replied, “No!” (wu). (Buswell, Jr., “The ‘Short Cut’ Approach,” 347)

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The critical phrase of this kung-an, Chao-chou’s “wu,” presents the student with a paradox. The denial that a dog has Buddha-nature materially implies a self-contradiction because it “contradicts the most fundamental tenet of sinitic Buddhist doctrine, which insisted the Buddha-nature is innate in all sentient beings” (347). Despite its apparent absurdity, in the student’s eyes the denial enjoys considerable epistemic support. Both Chao-chou as revered ancestral master and Ta-hui as teacher confer credibility on the denial. If the meditator applies himself assiduously and “takes the road of death,” the doubt occasioned by the paradox absorbs all his more mundane perplexities to form one “great doubt” (353). The great doubt exerts pressure on the meditator’s intellect and self-esteem until the doubt “explodes” and destroys his reliance on intellection and his ego boundaries. This new condition is enlightenment. Ta-hui’s kung-an technique forms a paradigm case of cognitive asceticism: meditation on the incomprehensible kung-an arouses distressing cognitive dissonance that effects a transformation of the self. Festinger defines cognition as “knowledge, opinion or belief about the environment, about oneself, or about one’s behavior.” Two cognitions are in a dissonant relationship if the obverse of one cognition follows from the other. In other words, cognitions “x and y are dissonant if not-x follows from y.” Festinger gives the crucial phrase “follows from” a broad latitude; dissonance can arise from logical inconsistency, a conflict with past experience, an incompatibility between one’s behavior and one’s knowledge of cultural mores (e.g., eating with one’s fingers at a formal banquet), or a conflict between a specific opinion and a more general opinion (preferring a particular Republican candidate, but supporting the Democratic cause). The magnitude of dissonance between two dissonant cognitions is a function of two factors. First, the importance of the cognitions influences the magnitude of dissonance. The more important the dissonant cognitions are for the individual, the more dissonance they produce. Second, of all the cognitions either consonant or dissonant with a given cognition, the proportion of cognitions dissonant with the one in question influences the magnitude of dissonance. In other words, if most of the

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cognitions either consonant or dissonant with the given one are, in fact, consonant with it, then the magnitude of dissonance is less than it would have been had most of the cognitions either consonant or dissonant with the given one been dissonant with it. The magnitude of dissonance cannot, however, exceed the resistance to change of the least resistant cognition. When the magnitude of dissonance between two cognitions exceeds the resistance to change of the less resistant cognition, one changes that cognition. Though Festinger does not describe it in quite this way, a cognition’s resistance to change is likewise a matter of its importance and its relative consonance with other cognitions. The magnitude of dissonance and the magnitude of resistance to change are essentially inversions of each other. Festinger’s theory posits both that individuals actively avoid circumstances likely to produce dissonance and that they seek to reduce dissonance. They pursue the latter course by both changing cognitive elements and adding cognitive elements. To change a cognitive element individuals might change their behavior or a feature of the environment to bring their cognitions into line. Or they might change a dissonant cognition without any overt activity to change reality. The inmate of the total institution, for instance, whose behavior is constrained, will feel pressure to change the cognitions dissonant with her knowledge of this behavior. Added cognitive elements can reduce dissonance in three ways. First, adding a cognitive element consonant with the dissonant one changes the proportion of dissonant and consonant cognitions, and thereby reduces the magnitude of dissonance, which is, in part, a function of this proportion. The most well-known result of Festinger’s theory concerns the tendency of individuals with high levels of dissonance to proselytize. If these individuals can convince others of their dissonant belief, their knowledge that the others share their belief adds a cognition consonant with the dissonant one. This change in the proportion of dissonance to consonance reduces the magnitude of their dissonance. Second, adding a cognition can reduce the importance of the dissonant cognition for the individual, and so reduce the magnitude of disso-

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nance. Third, an added cognition can sometimes reconcile two dissonant cognitions to remove the dissonance altogether. Often individuals (or groups of individuals sharing the same dissonance) employ many of these strategies in concert. Decisively disconfirmed apocalyptic movements, for instance, will often revise their beliefs (e.g., the kingdom of God is actually within you), reduce the importance of the disconfirmed belief in their ideology, and seek social support through proselytizing.

R a psychologically astute ascetic, however, might resist these means of reducing dissonance and seek to exalt the importance of certain dissonant cognitions. In fact, though not usually considered an ascetic, Søren Kierkegaard consistently and with extraordinary psychological insight characterized the Christian life precisely so as to accentuate dissonance. Kierkegaard published most of his best-known works pseudonymously, and implored readers not to attribute the pseudonyms’ views to him; but because Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms largely concur on this point, one need not plumb Kierkegaard’s complex relationship to his pseudonyms to assert defensibly that he portrays the religious life in cognitively ascetic terms. Though Johannes Climacus (Kierkegaard’s most philosophical pseudonym) explicitly denies that the religious life involves physical self-torment, Kierkegaard’s general account of religiousness nevertheless involves voluntary self-denial and suffering in a systematic pursuit of self-transformation. He claims that “religious existence” is essentially continual suffering. (Commentators often neglect this aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought, despite the paeans to the edifying nature of suffering and the exhortations to imitate Christ’s psychological suffering, both of which appear prominently throughout his works.) Religious suffering results from the practice of renunciation. The individual must renounce all relative or finite ends in order to relate himself absolutely to the absolute. Be-

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ginning in a state of “immediacy,” an absolute relation to finite ends and relative relation to the absolute, the religious individual renounces the finite to achieve an absolute relation to the absolute. Kierkegaard states his ascetical conception of religion unequivocally in a late polemical essay published under his own name: “All religion in which there is any truth, certainly Christianity, aims at a person’s total transformation and wants, through renunciation and self-denial, to wrest away from him all that, precisely that, to which he immediately clings, in which he immediately has his life.” This renunciation requires a dying to immediacy that Climacus characterizes as self-annihilation. An absolute relation to the absolute necessitates the existential recognition “that the individual is capable of doing nothing himself but is nothing before God,” and so “self-annihilation is the essential form for the relationship with God.” The individual actively strives to become passively transformed by God, to suffer God’s action. For Kierkegaard the term suffering denotes both passivity before God’s activity and the pain of self-annihilation. Kierkegaard rejects the more usual means of ascetic selftransformation, however, because willed acts of physical selftorment (e.g., “flagellation and other such things”) express that the self-tormentor believes that he is indeed capable of something before God. They reveal an unwillingness to suffer God’s transformative activity. The “fasting, scourging, and all the monkey antics” of medieval monastic life presuppose that the individual can earn merit before God. Far from true self-denial, furthermore, these acts brought honor and glory to their perpetrator. Despite Kierkegaard’s repudiation of acts of physical asceticism, his account of religiousness as a practice of “suffering as dying to immediacy” designed to transform the self is fundamentally ascetic in conception. Kierkegaard’s anti-Hegelian employment of Hegelian language elucidates the nature of his asceticism. Hegel allows that the exercise of thought called the understanding operates by means of the Aristotelian principles of identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded middle. The exercise of dialectical reason, however, can identify how all concepts imply their own contradiction. This func-

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tion is crucial, he believes, because the laws of the understanding are simply inadequate to the logic of the natural and social worlds. “There is in fact nothing, either in heaven or on earth, either in the spiritual or the natural world, that exhibits the abstract ‘either-or’ as it is maintained by the understanding. . . . Generally speaking, it is contradiction that moves the world, and it is ridiculous to say that contradiction cannot be thought.” Dialectical reason can perceive and surpass the abstract limits of the understanding. Reason can, moreover, in its speculative employment attain a perspective from which it can reconcile contradictions. Speculative reason negates the negations arrived at through dialectic and discovers a new comprehensive positivity. In the sharpest possible opposition to Hegel, Kierkegaard, throughout his corpus, ridicules speculation and seeks to preserve the Aristotelian “either-or.” In one characteristic instance Johannes Climacus twits the Hegelians for “canceling the principle of contradiction, without perceiving what Aristotle indeed emphasized, that the thesis that the principle of contradiction is canceled is based upon the principle of contradiction, since otherwise the opposite thesis, that it is not canceled, is equally true.” Hegel’s understanding of dialectical and speculative reason takes shape at the beginning of his logic in the context of his discussion of pure being. Hegel commences his logic with pure being because it is the absolute. Perfectly abstract and undetermined, pure being represents a starting point not relative to any other claims or presuppositions. The perfect abstractness of pure being means, however, that absolutely indeterminate pure being is “absolutely negative.”  It is absolutely without form or determinate content. Hegel argues that pure being, devoid of all concrete determinations, “overturns dialectically into its opposite . . . nothing.” He insists that for the understanding the identity of being and nothing is a paradox. Being and nothing are nevertheless united in becoming. When something becomes it simultaneously is and is not. Becoming negates the absolute negativity of nothing by bringing the positivity of being and the negativity of nothing into union. In actual somethings being and nothing lose their abstract, absolute charac-

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ter and become constitutive determining moments of positivity and negativity. [N]owhere in heaven or on earth is there anything which does not contain within itself both being and nothing. Of course, since we are speaking here of a particular actual something, those determinations are no longer present in it in the complete untruth in which they are as being and nothing; they are in a more developed determination, and are grasped, for example, as positive and negative, the former being posited, reflected being, the latter posited, reflected nothing; the positive contains as its abstract basis being, and the negative, nothing.

The opposition of being and nothing finds mediation in the becoming of actual somethings, and those somethings preserve being and nothing as positivity and negativity. For Hegel the “negative” is the motive force in history. The dialectical negation of current “positive” arrangements or conclusions leads through a mediation to a new positivity, a process that ultimately leads to a final, culminating positivity. Kierkegaard, who objects to Hegel’s speculative system and its “conclusion,” nevertheless adopts the language of “negativity.” He treats negativity as the motive force of individual inward deepening, but rejects the notion of any final positivity. Negativity is the irritant that spurs subjective individual development and that defies any deceived positivity about human existence. “But the genuine subjective existing thinker is always just as negative as he is positive and vice versa: he is always that as long as he exists, not once and for all in a chimerical mediation. . . . He is cognizant of the negativity of the infinite in existence; he always keeps open the wound of negativity, which at times is a saving factor (the others let the wound close and become positive—deceived).” Subjective existing thinkers always keep open the wound of negativity. The negative moves an individual, in increasing inwardness, to the religious sphere, the deepest, most inward sphere of existence. Kierkegaard insists that the “sign of the religious sphere,” the high-

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est existential sphere, is “that the positive is distinguished by the negative” (432). In a footnote Kierkegaard gives examples of “the positive distinguished by the negative” in the religious sphere. “The reader will recall,” he writes, “that revelation is marked by mystery, eternal happiness by suffering, the certitude of faith by uncertainty, easiness by difficulty, truth by absurdity” (432n). That one actively strives to become passive is another instance. Kierkegaard explains that the “wound of negativity” relates to the contradictory elements of the synthesis that composes the human subject: the infinite eternal and the finite temporal. Humans participate in timeless truths and ideals, but also exist in the temporal world of becoming. “The negativity that is in existence, or rather the negativity of the existing subject . . . , is grounded in the subject’s synthesis, in his being an existing infinite spirit. The infinite and the eternal are the only certainty, but since it is in the subject, it is in existence, and the first expression for it is its illusiveness and the prodigious contradiction that the eternal becomes, that it comes into existence” (82). The “wound of negativity” for the “subjective existing thinker” is her inward appropriation of the infinite ethical task of relating the contradictory elements into a synthesis. In other words, the “wound of negativity” concerns the subjective thinker’s consciousness of the ineradicable contradiction that defines her very existence. In a discussion of religious suffering, Kierkegaard explains that “suffering is precisely the consciousness of contradiction” (483). The more inward the individual, the deeper is the struggle with the “prodigious contradiction” and the greater the suffering. In the ethical sphere of existence, the individual attempts existentially to synthesize the eternal and the temporal. He tries fully to integrate absolute ideals into his finite, relative existence. When this attempt to enact the eternal in the temporal fails, the individual becomes existentially conscious of the “prodigious contradiction.” He gives up belief in his own self-sufficiency and strives for a relationship with God. He seeks to become passive before God. The suffering engendered by the wound of negativity leads the individual to seek self-annihilation. Kierkegaard asserts that “the relationship with God is distinguishable by the negative, and self-annihilation is the

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essential form for the relationship with God” (461). The practice of self-annihilation, of course, brings further suffering in the recognition of the misrelation between one’s acknowledgment that one is nothing before God and one’s continued attachments to the relative. From this brief summary it should be clear that Kierkegaard’s essentially ascetic conception of the religious life depends on the individual’s subjective appropriation of a contradiction. Kierkegaard predicates the ascetic nature of the religious life on the suffering caused by an ineradicable dissonance. The inwardness of the religious sphere is a function of the dissonance between the individual’s ideals and her knowledge of her own behavior and motivations. If, however, even the generically religious life (what Climacus calls “Religiousness A”) concerns self-chastening through dissonance, Kierkegaard’s conception of the Christian life of faith (“Religiousness B”) redoubles the cognitive asceticism. Faith in the Christian paradox, that the eternal God entered time as a finite human, culminates the religious project of selfannihilation (i.e., the individual comes to realize most deeply that he “is capable of doing nothing himself but is nothing before God”) and effects a “new birth.” The “wound of negativity” leads the individual to this final moment in the dialectic of inward deepening. Faith is a “martyrdom,” a “crucifixion” of the understanding. In the suffering of faith, the believer must set aside the understanding. Faith thereby deprives the individual of reasons for belief. Because reasons (concerning matters of fact) obtain relative to finite experience, faith completes his renunciation of the finite and places him in absolute relation to the absolute. Faith ensures that the relation to the absolute is not relative. Faith excludes not only the relativities grounding theoretical reasoning about existential matters but also those grounding prudential reasoning. In his later work Kierkegaard emphasizes the inconveniences, the sufferings brought on by faith, and insists that Christian commitment defies reasons. “When a person lives in such a way that he knows no higher criterion for life than that of the understanding, then his whole life is relativity, working only for relative goals; he does nothing unless

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the understanding with some help from probability can make more or less clear the advantages and disadvantages, can answer his question ‘Why and to what end.’ It is different with the absolute.” Prudential reason depends on finite experience and ends. The life of faith flouts that experience and those ends. “Christianity is a madness because it is incommensurate with any finite wherefore. But then what good is it? Answer: Be quiet, it is the absolute.” Christianity, for Kierkegaard, requires the passionate embrace of a paradox and a way of life that confound the understanding. In purging the relation to the absolute of the relative and the finite, the martyrdom of faith opens the individual to dependence on God’s transcendent transformative activity. The faithful individual “breaks” from “immanence”—that is, he frees himself from the vain delusion that he is ontologically and epistemologically adequate to the truth. “Religiousness A comprehends contradiction as suffering in self-annihilation, yet within immanence. . . . The paradoxical-religious breaks with immanence and makes existing the absolute contradiction—not within immanence but in opposition to immanence.” This final break from immanence, necessary to complete the project of self-annihilation, entails continual suffering. “It is, namely, a suffering, faith’s martyrdom even in times of peace, to have the eternal happiness of one’s soul related to something over which the understanding despairs.” In fact, it is the task of a Christian “to maintain this and endure this crucifixion of the understanding.” Just as this demonstrated commitment to cognitive asceticism would lead one to expect, Kierkegaard took pains to thwart the motivation to avoid or reduce the dissonance of Christian faith. He inveighed against the possibilities for reducing the dissonance and, in fact, sought wherever possible to heighten the dissonance, to increase its magnitude. Many of the major themes of his corpus can be understood as attempts to preserve or increase the dissonance of faith. Kierkegaard’s famous antipathy for Hegel, for instance, is rooted in Hegel’s attempt to reconcile the elements of the paradox. Kierkegaard scorned the idea of “mediating” the paradox and thereby “going beyond” it. Hegelian speculation changes cognitive

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elements of the paradox to eliminate the dissonance. “Speculation has naturally considered itself able to ‘comprehend’ the Godman—as one can very well comprehend, for speculation takes away from the God-man the qualifications of temporality, contemporaneity, and actuality.” Speculation is a “temptation” which “corrects” and “cancels” the paradox. The dissonance of the paradox must not be reduced, if the paradox is to play its role in ascetic, inward self-transformation. For the very same reason (and with equal renown), Kierkegaard emphasizes “the single individual.” To seek social support when grappling with the paradox would be to reduce its dissonance by adding the consonant belief that others also believe. “The religious person who could not bear, if it so happened, that everyone laughed at what absolutely occupies him lacks inwardness and therefore wants to be consoled by illusion, that many people are of the same opinion, indeed, with the same facial expression, as he has, and wants to be built up by adding the world historical to his little fragment of actuality.” Kierkegaard grounds his polemics against Christendom and the “established order” in the fact that they make faith too easy. They deprive the single individual of the “fear and trembling” accompanying the leap of faith. To live in the established order is to “exempt oneself from the least little decision of the kind in which ‘the single individual’ has pain, for one is not a single individual.” One must not seek to alleviate the dissonance of faith through social support because it is the suffering that deepens and transforms the individual. Not only does Kierkegaard try to prevent the reduction of dissonance, he also tries to prevent the avoidance of dissonance. In fact, he works to exalt the importance of the paradox and thereby sharpen the dissonance. This design helps account for Kierkegaard’s insistence that Christianity is not a doctrine. He continually asserts that it is an existence-communication, which must be subjectively appropriated (rather than objective knowledge which can leave the self untransformed). A retreat to objectivity, consigning Christianity to the status of Socratically recollected knowledge (rather than something lived existentially in repetition), lessens the

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importance of the paradox. Both to predicate of human subjectivity a “prodigious contradiction” and to insist that paradoxical Christianity must reconstitute that subjectivity is to augment the importance of dissonance and increase its magnitude. To consider Christianity a doctrine, conversely, “is an enervation of the thrust of the collision of offense” that the incarnation presents. Kierkegaard claims, moreover, that unless one faces the possibility of offense in contemporaneity with the paradox (and negates the domesticating “eighteen hundred years”), one is not “essentially Christian.” Kierkegaard defines both human subjectivity and Christianity in such a way as to maximize dissonance. The novelty of this interpretation notwithstanding, I think it is fair to conclude that Kierkegaard advocates a regimen of cognitive asceticism. Anti-Climacus (Kierkegaard’s most Christian pseudonym) proposes a “practice in Christianity” wherein an individual perpetually confronts the task of embracing the harrowing paradox in contemporaneity. The ascetic employment of cognitive dissonance is, as I have said, not something distinctive to Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is only an especially astute theorist of it (as well as an ardent advocate). Cognitive asceticism of this or similar nature appears sporadically in the world’s religious literature. The tendency of scholars to focus on physical mortifications when discussing asceticism results in a blindness to cognitive asceticism. The fact that the very same metaphors can figure both the ascetical and the mystical uses of paradox also helps to conceal cognitive asceticism. In the Christian tradition metaphors of light and darkness, derived from the dark cloud on Sinai when Moses received the law (Exodus 19–20), have served to convey both cognitive asceticism and mysticism. Though Pseudo-Dionysius, the fifth- or sixth-century Syrian, and others have employed the metaphors of light and darkness to signal mystical insight, other Christians have used them to express either the ascetic application of paradox or the afflictive paradoxes themselves. Kierkegaard himself claimed, “[W]hen worldly wisdom cannot see a hand’s-breadth before it in the dark night of suffering, Faith can see God. For faith sees best in the dark.”

3 MYSTICS AND ASCETICS

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seudo-dionysius inaugurates a tradition of mystical reflection that prefigures the Hegelian view of contradiction against which Kierkegaard reacts so vehemently. Hegel himself recognizes the affinity between his idea of speculative reason transcending contradictions to arrive at a “completer notion” and this mystical conception. He also sees his logic as an alternative to the asceticism of someone who, like Kierkegaard, “renounces thinking” and “ ‘take[s] reason captive.’ ” He explains that the meaning of the speculative is to be understood as being the same as what used in earlier times to be called “mystical,” especially with regard to the religious consciousness and its content. . . . [W]e must remark first that “the mystical” is certainly something mysterious, but only for the understanding, and then only because abstract identity is the principle of the understanding. But when it is regarded as synonymous with the speculative, the mystical is the concrete unity of just those determinations that count as true for the understanding only in their separation and opposition. So if those who recognize the mystical as what is genuine say that it is something utterly mysterious, and just leave it at that, they are only declaring that for them too, thinking has only the significance of an abstract positing of identity, and that in order to attain the truth we must renounce thinking, or, as they fre-

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quently put it, that we must “take reason captive.” As we have seen, however, the abstract thinking of the understanding is so far from being something firm and ultimate that it proves itself, on the contrary, to be a constant sublating of itself and an overturning into its opposite, whereas the rational as such is rational precisely because it contains both of the opposites as ideal moments within itself. Thus, everything rational can equally be called “mystical”; but this only amounts to saying that it transcends the understanding. It does not at all imply that what is so spoken of must be considered inaccessible to thinking and incomprehensible.

Hegel’s assimilation of the mystical to his own speculative logic in this passage is no idle remark. His logical system commences with the dialectic of being and nothingness, the very paradox at the center of so much mystical reflection, including that of Pseudo-Dionysius. In both The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology PseudoDionysius is preoccupied by the biblical idea of God as cause and creator. In these texts he reflects on the creation’s causal dependence on God. Starting with creatures and God as their creator, he pursues and articulates the consequences of the insight that God can’t be a creature. He emphasizes God’s transcendence of the creation. To fathom God’s transcendence, Pseudo-Dionysius draws on Proclus and the Neoplatonic tradition. Pseudo-Dionysius never explicitly poses the cosmological question (“Why is there something rather than nothing?”) because his reflections commence with the question’s answer, but his thought conforms to the peculiar logic the question prescribes. If God is to be explanatorily ultimate (“Cause” and “Source” of all), he must transcend all description because anything capable of description cannot be explanatorily ultimate (i.e., it is a “something” and fails to answer the cosmological question). God’s transcendence, therefore, is tantamount to obscurity. “There is no speaking of it [“the supreme Cause”], nor name nor knowledge of it.” Adopting the metaphor derived from Exodus, Pseudo-Dionysius argues that

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God’s radical transcendence renders him “darkness” to our intellect. God’s “transcendent darkness remains hidden from all light and concealed from all knowledge.” Pseudo-Dionysius (like many other apophatic mystics) perceives, moreover, that the very assertion of God’s transcendence leads to paradox because it limits God by excluding him from the realm of things capable of description. The transcendent itself becomes thereby a limited something capable of description. An assertion of transcendence proves unsatisfactory to the demands of transcendence; to assert it renders it like a limited thing. To compensate for this inadequacy, PseudoDionysius paradoxically supplements assertions of God’s transcendence with assertions of his immanence. God is both beyond all things capable of description and within all things capable of description. Dogged insistence on God’s transcendence paradoxically requires that he be immanent. Nicholas of Cusa, a fifteenthcentury admirer of Pseudo-Dionysius, terms this kind of outcome a coincidentia oppositorum. If, for Pseudo-Dionysius, God’s transcendence is darkness, God’s immanence is light. The paradoxical coincidence of God’s transcendence and immanence leads PseudoDionysius to employ phrases like “the ray of the divine shadow.” Pseudo-Dionysius believes that God’s convergent transcendence and immanence require two complementary modes of theology. God’s immanence means that creation participates in God and that names drawn from the created order apply (inadequately, to be sure) to its creator. God’s transcendence, conversely, requires the denial of any name for God. A dialectic emerges in PseudoDionysius whereby propositions about God are both asserted and denied. The resulting contradictions produce paradox. Whereas for Kierkegaard paradox is an instrument of asceticism, for PseudoDionysius paradox alleviates cognitive dissonance. He treats paradox as negating the negation implicit in the contradiction. Rather than simply accentuating painful contradictions, paradoxical propositions about God move past contradiction to a cognitive state “beyond assertion and denial.” Like Hegel, Pseudo-Dionysius sees negation or denial as merely a dialectical moment taken up in a

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higher positivity. The paradoxes that pertain to God do not, in Pseudo-Dionysius’s view, end in cognitive frustration. On the contrary, he argues that the individual can paradoxically achieve a more adequate “mystical” (mustikos) knowledge of God through “unknowing” (agnōsia). The apophatic dialectic of assertion and denial arising from God’s transcendence yields what Bernard McGinn terms “superknowledge,” a cognitive state characteristic of ecstatic union (henōsis). Paradox mediates between Creator and creature and enables the creature to attain God. Through paradox “one is supremely united by a completely unknowing inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.” The incarnation recapitulates the paradox of immanence and transcendence. Jesus is the ray of divine light, revealing (and simultaneously concealing) the transcendent in immanence. “[T]he transcendent has put aside its own hiddenness and has revealed itself to us by becoming a human being. But he is hidden even after this revelation, or, if I may speak in a more divine fashion, is hidden even amid the revelation. For this mystery of Jesus remains hidden and can be drawn out by no word or mind. What is to be said of it remains unsayable; what is to be understood of it remains unknowable.” Because the transcendent revealed itself in immanence, the revelation and its mysteries disclose the transcendent. Scripture, the inspired record of the revelation, transmits Jesus’ gift of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Jesus, “the source and being underlying all hierarchy, all sanctification,” bestows hierarchy “to enable beings to be as like as possible to God and to be at one with him.” Out of love Jesus became human to elevate humans, to divinize them. The sacraments, offices, and ranks that together compose the ecclesiastical hierarchy, in conjunction with instruction in their esoteric symbolic meanings, alter the individual’s volitional complex—his beliefs, emotions, attitudes, perspectives, and desires. Purgation of catechumens and other impure aspirants is the first of the ecclesiastical hierarchy’s anagogic activities, followed by Illumination (instruction in the symbolic meanings of scripture, liturgy, and ecclesiology) and perfection (union through unknow-

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ing.). Notice the prominence of cognitive training in this process of divinization. The goal of the hierarchy for each individual, Pseudo-Dionysius explains, consists of the continuous love of God and of things divine, a love which is sacredly worked out in an inspired and unique way, and before this, the complete and unswerving avoidance of everything contrary to it. It consists of a knowledge of beings as they really are. It consists of both the seeing and the understanding of sacred truth. It consists in an inspired participation in the one-like perfection and in the one itself, as far as possible. It consists of a feast upon that sacred vision which nourishes the intellect and which divinizes everything rising up to it.

The hierarchy cultivates virtue in large measure through edification. The culmination of this divinization is mystical union. He who attains to mystical knowledge attains to a perspective that eclipses the petty and parochial. Union is a cognitive state that transforms those who attain it. The supercognition achieved through paradox consummates the process of divinization, the process of becoming “as like as possible to God and . . . at one with him.” Nicholas of Cusa develops the mystical aspects of PseudoDionysius’s teaching. McGinn considers Cusa’s De docta ignorantia a prime exemplar of what McGinn labels “dialectical Christian Platonism.” McGinn characterizes this tradition, whose “founding document” is Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology, as “the use by some thinkers of categories of thought originating in Plato’s Parmenides that explore the logic of mutually opposed predications as a way to find an appropriate language to express the mystery of God and the God-world relationship.” To elevate the intellect to see God, Cusa examines the concept of the absolute maximum. The absolute maximum is not a maximum relative to something else. There can be, therefore, nothing lesser than the absolute maximum. But this makes the absolute maximum the absolute minimum! God, as absolute maximum, is the transcendent simplicity prior to contradictories, the enfolding source of all. “God, there-

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fore, is the enfolding [complicatio] of all in the sense that all are in God, and God is the unfolding [explicatio] of all in the sense that God is in all.” As the enfolding of contradictories, God transcends reason (ratio), which imposes names and operates by means of names and their opposites. “Learned ignorance” consists in exploiting but then transcending words, symbols, examples, and all sensible things in the recognition that they fail to convey God’s truth precisely. One must, he says, transcend “every act of reasoning” and “ascend to simple intellectuality [intellectus]” to see God incomprehensibly. The “effort of human intelligence” should be to “raise itself to that simplicity where contradictories coincide.” Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa’s dialectic of contradiction differs from Hegel’s primarily in the latter’s belief that the “completer notion” in which speculation results can be articulated (however poorly he in fact did so!). Pseudo-Dionysius and Cusa think that the deeper knowledge attained through paradox remains ineffable and can only be rhetorically suggested. Whatever insight can be gained from paradox, God’s transcendence nevertheless resists language. This difference is significant. The baffling nature of both the cosmological question and the theological paradoxes to which it gives rise evoke awe, mystery, and piety that the mystic takes to be revelatory. Their very resistance to language and logic lends to the paradoxes, in certain devotional contexts, the sense that they have extraordinary cognitive content to disclose. Theological elaborations can abet this response. The Christian category of mystery, for instance, includes those doctrines not only the truth but the very intelligibility of which one must take on faith. The concept mystery creates the expectation that some truths resist rational articulation. Because one expects not to understand these paradoxical truths, one’s failure to understand them arouses less dissonance. The concept provides assurance against absurdity. Embracing the concept of mystery installs a second-order cognition that functions to reduce first-order dissonance. It also serves to promote the idea that humans, raised above their ordinary, mundane capacities, might catch inarticulate glimpses of the higher intelligibility. Though the concept of mystery stops short of

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mysticism, it both allays dissonance in its own right and lends its countenance to a mystical response to paradox. To take another (and non-Christian) example, the Mahayana concept of anupalabdhidharmaks.ānti (“intuitive tolerance of the incomprehensibility of all things”) has these same functions. The Madhyamaka doctrine of the emptiness of all things leads to the paradoxical result that the doctrine of emptiness is itself empty. Consequently, one cannot rationally grasp or understand the ultimate truth about reality. Cultivating tolerance for this incomprehensibility is part of the boddhisattva path. By preparing the practitioner for the incomprehensibility, this second-order Buddhist concept eases the dissonance aroused by the doctrine of emptiness. It also contributes to the idea that humans can attain a higher cognitive state. Mādhyamika texts portray anupalabdhidharmaks.ānti as enabling the development of prajñā (intense knowing) or āryajñāna (holy intuition), the ineffable, transcendent cognitive state that discloses the ultimate truth about reality. Although not a cognitive ascetic, Pseudo-Dionysius does employ purgative language to describe the denials necessary for unknowing. He argues that one possessed of knowledge and light cannot know God’s darkness, and so to know God one must divest oneself of knowledge and light. “I pray we could come to this darkness so far above light! If only we lacked sight and knowledge so as to see, so as to know, unseeing and unknowing, that which lies beyond all vision and knowledge. For this would be really to see and to know: to praise the Transcendent One in a transcending way, namely through the denial of all beings.” Pseudo-Dionysius’s mystical theology depicts cognitive denial as continuous with the more ordinary forms of ascetic denial required of the neophyte. Nevertheless, Pseudo-Dionysius would not recognize the “horror metaphysicus” which Leszek Kolakowski claims the coincidentia oppositorum evokes. Paradox, rather, resolves the dissonance produced by the denials. His fondness for paradoxical formulations (e.g., God’s illuminating rays of darkness; lacking knowledge so as to know, etc.) and ascetic language does, however, provide the vocabulary and imagery for the cognitive asceticism that oth-

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ers will formulate: because God transcends knowledge, the intractable, horror-evoking paradoxes which transcendence generates and the incomprehensible mysteries of faith ascetically purify the cognitive faculties and prepare the individual for union with God.

R john of the Cross may present the clearest case of a cognitive asceticism featuring Pseudo-Dionysius‘s imagery. John’s Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night are lengthy commentaries on his lyric poem “The Dark Night.” The commentaries follow the pattern established by Pseudo-Dionysius: purgation, illumination, and union. In Ascent John explains that “there are three reasons for which this journey made by the soul to union with God is called night.” These reasons, furthermore, correspond to the three consecutive stages of night. The first concerns the point of departure. The soul must ascetically mortify its desires for worldly goods. John describes this deprivation as night to the senses. It corresponds to nightfall, when objects are lost from sight. The first book of Ascent of Mount Carmel discusses this night of the senses. The second reason concerns the road or means to union: faith. Faith, John declares, is “dark as night to the understanding.” This stage corresponds to the darkest hours of the night. John addresses faith in the second book of Ascent primarily. The third reason concerns the destination: God. God too is dark as night to the understanding, but this stage corresponds to the predawn hours. It figures the incipient illumination by God’s incomparable light that signals the beginning of union. John most fully addresses God’s activity and the onset of illumination in The Dark Night. Many interpreters have remarked upon the prevalence of ascetic imagery in the sections of John’s works dedicated to the interior life. The tide of ascetic rhetoric does not recede after he finishes speaking of the night of the senses and, in fact, his language is most ascetic in Book II of The Dark Night where he describes how divinely infused contemplation (“Saint Dionysius calls it a ray of

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darkness”; 92) purges the understanding, will, and memory. That the soul passively “suffers” God’s activity in contemplation by no means fully accounts for the ascetic language. Here as in other passages dedicated to the interior faculties of the soul he emphasizes suffering, torment, grief, and trial. In Book II of Ascent, for instance, he advocates taking up Christ’s cross through self-denial, “giving oneself up to suffering for Christ’s sake, and to total annihilation,” “a death to the natural self ” (85–86). Attunement to the discomforts of cognitive asceticism places these passages in a new light. That John gives cognitive dissonance central importance in his spiritual discipline helps explain these references to interior suffering and self-denial. John denies that any natural or supernatural apprehension or knowledge can serve as a sufficient means to God, and argues that only the darkness of faith is the means to the attainment of him. In fact, John claims that the understanding must be purged of apprehensions and knowledge, if one is to attain God. The soul must strip itself of all that is unlike God; it must void its affections and abilities. And thus a soul is greatly impeded from reaching this high estate of union with God when it clings to any understanding or feeling or imagination, or appearance or will or manner of its own, or to any other act or to anything of its own, and cannot detach and strip itself of all these. For, as we say, the goal which it seeks lies beyond all this, yea, beyond even the highest thing that can be known or experienced; and thus a soul must pass beyond everything to unknowing. (76)

The consummately religious life for John consists in rigorous cognitive self-denial. One must annihilate the impediments attached to the faculties, so that God can fully illuminate the soul in the same way that the sun can fully illuminate a completely clean, transparent window. Faith is the viable road to God because its darkness to the understanding is commensurate with God’s darkness. John reasons “that,

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according to a rule of philosophy, all means must be proportioned to the end; that is to say, they must have some connection and resemblance with the end, such as is enough and sufficient for the desired end to be attained through them.” If God is the destination, but God is darkness to the understanding, only something equally dark to the understanding can serve as a means to God. Faith, which is dark to the understanding, resembles God and can therefore serve as a means to God. In its likeness to God, faith blinds the understanding and purifies the soul. “For, even as God is infinite, so faith sets Him before us as infinite; and, as He is Three and One, it sets him before us as Three and One; and, as God is darkness to our understanding, even so does faith likewise blind and dazzle our understanding.” The incomprehensible and paradoxical nature of faith purges the understanding. In the Varieties of Religious Experience William James reproduces a passage from John and describes it as exhibiting “that vertigo of self-contradiction which is so dear to mysticism.” For John, at least, it is precisely the vertigo which is so dear. The vertigo induced by faith abets detachment. The faithful individual must renounce the understanding because faith’s painful darkness confounds it. “For not only does it [faith] give no information and knowledge, but, as we have said, it deprives us of all other information and knowledge, and blinds us to them, so that they cannot judge it well. For other knowledge can be acquired by the light of the understanding; but the knowledge that is of faith is acquired without the illumination of the understanding, which is rejected for faith.”  The inability of the understanding to comprehend faith forces the faithful individual to depreciate her understanding. The dissonance produced by the darkness of Christian Faith ascetically “resigns,” “detaches,” and “annihilates” the soul, eliminating selfreliance and preparing it for union with God. Not unlike Kierkegaard’s view that faith in the Christian paradox forces the understanding to step aside and thereby roots out the final illusions of self-sufficiency, John contends that the dissonances of faith humble because they uproot the deep-seated tendency to overvalue ourselves at the expense of God. Like Kierke-

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gaard, John exalts the paradoxes and mysteries of Christian faith because the dissonance they produce effects ascetic selftransformation. Unlike Kierkegaard, however, John sees cognitive asceticism as a preparatory discipline. The purgation effected by cognitive asceticism culminates in Illumination. The dark night of faith gives way to dawn. Kierkegaard, by contrast, portrays the life of faith as perpetual martyrdom. Nevertheless, despite this difference and despite the fact that Dionysian visual metaphors of light and darkness are the guiding conceit of his writings, John more closely resembles Kierkegaard than Pseudo-Dionysius in his use of paradox.

R pseudo-dionysius’s and Kierkegaard’s respective reactions to paradox suggest the beginnings of an ideal typology of religious uses of paradox. Mystics (as I am using the term) postulate paranormal cognitive states. They regard human intellectual faculties as capable of grasping (however obscurely) truths that can only be formulated paradoxically. The truths’ resistance to language ensures that these mystics remain mystics. If the truths could be intelligibly articulated, these mystics would cease to be mystics. The “mystical” would collapse into discursive reasoning, as indeed it does for Hegel who believed he could articulate the results of speculation. These mystics celebrate paradox as the opening or gateway that affords a glimpse of a higher cognitive plane. They may insist on some preparatory ascetic practices or other discipline, but it is paradox that opens the cognitive vista. To view paradox as revelatory resolves the dissonance it arouses. In De docta ignorantia Nicholas of Cusa seems to lie near this end of the spectrum. Ascetic language is conspicuously absent from his discussion of the coincidentia oppositorum, and he regards it as a cognitive method not limited to the elevated precincts of contemplative theology, but more generally applicable.

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Other religious figures who traffic in paradox are cognitive ascetics. They bear the psychological discomfort of paradox as a spiritual exercise to discipline and transform the self. Though the ascetic application of paradox may transform human intellectual faculties to make a higher cognitive plane accessible, it is not paradox itself that affords the glimpse of higher truths. For these thinkers it is the intractable opacity of paradox that makes it religiously valuable. John of the Cross lies near this end of the spectrum. Given this typology, one might well wonder under what conditions the religious response to paradox will tend toward the ascetical rather than the mystical and vice versa. Religious responses to paradox inform religious practice. The study of practices invites social scientific theory. Mary Douglas’s efforts toward what she has called “a sociology of the uses of logic” provide fertile ground for devising a thesis concerning the conditions for a tendency toward one or another use of paradox. Her “pure, unreconstructed Durkheimianism” holds that the apprehension “of what is right and necessary in social relations” generates the a priori. She explains that the practical necessity of rendering a society stable and the psychological satisfaction of achieving consonance tend in conjunction to produce a correspondence between the society’s formal pattern of social relations and the seams of its constructed universe. The society legitimates its social relations by grounding their pattern in nature and reason. What Douglas calls her “forensic approach” attends to the ways in which people vest nature and reason with the authority to regulate social intercourse. They use nature and reason to coerce each other. In her essay, “Self-evidence,” she illustrates her claim by comparing several different systems of animal classification to the societies that use them (Thai, Karam, Lele, and ancient Hebrew). Most revealingly, she correlates each society’s response to hybrids and anomalies, those creatures that cross taxonomic boundaries, with that society’s attitude to outsiders. At the ends of a “continuum,” some societies admit outsiders to “full membership” and other societies exclude outsiders “completely and irrevoca-

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bly.” Generally, Douglas argues, a social group that finds incorporation of outsiders enriching will venerate anomalies as sacred mediators and view them as auspicious, while a social group that finds its external boundaries threatened by outsiders will abominate anomalies and view them as dangerous. In the first case, pollution rules will delineate the modes of profitable contact with the anomaly; in the second, pollution rules will act as a protective barrier against contact with the anomaly. My general argument supposes that in each constructed world of nature, the contrast between man and not-man provides an analogy for the contrast between the member of the human community and the outsider. In the last most inclusive set of categories, nature represents the outsider. If the boundaries defining membership of the social group have regulated crossing points where useful exchanges take place, then the contrast of man and nature takes the imprint of this exchange. The number of different exchanges envisaged, their possible good and bad outcomes and the rules which govern them are all projected on to the natural world. If the institutions allow for some much more generous and rewarding exchange with more than normally distant partners, then we have the conditions for a positive mediator. If all exchanges are suspect and every outsider is a threat, then some parts of nature are due to be singled out to represent the abominable intruder who breaches boundaries that should be kept intact. In sum, the argument here advanced is that when boundary crossing is forbidden, a theology of mediation is not acceptable, and that every theology of mediation finds its adherents in a society which expects to do well out of regulated exchange.

In their beliefs about anomalous beasts, social groups develop a bias that depends on the group’s posture toward crossings of its external boundaries. This bias is not chiefly intellectual. Anomalies enlist the emotional energy invested in social concerns and arouse a strong affective response. Abominable beasts shock and viscer-

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ally offend. They induce horror and loathing. Sacred mediators by contrast evoke awe and reverence. Though her argument in “Self-evidence” specifically concerns how the natural world comes to bear the imprint of social concerns, she intends her Durkheimianism to hold generally of classifications, causal theories, logical operations, and “above all, the sense of a priori rightness of some ideas and the nonsensicality of others.” The tendency to see paradox as irremediably incomprehensible, on the one hand, or potentially revelatory, on the other, represents an a priori response to the logic of contradiction. This phenomenon falls squarely within the scope of her theory. Douglas’s “sociology of the uses of logic,” which explains how social preoccupations generate the a priori, provides an elegant explanation of the bias in favor of either an ascetical or mystical use of paradox. Her conclusions about anomalies apply equally to paradoxes. Paradoxes are logical anomalies. Anomalous with respect to the categories and boundaries of reason and rational belief, they defy the very principles of logic. Different responses to paradox, like different responses to anomalous creatures, will reflect different attitudes to outsiders. Arguably, paradoxes serve to represent outsiders better than do taxonomic anomalies. Paradoxes present themselves as beyond comprehension. They challenge the outer limits of the understanding and function thereby as a direct analogue to the outsider who stands poised to cross the outer limits of the social order. Like the alien, who can be naturalized or excluded, paradox can be brought within the recognized boundaries of the cognizable or left beyond the pale. Taxonomic anomalies, by contrast, do not always represent a crossing of, specifically, the external social boundary so unambiguously. The analogy between the outsider and the taxonomic anomaly operates in many cases at a couple of representational removes. As the quotation above evinces, Douglas argues that the contrast between “man and nature” represents the insider/outsider contrast, and that the social meaning of outsiders is then projected onto taxonomic anomalies in nature. When the anomaly is anom-

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alous precisely because it is something natural that exhibits humanlike attributes, the analogy is more direct. Apart from her compelling interpretations of the examples she offers, however, it’s not clear on the face of it why other types of taxonomic anomalies— e.g., those that are anomalous with respect to categories pertaining only to nature—should not represent insiders who cross internal social boundaries. Paradox, by contrast, is intrinsically well suited to represent outsiders. In “Self-evidence” Douglas describes entire societies and indexes their attitude toward “exchange” in marriage practices. She writes, “Where society is based on the structuring of birth and marriage, the most significant exchanges will concern transfers of women.” To determine a given society’s attitude to outsiders, one must examine the effect of its rules of exogamy or endogamy in practice. In her more recent work, however, she has tended to focus on institutions and/or groups with rival social visions, rather than whole societies. It follows, then, that where social groups are not structured by birth and marriage, the most significant exchanges will not necessarily concern transfers of women. Her thesis that attitudes toward exchange condition response to anomaly need not apply only to full-scale societies and their marriage practices. Attitudes to exchange exert their influence at every scale. Whole societies, institutions within a society, and even relatively solitary thinkers feel the pressures to ground their social preoccupations in nature and reason. As an “unreconstructed Durkheimian,” Douglas offers a functionalist account as her principal explanation for the correspondences she observes between social attitudes and views of nature and reason. The functional necessity of legitimating social forms explains the unintentional and unrecognized tendency to ground their pattern in nature and reason. As I noted in passing, she occasionally, especially in her early works, supplements the functionalist explanation with a psychological consideration: endowing nature and reason with the pattern of social relations produces a psychologically satisfying consonance. Despite this concession to the psychological, functionalism bears the explanatory weight. To

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demonstrate that the unintended beneficial or useful effects of something explain its presence, however, one must provide what Elster calls a “feedback mechanism” that shows precisely how the effects produce their cause. Otherwise, one cannot distinguish the functionalist case from a case in which something happens to have useful effects, but does not exist for the sake of those effects. In the absence of a designated feedback mechanism, Douglas’s functionalist argument can only appear suppositious. To better substantiate her explanation, one would need to provide an account indicating how the socially useful effects of the correspondences between social attitudes and views of nature and reason produce their putative cause. Although my theory takes inspiration from Douglas, it reverses the explanatory priority of the functional to the psychological. My interest in individual thinkers and their reaction to paradox suggests that my theory should lay greater emphasis on psychological explanation than does Douglas’s. Greater attention to the psychological, moreover, reveals the outline of a functionalist feedback mechanism. What cognitive psychologists call “availability bias” explains the tendency to lodge one’s social preoccupations in one’s response to paradox. Because humans must make so many immediate judgments and decisions, they employ certain intuitive strategies of inference naively and without conscious consideration. They make judgments about the relative frequency or likelihood of particular objects or events, for instance, based on the availability of the objects or events to perception, memory, or imagination. They draw inferences from the sample subjectively available to mind. Sometimes one’s personal experience biases the sample. Unemployed people tend to overestimate the unemployment rate because they tend to encounter an unrepresentatively high proportion of unemployed people. Other times one’s expectations and interests influence the storage and/or retrievability of information and bias the sample readily available to mind. One pays more attention to and can better remember information that is either extraordinary or relevant to one’s interests. The occurrence of especially heinous crimes, for

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example, leads people to overestimate the crime rate. Subjective availability not only influences judgments about the frequency or likelihood of objects or events, it also influences judgments about the relationships between events. Experimental evidence shows that merely drawing attention to a potential cause of an event increases the likelihood that a subject will identify the potential cause as the actual cause of the event. A similar form of availability bias explains the correlation between a thinker’s reaction to outsiders poised to cross the social boundary and his or her reaction to seemingly extra-rational paradox pressing against the bounds of reason. The subjective importance of the external boundary of whatever social group most preoccupies a thinker produces an availability bias when the thinker encounters the external boundary of the understanding. The thinker generalizes from the subjectively available case of boundary crossing to the new case. The greater the importance accorded to the external social boundary, the more subjectively available it is, so those thinkers who exhibit the most interest in an external social boundary will be most likely to generalize their attitude and exhibit the attitudes toward paradox characteristic of cognitive asceticism or mysticism. Where thinkers view crossings of their social group’s external boundary as invasive and would prohibit them, they come to view the bounds of reason as inviolable and paradox will seem defiling. Where thinkers value controlled crossing of their social group’s external boundary, they will view paradox as cognitively enriching. Having lodged one’s attitude toward outsiders in one’s attitude toward paradox, paradox becomes serviceable in the ways Douglas’s “forensic approach” suggests. Paradox becomes useful for legitimating and establishing one’s social vision because paradox now functions to exemplify or intimate the dangers or rewards of boundary crossing. Further, it metaphysically grounds one’s social vision. The very nature of reason itself bears out one’s attitude toward boundary crossing! The useful effects of this instance of availability bias, moreover, contribute to their cause and thereby furnish the feedback mechanism necessary for a successful func-

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tionalist explanation. Using paradox to authorize one’s attitude toward social boundaries refocuses attention on social boundary crossing, and the implicit metaphysical warrant that paradox confers augments the gravity of one’s attitude toward social boundary crossing. This heightened salience reinforces the availability bias that produces the useful attitude toward paradox. Despite the shortcomings of Douglas’s explanation of the correspondences she observes between patterns of social relations and views of nature and reason, the existence of the correspondences is extraordinarily well documented. Even ardent critics of the Durkheimian tradition acknowledge the presence of what scholars sometimes lump together under the designation “god-group correlations.” Likewise, much of my larger argument could withstand misgivings about my explanation of the correlation between attitudes toward outsiders and attitudes toward paradox. To preserve what is most important in my argument, it is sufficient to (1) demonstrate that correlations do obtain between attitudes toward outsiders and attitudes toward paradox, and (2) demonstrate that the direction of causality (whatever the explanation) runs from the attitude toward outsiders to the attitude toward paradox (and not vice versa). Correlation alone, of course, is not conclusive evidence of causality—to believe so is to commit the informal fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc—but correlation is often good evidence of causality, especially in cases where one of the correlated events regularly precedes the other. My explanatory humility notwithstanding, I do believe the evidence indicates that there are cognitive and “forensic” pressures to ground one’s social preoccupations in nature and reason. A glance at the entirety of Pseudo-Dionysius’s corpus makes it evident that he succumbs to these pressures. He argues that God’s powers of purification, illumination, and perfection are symbolically reflected both in the three orders comprising the celestial hierarchy of angels and in the three orders comprising the ecclesiastical hierarchy organizing the church. Pseudo-Dionysius explicitly justifies the ecclesiastical hierarchy by claiming that it is isomorphic with God’s activities. “[I]t is clear that the hierarchy, as an

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image of the divine, is divided into distinctive orders and powers in order to reveal that the activities of the divinity are preeminent for the utter holiness and purity, permanence and distinctiveness of their orders.” He declares here that the social group’s internal boundaries conform to the structure of ultimate reality, and the threat of pollution protects that conformity. If the cosmic order that Pseudo-Dionysius retails serves to legitimate his conception of the social order, his mystical theology does not differ in reflecting social preoccupations. The whole purpose of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and liturgy of the church is to initiate people. God “has bestowed hierarchy as a gift to ensure the salvation and divinization of every being endowed with reason and intelligence” (198). Salvation can only occur through divinization, which “consists of being as much as possible like and in union with God” (198). The sacraments, dispensed through the hierarchy, initiate outsiders into the mysteries and divinize them. Pseudo-Dionysius’s mystical theology represents the pinnacle of the anagogic divinization that is the very reason for the church. One could have no stronger statement of the value placed on incorporating outsiders into the group: the very reason for the social group is to bring others into the group. Entry into the group must, nevertheless, be carefully controlled, if the group is to retain its character. This concern for regulated crossing of the external boundary is reflected in Pseudo-Dionysius’s continual admonitions that his mystical theology, as well as his accounts of the meaning of the hierarchy and liturgy, not reach the eyes of the uninitiated. He couches these warnings in the language of pollution: the impure would defile the sacred teachings. Though he hedges both the internal and external boundaries with pollution dangers, he expresses special concern for the external boundary. The deacons, charged with the task of purging the uninitiated, maintain the integrity of the external boundary of the group. [T]he order of deacons has the task of purification and it uplifts those who have been purified to the clear sacred acts of the priests.

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It makes clean the imperfect and incubates them by means of the cleansing enlightenments and teachings of scripture. Furthermore, it keeps the priests from contact with the profane. The hierarchal ordinance gives them charge of the sanctuary doors, thereby demonstrating that postulants must submit to total purification before they can be allowed to come into the presence of the sacred. (Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, 238)

The concern for external boundary-maintenance is symbolized by the deacons’ responsibility for the doors to the sanctuary. Though desired, crossings of the external boundary of the group must be carefully regulated. Little can be claimed with confidence about the unknown Syrian author of the Corpus Dionysiacum, but Alexander Golitzin suggests an authorial intent that bears out the emphasis on integrating outsiders into the Church communion and hierarchy that I have attributed to the text. He points to a long-standing tradition in Syria that located charismatic authority in solitary ascetic visionaries, at the expense of the liturgy and clergy. The fundamental intention of the author, Golitzin argues, is to integrate these monks (or, at least, the social tradition they represent) into the Church communion, while preserving the authority structures and liturgy of the Church. Pseudo-Dionysius assigns monks a place within the hierarchy, albeit a rank subordinate to the clergy, and allows for a mystical (rather than visionary) encounter with God, but one made possible only through participation in the liturgical life of the Church. If Golitzin is correct, not only Pseudo-Dionysius’s explicit ecclesiology but also the interest informing it pertain to the ordered incorporation of outsiders. In conformity with what Douglas’s theory would lead us to expect, Pseudo-Dionysius, whose primary social concern is bringing outsiders across the external boundary of a well-defined group, grounds his preoccupation in his response to paradox. He views the theological paradoxes, which cross the fundamental boundary or limit of the understanding, congenially. Paradox functions for him as a sacred cognitive mediator. It provides the occasion for

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contact (union) with the divine. Accordingly, Pseudo-Dionysius’s pollution concerns do not abominate paradox. Rather they act as conduits insuring propitious encounter with paradox. Paradox, for Pseudo-Dionysius, assumes the emotional freight borne by his principal social concern, and elicits awe and reverence. These strong affects reinforce and make vivid the assertion that leads to paradox, the assertion that God is immanent in all creation. Without our having to countenance supercognition, these affects explain how Pseudo-Dionysius’s mystical cognitive practice transforms the self. Rather than gaining extraordinary insight into what cannot be said, the powerful affects elicited by paradox in fact intensify the salience of what can be said. PseudoDionysius’s mystical practice works to refashion one’s volitional complex by heightening the affective response to ideas about God’s relation to creation. By galvanizing these ideas it works to decenter selfish desires and promote an identification with God’s wider perspective. Pseudo-Dionysius confirms the thesis that a positive attitude toward the incorporation of outsiders produces a bias in favor of viewing paradox as revelatory. Kierkegaard resoundingly confirms the converse, that fear for the integrity of an external boundary produces a far less sanguine reaction to paradox. Notably, Kierkegaard wrote from the perspective that the social and political forces of the “present age” besiege Christianity. More specifically, he feared for the integrity of Christianity in the face of what he viewed as its quiet euthanasia in Christendom, where one becomes a Christian by virtue of birth and citizenship. His intellectual biographer, Bruce Kirmmse, attests to Kierkegaard’s preoccupation with this concern. He concludes that “much of [Kierkegaard’s] authorship is a meditation on the relation”—or as Kirmmse puts it elsewhere, “the boundaries, or limits”—“between religion and politics.” Kierkegaard himself comes to this conclusion in his retrospective work, The Point of View for My Work as an Author, where he claims (admittedly, with some possible revisionism) that his “whole authorship pertains” to the problem of Christianity and Christendom.

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Though Kierkegaard is famous for his emphasis on the “the single individual,” he does not entirely repudiate the social element of Christianity. Christianity requires true individuality in inward relation to God, he argues, and the Christian social group is composed of such true individuals. True individuality is the sine qua non of the true Christian social unit. “And insofar as there is the congregation in the religious sense, this is a concept that lies on the other side of the single individual, and that above all must not be confused with what politically can have validity: the public, the crowd, the numerical, etc.” Christendom wholly confuses the concept of the congregation with “what politically can have validity.” It has blurred the boundaries between Christianity and pagan deification of the established political and social order. Christendom is a both/ and, a hybrid that transgresses important boundaries. As a result it has created freaks worthy of a sideshow: “there arose in Christendom a class of Christians that is so odd that it could be exhibited for money.” To the extent that Christendom prevents or interferes with the upbuilding of true individuality, it threatens Christianity, an ideal society of true individuals. The polemical nature of Kierkegaard’s authorship supports a “forensic” explanation of his response to paradox. Despite his antipathy for Hegel, Kierkegaard nevertheless follows Hegel’s example by tending to correlate the social and the logical. In A Literary Review, for instance, Kierkegaard argues that the established order of the passionless present age is “equivocal and ambiguous.” It has “nullified the principle of contradiction” and effaced the distinction between good and evil. More to the point, he lodges his preoccupation with erecting an unambiguous, exclusionary boundary between Christianity and other social groups in his estimation of logic. Rejecting Hegel’s speculative logic, he insists on the nonnegotiability of the principle of non-contradiction. The sharply defined external boundary of Christianity finds expression in the sharply defined, impregnable limits of the understanding. In fact, Kierkegaard expressly links the external boundary of Christianity to the limits of the understanding: unless one confronts the possibility of offense at the Christian paradox, one is not essentially Christian.

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Kierkegaard’s anxiety about the integrity of Christianity produces a bias whereby one would expect him to abominate paradox. And, in fact, the paradox evokes in him the emotional response one expects from the abominable. His social preoccupations accent the emotional tenor of his cognitive dissonance. The paradox is not only maddeningly vexing; it is horrible, appalling, and offensive. As a Christian, however, Kierkegaard cannot simply abominate the paradox that constitutes orthodox Christianity. Instead, he harnesses the potential for “horror” and “madness” evoked by the paradox to his asceticism. In the “Gospel of Sufferings” Kierkegaard makes it clear that suffering distinguishes the true Christian from the sideshow Christians of Christendom. The offensive paradox becomes the essential instrument of this distinctive Christian suffering. The use of the paradox that Kierkegaard advocates resembles the use of pus that the hagiographers attribute to Catherine of Siena when, they insist, she chose to drink it. Both try to overcome offense to transform themselves in relation to God. If this comparison of Kierkegaard’s reaction to Christian paradox to Catherine’s visceral disgust at the prospect of drinking pus seems far-fetched, consider a revealing vignette recorded in the annals of the North American colonial encounter. In a 1723 letter the Jesuit missionary to the Abnakis, Sébastien Rasles, describes his life with the Indians to his brother. In conveying what most “shocked” him early in his tenure with the Indians, he reports that he found their meals of boiled meat “revolting.” The Indians quickly observed his “repugnance.” “Thou must conquer thyself, they replied; is that a very difficult thing for a Patriarch who thoroughly understands how to pray? We ourselves overcome much, in order to believe that which we do not see.” Elsewhere in the text Rasles explains that in the Abnaki idiom “prayer” means Christianity. These newly Christian Indians argue in this peculiar exchange that someone who is Christian must of course be capable of suppressing disgust. They make an analogy between Rasles’s disgust with their food and their own (and what they presume must be his) reaction to Christian paradox. Two considerations suggest that it is specifically paradox that the Indians find offensive about Christianity.

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First, Rasles tells his brother that he has endeavored to instruct the Indians in the “Mysteries of Religion.” Mysteries are not simply doctrines one must take on faith, but doctrines whose very intelligibility one must take on faith. Second, Rasles describes at length Abnaki belief in manitous. A manitou is “a sort of spirit who rules all things, and who is the master of life and death.” That Christianity requires belief in things unseen could not in itself, therefore, be the problem. Abnaki religion too requires belief in things unseen. The paradoxical nature of Christian doctrine presents a special obstacle to belief. For these Abnakis, as for Kierkegaard, Christian paradox produces a reaction akin to the abominable. If Kierkegaard does not abominate the Christian paradox, he does, nevertheless, abominate Christendom, that disastrous hybrid. He finds its attempts, all in the name of Christianity, to “demonstrate” Christian faith-claims, and thereby eliminate the paradox, “a horrible contradiction.” “[H]ow abominable!” he exclaims. In contrast to Pseudo-Dionysius and Kierkegaard, John of the Cross’s surviving writings cannot sustain a detailed correlation of his attitude to paradox and his ecclesiology because they do not address issues of institutional organization. One can, nevertheless, conclude that John, who like Kierkegaard treated faith in Christ, the paradoxical mediator, as chastening, also wrote from a defensive posture. John’s religious order, the discalced Carmelites, was a splinter group he and some others founded in order to follow a reformed monastic rule. He composed his poem, “The Dark Night,” and the treatises explicating it shortly after enduring nine months’ imprisonment for refusing to acknowledge the decreed reabsorption of the discalced Carmelites by the so-called observant Carmelites. He refused to capitulate the autonomy of the discalced reform. Most commentators on John’s poem and the treatises plausibly associate the imagery of the dark night of suffering with John’s actual confinement in a narrow, dark room. His experience more particularly, however, also suggests an explanation of his ascetic use of paradox. His imprisonment testifies to the importance he placed on maintaining the boundary between the discalced and the observant, with their rival social vision. John conceived his

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theology at a time when outsiders—indeed, the very outsiders in opposition to whom his group defined itself—profoundly threatened the external boundary of his social group. John’s insistence on the obscurity of the paradoxes of faith and his ascetic use of them reflects his refusal to surrender the integrity of his religious order. At first glance Ta-hui Tsung-kao, the twelfth-century Ch’an master, might seem to present a counterexample to the thesis that cognitive asceticism arises where a religious thinker views outsiders as a threat to the group. In Buddhist historiography Ta-hui is renowned for teaching his cognitively ascetic kung-an technique to the literati, the educated lay elite. In fact, he believed his technique better suits life in the world than it does monastic life. He insisted, moreover, on the compatibility of Buddhism and Confucianism. This outreach might suggest that Ta-hui did not feel his group threatened by outsiders. The frequency of his attacks on what he called the “heretical (hsieh) silent illumination Ch’an” of the Ts’aotung lineage belies this impression. In an era when “support from the literati became absolutely necessary for the success of any Ch’an lineage, or Ch’an master,” Ta-hui competed against other groups in courting the literati. Morton Schlütter observes that Ta-hui only devised his distinctive use of the kung-an in 1134 after traveling to Fukien, where, Ta-hui reports, the teaching of “silent illumination Ch’an” to literati was widespread. Thereafter, whenever Ta-hui extolled his method to literati, he usually denigrated “silent illumination” teaching as well. Schlütter emphasizes that the competition for support from the literati inaugurated a period of sectarianism in Ch’an, and that Ta-hui developed his teaching in response to a rival lineage’s success in attracting indispensable patronage. The lay elite are not, in the case of Ta-hui’s cognitive asceticism, the relevant outsiders; rather, Ta-hui’s cognitive asceticism reflects the threat posed to his group by a rival monastic lineage. In one respect at least, John of the Cross and Ta-hui prove more instructive than Pseudo-Dionysius and Kierkegaard, both of whom elaborated on their social visions. In the cases of Pseudo-Dionysius and Kierkegaard one might well wonder why one should suppose that the response to paradox is the dependent variable. Why cleave

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to the Durkheimian line? Why not argue conversely that their responses to paradox condition their social visions? The cases of John of the Cross and Ta-hui, however, demonstrate that the social concerns have causal priority. A specific, identifiable set of historical circumstances produces John’s fear for the external boundary of his order: the decreed reabsorption of the discalced Carmelites by the observant. Given historical events condition John’s social concerns; his attitude toward paradox does not. His social concerns are grounded in history in a way that his attitude to paradox is not and that indicates that the latter is in fact the dependent variable. Ta-hui’s social concerns too find their explanation in history: the competition between lineages for necessary support from the literati. His response to paradox in turn finds its explanation in these historically grounded social concerns. The cases of John of the Cross and Ta-hui invite the general Durkheimian conclusion that social concerns have causal priority and condition a religious thinker’s attitude to paradox. Nicholas of Cusa’s biography provides perhaps the most dramatic evidence for the thesis. He rose to prominence at the Council of Basel (1431–1449) where he exhibited an overriding concern with the unity and harmony of the Church. He wrote overtures of reconciliation to the Hussites (1433) and completed De concordantia catholica (1434), both of which emphasized the importance of unity and harmony in diversity. Despite the fact that Cusa was a leading conciliarist at Basel and that De concordantia catholica is a preeminent statement of conciliarist theory, Cusa abruptly switched his allegiance to the papal party in 1436 when it became clear to him that the council impeded the cause of Church unity and harmony. The council’s intransigence about the location of a proposed council to unite the Latin and Greek Churches occasioned Cusa’s break with conciliarism. The council mandated sites unacceptable to the Greek delegation and to the pope, on whose participation the Greeks insisted. The prospect of bringing the Greek Church back into communion motivated Cusa to side with the pope. Cusa’s vision of Church unity and harmony outweighed lesser allegiances.

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This commitment to bringing outsiders—in this case, schismatics (as the medieval West viewed the Eastern Church)—into the fold, to bringing them across the external boundary of the social group, finds expression in Cusa’s mystical theology. Cusa avers that the “effort of human intelligence” should be to achieve ineffable, incomprehensible vision that transcends reason (“since reason cannot leap over contradictories”). His view that “simple intellectuality” can transcend the limits of reason reflects his efforts to bring outsiders across the external boundary of the Church’s communion. The circumstances in which Cusa reports that he first conceived of his mystical theology dramatically exhibit its connection to his ecclesiology. In a dedicatory epistle appended to De docta ignorantia, Cusa recounts how the fundamental insight of the book came to him. Addressing Cardinal Guiliano Cesarini he writes: Accept now, Reverend Father, what for so long I desired to attain by different paths of learning but previously could not until returning from Greece when by what I believe was a celestial gift from the Father of Lights, from whom comes every perfect gift, I was led to embrace incomprehensibles incomprehensibly in learned ignorance, by transcending those incorruptible truths that can be humanly known.

Cusa dates his mystical insight to a shipboard voyage from Greece to Italy during the winter of 1437–38. He leaves unstated the reason for the journey. Earlier, in the summer of 1437, Cusa had embarked for Constantinople as one of several papal envoys charged with negotiating with the Eastern emperor and the Patriarch of Constantinople and, ultimately, accompanying them to Italy for the reunification council. Cusa’s mystical inspiration occurred while transporting the heads of Eastern Christendom to the site of the Greek Church’s reincorporation into the Catholic communion. Some scholars speculate that shipboard conversations with the Greeks might account for Cusa’s insight, but the concomitance of the tangible fruition of Cusa’s ecclesiastical hopes

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and the development of his mysticism impressively corroborates the thesis that social concerns condition responses to paradox. Equally powerful evidence derives from Cusa’s later career. De docta ignorantia lacks any ascetic emphasis and it is notable for the exiguousness of its stress on purgation, especially given Cusa’s explicit reliance on Pseudo-Dionysius. By contrast, the later De visione Dei (1453) employs some strikingly ascetic language at the height of the mystical encounter with God. Therefore, I thank you, my God, because you make clear to me that there is no other way of approaching you except that to which all humans, even to the most learned philosophers, seems wholly inaccessible and impossible. For you have shown me that you cannot be seen elsewhere than where impossibility confronts and obstructs me. O Lord, you, who are the food of the mature, have given me courage to do violence to myself, for impossibility coincides with necessity, and I have discovered that the place where you are found unveiled is girded about with the coincidence of contradictories. This is the wall of paradise, and it is there in paradise that you reside. The wall’s gate is guarded by the highest spirit of reason, and unless it is overpowered, the way in will not lie open.

This passage exhibits many continuities with Cusa’s earlier work. Cusa continues to rely on the mystical notion of the coincidentia oppositorum and still holds that reason cannot attain God. Despite the continuities, however, Cusa’s rhetoric has become markedly ascetic. He no longer writes about readily ascending above reason to simple intellectuality. Now, while still allowing for mystical vision, he claims that one must do violence to oneself and overpower one’s reason to storm the gate in the wall that partitions us from the vision of God. This subtle change in Cusa’s attitude toward paradox suggests a precipitating shift in Cusa’s ecclesiastical concerns. The circumstances immediately preceding Cusa’s composition of De visione Dei provide the context for explaining the new ascetic emphasis.

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On May 29, 1453, Constantinople fell to the Turks. This defeat, which shook all of Christendom, had particular resonance for Cusa because of his role in the events of 1437. Cusa learned of the calamity sometime after July 21. In the weeks following he wrote De pace fidei, finishing on September 21. In De pace fidei Cusa wrestles with the relation of religious diversity to the one orthodox faith. After completing De pace fidei, Cusa wrote De visione Dei in six weeks. At this moment of intense anxiety about the threat posed by outsiders, Cusa portrays the boundaries of the understanding as rigid enough to require that one do violence to oneself. Though still a mystic, Cusa has moved along the continuum to a position considerably closer to cognitive asceticism. Cusa did not move all the way to the far pole because he still held out hope that the threatening outsiders could be converted. In a letter to John of Segovia, Cusa acknowledges the dire nature of the threat posed by the Turks, but conveys his hope that they could be brought peacefully into the fold. De visione Dei perfectly expresses Cusa’s concerns about the external boundary of Christianity. The ascetic language reflects the threat; the ineffable cognition beyond reason reflects his long-standing, paramount commitment to creating a universal church.

4 ABSOLUTE TRANSCENDENCE

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ot all mysticism, in the sense I am using the term, derives from reflection on the cosmological question. In the second and third sections of chapter 5, I consider two mystical responses that do not arise from cosmogonic speculation. By the same token, Pseudo-Dionysius is far from unique in this respect. Apophatic mystical texts often explicitly announce their relationship to cosmogony. The conceptual connections between ineffability, transcendence, and cosmogony extend in Greek thought at least as far back as the sixth century BCE, when Anaximander described the source of things as the apeiron, the unlimited or indeterminate. Later, more fully apophatic texts continue to exhibit cosmogonic inspiration. Plotinus’s account of emanation, for instance, obviously has cosmogonic intent. Apophasis is by no means, however, an exclusively Western phenomenon. In India the peculiar nature of the cosmological question was recognized as early as the R.g Veda. Hymn 10.129 raises the cosmogonic question, but ultimately declines to answer it. “Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?” The gods thus are no answer to the question “Why is there something?” because the gods are something, which is precisely what requires explanation. While this hymn leaves the question open, the Upanis.ads try to answer it by means of apophasis. They closely conjoin cosmogonic speculation with assertions that the world-ground (“navel of the universe,” “womb of all things”),

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Brahman, is without determining marks (a-linga) or qualities (nirgun.a). “Hence, now, there is the teaching ‘Not thus! not so!’ (neti, neti), for there is nothing higher than this, that he is thus.” These passages aim to answer the cosmological question while simultaneously frustrating the attempt to word the answer in a way that would render it an unsuitable answer. The Upanis.ads, moreover, bear witness to the paradox of transcendence: that which is beyond all things capable of description must also be within all things (or else it would be a limited something capable of description). “It is far, and It is near. It is within all this, And it is outside of all this.” Indeed, the equivalence postulated throughout the Upanis.ads between the self (ātman) and Brahman finds its basis in the paradox of transcendence. To be truly transcendent, the world-ground must paradoxically be immanent in humans. The concept of transcendence need not, of course, inevitably lead to ineffability and paradox. Most uses of the term employ it in a relative sense. To predicate transcendence of something in a relative sense is to claim that the object of one’s assertion transcends something else in some respect. Such a use of the term leaves room for description. To say “Love of country transcends mere loyalty” does not preclude a detailed specification of patriotism. Likewise, to say “God’s is a transcendent love” does not necessarily consign one to silence. By contrast, the cosmological question dictates that its answer be absolutely transcendent. The cosmological question gestures to a cause that transcends in all respects anything susceptible of description. Absolute transcendence entails ineffability and necessitates apophatic language. The concept of absolute transcendence differs from relative transcendence also in that to predicate transcendence of something in a relative sense does not necessarily produce paradox. The concept of absolute transcendence, by contrast, immediately engenders the paradox of immanence and transcendence. The kinship between the concept of transcendence and the concept of the infinite, both of which mean “without bounds or limits,” can conceal the paradox-generating nature of absolute transcendence. Contemplating the relationship between finite numbers

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and the infinite can lead one to deny that transcendence generates paradox. Simply because the infinite is beyond any finite number, that fact does not paradoxically render the infinite finite. Equivalently, so one is led to suppose, the fact that the transcendent is beyond all limited and describable things does not paradoxically limit the transcendent and render it a describable thing in relation to others. The term infinite, however, has two senses. Since the Greeks, “infinite” has had a qualitative as well as a quantitative sense. Anaximander, engaging in cosmological and ontological speculation, used apeiron to mean qualitatively or descriptively unlimited, i.e., beyond any determinate description. In the sense of the term that derives from this use of apeiron, “infinite” is a synonym for the absolutely transcendent. Zeno of Elea and Aristotle, on the other hand, use the word apeiron when reflecting on the mathematical properties of series. The quantitative sense of “infinite” derives from this use of apeiron. Although some religious figures have (sometimes intentionally) conflated these two senses of “infinite,” others have clearly distinguished between them. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, predicates infinity of God’s essence because God is the first principle whence all things flow, but explicitly denies that the “infinite of quantity” can be attributed to God. When one disambiguates the two senses of “infinite,” it becomes clear that one cannot use the quantitative sense of “infinite” to gainsay the paradox-generating property of the qualitative conception. As a concept, the absolutely transcendent does not behave in the same way as the quantitative sense of “infinite.” Perhaps the best-known example of apophatic language is the opening of the Tao-te-ching. This passage is notorious too for its headlong descent into paradox. The Way that can be “Way”-ed Is not the constant Way. The name that can be named Is not the constant name. What has no name is the beginning of heaven and earth, What has a name is the mother of the myriad things.

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The Tao-te-ching begins with the familiar association of cosmogonic speculation and a claim of ineffability. The Tao, which cannot be named, is the cause and source of heaven and earth. Anything that can be named cannot be the ultimate source of things with names. Predictably, the Tao (like Brahman) generates the paradox of transcendence. To transcend the realm of things with names, it must paradoxically inhere in things with names, including human beings. “Inward Training,” perhaps the earliest extant Taoist text and one that “demonstrates a commonality of mystical practice, mystical experience, and mystical philosophy” with the Tao-te ching, claims “The Way [Tao] fills the entire world. / It is everywhere that people are, / But people are unable to understand this.” Not a discrete something, the creative Tao paradoxically pervades even humans. This idea, that the transcendent lies within oneself, readily suggests that one could directly experience the immanent transcendent. Various forms of bodily and meditative practice produce anomalous, altered states of consciousness that mystics in diverse contexts interpret in light of the paradox of transcendence and the extraordinary cognitive states they posit. They invest the altered states with significance borrowed from their cosmological speculations and commitments to higher cognition. Simply, they explain the anomalous states as experiences of the transcendent. The commitments such a mystic harbors about the causes of her experience and the terms appropriate to describe it are constitutive of the experience’s intentionality, or what the experience is of. William James and most other scholars of mysticism have taken logical features of the concepts and cognitive commitments informing the intentionality of the experience—ineffability, paradoxicality, a purported intuitive cognition (James calls it the “noetic” quality)—to be simple, unanalyzable, descriptive characteristics of the consciousness. Instead of focusing on the logic embedded in the experiences’ intentionality, they have misleadingly assimilated these features to prelinguistic sensations. James famously writes, “The records show that even though the five senses be in abeyance

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in . . . [mystical states of consciousness], they are absolutely sensational in their epistemological quality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression—that is, they are face to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist.” To recognize, however, that the ineffability, paradoxicality, and noetic quality are not, like sensations, outside the space of reasons, but derive from the interpretation of the meditative state, opens the peculiar states of consciousness to analysis (and criticism). Walter Stace, another influential philosopher of mysticism, exemplifies the pitfalls awaiting the traveler on James’s well-worn path. More recent scholars have with good reason much criticized Stace for his effort to distinguish between mystical experience and the mystic’s interpretation of her experience. The mystic’s implicit interpretation, the critics rightly object, is constitutive of the experience’s intentionality. To revisit Stace once more, however, illustrates the perils of treating logical features of the concepts and commitments informing an experience’s intentionality as simple, descriptive qualities of experience. Stace argues that paradoxicality is a primordial phenomenological quality of mystical experience. “The mystics are driven by powerful inner impulsions to utter paradoxes. These are not the product of thought or intellect, but rather of inspiration. But being themselves rational men who in their ordinary lives and in regard to their ordinary experiences use and apply the ordinary logical laws, they are likely to be puzzled and even astounded when these basically paradoxical experiences come upon them and break out from their lips in contradictory phrases.” “The language,” he insists, “is only paradoxical because the experience is paradoxical.” Like James, Stace treats paradoxicality as a simple, unanalyzable feature of the experience rather than as a logical feature of the experience’s intentionality. Paradoxical language does not, however, merely “mirror” paradoxical experience as Stace claims. Paradoxicality is a logical feature of the immanent transcendent, an idea informing the intentionality of many of the experiences Stace considers. Stace’s argument about mystical paradox leads him to suggest, moreover,

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that mystics are mistaken about ineffability. He argues that paradoxical descriptions accurately report mystical experience, but the mystics’ astonishment at these descriptions leads them to claim falsely that the experiences are ineffable. Stace’s analysis masks the fact that ineffability is a logical requirement of absolute transcendence. The ineffability of mystical experience is conceptually entailed by the mystic’s commitments to higher cognition of the transcendent that compose the intentionality of the experience. Not all mystics appropriate altered states of consciousness, but the frequency with which they associate ineffable higher cognition with altered states of consciousness has compounded the interpretive mistakes. Mystics engaged in negative theology, like PseudoDionysius, who assert the ineffability of its conclusions, have been mistakenly read as reporting altered states of consciousness. The student of mysticism must distinguish between claims of extraordinary cognition and reports of extraordinary consciousness. This caveat notwithstanding, in unrelated contexts around the globe one finds disciplines designed to produce altered states of consciousness that yield intuitive knowledge of the immanent transcendent. The yoga described in the Maitrī and later Upanis.ads and the inner cultivation advocated in the “Inward Training” both purport to lead to a cognitive awareness of the ineffable transcendent that paradoxically lies within. “Inward Training” provides instruction in directly apprehending the Tao, so to live in harmony with this cosmic power. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The Way [Tao] has no fixed position; It abides within the excellent mind. When the mind is tranquil and the vital breath is regular, The Way can thereby be halted. That Way is not distant from us; When people attain it they are sustained That Way is not separated from us; When people accord with it they are harmonious. Therefore: Concentrated! as though you could be roped together with it.

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Indiscernible! as though beyond all locations. The true state of that Way: How could it be conceived of and pronounced upon? Cultivate your mind, make your thoughts tranquil, And the Way can thereby be attained.

Successful practice of inner cultivation reveals the “mind within the mind” or “numinous mind,” (shen) “a direct, nondual, awareness of the Way [Tao] that resides within all human beings.” This awareness of the Tao includes “illumined knowing” (chao chih), “the ability immediately and intuitively to know all the myriad things.” Because the transcendent Tao is paradoxically immanent, direct apprehension of the transcendent includes intuitive awareness of all things. Like the “Inward Training,” many of the later Upanis.ads offer detailed instructions for attaining cognitive awareness of the immanent transcendent within one. The widely anthologized Maitrī Upanis.ad catalogues the stages of yogic attainment of Brahman, but the Yoga Darśana Upanis.ad states perhaps most explicitly the entailments between meditational states and the salvific knowledge of the immanent transcendent. When there appears within you the true knowledge of the unity of your a¯tman with the cosmic a¯tman, that is called sama¯dhi [concentration], for the a¯tman is in truth identical with brahman, the omnipresent, the perpetual, the One without second. ………………………….. If he no longer sees anything but “That,” remaining forever in sama¯dhi, he is forever brahman and perceives his soul in it; the world then melts away: joy alone remains!

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Yogic practice enables one to know intuitively the transcendent that pervades one. This Upanis.ad marries the yogically induced altered state of consciousness to the purported extraordinary cognition beyond paradox. Buddhist meditation makes a revealing contrast with Taoist cultivation and yoga. Like them, Buddhist traditions relate meditational states to extraordinary insight but, typically, Buddhism refuses to reify or “ontologize” the content of meditational experience. It refrains from identifying the altered states with the extraordinary cognition. The altered states do not simply reveal the truth; rather, they help train the mind to realize the truth. The transports of śamatha [calming], dhyāna [absorption], and samādhi [concentration] serve primarily the purposes of immunizing the meditator against . . . disturbance and of honing his faculties of attention. Apart from these functions, however, the extraordinary experiences of calming, absorption, and concentration are themselves only further data to be offered by the meditator to the scrutiny of his discernment [vipaśyanā]. Discernment, in turn, will show these data to be “dependently originated,” “impermanent,” “devoid of self-hood,” “illusory,” etc. It is especially to be emphasized that samādhi and its associated experiences are not themselves revelatory of the truth of things, nor are they sufficient unto liberation from suffering. These paramount tasks are accomplished by discernment or insight [ prajñā], for which calming and concentration only establish the suitable mental conditions.

Buddhist doctrines about impermanence, dependent origination, and emptiness encourage a certain suspicion about altered states of consciousness. Meditational states have heuristic value, but only when the meditator in turn applies these Buddhist doctrines to the states themselves. Meditational experience must exemplify, not defy, Buddhist doctrine about emptiness. In stark contrast, the cosmological question encourages an ontologized interpretation of altered states of consciousness. To the yogin or Taoist sage, altered states reveal the ineffable transcendent.

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That the link between cosmogony and ineffability appears in early Chinese thought is especially significant because it shows that the “Why something rather than nothing?” question is not simply an artifact of that vagary of Indo-European grammar: the coincidence of the existential verb and the copulative verb. This last fact explains, I think, Heidegger’s well-known fascination with the Tao-te-ching. Taoism attracted him because it poses the “question of Being” while dwelling in a language which does not by its very structure confuse the “Being of beings” with a being. Another way of describing Heidegger’s fundamental complaint against the “metaphysical tradition” (that it does not heed the ontological difference between Being and beings) is to say that the metaphysical tradition does not sufficiently recognize the necessity of an apophatic treatment of the question “Why something rather than nothing?” Being, Heidegger insists, is “transcendens,” i.e., not an entity or property. “Thinking,” moreover, consists in a questioning which does not seek answers. This way of looking at Heidegger’s project helps elucidate his late esteem for Eckhart. Heidegger’s insistence that we pay persistent attention to the demands of the cosmological question, does not, however, provide much insight into the question itself. Another twentieth-century philosopher captivated by the same question does help us evaluate it: Wittgenstein, whose views on the question remain equivocal, points the way to a critique of it. Commenting on Heidegger, Wittgenstein told Friedrich Waismann in 1929: I can well understand what Heidegger means by Being and Angst. Human beings have a drive to run up against the boundaries of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question and also there is no answer at all. All we can say can a priori be only nonsensical. Nevertheless we dash ourselves against the boundaries of language.

Wittgenstein claims to understand Heidegger’s cosmological concerns, but also labels them nonsense. He suggests that the cosmo-

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logical question is in fact a pseudo-question, but cosmological “astonishment” appears in his own published work. From the very beginning of his philosophical career, Wittgenstein both held the question dear and recognized that the question is, in some sense, nonsense. At 6.44 of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he famously declares, “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.” Here Wittgenstein associates the mystical with the cosmological question. He immediately denies, however, that an answer to the question can be put into words and for this reason denies that the question itself can be put into words. 6.5 When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The Riddle does not exist. If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.

Wittgenstein suggests that the very transcendence required of the answer renders the question suspect. The question, though it has semantic content, is a pseudo-question; it is nonsense. Wittgenstein follows this passage with the assertion that skepticism too is nonsensical; it also raises questions where no answer is possible. A question can be intelligibly asked only against some framework held constant. To see, furthermore, that the question is nonsense is for the question to vanish. “The solution of the problem . . . is seen in the vanishing of the problem” (6.521). To see the question as a pseudo-question is to “solve” it. Wittgenstein nonetheless had the tendency to regard the mystical as, in Frank Ramsey’s caustic phrase, “important nonsense.” He declares that the mystical astonishment makes itself manifest (6.522). Though “the Riddle” vanishes, the mystical—the astonishment that the world exists— yet manifests itself. Wittgenstein’s weakness for this bit of “important nonsense” accords especially badly with his later philosophy, which he describes as “a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language,” but conforms to his oft-noted blindness about religion (109). Despite his puzzling embrace of the mystical, his observation at the end of the Tractatus about the relationship between

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“framing” a question and the possibility of answering it (an observation which forms the basis for his later notes, published as On Certainty) indicates that an assessment of the cosmological question must pursue its pragmatics. Such an inquiry demonstrates that the cosmological question “bewitches our intelligence by means of language.” Bas van Fraassen has most fully analyzed the pragmatics of explanation requests. He points out that the topic of a whyquestion—the description of the fact or event about which one requests an explanation—is not sufficient to individuate an explanation request. To constitute a successful explanation request, a why-question must fulfill two pragmatic conditions supplied by the context in which it is asked. First, the context must indicate a contrast class to specify the why-question. The contrast class for the topic of a why-question indicates the range of alternatives in light of which the topic needs explanation. The why-question, “Why is the truck red?” for example, has the topic “The truck is red” and will request different explanations depending on whether the topic’s contrast class is {the truck is blue; the truck is green; etc.} or {the car is red; the bicycle is red; etc.}. Second, the context must supply a relevance relation to define the explanation request. A relevance relation determines which facts or events, which elements of the entire causal picture, are relevant to an answer to the explanation request. Different relevance relations distinguish explanation requests. Depending on the relevance relation, the why-question “Why is the truck red?” (with the contrast class: {the truck is blue; the truck is green; etc.}) could request an explanation in terms of pigments, fire department policies, or safety studies. The context in which one asks the why-question determines which elements of the total causal picture are relevant to an answer. Paint pigments are in all likelihood (though not necessarily) irrelevant when someone asks the question “Why is the truck red?” in a public hearing. To consider the cosmological why-question in light of van Fraassen’s analysis reveals the question’s curious nature. The topic of the why-question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” does indeed have a contrast class that specifies the explanation request. In fact, phrased in this way, the contrast class is built into the ques-

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tion itself. The topic of the question is “There is something” and the contrast class is: {there is nothing}. The question fails, however, to fulfill the other pragmatic condition for an explanation request. By requesting an explanation of the entire causal nexus, it eliminates the possibility of a relevance relation—a relevant portion of the total causal picture with which to define the explanation request. The universal nature of the question subverts any possible relevance relation that one might propose. All facts or events are irrelevant to the question why there are facts or events at all. The question deflects any relevance relation and thereby removes the background against which one intelligibly asks a why-question. Expressed more technically, the question has syntactic form and semantic content, but lacks one of the pragmatic conditions necessary for a successful explanation request. The universal question, therefore, is not simply an explanation request that we reject because, on our best background theories, it could have no true answer (the way we reject the request to know why a particular plutonium atom disintegrated precisely when it did). The problem with the question is more fundamental than that; it fails even to satisfy the conditions for a successful explanation request. The pragmatics of explanation reveal that, as Wittgenstein surmised, the cosmological question’s universal scope renders it, in fact, a pseudo-question. They also clarify the parallel Wittgenstein glimpsed between the mystical and skepticism. Whereas universal skepticism undermines the beliefs that invest the skeptic’s language with semantic meaning and thereby prevents one from articulating one’s skepticism, a universal explanation request undermines the background necessary to invest the question with pragmatic intelligibility. In both cases the universality of the problem consumes the problem. Despite the “vanishing” of the problem, Wittgenstein nevertheless regarded the mystical as “important nonsense,” but did not so regard skepticism. That the cosmological question retains its semantic meaning explains this fact. Because the cosmological question obviously has semantic meaning—it is not utter gibberish—but systematically repels any possible relevance relation, it assumes a baffling or enigmatic mien.

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Much like the paradoxes to which it gives rise, its anomalousness can come to bear the emotional freight of social concerns. In certain circumstances the question can work to arouse awe or reverence. Hence arises the “sense of mystery,” “wonderment” and “bewilderment” that Michael Sells misleadingly considers “a basic human response . . . to the nothingness in which being is situated” (and which he views apophatic texts as attempting to produce through their ambiguities and paradoxes). The question frustrates the inquirer and can, especially in a devotional context, evoke a religious response. When Friedrich Schleiermacher contends that the distinguishing element of piety is the consciousness of all temporal existence’s “absolute dependence,” he confirms this analysis. Semantic nonsense, on the other hand, would not generate awe or reverence in this way. Despite recognizing that the question is, in a qualified sense, nonsense, Wittgenstein succumbs to the “astonishment” which the baffling question produces. The best intentions of his philosophy notwithstanding, he allows language to bewitch his intelligence. The evocative potential of the cosmological pseudo-question abets its theological or devotional employment. Though we are well aware of its influence on Aquinas, Schleiermacher, Paul Tillich, and Mircea Eliade, its dynamic fuels more of the Christian theological tradition than we generally realize. At the heart even of Anselm’s ontological argument lies an apophatic movement of thought that finds its inspiration in cosmological speculation. Geoffrey Schufreider argues that the distinction Anselm draws in Proslogion 3 between those things that can be thought not to exist and that which cannot be thought not to exist condenses the cosmological reasoning of the Monologion. Schufreider suggests that Anselm’s cosmological speculations led to the identification of God characteristic of the ontological argument. In keeping, furthermore, with the requirements of the cosmological question, Anselm relies on an apophatic movement to locate God cognitively. The basic strategy—we might even say, the cognitive act—that allows thought to think something that cannot be thought not to

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exist involves the negation of the being of those beings that can be thought not to exist precisely insofar as rational thought may conceive of them in view of their nonexistence.

Just as one can only answer the cosmological question negatively, by denying the limitations of determinate things, Anselm embeds a via negativa in the ontological argument. Schufreider emphasizes the devotional nature of the Proslogion and compares this negative movement of the mind to the negations evident in apophatic mysticism. The peculiarities of the cosmological pseudo-question help to explain some strikingly similar features of religious reflection and religious practice in several different traditions. These recurrent patterns revolve around the idea of absolute transcendence, an idea that generates paradox. Because of its specious basis in the pseudo-question, the paradox of transcendence invites an analysis parallel to that of the infamous barber paradox. Consider a (male) village barber who shaves all and only those village men who do not shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself? If he does, he does not. If he does not, he does. Paradoxically, the barber shaves himself if and only if he does not. Over forty years ago Quine pointed out that this paradox is easily resolved. The paradoxical result functions as an effective reductio ad absurdum of the very idea of such a barber. The paradox proves that a village barber who shaves all and only those village men who do not shave themselves cannot exist. The paradox of transcendence functions similarly as a reductio of the very idea of an absolutely transcendent cause. Given that the idea of absolute transcendence flows from no better source than a mere eddy in the stream of language—that it is the pseudo-question that issues the demand for absolute transcendence—one should take the paradox of transcendence as a conclusive argument demonstrating that there can be no absolutely transcendent cause of the universe. Just as we reject as absurd the premise that produces the barber paradox, we should reject as absurd the premise that produces the paradox of transcendence. This result, moreover, thwarts the currently fash-

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ionable idea that the paradoxes found in traditional apophatic mystical texts transcend standard Aristotelian logic and can contribute to contemporary ethical and political thinking. Striken from the catalogue of mysteries, absolute transcendence enters the list of absurdities.

5 SKEPTICISM AND MYSTICISM

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ellenistic philosophers commonly saw themselves as practicing the art of living. To greater or lesser degrees theoretical inquiry subserved the pursuit of the good life. While this characterization is undeniably apt for the Stoics and the Epicureans, it also applies in a qualified way to the Pyrrhonian Skeptics, those later Skeptics who looked back with admiration to the early Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360–270 BCE). Rational inquiry does indeed inform the Pyrrhonian’s discipline—the Greek word skeptikos literally means “inquirer”—but Pyrrhonian Skepticism does not undertake inquiry to arrive at dogma. Rather, it advocates inquiry to perpetuate doubt. The Pyrrhonians direct rational argument against belief. They devised “modes,” or patterns for argument, which lead to a suspense of judgment. Though the modes do not produce paradoxes in the technical sense, they highlight contradictory evidences and, like paradoxes, disrupt normal doxastic practice. The Pyrrhonians aim to force themselves to suspend judgment on all questions of fact and value, including the question whether there is an art of living at all. Their discipline, they claim, fosters detachment from the judgments that underlie one’s hopes and fears, and detachment from oneself insofar as one has inclinations to form those judgments on the basis of how things appear to one. This detachment, the Skeptic claims, produces a tranquil state (ataraxia—lit., “without disturbance”). Unlike the Christian, who

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cultivates cognitive attachment to God’s will (perhaps through meditation, etc.) in order to detach from her ordinary affections and valuations and, thereby, attain peace, or the Stoic, who cultivates attachment to cosmic law in order to detach from his ordinary affections and valuations and, thereby, attain peace, the Skeptic seeks detachment from all beliefs, even beliefs about the cosmos or God, to attain peace. To confront ancient Pyrrhonian Skepticism with a pragmatist analysis of belief suggests that the Skeptic misunderstands and misdescribes his practice. Pragmatism leads one to conclude that whatever detachment a Skeptic manages to achieve does not come unaccompanied by beliefs. The Skeptic’s tranquillity derives not from perpetuating doubt, but from dispelling doubt and supplanting disturbing beliefs with affectively neutral ones. Because of the Skeptic’s metaphysical reticence, one might justifiably hesitate to label Greek Skepticism religion, but skeptical patterns of thought and practice appear in diverse contexts, some more generally recognized as religious and some merely quasireligious. Aside from the enormous importance of Skepticism in Post-Reformation Christian thought, disciplines quite similar to Skepticism appear prominently in India. The Greek sources, in fact, claim Pyrrho studied with Indian “gymnosophists,” and Everard Flintoff has made a persuasive case for it. Regardless of possible influence, a number of Indian texts bear close similarities to . Greek Skepticism. Jayarāśi Bhat.t.a’s Tattvopaplavasimha, for example, offers arguments against both inference and causality that are remarkably similar to those in Sextus Empiricus, our main surviving source for Pyrrhonism. The “annihilation” of “principles,” Jayarāśi concludes, results in a “delightful” life. In the Dīghanikāya— “The Long Discourses of the Buddha”—a mendicant, Sañjaya Belat. t.haputta, who like Pyrrho and Sextus uses tetralemmas (catusketi) to express his refusal to stake an opinion and whose skepticism, like theirs, serves to eliminate obstacles to mental peace, is depicted as a fool. Despite these widespread affinities, not all thinkers who turn reason against itself in pursuit of equanimity should be classified as

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skeptics. The presence of skeptical strategies and patterns of argument can mislead. Mystics, as well as skeptics, gladly indicate the shortcomings of reason. In the second and third sections of this chapter, I discuss two thinkers who have recently been described as skeptics. In both cases I argue they are more accurately described as mystics. In the second section, I conclude that Nāgārjuna, the second-century Mādhyamika Buddhist, confronts a paradox at the heart of the tradition he inherits and responds mystically. Consequently, he employs his famous tetralemmas with very different inspiration from Sextus and with different effect. In the third section, I contend that Chuang-tzu, the fourth-century BCE Chinese thinker, likewise adopts a mystical stance when confronted by paradox.

R the skeptic discipline of inquiry, i.e., the application of the modes, consists in finding considerations pertaining to a belief that oppose the considerations justifying or supporting it. As Sextus describes it, “Scepticism is an ability to place in antithesis, in any manner whatever, appearances and judgments, and thus— because of the equality of force in the objects and arguments opposed—to come first of all to a suspension of judgment and then to mental tranquillity.”  Though Sextus here distinguishes appearances and judgments, he often uses “appearances” to cover a broad spectrum of mental states. Appearances, for Sextus, are not just sense impressions. Sextus allows, for example, that a line of argument can appear sound and a course of action can appear reasonable, both of these sorts of appearance proving crucial for the Skeptic’s apologetics. In all cases, nevertheless, the ancient Pyrrhonians sought out conflicting evidences or “appearances” in order to eliminate belief with the aim of attaining a tranquil state. If one felt tempted to adopt a belief, one could deploy one or more of the modes to prevent it. If, for example, one were tempted to believe that an oar is straight based on its appearance, one should remember that, when partially submerged in water, the oar

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appears bent. Having opposed in this case one perceptual appearance to another perceptual appearance, the Skeptic insists that one has no criterion by which to choose true appearances from false. The modes rely in this way on the infamous Problem of the Criterion: any attempt to substantiate a criterion of veridical appearance will end in an infinite regress or circularity. To know, so the argument goes, whether things are as they appear, one needs a criterion to distinguish true appearances from false. But how does one know that one’s criterion is reliable? One either needs a reliable criterion by which to select a reliable criterion, and this avenue launches one into an infinite regress, or one looks to see if one’s criterion selects the true appearances, but this tack is circular because to know which appearances are true one needs a reliable criterion. So, the Skeptic claims, one has no reason to prefer the straight appearance of the oar to the bent appearance of the oar when it is in water. The appearances are equipollent; they are equal “in respect of credibility and incredibility.” One cannot believe either that the oar is in reality straight, or that it is in reality bent. Through cognitive exercises of this nature, the Skeptic discipline induces a general suspense of judgment. The Greek sources attest that from the very beginning critics have claimed that the Pyrrhonian cannot possibly live without beliefs. How could one avert danger, let alone eat, drink, or move purposefully, devoid of beliefs? Later, Hume famously leveled this same charge. Further, in a notorious passage of the Treatise that Jeffrey Stout has labeled “Hume’s Lament,” Hume also testified that a thoroughgoing skepticism results not in tranquillity, but in what seems “the most deplorable condition imaginable,” a “philosophical melancholy and delirium.” Sextus replies to the ancient critics that the term criterion has two senses. “First, it is the standard one takes for belief in reality or non-reality. . . . Second, it is the standard of action the observance of which regulates our actions in life.” Predictably, Sextus repudiates the idea of a criterion in the first, theoretical sense. He insists, however, that the Skeptic’s discipline includes a criterion in the second, practical sense. The Skeptic’s practical criterion is appear-

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ances. The Skeptic regulates his actions in life by the standard of appearances. Sextus explains the various sorts of regulating appearances: Now, we cannot be entirely inactive when it comes to the observances of everyday life. Therefore, while living undogmatically, we pay due regard to appearances. This observance of the requirements of daily life seems to be fourfold, with the following particular heads: the guidance of nature, the compulsion of the feelings, the tradition of laws and customs, and the instruction of the arts. It is by the guidance of nature that we are naturally capable of sensation and thought. It is by the compulsion of the feelings that hunger leads us to food and thirst leads us to drink. It is by virtue of the tradition of laws and customs that in everyday life we accept piety as good and impiety as evil. And it is by virtue of the instruction of the arts that we are not inactive in those arts which we employ.

While suspending judgment about how things really are, the Skeptic follows the appearances that fall into these four categories. Notice again that appearances are not even primarily perceptual appearances. Sextus includes the deliverances of internal sense, thought, enculturation, and education. Notice too that the practical criterion does not include all appearances. It conspicuously excludes the appearances relating to affective disturbance—for example, the appearance that pain or loss is a misfortune. This practical criterion, Sextus insists, directs actions, but involves no beliefs. The Skeptic acts in accordance with how things appear to him, but without believing that they are so. When the Skeptic allows that he assents to appearances, he uses the term appearances in its non-epistemic sense. That is, he claims to use it to make a phenomenological report. He claims he does not use it to report what he is inclined to believe. When I say, for instance, that the moon appears no larger than the quarter I am holding at arm’s length, I can either intend simply to report a fact about my perceptual experience, or I can intend to report a kind of belief I have about the moon. The former use of “appears” is non-

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epistemic, the latter epistemic. The distinction between nonepistemic and epistemic senses of “appearance” is most easily grasped in perceptual cases. Indeed, Myles Burnyeat convincingly argues that in cases like the appearance of validity in a line of reasoning, one cannot distinguish a non-epistemic sense of appearing. Despite what the Skeptic claims, to assent to the appearance of validity in an argument (as the “guidance of nature” dictates) simply is to believe that the conclusion of the argument obtains. Burnyeat explains: [A]ccepting the conclusion that p on the basis of a certain argument is hardly to be distinguished from coming to believe that p is true with the argument as one’s reason. . . . [The Skeptic] wants to say something of the form “It appears to me that p but I do not believe that p,” with a non-epistemic use of “appears,” but it looks to be intelligible only if “appears” is in fact epistemic, yielding a contradiction: “I (am inclined to) believe that p but do not believe that p.”

The fact that there is no intelligible non-epistemic sense of “appearance” with regard to reason and argument creates crippling difficulties for the Skeptic. Sextus characterizes Skepticism as “a discipline which, in accordance with appearance, follows a certain line of reasoning, that line of reasoning indicating how it is possible to seem to live rightly . . . , and extending also to the ability to suspend judgment.” The Skeptic’s discipline fundamentally depends on a line of reasoning appearing valid in a non-epistemic sense. He adopts the practical criterion because it seems reasonable and right. In applying the modes, moreover, the Skeptic uses argument to produce the appearance of equipollence. If these so-called appearances are really cryptobeliefs, the Skeptic’s discipline does not produce a life without beliefs. Burnyeat supplements this argument with a suspicion, confirmed by Hume’s testimony, that a life of doubt would not produce ataraxia. He writes, “Both the causes (reasoned arguments) of the state which Sextus calls appearance [of equipollence] and its effects (tranquillity and the cessation of emotional disturbance) are such as

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to justify us in calling it a state of belief.” Concurring with the ancient critics, but on different grounds, Burnyeat concludes that the Skeptic cannot live his skepticism. To consider ancient Pyrrhonian Skepticism in light of a pragmatist analysis of belief places Burnyeat’s conclusion in a broader framework. C. S. Peirce conceived his pragmatism as a rejoinder to skeptical philosophy. He had modern, Cartesian methodological skepticism primarily in view, but Peirce’s anti-Cartesian discourse on method subverts ancient Pyrrhonian Skepticism as well. In line with his anti-Cartesian aims, Peirce characterizes belief by contrasting it with doubt. In his well-known essay of 1877, “The Fixation of Belief,” Peirce asserts that belief differs from doubt not only in its felt quality but also with regard to action. Peirce claims: The feeling of believing is a more or less sure indication of there being established in our nature some habit which will determine our actions. Doubt never has such an effect. . . . Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else. On the contrary, we cling tenaciously, not merely to believing, but to believing, just what we do believe. . . . Belief does not make us act at once, but puts us into such a condition that we shall behave in a certain way, when the occasion arises. Doubt has not the least effect of this sort, but stimulates us to action until it is destroyed.

Peirce emphasizes two features of belief in contrast to doubt. First, beliefs should be understood primarily as habits of action. They are dispositions to behave in certain ways on certain occasions. Second, belief is a tranquil state, and doubt a disturbed, unpleasant one. Both of Peirce’s claims have proved influential. Later pragmatists have emphasized the first. They reject the Greek idea that beliefs are more or less accurate representations of reality, and instead follow Pierce in defining beliefs as more or less successful habits of action.

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Some social psychologists have adopted the second. Leon Festinger, the psychologist who devised cognitive dissonance theory, posits the irritating nature of doubt as the fundamental premise of the theory. He even compares the psychological motivation to avoid or reduce the cognitive dissonance aroused by doubt to the psychological motivation to avoid or reduce hunger, just as Pierce does in a 1903 footnote added to “The Fixation of Belief.” In his famous companion essay to “The Fixation of Belief,” entitled “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Peirce elaborates his conception of belief and argues that the individuation of beliefs does not depend on their felt quality or linguistic expression. The identity of a belief depends, rather, on what perceptions act as a stimulus for action, and what expected sensible results provide the motivation for action. A belief is a disposition to act purposefully in certain perceptual circumstances. Peirce’s esteem for laboratory science prompted him to construe his pragmatist principle too narrowly. He claims that only differences in sensible effects can produce differences in conduct. “[O]ur action,” he writes, “has exclusive reference to what affects the senses.” In a much later essay (1905), taking pains to distinguish his pragmatism from James’s, Peirce emphasizes this feature of his thought. He describes his pragmatism as “a species of prope-positivism” (“prope-” signifying a broader than usual definition of “positivism”) and asserts that “experimental results are the only results that can affect human conduct.” Peirce’s very first application of his principle in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” reveals its shortcomings. He argues that because Protestants and Catholics agree about the sensible effects of wine, they do not disagree about the sacrament. Peirce’s dogma that only differences in sensible effects can produce differences in conduct leads him to neglect the noticeable differences in ritual practice and life conduct that Protestants and Catholics display with regard to the sacrament. A less positivistic pragmatism distinguishes Protestant and Catholic beliefs about the sacrament by reference to these differences in practice and conduct. Peirce’s ill-conceived “prope-positivism” notwithstanding, the pragmatist conception of belief prevents the Skeptic from saying

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that he suspends judgment, but nevertheless has a criterion that directs action. To a pragmatist a criterion that directs action in light of appearances simply is a criterion of belief, because the defining feature of belief is dispositional action. The policy to act on appearances results in habits of action; it results, that is, in beliefs. When one is willing to act on appearances as a general rule, those appearances can no longer be said to be non-epistemic. Pragmatism generalizes Burnyeat’s conclusion: the appearances that guide the Skeptic’s conduct are, in fact, epistemic. If the appearances on the basis of which the Pyrrhonist acts were truly non-epistemic, he could act on the basis of the appearance that loss is a misfortune without feeling the disturbance that a belief to that effect would bring. That Sextus excludes these appearances from his practical criterion suggests that the criterion is, in fact, a criterion of belief. To rid himself of the disturbance attendant on a belief that loss is a misfortune, the Skeptic must come to believe (despite his claim to suspend judgment) that no belief about loss is warranted. The Skeptic replaces a disturbing belief with an affectively neutral belief. A policy to act on the appearance that loss is a misfortune, however, would reproduce the disturbing belief that loss is a misfortune. In the case of the appearances Sextus does include in the practical criterion, the Skeptic may believe that no beliefs are warranted and that he holds no beliefs, but his resolve to act on the appearances indicates that he does indeed hold beliefs. The pragmatist conception suggests that the Skeptical discipline achieves tranquillity not, as the Skeptic claims, by perpetuating doubt, but rather by resolving it. The tranquillity that a Skeptic feels indicates that he is not irritated by doubt; it indicates that he has passed into what Peirce calls the “calm and satisfactory state” of belief. In fact, some of Sextus’s own pronouncements on the origin of Skepticism lend support to this conclusion. “Men of noble nature,” Sextus reports, “had been disturbed at the irregularity in things, and puzzled as to where they should place their belief. Thus they were led on to investigate both truth and falsehood in things, in order that, when truth and falsehood were determined, they

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might attain tranquillity of mind.” Sextus implies here that the noble men’s puzzlement (i.e., their doubt) was the source of their perturbedness, and he cites the connection that they supposed holds between belief and tranquillity. It almost seems that Peirce could have penned this passage. When Sextus goes on, however, to claim that the Skeptics accidentally discovered that the tranquillity they sought followed upon their suspense of judgment, the pragmatist demurs. [The Skeptics] were in hopes of attaining mental tranquility, thinking that they could do this by arriving at some rational judgement which would dispel the inconsistencies involved in both appearances and thoughts. When they found this impossible, they withheld judgement. While they were in this state, they made a chance discovery. They found that they were attended by mental tranquility as surely as a body by its shadow.

The follower of Peirce contends that the Skeptic misunderstands and misdescribes the culmination of his discipline. She argues that the Skeptic’s tranquillity derives from having, counter to his intentions, adopted a theoretical criterion. In “The Fixation of Belief ” Peirce catalogues some of the unsatisfactory methods by which people have historically eliminated doubt and fixed belief. Along with the “method of tenacity,” whereby one resolutely clings to the beliefs one has and self-deceptively avoids countervailing evidence, and the “method of authority,” whereby the powerful coerce belief and fix it by threat, Peirce describes the “a priori method,” whereby one heedlessly fixes belief in accord with what seems “agreeable to reason.” His chief target in criticizing the a priori method is unempirical metaphysics, but he points out more generally that our moral and political convictions usually have no better foundation. We are encultured to see our conventions as agreeable to reason. A pragmatist analysis of Pyrrhonian Skepticism leads to the conclusion that the Skeptic’s practical criterion, contrary to his insistence, cannot be distinguished

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from a theoretical criterion that employs the a priori method. He fixes his habits for action—his beliefs—by the criterion of what appears agreeable to reason. The Skeptic’s tranquillity derives from his having adopted a wholesale criterion for quelling doubt and fixing affectively neutral beliefs. Though a pragmatist analysis does not necessarily gainsay the Pyrrhonist’s reported tranquillity, in contending that he misdescribes and misunderstands his practice, it does contest the extent of his detachment. Pyrrhonism attempts the most extreme form of mental detachment: utter or complete detachment from all belief. The pragmatist critique of Pyrrhonism offers a general conclusion for the student of religion: complete detachment is not viable. The scope of detachment is limited in any particular case to certain cognitive domains and not others. Detachment from some or all of one’s ordinary affections and valuations is possible, but only if one maintains or adopts some cognitive counterweight. Mental detachment, it turns out, is parasitic on belief. Pragmatism helps to place Burnyeat’s conclusion in a broader context, but one can also view the fit between Burnyeat’s argument and pragmatism as militating in favor of a non-representationalist or pragmatist account of belief. The elaboration of Burnyeat’s argument that pragmatism allows, in conjunction with the explanatory success of cognitive dissonance theory, provides abductive support for pragmatism’s conception of belief and doubt. In the same way that a successful scientific theory can account in its own terms for the successes and failures of its rivals, pragmatism gains credibility from the light it sheds on Skepticism’s practical successes and its theoretical failures.

R in mdhyamika (“the school of the middle”) thought the metaphysical term śūnyatā (“emptiness”) is the key to Buddhist doctrines. Emptiness formulates the middle way between affirmations of being and non-being. Insight into emptiness

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prevents reification—i.e., treating anything as if it were selfsubsistent, as if it had its own independent being or intrinsic nature—as well as nihilism—i.e., treating things as if they were altogether unreal. Reification is the source of the disturbances that produce suffering. Detachment from reification eliminates grasping, craving, and so forth. Nirvān.a is seeing reality as empty, “without reification, without attachment.” Some recent interpretations of Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakārikā— the foundational text of Mādhyamika Buddhism— compare it to Pyrrhonian Skepticism. The affinity is easy to perceive. Nāgārjuna carefully pursues the epistemological and soteriological implications of emptiness. He takes the ontological concept and adds an epistemological dimension. At least one reference of the term śūnyatā, for Nāgārjuna, is doxastic. Emptiness is neither being nor non-being, but it is also neither an affirmation nor a negation. Like a Pyrrhonian Skeptic he insists upon detachment from dogma. He reduces to absurdity all alternative positions and claims to have no thesis to affirm beyond rejecting the affirmations and denials of all metaphysical systems. Emptiness too is empty. One must not treat the doctrine of emptiness as if it were a truth that captures the intrinsic, essential nature of things. This doxastic emptiness ensures that one does not reify a metaphysical view and thereby open oneself to craving, and disturbance. The victorious ones have said That emptiness is the relinquishing of all views. For whomever emptiness is a view, That one has accomplished nothing. (XIII:8)

In order to escape from suffering, one must hold no position. Not entirely unlike Sextus, for whom suspension of judgment is a necessary condition of ataraxia, Nāgārjuna holds that doxastic emptiness is a necessary condition of nirvān.a. Finally, for both Sextus and Nāgārjuna one can talk about how things conventionally are said to be, but cannot assert how things

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are ultimately. Sextus distinguishes two criteria: the illusory theoretical criterion which would determine how things really are, and the practical criterion which guides conduct in accord with how things conventionally appear to be. Nāgārjuna likewise uses (in the Vigrahavyāvartanī —“The Rebuttal of Objections”) a version of the Problem of the Criterion to undermine the idea that we have valid means for knowing (pramān.as), but yet distinguishes a conventional truth. The Buddha’s teaching of the Dharma Is based on two truths: A truth of worldly convention And an ultimate truth. (XXIV:8)

Nāgārjuna carefully differentiates the elusive, ultimate, ineffable (nirvān.ic) truth about reality from the empty truths of conventional discourse. Despite these manifest similarities, Nāgārjuna’s thought differs from Pyrrhonian Skepticism in both its inspiration and in its effect. Jay Garfield maintains that Nāgārjuna “demystifies” the “mystical” appearance of the doctrine of emptiness. Much depends on how one defines “mystical,” of course, but in the terms laid out in chapter 1, Na¯ga¯rjuna (whatever else he might be) is a paradigmatic mystic. His unremitting application of the doctrine of emptiness leads to paradox and, in the face of paradox, he resorts to mysticism. He appeals, that is, to a sort of ineffable superknowledge attained through reflection on the paradox. Pyrrhonian Skepticism arises from epistemological considerations. No view about how things really are seems warranted. Nāgārjuna’s problem, by contrast, is not motivated by the unavailability of a theoretical criterion. Rather, he begins with a received metaphysical doctrine and its soteriological fruits. His application of the Problem of the Criterion serves the metaphysics and soteriology. From the Prajñāpāramitāsūtras he adopts the Buddhist doctrines that all phenomena are empty and that the realization of

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emptiness eliminates suffering, then pursues the epistemological consequences of these doctrines. He uses epistemological argument to prevent the reification of metaphysical views. Consistency dictates, however, that if all phenomena are empty, the doctrine of emptiness must itself be empty. It cannot describe the essential or intrinsic nature of things. Likewise, if reification produces suffering, one must resist the reification of emptiness. Doxastic emptiness, the Buddhist analogue to the Pyrrhonian suspension of judgment, is based in metaphysical and soteriological views, not an epistemological impasse. Ironically, Pyrrho’s skepticism (if not that of Sextus and the later Pyrrhonians) may also have taken inspiration from a metaphysical thesis. Aristocles reports that According to Timon [a follower of Pyrrho], Pyrrho declared that things are equally indifferent, unmeasurable, and inarbitrable. For this reason neither our sensations nor our opinions tell us truths or falsehoods. Therefore for this reason we should not put our trust in them one bit, but we should be unopinionated, uncommitted and unwavering, saying concerning each individual thing that it no more is than is not, or it both is and is not, or it neither is nor is not. The outcome for those who actually adopt this attitude, says Timon, will be first speechlessness, and then freedom from disturbance.

If we can trust this report, Pyrrho advocated tetralemmas on the basis of a metaphysical thesis, the claim that “things are equally indifferent, unmeasurable and inarbitrable.” The speechlessness ultimately derives not from epistemological considerations (i.e., that our faculties are inadequate for discerning the nature of things, or that we lack a defensible theoretical criterion), but rather from the nature of things. The nature of reality is such that it defies the assignment of truth values to sensations or opinions. Like Nāgārjuna, Pyrrho’s so-called skepticism stems from a dogma. Pyrrho seems to exempt his metaphysical dogma from its own implications. Despite claiming that our opinions cannot be true

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(or false) of things, he appears to hold that his dogma is a true opinion about the nature of things. This inconsistency is the ransom that delivers Pyrrho from paradox. Nāgārjuna, by contrast, submits the metaphysical doctrine of emptiness to its own implications. Emptiness itself is empty. Unsurprisingly, this admirable consistency culminates in paradox. Nāgārjuna highlights this result in the final sutra of the Mūlamadhyamakārikā. I prostrate to Gautama Who through compassion Taught the true doctrine [lit., “the exact or real nature of the case”], Which leads to the relinquishing of all views. (XXVII:30)

In the Vigrahavyāvartanī Nāgārjuna indicates that consistency is indeed a consideration. “If I were to have any thesis whatsoever, I would be liable to that fault [inconsistency]; but I am completely faultless, because I have no thesis.” To deny that things have an intrinsic nature is to deny that this very claim captures the intrinsic nature of things. To deny that things have an intrinsic nature, one must have no view. The claim that all phenomena are empty is self-subverting. It asserts a truth that cannot be true because it applies to itself. The doctrine shares the formal characteristics of the notorious Liar Paradox of Epimenides the Cretan, who allegedly declared, “All Cretans are [always] liars.” If Epimenides’s statement is true, then it is false (because a Cretan has told the truth). Conversely, if his statement is false, then it is true (because he’s lying). Simpler versions of the Liar Paradox do not require that we attribute mendacious intent to Epimenides in the case that his statement proves false. Consider the following sentence: “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true if and only if it is false, and vice versa. Likewise, if the doctrine of emptiness asserts a truth about the intrinsic nature of reality, then it does not assert a truth about the intrinsic nature of reality (because reality is empty of intrinsic nature). Conversely, if the doctrine does not assert a truth about the intrinsic nature of

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reality (because reality is, in fact, empty of intrinsic nature), then it asserts a truth about the intrinsic nature of reality (that by nature it is intrinsically empty of intrinsic nature). The doctrine asserts a truth about the intrinsic nature of reality if and only if it does not, and vice versa. The final verse of the chapter on the Buddha summarizes the fundamental paradox. Whatever is the essence of the Tathāgata, That is the essence of the world. The Tathāgata has no essence. The world is without essence. (XXII:16)

Like the Tathāgata, the essence of the world is to be without essence. Having pushed the doctrine of emptiness to its paradoxical extreme, Nāgārjuna faces at least three options. First, he could reject the doctrine of emptiness, treating its paradoxical implications as a reductio ad absurdum. Unlike the case of the Liar Paradox, where it is not at all clear how to eliminate the paradox—the many proposals are highly technical, not necessarily completely effective, and highly controversial—here one can eliminate the paradox simply enough, by rejecting the doctrine as Nāgārjuna formulates it. The paradoxical results militate against the doctrine, at least in its unqualified, universal form. Similar paradoxical results led the Skeptics to avoid the claim that they knew that they did not know. The patent absurdity of such a claim tempted Sextus, in the very first paragraph of his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, to calumniate the rival Academic Skeptics by attributing it to them. Similarly, in Plato’s Theaetetus Socrates tries to force Theodorus to repudiate his Protagorean relativism by drawing out the paradoxical conclusions to which the claim that all truth is relative leads. Nāgārjuna, by contrast, retains the doctrine of emptiness. Second, he could use the paradox ascetically. A legend accompanying the Liar Paradox attests to the potential for an ascetic use of the paradox of emptiness. Athenaeus of Naucratis warns against

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the fate of the poet and grammarian, Philetus of Cos (d. 270 BCE), who wasted away and, ultimately, perished from fretting about the Liar Paradox. His epitaph read: Philetus of Cos am I ’Twas The Liar who made me die, And the bad nights caused thereby.

Without placing undue emphasis on Philetus’s legendary languishing, it does not require too much imagination to conceive of an ascetic use of the paradox of emptiness. One could harness the cognitive frustration as a technique of Buddhist self-transformation. Though he is centrally concerned with self-transformation, Nāgārjuna, nevertheless, does not use the paradox ascetically. Third, Nāgārjuna could and, in fact, does use the paradox mystically. Though the doctrine of emptiness defies rational articulation, he suggests that the paradox it produces points past itself to a second, higher order of truth that resolves the contradiction. Nāgārjuna treats paradox as revelatory, the gateway to a higher, ineffable sort of cognition and the truth appropriate to it. Those who do not understand The distinction drawn between these two truths Do not understand The Buddha’s profound truth. Without a foundation in the conventional truth, The significance of the ultimate cannot be taught. Without understanding the significance of the ultimate, Liberation is not achieved. (XXIV:9–10)

Emptiness, which on the conventional level results in paradox, serves as the means to a higher, ineffable, cognitive insight. Nāgārjuna saves the doctrine of emptiness by positing a “higher faculty” capable of cognizing the doctrine. Though, like Garfield, Robert Thurman hopes to thwart “the usual mysticism interpretation” of Madhyamaka, he supports a mysticism interpretation

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along the lines of the one developed in this book when he generalizes that “[Madhyamaka] philosophers did not consider human potential limited to given mundane cognitive faculties.” In addition to mundane faculties, they countenanced a cognitive faculty which can “encounter” the “incomprehensible.” “This faculty they variously called wisdom (prajñā), holy intuition (āryajñāna), and genius (dhi).” Prajñā in particular, “which literally means ‘intense’ (pra-) ‘knowing’ (jna) . . . can experience, understand, encounter the transcendent reality.” Nāgārjuna responds to paradox by positing a higher order of truth, and a higher faculty for cognizing a kind of ineffable superknowledge. The tetralemmas so prevalent in Nāgārjuna contribute to this response. They function not merely to express an unwillingness to stake an opinion or to show the fruitlessness of inquiry into a given topic but also work to evoke a sense of ineffable insight. B. K. Matilal labels the culmination of Nāgārjuna’s tetralemmas a “leap negation” because it “is a special case of negative act, ‘NO’, that asks us to look beyond.” A tetralemma concerning emptiness makes this clear. “Empty” should not be asserted. “Nonempty” should not be asserted. Neither both nor neither should be asserted. They are used only nominally. (XXII:11)

The paradox of emptiness points past the conventional truth to a truth that defies assertion. The purely negative descriptions of nirvān.a serve the same purpose. This mystical response to paradox evokes strong affects that serve to transform the self. The awe and wonder aroused by the paradox of emptiness help make the doctrine of emptiness constitutive of one’s volitional complex. The profound realization of emptiness manifests as universal compassion. Despite, therefore, the apparent similarity between Sextus’s two criteria and Nāgārjuna’s two truths, they differ fundamentally. Sextus insists we can only talk about how things conventionally ap-

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pear to be because it appears that we cannot know how things really are. For Nāgārjuna, however, we can only talk about how things conventionally appear to be, not because we cannot in some sense know how things really are, but rather because we cannot say how things really are. Nāgārjuna’s assurance that one can attain insight into the ultimate truth belies his apparent skepticism. Although the cognitive practice of both a Skeptic like Sextus and a mystic like Nāgārjuna works to arouse cognitive dissonance, they reduce the dissonance after different fashions. Skeptics reduce the dissonance by disguising a theoretical criterion as a merely practical criterion. Mystics reduce the dissonance by positing paranormal cognitive states. This difference relates to the different manners by which skepticism and mysticism transform the self. Skepticism quells doubt and fixes affectively neutral beliefs. Mysticism exploits the awe aroused by paradox to render compelling the ontological doctrine that produces paradox.

R how closely the thought of Chuang-tzu, the fourth-century BCE Chinese thinker, resembles Greek Skepticism has been the subject of even more discussion than the resemblance between the Mūlamadhyamakārikā and Skepticism. The chapter of the Chuang-tzu entitled “On Seeing Things as Equal” (Ch’i wu lun), a collection of pregnant anecdotes and allusive reasonings, has received particular attention. It asks well-crafted skeptical questions, adduces the kind of relativism that is prominent in the Skeptic’s modes, and denigrates logic and theory. The following passage displays this repertoire. Gaptooth put a question to Wang Ni. “Would you know something of which all things agreed ‘That’s it’?” “How would I know that?” “Would you know what you did not know?”

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“How would I know that?” “Then does no thing know anything?” “How would I know that? However, let me try to say it—‘How do I know that what I call knowing is not ignorance? How do I know that what I call ignorance is not knowing?’ ” “Moreover, let me try a question on you. When a human sleeps in the damp his waist hurts and he gets stiff in the joints; is that so of the loach? When he sits in a tree he shivers and shakes; is that so of the ape? Which of these three knows the right place to live? Humans eat the flesh of hay-fed and grain-fed beasts; deer eat the grass, centipedes relish snakes, owls and crows crave mice; which of the four has a proper sense of taste? Gibbons are sought by baboons as mates, elaphures like the company of deer, loaches play with fish. Mao-ch’iang and Lady Li were beautiful in the eyes of men; but when the fish saw them they plunged deep, when the birds saw them they flew high, when the deer saw them they broke into a run. Which of these four knows what is truly beautiful in the world? In my judgement the principles of Goodwill and Duty, the paths of ‘That’s it, that’s not,’ are inextricably confused; how could I know how to discriminate between them?”

The thematic unity of this dialogue derives from its implicit critique of the discrepant doctrines of rival philosophies. Confucians and Mohists disagree in their assertions (“That’s it.”) and denials (“That’s not.”). In the second half of the passage Chuang-tzu likens their disagreement to the relativity of the divergent preferences of different species, and in the first half traces the skeptical consequences of what he takes to be incommensurable doctrines. Like Sextus, moreover, Chuang-tzu recognizes the self-referential paradox at the heart of a claim of ignorance—How could one know that no one knows anything? To heighten the epistemic uncertainty created by divergent philosophical views, Chuang-tzu supplies an argument with the same import as the Problem of the Criterion. You and I having been made to argue over alternatives, if it is you not I that wins, is it really you who are on to it, I who am not? If it

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is I not you that wins, is it really I who am on to it, you who are not? Is one of us onto it and the other of us not? Or are both of us on to it and both of us not? If you and I are unable to know where we stand, others will surely be in the dark because of us. Whom shall I call in to decide it? If I get someone of your party to decide it, being already of your party how can he decide it? If I get someone of my party to decide it, being already of my party how can he decide it? If I get someone of a party different from either of us how can he decide it? If I get someone of the same party as both of us to decide it, being already of the same party as both of us how can he decide it? Consequently you and I and he are all unable to know where we stand, and shall we find someone else to depend on? It makes no difference whether the voices in their transformations have each other to depend on or not. Smooth them out on the whetstone of Heaven, use them to go by and let the stream find its own channels; this is the way to live out your years.

Like a Skeptic, Chuang-tzu works to undermine the idea of a theoretical criterion, and seems to advocate something like the practical criterion: one should live out one’s years using alternative views “to go by” in the way that a stream uses its channels to go by. To put Chuang-tzu’s use of skeptical arguments and strategies in its proper context, however, one must recognize the mysticism at the heart of the text. Much of the recent commentary on the Chuang-tzu emphasizes the text’s paradoxicality less than did earlier scholarship. A. C. Graham deserves credit for retaining the focus on paradox. Graham highlights Chuang-tzu’s friendship with Hui Shih, the early rationalist. Although the Chuang-tzu frequently portrays Hui Shih as Chuang-tzu’s foil, it also testifies to their intellectual companionship. Hui Shih produced a number of paradoxes pertaining to counting and division. They collapse spatial and temporal discriminations leading to an undifferentiated unity. He wielded his paradoxes as a reductio ad absurdum on the presupposition that spatial and temporal distinctions really exist. This metaphysical result

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suits an ethic of equal regard. “Let concern spread to all the myriad things; heaven and earth count as one unit” (78). Graham argues that Chuang-tzu “learned from, in the course of defying, his rationalistic mentor” (176). Chuang-tzu discerns that even the discriminations inherent in language and rational analysis end in contradiction or paradox. His accomplishment is “transforming ‘All are one’ from a moral to a mystical affirmation” (176). In the clearest example, Chuang-tzu begins with Hui Shih’s conclusion that heaven and earth are one, then shows how this assertion results in paradox. Nothing in the world is bigger than the tip of an autumn hair, and Mount T’ai is small; no one outlives the cut-off in childhood, and P’eng-tsu died young; heaven and earth were born together with me, and the myriad things and I are one. —Now that we are one, can I still say something? Already having called us one, did I succeed in not saying something? One and the saying make two, two and one make three. (Graham, Disputers of the Tao, 181)

Chuang-tzu argues that Hui Shih falls into performative selfcontradiction when he asserts his conclusion. Performative selfcontradiction occurs when the performance of a statement is inconsistent with the semantic content of the statement. The act of uttering “I do not exist,” for instance, is inconsistent with the content of the statement. Whether or not he is correct, Chuang-tzu claims that to assert “All is one” likewise contradicts what one asserts. Whereas the performative contradiction involved in saying “I do not exist” leads one (let us call this generic person “Descartes”) to conclude that the statement is false, the alleged performative contradiction involved in saying “All is one” does not lead Chuang-tzu to conclude that the statement is false, but rather leads him to conclude that the unity of the myriad things is ineffable. Hui Shih propounded paradoxes to subvert commonsense metaphysics. Chuang-tzu maintains that the paradox to which Hui Shih’s

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assertion is subject in turn does not subvert Hui Shih’s position. Rather, the paradox subverts the attempt to articulate the position. The Tao “pervades and unifies” the myriad things, but the Tao eludes description or analysis: “that of which you do not know what is so of it you call the Way.” Endorsing this notion of an inexpressible unity, Chuang-tzu seeks to show how any assertion or argument, not just those of Hui Shih, is inadequate to reality. Assertions and denials, deeming something “that’s it” or “that’s not,” obscure the Tao. By what is the Way hidden, that there should be a genuine or a false? By what is saying darkened, that sometimes “That’s it” and sometimes “That’s not”? Wherever we walk how can the Way be absent? Whatever the standpoint how can saying be unallowable? The Way is hidden by formation of the lesser, saying is darkened by its foliage and flowers. And so we have the “That’s it, that’s not” of Confucians and Mohists, by which what is it for one of them for the other is not, what is not for one of them for the other is.

Language and reason distort and divide the Tao. Although the disputations of the philosophers nubilate the Tao, Chuang-tzu countenances “illumination,” a mystical apprehension of the Tao which he exempts from his skepticism and in the light of which one can affirm what the Confucians or Mohists deny and deny what they affirm. Disclosing the coincidence of opposites, illumination represents an ineffable cognition of the pervading and unifying Tao that is lost to reason and language. What is It is also Other, what is Other is also It. There they say “That’s it, that’s not” from one point of view, here we say “That’s it, that’s not” from another point of view. Are there really It and Other? Or really no It and Other? Where neither It nor Other finds its opposite is called the axis of the Way. When once the axis is found at the center of the circle there is no limit to responding with either, on the one hand no limit to what is it, on the other no limit

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to what is not. Therefore I say: “The best means is Illumination.” (Graham, Chuang-tzu, 53)

Assertions and denials obtain relative to a point of view or perspective. Illumination is the perspective on reality that is inarticulable because, paradoxically, it is no particular perspective. Any attempted literal characterization of the purported cognitive content of illumination will only obtain relative to a particular perspective and, therefore, will inevitably fail to convey the pervading and unifying Tao, in which opposites coincide. “To ‘divide,’ then, is to leave something undivided: to ‘discriminate between alternatives’ is to leave something which is neither alternative. ‘What?’ you ask. The sage keeps it in his breast, common men argue over alternatives to show it to each other” (57). The sage has attained superknowledge of the Tao on the far side of paradox, but knows well enough not to try to defend a thesis concerning the Tao. The sage will not “argue over alternatives”; rather, he “uses” illumination to transform himself (55). His mystical cognitive practice fundamentally alters his volitional complex by encouraging an identification with the pervading Tao. The affects aroused by paradox serve to fortify the notion that all is one. Having found the axis of the Tao, the sage can pervade and unify things and, therefore, does not use the “ ‘That’s it’ which deems [wei shi].” Rather, he can find for the myriad things “lodging places in the usual” and only uses a “ ‘That’s It’ which goes by circumstance [ yin shih]” (54). Divested of intellectual attachments (“petty” knowledge) (50), he acts spontaneously, without deliberation, as a conduit for the pervading Tao. His ability to pervade and unify It and Other extends to the ability to pervade and unify Self and Other. “Without an Other, there is no Self; without Self, no choosing one thing rather than another” (58). Roth points to tantalizing evidence in the Chuangtzu that the mystical practice it advocates includes the cultivation of extraordinary states of consciousness. The text appears to invest those anomalous states with its commitment to ineffable superknowledge of the pervading Tao. The intentionality attributed

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to these experiences—that they put one in contact with the Tao— nurtures the identification with the Tao. This wider identification dictates a practical attitude. One should use contested alternatives “to go by and let the stream find its own channels; this is the way to live out your years. Forget the years, forget duty, be shaken into motion by the limitless, and so find things their lodging-places in the limitless.” A self transformed to this extent borders on the superhuman. By learning not to interfere with the “daemonic [shen]” in him, [t]he utmost man is daemonic. When the wide woodlands blaze they cannot sear him, when the Yellow River and the Han freeze they cannot chill him, when swift thunderbolts smash the mountains and whirlwinds shake the seas they cannot startle him. A man like that yokes the clouds to his chariot, rides the sun and moon and roams beyond the four seas; death and life alters nothing in himself, still less the principles of benefit and harm! (Graham, Chuang-tzu, 58)

Perfectly conformed to the Tao, the fully transformed self achieves an independence from the normal human condition. In the Chuang-tzu one finds a variation on a paradox common in religious literature: unconditional dependence is tantamount to supreme independence.

R taking inspiration from a theory of Mary Douglas’s, in chapter 3 I explained a tendency toward either a mystical or an ascetical response to paradox. A thinker’s attitudes toward the incorporation of outsiders into the social group bear upon his or her treatment of refractory paradox. Through the mechanism of availability bias, thinkers lodge their social preoccupations in their response to paradox. Those who favor controlled incorporation of outsiders, bringing them across the external boundary of the social group,

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will be mystics. They will tend to see the boundaries of the understanding as permeable, and will value certain paradoxes as holding out the promise of extra-rational, ineffable truth. Those who fear for the external boundaries of the social group, conversely, will tend to view the boundaries of the understanding as impregnable. Faced with irresolvable paradox, they may use it ascetically. Despite the fact that Skepticism does not originate with entrenched paradox, can one explain it in similar terms? Douglas’s work again proves suggestive. In a rich essay entitled “Credibility,” she attempts to sketch a sociological explanation of “skepticism,” but defines it so loosely as to include nihilism, Romanticism, relativism, and Hindu and Buddhist doctrines of illusion. “Skepticism” in her usage certainly includes mysticism, and possibly cognitive asceticism as well, categories I want to distinguish from a more fine-grained category of Skepticism. She also tries to explain “skepticism,” as she defines it, by the Skeptic’s place in the general society, whereas I look to a thinker’s views about the institution or social group of most concern to him or her. Douglas’s insight into the sociological significance of the fact that Skepticism is the philosophy of non-attachment par excellence proves valuable nevertheless. Radical cognitive non-attachment presupposes an attitude of social non-attachment. Skepticism flourishes, I conclude, where antipathy toward social groups prevails. Although we often classify the ancient Pyrrhonists as a “school” of Hellenistic Philosophy, this practice misleads in two related respects. First, most of the Pyrrhonists about whom we know anything were physicians, not philosophers as defined by the sociosemantic criteria of the day. Second, the social arrangements and social identity of the Pyrrhonists diverged considerably from that of the philosophers of the schools. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes summarize some of the salient differences. The chief dogmatic philosophies—Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism—were to some extent institutionalized. They were marked by characteristic doctrines and distinctive ideologies.

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They enjoyed some measure of formal organization. They functioned as educational establishments. They had official heads or “scholarchs.” They owned property. The history of scepticism . . . is not like that. Leading skeptics had associates and pupils, and they were aware of their predecessors. Sceptical attitudes and arguments were transmitted from one generation to the next. But by its very nature scepticism could profess no school doctrines, and its adherents did not hanker after the institutional trappings or the professional status of the dogmatic sects.

Unlike the “chief ” dogmatic schools the Pyrrhonists were not bureaucratically organized. They did not have a school (schole¯ or diatribe¯) in the institutional sense. Probably for this reason, Marcus Aurelius neglected to establish a professorship for Pyrrhonism when he created professorships for the four dogmatic schools. If the Pyrrhonists were not a school in the institutional sense, neither were the Pyrrhonists considered a school in another relevant sense. The Greek word hairesis, usually translated as “school” or “sect,” refers to “a group of people, a philosophical or political faction, united by a shared persuasion or body of doctrine.” A school in this sense, a sect or faction, is characterized both by a social identity and by the mutually affirmed doctrines that form the basis for it. The “chief ” dogmatic philosophies numbered among the sects, of course, but so did other minor philosophies that did not have the benefit of a school in the institutional sense. When ancient authors survey the philosophical landscape, however, they exhibit reluctance to classify the Pyrrhonists as a sect. Sextus himself will allow that Pyrrhonism is a sect only in a qualified sense. A sect functions to develop, defend, and disseminate dogmas. How then could one have a sect without dogmas? This semantic interrelationship between “sect” and “dogma” seems to hold in the converse too. To subscribe to dogmas implies a social affiliation. This social dimension becomes evident in Sextus’s frequent criticism of “the dogmatists.” Despite the universal scope of the skepticism that Sextus espouses (i.e., he proposes to

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suspend judgment on all candidates for belief ), Sextus evinces particular interest in subverting the dogmas of the sects. When he targets “the dogmatists,” he is not in these instances assailing the commonplace beliefs of individuals. Rather, he assails the dogmas constitutive of the sects. In these contexts he sometimes mentions the sects by name. In this light Pyrrhonism can be viewed as an assault on the sects as social groups. Some of the lesser-known surviving sources on ancient Pyrrhonism corroborate this perspective on the social attitudes of the Pyrrhonists. They suggest that Pyrrhonism was rooted in self-conscious antagonism toward the sects. Lucian of Samosata’s (second century CE) unjustly neglected “Hermotimus, or Concerning the Sects” offers a rare portrait of a Pyrrhonist in action. This dialogue, uncharacteristically serious for an author primarily remembered for his satires, purports to recount a discussion between Hermotimus, a Stoic, and Lycinus, a figure who is never explicitly identified with Pyrrhonism, but who skillfully employs the skeptical modes. Lycinus deploys the modes to subvert Hermotimus’s allegiance to his sect. Lycinus insists, however, that his arguments apply generally to all the sects; he harbors no especial animosity toward the Stoics. Lycinus counsels Hermotimus to become a layman again and tells him to “join in the common life. Share in the city of everyday, and give up your hopes of the strange and puffed-up.” In the end Hermotimus credits Lycinus with liberating him from his sect and its arduous discipline, and Hermotimus pledges to lay aside the distinctive dress, short hair, and long beard of the Stoic. He laments his years of wasted effort and describes the Pyrrhonist as a deus ex machina that saved him from a raging torrent of servitude and delusion. Salvation, as delivered by the Pyrrhonist, consists in defecting from the sect and rejoining the common life. In the concluding sentence of the dialogue, Hermotimus asserts, “If in the future I ever meet a philosopher while I am walking on the road, even by chance, I will turn round and get out of his way as if he were a mad dog.” Earlier in the dialogue, however, Lycinus

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reserves the title “philosopher” for someone who, having experienced the deceptions of the sects, endeavors to prevent others from joining them. “You will certainly find very few brave enough to admit that they have been deceived and to turn away others from a similar attempt. If, then, you meet such a one, call him a lover of truth, honest, and just, and, if you like, a philosopher; for to him alone I would not begrudge the name.” The Pyrrhonist, as Lucian portrays him, counterposes the doctrines definitive of the various sects, only with the ethical aim of leading individuals away from the hardships, pretensions, and delusions of the schools. The Pyrrhonist attacks social factions that deceitfully entrap individuals, impose unpleasant and useless disciplines, and introduce specious social distinctions. As Lucian depicts it, Pyrrhonism was not one of the sects, but an attack on the sects. There is evidence to suggest that Lucian’s depiction is not idiosyncratic, that Lucian has not put Pyrrhonian tropes to nonPyrrhonian purposes, but rather that from the very revival of Pyrrhonism in the first century BCE, skepticism was rooted in antagonism to the sects. The revival of Pyrrhonism is credited to Aenesidemus of Cnossus. Aenesidemus broke away from the Academy, Photius reports, because the Academics had adopted too many Stoic positions. They had become Stoics in Academic clothing. Reasons exist, however, for concluding that more than disaffection with the current theoretical stance of the Academy motivated Aenesidemus’s departure. It seems that he harbored reservations of a more general nature concerning the tendencies of the philosophical sects. Many scholars have pointed out that Aenesidemus’s skepticism resembles in many respects that of Arcesilaus of the Middle Academy. Aenesidemus, nevertheless, chooses to invoke Pyrrho’s name for his Pyrrhonist Discourses. Although he did apparently enlist Plato as a predecessor skeptic, Aenesidemus does not mount a significant campaign to assume Plato’s mantle. Pyrrho, rather than Plato, serves as his paragon of happiness and wisdom. Nor does Aenesidemus claim to possess the true heritage of the Academy. In other words, he does not attempt to instigate a

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factional schism within the Academy (for which Antiochus had set a recent and successful precedent). Rather, he abandons the Academy altogether and co-opts the memory of a legendary man linked to no sect, extant or extinct. It is widely believed that Timon’s account of Pyrrho provides “the literary foundation for the renewal of Pyrrhonism initiated by Aenesidemus.” The portrait of Pyrrho found in Timon offers one reason Aenesidemus identified his repudiation of the Academy with Pyrrho. As recorded by Diogenes Laertius, Timon eulogizes Pyrrho for his independence. “O old man, O Pyrrho, how and whence did you discover escape from servitude to the opinions and empty theorizing of sophists? How did you unloose the shackles of every deception and persuasion?” Timon praises Pyrrho’s marvelous escape from servitude to the sophists and their deceptions. That Aenesidemus adopts this legacy when breaking free from the Academy suggests that he, like Lycinus, views Pyrrhonism as the antidote to the sects. Photius’s description of Aenesidemus’s seventh and eighth discourses makes plain that Aenesidemus, like Lycinus, directs the modes against the sects. The seventh discourse he marshalls against the virtues, saying that those who philosophize about them have uselessly invented their doctrines, and that they have misled themselves into thinking that they have attained the theory and practice of them. The eighth and last launches an attack on the end, allowing the existence of neither happiness nor pleasure nor prudence, nor any other end which any sect [hairesis] might believe in, but asserting that the end which they all celebrate simply does not exist.

Aenesidemus’s skepticism exhibits a similar ethical inspiration to that of Lycinus. The Pyrrhonist defends against the useless and deluding doctrines of the sects. Sounding much like Lycinus, Aenesidemus contends that the philosophers of the sects “[wear] themselves out uselessly and [expend] themselves in ceaseless tor-

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ments.” Aenesidemus exemplifies, in fact, Lycinus’s conception of the true philosopher. He experienced the torments and delusions of the sects and undertook to prevent others from joining them. The passage concerning the seventh and eighth discourses, when conjoined with another ancient testimony relating to Aenesidemus’s views, strongly suggests that Aenesidemus did not consider Pyrrhonism a sect, and views it as antithetical to the sects. Aenesidemus here denies the existence of any end “which any sect might believe in.” The ends that the sects “celebrate” do not exist. Yet Diogenes Laertius asserts that the Skeptics’ end is suspension of judgment. Dogmas concerning the end or chief good are the most characteristic doctrines distinguishing the sects. Aenesidemus’s “attack on the end” (as Photius terms it) leaves space for Aenesidemus to promote suspension of judgment as an end, because it does not require belief in dogmas. In declaring suspension of judgment their end, the Skeptics ensure that they do not compose a sect, because sects are constituted by shared dogmas. Aenesidemus’s end, moreover, is the solvent that breaks down the sects. On the basis of other evidence, Glucker traces the widespread ancient reluctance to classify Pyrrhonism as a sect to Aenesidemus himself. The scant surviving evidence suggests that the antagonism to the sects displayed by Lucian’s fictional Pyrrhonist accurately reflects attitudes at the heart of Aenesidemus’s Pyrrhonism. These attitudes survive in Sextus. Throughout his corpus Sextus deplores the inordinate pride and delusional conceit of the dogmatists. In one telling passage he portrays the Pyrrhonist as a humanitarian dispensing the antidote. “The Sceptic wishes, from considerations of humanity, to do all he can with the arguments at his disposal to cure the self-conceit and rashness of the dogmatists.” The Pyrrhonist, Sextus explains, seeks to counteract the lamentable effects of the sects on those who belong to them. Sextus echoes Lycinus and Aenesidemus when he describes Pyrrhonism as an ethically inspired treatment that frees individuals from the pretensions and delusions of the sects If this account of Pyrrhonism is correct, its primary historical impetus was hostility toward specific social groups: the sects. The

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Pyrrhonists wanted to eliminate the sects. They wanted to erase the external boundaries of the sects that set them apart from “the common life.” This disdain for boundaries is reflected in their cognitive practice. The Skeptics set the dogmatists’ views in mutual opposition in order to give the impression that one has no reason to prefer the dogmas of one sect over another and, therefore, no reason to join one sect rather than another. If one has no reason to join one sect rather than another, one has no reason to join any particular sect. The Skeptics insist, however, that they do not believe that the various dogmas are equally credible. To believe so would mean one has a dogma, and, therefore, the basis for a sect (especially in an era when dogmas were definitive of sects). Likewise, the Skeptics use contradiction to disavow knowledge, but they avoid claiming to know that they do not know. To claim to know that one is ignorant would supply a dogma that could be the basis for a sect (the Pyrrhonists view the Academic Skeptics as having made this move). The Skeptics try to remove the cognitive basis for the sects as distinct social groups. Through the modes they try to render reason non-binding, so one cannot commit, either cognitively or socially. By effacing the boundaries between the credible and the dubious, the Skeptics try to eliminate the social boundaries that set philosophers apart from life in common. Sextus, furthermore, makes a point of undermining deductive and inductive inference; using reason he tries to erase all rational boundaries. Because the Skeptics despise the social boundaries that most concern them, they do not invest the external boundaries of the understanding with the social meaning (and emotion) conveyed by either mysticism or cognitive asceticism. Rather, they consider logic and inference as illusory as they would prefer that social boundaries be.

CONCLUSION

T

he autocrat of the Breakfast Table counsels that when faced with an interlocutor “too fond of paradox,” one should “stick a fact into him like a stiletto.” Diffidence prevents me from claiming that I wield anything so incontestable as a “fact” with which to puncture the overblown esteem for paradox in religious discourse. Nevertheless, I do try in this book to offer a deflationary account of religious paradox. Drawing on social scientific theory and philosophy, I attempt a sober explanation of the religious fascination with paradox, an explanation that does not itself wax mystical or affect a misplaced humility in the face of religious paradox. Indeed, if my approach proves sound, it even helps explain the scarcely concealed piety afflicting most scholarly discussions of religious paradox. Piety may well be a religious virtue, but it is the besetting sin of the humanistic study of religion. In brief summary I have argued a number of points. I have discussed several prominent religious paradoxes (the paradox of immanence and transcendence, the paradox of the absolute maximum, the paradox of the emptiness of emptiness, the performative self-contradiction of uttering “All is one”) and argued that nothing except heavy investment in the doctrines that produce them prevents one from treating the paradoxes as reductiones ad absurdum on those doctrines. When a religious thinker is too heavily invested in a paradox-generating doctrine to revise or reject the doctrine, his social attitudes condition his response to the paradox. Reflecting this basis in social attitudes, different responses to paradox

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arouse strong affects that suit paradox for projects of religious selftransformation. Paradox will horrify and offend a religious thinker fearful for the external boundary of his or her group. Such a thinker may use the cognitive dissonance and offense aroused by paradox ascetically to alter his or her volitional complex. Conversely, a thinker concerned to bring outsiders into his or her group will feel awe or reverence for paradox and view it as a sacred mediator. The mystic’s awe or reverence renders the doctrine (e.g., that God is immanent, that all is one, that everything is empty) motivationally efficacious. I have also argued that Skeptics, who claim to use contradiction to divest themselves of all belief, misrepresent their practice. They in fact cultivate a volitional complex that avoids all cognitive or affective disturbance. My contention that a thinker’s attitude toward the external boundary of whatever social group most concerns her correlates with her response to entrenched paradox is one of my principal claims. It underlies much of my argument. It bears noting that this contention is not a conceptual or a priori claim. It’s an empirical observation based on the cases I examine, and is open to falsification by appeal to further examples. Douglas’s work provides the inspiration to look for the correlation and prompts reflection about its cause, but my claim that the correlation, in fact, obtains rests on an empirical basis. My explanation in terms of availability bias is a hypothesis that attempts to account for the correlation I have found. Examples that deviate from the pattern I describe, and whose anomalousness in this respect I cannot suitably explain, would throw my argument into disarray. Potential counterexamples must be carefully vetted, however, because, if my hypothesis is correct and availability bias explains the correlation, we can expect that the tendency toward bias will be disrupted in some circumstances. Cognitive bias can be corrected or defeated by other cognitive factors in a given instance. My deflationary intentions depend on this very capacity to rectify cognitive bias. That some individuals in some circumstances do not (for one reason or another) fall victim to subjective sample bias does not, however, negate the fact that humans have a tendency to make judgments on the basis of subjectively biased samples.

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My conclusions in this book may be most pertinent to the philosophy of mysticism. Most philosophical discussion of mysticism begins with a consideration of the phenomenology of mystical experience. What do the descriptions of mystical experiences tell us about their felt quality? Does the peculiar felt quality of these experiences safeguard (or, more modestly, support) the claims mystics make on their behalf? What does the human susceptibility to these altered states contribute to our best account of the cosmos? By contrast I have emphasized that altered states of consciousness are incidental to mysticism, and that when analyzing mystical experience one must attend to the cognitive commitments that compose the intentionality of the experience. Whatever cognitive import mystical experience might have, the mystic invests it in a merely physiological capacity for altered states of consciousness. She does not derive the cognitive import from the consciousness. Sometime in the early twentieth century, philosophers turned to language as the most fruitful avenue of philosophical inquiry. They diverted their attention from the phenomenological constituents of consciousness and focused on language as the key to understanding the human condition. Likewise, I am suggesting that philosophers of mysticism divert their attention from the phenomenology of mystical states of consciousness and instead focus on the logic and language of the paradoxes that inform mysticism. In short, I urge the philosophy of mysticism to make the linguistic turn. Such a turn better enables us to understand mystical reports and explain why mystics describe their experiences as they do. By giving us access to the ideas and inferences informing mystical experience, moreover, the linguistic turn I advocate provides the critical purchase to deflate the cognitive claims made on behalf of mystical experience. The linguistic turn does not by itself do any deflationary work, but it locates mystical experience squarely within the space of reasons, where philosophical criticism and social scientific theory can be brought to bear. At risk of grandiosity, I justify my purpose in deflating religious paradox by appealing to the ever unfinished Enlightenment project of human emancipation. The Enlightenment and its legacy are highly controversial, but one (admittedly, some would say naive)

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way of conceiving the Enlightenment sees its central motivation as enlarging the scope of human freedom. Understanding ourselves and the causes that impinge on us emancipates us from blind causality. Bearing that self-knowledge, we can take a more active stance with regard to ourselves, our attitudes, and our behavior. In that spirit I contend that understanding the causes that drive the inflation of religious paradox enlarges the scope of our freedom.

NOTES

preface and acknowledgments 1. The Paine and Jefferson quotations appear in Gordon S. Wood, “American Religion: The Great Retreat,” New York Review of Books 53.10 (June 8, 2006): 60–63.

. introduction: par adox without piet y 1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651; rpt., London: Penguin, 1985), 179. 2. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion (1757; rpt., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1956), 54. 3. Robin Horton, “Paradox and Explanation: A Reply to Mr. Skorupski,” Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 259–300. 4. Hume, Natural History of Religion, 54. 5. John Bullokar, An English Expositor; Or, Compleat Dictionary: Teaching the Interpretation of the Hardest Words, and Most Useful Terms of Art, Used in Our Language (London, 1698). 6. R. M. Sainsbury, Paradoxes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 7. J. L. Mackie, Truth, Probability, and Paradox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 8. Nicholas Rescher, Paradoxes: Their Roots, Range, and Resolution (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2001). 9. Gareth Matthews, “Paradoxical Statements,” American Philosophical Quarterly 11 (1973): 133–39. 10. Roy Sorensen, A Brief History of the Paradox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 11. W. V. Quine, “The Ways of Paradox,” The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 1.

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12. Insofar as the principle of non-contradiction is an epistemic authority militating against the credibility of claims that apparently entail a selfcontradiction, a paradox consists in a conflict of epistemic authorities. 13. Anatol Rapoport, “Escape from Paradox,” Scientific American 217 (July 1967): 50. 14. Herbert Spencer, First Principles (New York: Appleton, 1888), 45. 15. Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion (London: Longmans, Green, 1873), 18. 16. See, for example, Robert Slater, Paradox and Nirvana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 115–16; and Robert Calhoun, “The Language of Religion,” in Lewis Leary, ed., The Unity of Knowledge (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 262. 17. Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 151. 18. Once again, “worship” is not really the right word; it suggests devotional theism. Many of the cognitive practices I will discuss do not involve devotion to a personal deity. 19. Cognitive Therapy in psychology represents one exception to this generalization. 20. Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens, 37. 21. See Steven Collins, Selfless Persons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 111. 22. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 23. Ninian Smart, “Paradox in Religion,” Aristotelian Society Supplement 33 (1959): 220. 24. Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), ch. 5. 25. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; rpt., New York: Collier, 1961), 221. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text.

. credo quia absurdum: cognitive asceticism and kierkega ard 1. Hume, The Natural History of Religion, 52, 54. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text. 2. See Wayne Proudfoot’s Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), and Matthew Bagger, “The Uses of Mysticism,” Religious Studies Review 25.4 (Oct. 1999): 369–75). 3. Geoffrey Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 4. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 78.

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5. John Gager, Kingdom and Community (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1975), ch. 2. 6. Alan Segal, Paul the Convert (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 7. Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1961). 8. See Robert E. Buswell, Jr., “The ‘Short Cut’ Approach of K’an-hua Meditation: The Evolution of a Practical Subitism in Chinese Ch’an Buddhism,” in Peter N. Gregory, ed., Sudden and Gradual: Approaches to Enlightenment in Chinese Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), 321–77. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text. 9. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1957), 3. 10. Festinger does not try to address how one might individuate cognitions (ibid., 10). He argues that it does not matter whether one describes dissonance as a relation between cognitions or a relation between clusters of cognitions. 11. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, 13. 12. Søren Kierkegaard, “Confirmation and the Wedding; Christian Comedy or Something Worse,” in “The Moment” and Late Writings, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 248. 13. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to “Philosophical Fragments,” trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 461. 14. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 463. 15. Søren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination / Judge for Yourself!, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 193. 16. G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 187. 17. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 108–109. 18. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 139. 19. Ibid., 139; italics in original. 20. Ibid., 141. 21. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 85; italics in original. 22. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 85. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text. 23. Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 116. 24. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 62. 25. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 572–73. 26. Ibid., 291–92; see also 559.

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notes

Ibid., 564. Kierkegaard. Practice in Christianity, 81. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 522. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 90. Ibid., 106. Ibid., 65. Søren Kierkegaard, The Gospel of Sufferings, trans. A. S. Aldworth and W. S. Ferrie (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1955), 36.

. mystics and ascetics 1. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 133. 2. Pseudo-Dionysius, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 141. 3. Ibid., 263. 4. On the paradoxes to which transcendence gives rise, see Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 5. I discuss this paradox further in chapter 4. 6. Pseudo-Dionysius, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 135. 7. Ibid., 141. 8. Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 171. 9. Pseudo-Dionysius, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 137. 10. Pseudo-Dionysius, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 264. 11. Ibid., 154, 195–96. 12. Ibid., 238–39. 13. Ibid., 198. 14. Bernard McGinn, “Introduction,” in Gerard Christianson and Thomas M. Izbicki, eds., Nicholas of Cusa on Christ and the Church (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 11. 15. The concept of the absolute maximum leads directly to paradox because the concept itself is self-contradictory. “Maximum” is a relative term, and “absolute” precludes relations. 16. Nicholas of Cusa, Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, ed. H. Lawrence Bond (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 135. 17. Ibid., 90, 92. 18. Ibid., 206. 19. See John Skorupski, Symbol and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 218. 20. Koushik Mallik alerted me to anupalabdhidharmaks.ānti. The translation of the term and my understanding of it derive from Robert A. F. Thurman, The Holy Teaching of Vimalakīrti (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976).

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21. I discuss the paradox of the emptiness of emptiness at length in the second section of chapter 5. 22. Pseudo-Dionysius, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 138. 23. Leszek Kolakowski, Metaphysical Horror (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). 24. John of the Cross, The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, trans. E. Allison Peers (Westminster, Eng.: Newman Press, 1964), 19. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text. 25. Ascent of Mount Carmel, Bk. II, ch. v, secs. 6–7. 26. John of the Cross, The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, 89. 27. Ibid., 93. 28. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 246. 29. John of the Cross, The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, 68–69. 30. Mary Douglas, “Self-evidence,” in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London: Routledge, 1975), 314. 31. Douglas, “Self-evidence,” 281. 32. She defines anomalies as “creatures which in their morphology show criteria of more than one major class, or not enough criteria to enable them to be assigned to any one class, and . . . creatures which in themselves belong clearly enough to a recognized class but which have either the habits or which stray into the habitat of another class.” Douglas, “Selfevidence,” 282. 33. Douglas, “Self-evidence,” 281. 34. Ibid., 289. 35. Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 10. 36. Durkheim suspected that the logic of contradiction itself depends on social factors. One might even ask whether the notion of contradiction does not also arise from social conditions. What tends to make this plausible is the fact that the hold the notion of contradiction has had over thought has varied with times and societies. Today the principle of identity governs scientific thought; but there are vast systems of representation that have played a major role in the history of ideas, in which it is commonly ignored. . . . These historical variations of the rule that seems to govern our present logic show that, far from being encoded in the mental constitution of man, the rule depends at least in part upon historical, hence social, factors. (Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields [New York: Free Press, 1995], 12) Unlike Durkheim, I tend to think that the principle of non-contradiction itself is not socially based. I argue only that responses to seemingly incorrigible violations of this principle reflect social attitudes. 37. Douglas, “Self-evidence,” 296.

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38. Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens. 39. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman first proposed the availability heuristic. See “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science 185 (1974): 1124–1131. The subsequent literature is vast, but Richard Nisbet and Lee Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980) has proven both influential and important. I draw on this literature to remedy a weakness in the tradition stemming from Durkheim. In like fashion Jon Elster, Sour Grapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 143–48, appeals to availability bias to rehabilitate one aspect of the Marxist conception of ideology. 40. Pseudo-Dionysius, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 239. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text. 41. Alexander Golitzin, “Dionysius Areopagita: A Christian Mysticism?” Pro Ecclesia 12.2 (2003): 161–212. 42. Bruce Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), ix, 5. 43. Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 23. 44. Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 10n (italics in original). 45. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 253. 46. Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 80. 47. Kierkegaard, Two Ages, 66 (italics in original). 48. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 67. 49. “Letter from Father Sébastien Rasles, Missionary of the Society of Jesus in New France, to Monsieur his Brother,” in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents 67:141 (italics in original). 73 vols. (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1900). 50. “Letter from Father Sébastien Rasles,” 159. 51. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 98. 52. Morton Schlütter, “ ‘Before the Empty Eon’ versus ‘A Dog Has No BuddhaNature’: Kung-an Use in the Ts’ao-tung Tradition and Ta-hui’s Kung-an Introspection Ch’an,” in Steven Heine and Dale Wright, eds., The Koan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 189. 53. For a less schematic analysis of the episode, see Paul Sigmund, Nicholas of Cusa and Medieval Political Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 218–31; and Scott H. Hendrix, “Nicholas of Cusa’s Ecclesiology Between Reform and Reformation” in Christianson and Izbicki, eds., Nicholas of Cusa on Christ and the Church, 107–126. 54. Sigmund, Nicholas of Cusa, 121, 206. 55. Ibid., 205–206. 56. Cusa claims that he turned to Pseudo-Dionysius only after the shipboard insight. In Apologia doctae ignorantia (1449) he writes, “I had not seen Dio-

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nysius or any of the true theologians when I received this concept from above; but I turned eagerly to the writings of the doctors and found nothing but the revelation variously expressed in figures.” Quoted in H. Lawrence Bond, “Nicholas of Cusa from Constantinople to ‘Learned Ignorance’: The Historical Matrix for the Formation of the De docta ignorantia,” in Christianson and Izbicki, eds., Nicholas of Cusa on Christ and the Church, 155. 57. Sigmund, Nicholas of Cusa, 251–52. 58. See Morimichi Watanabe, “Nicholas of Cusa and the Idea of Tolerance,” Concord and Reform (Aldershot, Hampshire.: Ashgate, 2001), 217–28.

. absolute tr anscendence 1. he influence of the question does, nevertheless, appear in unlikely places. In Religion and Nothingness Keiji Nishitani, the well-known representative of the so-called Kyoto School, describes “an elemental and truly original intellection,” an ineffable “knowing of non-knowing” which can only be expressed in a paradox. This superknowledge arises when one transcends the standpoint of nihility—the awareness of the nothingness at the ground of all that exists—and occupies the standpoint of śūnyatā. Nishitani’s thought integrates themes derived from Heidegger, Dogen, Eckhart, and Cusa, among others, into an eclectic mysticism that takes the problem of nothingness as a starting point. Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 110. 2. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, ed., The Rig Veda (London: Penguin, 1981, 25. 3. Mahā-Nārāyana 1.5; Mun.d.aka 1.6 in Jean Varenne, Yoga and the Hindu Tradition, trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 17, 18. 4. Kat.ha 6.8; Śvetāśvatara 6.9–11 in Robert Ernest Hume, The Thirteen Principal Upanishads: Translated from the Sanskrit (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). 5. Br.ihad-áran.yaka 2.3.6 in Hume, The Thirteen Principal Upanishads. 6. Īśā 5 in Hume, The Thirteen Principal Upanishads. 7. Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 1952), I. Q. 7 A. 1, rep. 2. Deeply influenced by Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas nonetheless attempts to mitigate the ineffability and paradoxicality of God’s absolute transcendence. On one front Aquinas tries to soften the ineffability of the absolutely transcendent by means of analogical predication. On the other front Aquinas addresses the objection that “what is above all things is not in all things.” (I. Q. 8, A. 1, obj. 1), or, in other words, the objection that to predicate both immanence and transcendence of God is self-contradictory. In his argument for God’s immanence, he tries to resolve the paradox of immanence and transcendence by delineating a sense in which one thing can be in another by causing it. Although this is not the place to mount the argument, I do not find either of these palliative measures successful.

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8. A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1989), 219. 9. Harold Roth, Original Tao: Inward Training (nei-yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 185 and 72 (verse XIV). 10. For a full discussion of this issue, see Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience. 11. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 332. 12. W. T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1960), 261. 13. Ibid., 305. 14. Roth, Original Tao, 54 (verse V). 15. Ibid., 108. 16. Ibid. 17. Yoga Darśana 10.1, 10.9 in Varenne , Yoga And the Hindu Tradition. 18. Robert M. Gimello, “Mysticism and Meditation,” in Steven Katz, ed., Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 193. 19. Gimello, “Mysticism and Meditation,” 184. 20. Cyril Barrett, Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 22. 21. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 73 (italics in original). 22. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 73 (italics in original). 23. Ibid. 24. Ramsey, quoted in Barrett, Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Belief, 22. 25. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 47. 26. Bas van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 97–157. 27. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, 216. 28. Gregory Schufreider, Confessions of a Rational Mystic: Anselm’s Early Writings (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1994), 190. 29. Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 2. 30. See Bagger, “The Uses of Mysticism,” 369–75.

. skepticism and mysticism 1. Everard Flintoff, “Pyrrho and India,” Phronesis 25 (1980), 88–108. 2. Eli Franco, Perception, Knowledge, and Disbelief: A Study of Jayarāśi’s Scepticism (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 1987), 44. 3. A tetralemma either asserts or (more usually) denies all of the four possibilities of predication: X is f, X is ~f, X is both f and ~f, X is neither f nor ~f. According to Aristocles, Timon reports that Pyrrho declared, “[We should say] concerning each individual thing that it no more is than is not,

notes

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

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or it both is and is not, or it neither is nor is not.” A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1:15. Sextus, Sextus Empiricus: Selections from the Major Writings on Scepticism, Man, and God, trans. Sanford G. Etheridge (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 32–33. Sextus Empiricus, 34. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40; rpt., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 269. Sextus Empiricus, 39–40. Myles Burnyeat, “Can the Sceptic Live His Scepticism?” in Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede, eds., The Original Sceptics: A Controversy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 54–55. Sextus Empiricus, 37. Burnyeat, “Can the Sceptic Live His Scepticism?” 56. Charles S. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Dover, 1966), 98–99. Charles S. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings, 124. Charles S. Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings, 192, 195. Sextus Empiricus, 35. Sextus Empiricus, 41–42. Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 331. I have used Garfield’s translation of the Mūlamadhyamakārikā. Chapter and verse citations appear in the text. Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, 94. Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers 1:14–15. My interpretation of this passage is informed by Long and Sedley’s discussion (see 1:16–17). This feature of Pyrrho’s philosophy explains Flintoff ’s assertion that it is “almost certainly a form of apophatic mysticism.” Flintoff, “Pyrrho and India.” 104. Quoted in Robert A. F. Thurman, Tsong Khapa’s Speech of Gold in the “Essence of True Eloquence” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 155. Deipnosophists, IX, 401e. The translation is from St. George Stock, Stoicism (London: Archibald Constable, 1908), 36. Robert A. F. Thurman, “Transcendence and the Sacred in the Mahayana Middle Way,” in Alan M. Olson and Leroy S. Rouner, eds., Transcendence and the Sacred (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 101, 111. Thurman, “Transcendence and the Sacred in the Mahayana Middle Way,” 110. Ibid., 111.

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25. B. K. Matilal, Logical and Ethical Issues of Religious Belief (Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1982), 124 (italics in original). 26. For similar reasons Matilal (ch. 3.) concludes that Nāgārjuna is a Buddhist, not a Skeptic, and labels him an “Indian sceptic-mystic.” Matilal errs, however, when he suggests that Sextus and Nāgārjuna negotiate the paradoxes of self-reference in the same way. Sextus avoids declaring that he knows that he does not know. Nāgārjuna, on the other hand, accepts the paradoxical results of his reasoning about emptiness, and claims they make sense from an extraordinary viewpoint. 27. When I speak of “Chuang-tzu,” I mean the putative author of the so-called inner chapters (chs. 1–7). 28. See, for instance, Paul Kjellberg and Philip J. Ivanhoe, eds., Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the “Zhuangzi” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). 29. A. C. Graham, Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters (London: Mandala Books, 1981), 58. 30. Graham, Chuang-tzu, 60. 31. Graham, Disputers of the Tao, 175. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text. 32. Jaakko Hintikka argues for the controversial conclusion that the Cartesian cogito is best understood as expressing the “existential inconsistency” involved in asserting “I do not exist.” Jaakko Hintikka, “Cogito, Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance?” in Willis Doney, ed., Descartes: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City: Anchor, 1967.) 33. I employ Roth’s translation—“pervade and unify”—of t’ung wei yi. Harold D. Roth, “Bimodal Mystical Experience in the ‘Qiwulun’ Chapter of Zhuangzi,” Journal of Chinese Religions 28 (2000), 43n61. 34. Graham, Chuang-tzu, 52. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text. 35. Roth, “Bimodal Mystical Experience.” 36. Graham, Chuang-tzu, 60. 37. Mary Douglas, “Credibility,” Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1992), 235–54. 38. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes, The Modes of Scepticism: Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 10. 39. John Glucker, Antiochus and the Late Academy (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1978), 184. Glucker discusses the history of “hairesis” at length (159–92). 40. Sextus Empiricus, 37. Etheridge translates hairesis as “system.” 41. Lucian, 8 vols., trans. K. Kilburn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 6:413. 42. Lucian 6:415. 43. Lucian 6:401.

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44. Diogenes Laertius reports that Arcesilaus, the Academic Skeptic, advised his pupils to study outside the Academy. If true, this fact supports my argument that Skepticism appears in socially centrifugal circumstances. Mysticism arises where one wishes to bring outsiders into the group. Skepticism arises where one wants to bring insiders out. 45. Sextus mentions that Aenesidemus is one of the “leading representatives” for the position that Plato was a “true Sceptic.” Sextus Empiricus, 92. 46. Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers 1:23. 47. Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers 1:18–19. 48. Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers 1:483–84. Long and Sedley translate hairesis as “philosophical persuasion.” I have substituted “sect.” Their discussion of Aenesidemus supports my argument regardless. They write that “all Aenesidemus’ arguments . . . are aimed at dissuading us from ever adopting a partisan stance with regard to whatever issue whatever” (485). 49. Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers 1:468. 50. See Long and Sedley’s discussion in The Hellenistic Philosophers 1:473. 51. John Glucker, Antiochus and the Late Academy, 179n41. 52. Sextus Empiricus, 128.

conclusion 1. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of The Breakfast Table (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1858), 52. 2. I do not use the adjective deflationary in any technical sense, but I do see a rough analogy between a so-called deflationary account of truth and my procedure in this book. When a philosopher describes her position on truth as deflationary, she means that she does not inflate the concept of truth by offering a metaphysical account of the property that truth names. She contents herself with empirical inquiry into the social practices in which the concept of truth figures and investigation into the pragmatics of the concept (i.e., the relationships between the word and its contexts of use). She believes that these kinds of inquiry into truth leave nothing for a specifically metaphysical account to explain. In somewhat similar manner, I have inquired into religious paradox with theories developed for empirical inquiry into social practices and with attention to pragmatics. I believe my naturalistic inquiry sufficiently explains the celebration of religious paradox and leaves no room for inflating religious paradox with special metaphysical or epistemological significance.

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INDEX

Aenesidemus of Cnossus, 102–104, 121n48 Anaximander, 59, 61 Annas, Julia, 99 Anselm of Canterbury, 71–72 Antiochus, 103 anupalabdhidharmaks.ānti, 36 apeiron, 59, 61 Aquinas, Thomas, 61, 71, 117n7 Arcesilaus, 102, 121n44 Aristotle, 22–23, 61, 73 Aristocles, 87, 118n3 Ascent of Mount Carmel, 37–39. See also John of the Cross asceticism, 16–17, 18, 21–22, 26, 28, 29, 32, 37–38, 41, 43, 53–4, 57–58, 98–99, 107. See also cognitive asceticism Athenaeus of Naucratis, 89 availability bias, 45–46, 98, 107–108, 116n39 barber paradox, 72 Barnes, Jonathan, 99 Bhat.t. a, Jayarāśi , 75 Bullokar, John, 2 Burnyeat, Myles, 79, 80, 84 Cameron, Averil, 10 Catherine of Siena, 52

Chao-chou Ts’ung-shen, 18–19 Chuang-tzu, 13, 76, 92–98, 120n27 Chuang-tzu, 13, 92–98 cognition, 24, 32 cognitive asceticism, 9, 10, 18–19, 21, 26, 28–29, 36, 37, 38, 41, 43, 53–4, 54, 98–99, 105, 107 cognitive dissonance, 9, 10, 11, 17– 21, 26, 27, 28–29, 32, 35–36, 38, 39–40, 52, 81, 84, 92, 107 cognitive practice, 7–8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 50, 105, 112n18 coincidentia oppositorum, x, 32, 36 cosmogonic question, 12–13, 31, 59– 62, 67–72 “Credibility,” 99. See also Douglas, Mary criterion, problem of , 77, 86, 92, 93 The Dark Night, 37–39. See also John of the Cross De concordantia catholica, 55. See also Nicholas of Cusa De docta ignorantia, 34, 40, 56, 57. See also Nicholas of Cusa Descartes, 95, 120n32 detachment, 8–9, 39, 74–75, 84, 85, 99

# 130  De pace fidei, 58. See also Nicholas of Cusa De visione Dei, 57–58. See also Nicholas of Cusa Dīghanikāya, 75 Diogenes Laertius, 103, 104, 121n44 The Divine Names, 31. See also Pseudo-Dionysius Douglas, Mary, 10, 41–47, 98–99, 107, 115n32 Durkheim, Émile, 115n36, 116n39 Eckhart, Meister, 67 Eliade, Mircea, 71 Elster, John, 6, 7–8, 45, 116n39 English Expositor, 2 Epimenides the Cretan, 88 Festinger, Leon, 17, 19–20, 81, 113n10 fideism, x–xi “The Fixation of Belief ”, 80–81, 83. See also Pragmatism; Peirce, C. S. Flintoff, Everard, 75 functionalism, 44–45, 46–47 Gager, John, 17 Garfield, Jay, 86, 90 Glucker, John, 104 Goffman, Erving, 17–18 Golitzin, Alexander, 49 Graham, A. C., 94–95 Hadot, Pierre, 8 Hamann, Johann, x Harpham, Geoffrey, 16 Hegel, Georg, 22–24, 27–28, 30–31, 32, 35, 40, 51 Heidegger, Martin, 67 Hobbes, Thomas, 1, 5, 6 Horton, Robin, 1 “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” 81. See also Pragmatism; Peirce, C. S.

index Hui Shih, 94–96 Hume, David, x, 1–2, 5–6, 10, 15–16, 77, 79 immanence, 32–33, 50, 60, 62, 65, 106, 107 ineffability, 6, 9, 12, 31–32, 33, 35, 36, 40, 50, 58, 59–68, 86, 87, 90, 91, 92, 95–97 “Inward Training”, 64–65 James, William, 11–12, 39, 62–63, 81 Jefferson, Thomas, ix John of the Cross, 10, 37–40, 41, 53–55 Kierkegaard, Søren, 3, 9, 16, 21–29, 30, 32, 39–40, 50–53, 54 Kirmmse, Bruce, 50 Kolakowski, Leszek, 36 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, ix Liar Paradox, 88–90 A Literary Review, 51. See also Kierkegaard, Søren Lucian of Samosata, 101–104 Maitrī Upanis.ad, 64, 65. See also Upanis.ads Marcus Aurelius, 100 Matilal, B. K., 91, 120n26 McGinn, Bernard, 33, 34 meditation, 8, 62, 64–66 Monologion, 71–2. See also Anselm of Canterbury Mūlamadhyamakārikā, 13, 85–86, 88, 90–91, 92. See also Nāgārjuna Müller, Max, 6 Moses, 29 mystery, 16, 35–36, 53 The Mystical Theology, 31, 34. See also Pseudo-Dionysius mysticism, XI, 9–10, 11–13. 16, 33, 34, 40–41, 43, 50, 56–58, 59, 62–

index 64, 68, 70, 76, 86, 90–92, 94, 95, 96–99, 105, 107, 108, 119n19, 120n26 Nāgārjuna, 13, 76, 85–92, 120n26 The Natural History of Religion, 1, 15–16. See also Hume, David Nicholas of Cusa, 10, 32, 34–35, 40, 55–58, 116n56 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 16 Nishitani, Keiji, 117n1 On Certainty, 69. See also Wittgenstein, Ludwig Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 89. See also Sextus Empiricus Paine, Thomas, ix paradox, definition of, 2–5 Parmenides, 34. See also Plato Pascal, Blaise, 7 Peirce, C. S., 13, 80–81, 83 Philetus of Cos, 90 Photius, 102, 103, 104 Plato, 34, 89, 102 Plotinus, 59 The Point of View for My Work as an Author, 50. See also Kierkegaard, Søren Pragmatism, 13, 75, 80–84 Prajñāpāramitāsūtras, 86 Proclus, 31 Proslogion, 71–72. See also Anselm of Canterbury Pseudo-Dionysius, 10, 29, 30–37, 40, 47–50, 53, 54, 59, 64 Pyrrho, 74, 75, 87–88, 102–103, 118n3

# 131  reductio ad absurdum, 72, 89, 94, 106 R.g Veda, 59 Roth, Harold, 97 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 71 Schlütter, Morton, 54 Schufreider, Geoffrey, 71, 72 “Self-Evidence”, 41–43. See also Douglas, Mary Segal, Alan, 17 self-transformation, xi, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 16, 28, 50, 97–98, 107 Sells, Michael, 71 Sextus Empiricus, 75–79, 82–83, 85– 87, 89, 93, 100–101, 104, 105, 120n26 Shantideva, 8 Skepticism, 13, 70, 74–84, 85–88, 92–94, 99–105, 107 Spencer, Herbert, 5–6 Stace, Walter, 63–64 Stout, Jeffrey, 77 śūnyatā, 84–92, 106 Ta-hui Tsung-kao, 18–19, 54–55 Tao-te-ching, 61–62, 67 . Tattvopaplavasimha, 75. See also Bhat.t. a, Jayarāśi Teresa of Avila, 8 Tertullian, 18 Theaetetus, 89. See also Plato Thurman, Robert, 90 Tillich, Paul, 71 Timon, 87, 103, 118n3 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 68–69. See also Wittgenstein, Ludwig transcendence, 12, 32–33, 34–35, 36, 59–67, 72–73, 106

Quine, Willard van Orman, 3, 72 Ramsey, Frank, 68 Rapoport, Anatol, 5, 6 Rasles, Sébastien, 52–53

Ulysses and the Sirens, 7. See also Elster, Jon union, 9, 33, 34, 37, 48, 50 Upanis.ads, 59–60, 64–66

# 132  Van Fraassen, Bas, 69 The Varieties of Religious Experience, 11–12, 39. See also James, William Vigrahavyāvartanī, 86, 88. See also Nāgārjuna

index Yoga Darśana Upanis.ad, 65–66. See also Upanis.ads Waismann, Friedrich, 67 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 67–71 Zeno of Elea, 61