On the continuum of rationality and mysticism

This is an excerpt from my journal.

Writing for Psyche magazine, Sam Woodward explains how For Plato, rationalists and mystics can walk the same path.

We may view Plato as an archetypal rational philosopher, a thinker at odds with the mysticism of Eleusis. Instead, he saw common ground with the initiate who seeks an experience beyond the sensory realm. Participants in the Eleusinian Mysteries sought the divine through mystic ritual; Plato’s philosopher seeks eternal and ‘divine’ Forms by transcending the shadows of sensory perception. For Plato, mystery-cult initiates and rational philosophers can walk the same path.

To a modern person it is indeed bizarre how a “rationalist” can see any value in religious initiation. This is because we are conditioned to think of the human experience in a compartmentalised way. You can either be one or the other. The rationalist will be associated with the scientific enterprise, be considered an empiricist, and only say what the facts support. By contrast, the mysticist will be expected to observe various spiritual practices and beliefs that seem to not be supported by reproducible evidence. In popular culture, we find this divide typically expressed as the mutual exclusivity of science and religion.

For the ancient Greeks those two magnitudes were not antithetical. The more I think of the various tenets of Greek philosophy and religion, the more I am convinced that there is consistency and continuity between them. Sure, there are secondary differences, but the core ideas are the same from the pre-Socratics to those who were active during the pre-Christian Roman era, as well as in myths (the theocratic Romans later shut down philosophical schools on the premise that those were “idolatrous”—same for the Olympic games, the theatre dramas, and the like).

To the Greeks, the cosmos is always there. It is not made by any one god and no god is omnipotent. There is no universal tension between good and evil: those magnitudes apply to a tiny subset of phenomena which are human affairs. At the cosmic scale, we have admixture: a tenet that is passed down to us through the proverb «ουδέν κακόν αμιγές καλού», which literally reads as “no bad unmixed with good” or, more freely, “everything bad still has something good mixed into it”. And, of course, the inverse is true: everything good still has something bad mixed into it.

The cosmos is one of admixture, else of consubstantial diversity. The multitude of forms all share an underlying essence, which is encapsulated in the word logos. It means ratio, pattern, reason (as reasonableness and as cause), and word/language. Those all relate to order, which is what everything in the cosmos exhibits.

This is why the Greek religion worships the continuum of human and worldly multifacetedness, artistically expressed as polytheism: many different facets of a greater oneness. The divine is at once singular and of many forms, just how in the same human nature we find love and hatred, courage and fear, reason and feeling, and all the rest.

How we reconcile those facets of our nature within the confines of organised society is part of the cultural work we need to do. The point though is that we cannot deny their joint presence and the corresponding fact that no human is unidimensional. The ancient Greeks, then, conceived of our experience in a nuanced way where there are permutations between the analytical extremes.

The many which are at once singular/consubstantial is not a line of thinking that died with the ancient Greek world. It survived to the present era through Christian theology. This is none other than the central doctrine of the trinity: the Three which are One; the One which is Three. And if the One can be Three, it might as well manifest as Four, such as through a Daughter or another Son. And if it can be Four, then why not Twelve or a Million? There is no extra-divine mechanism that enforces a fixed number of instantiations of the divine. Not to run off on a tangent though. The point is that we have in our culture the elements of a nuanced understanding of plurality that does not challenge an underlying unity.

Couched in those terms, the Greek culture does not operate on the basis of pitting opposites against each other. It rather acknowledges their joint presence and teaches a balanced lifestyle that at once allows the various facets of our being to be expressed in the right context while ensuring none of them overpowers the rest. The primordial Delphic maxim of «μηδέν άγαν» (nothing in excess; nothing led away from the moderate path) is not about complete suppression of some perceived inherent malice/sin, for there is no such thing (per the cosmic admixture). Put simply, an extremely rationalist person is lacking in moderation as they are not cultivating their emotional capacity. Someone who spends all their day at the gym lacks moderation for not dedicating enough time to spiritual matters. And so on.

It is in this light that I dismiss the premise of German thinkers of modernity about the putative contradiction between the Apollonian and Dionysian propensities. Apollon and Dionysos are two consubstantial gods in whose image we identify archetypes that encapsulate aspects of human nature (and the world at-large). In the names of those two gods, the poet discerns patterns that are made manifest in the cosmos and which can—and do—coexist in the same person and/or in society as a whole. It is entirely possible to, say, be disciplined and harmonious (Apollon) while being ready to experience a special event, like a festival, wholeheartedly (Dionysos). This is the whole point of polytheism, as the non-contradiction between the various facets of our being. It then comes down to moderation. Those who see Apollon and Dionysos as necessary opposites are thus missing the point entirely.

This is not to argue that we should hold the same religious beliefs as the ancients. I am not religious myself. What I find in the Greek religion and in the philosophy it allowed to flourish in its midst is a set of tenets, thoughts, and hypotheses that make sense to me. I do consider religion a useful tool for popularising certain practical teachings and for providing a framework for our communal experience. I also appreciate the artistic as well as communicative value of mythology, due to how it can capture profound insights and give them strong mnemonic value without delving into boring technicalities. I am, nevertheless, of the view that we humans define god as the overarching narrative of our worldview. It is not a fact of nature that, e.g., Athena dresses as a warrior. People just thought this would be a good idea in an attempt to convey certain closely related concepts. Whether anyone is right or wrong is part of our ongoing efforts to understand our world and ourselves better.

To this end, what Platon believed is the mainstream ancient Greek thought.

Taking a step back, I find it strange how a philosopher would limit their outlook to a neatly defined “-ism”. Not just for a monumental historical figure like Platon, but even for ordinary friends of wisdom such as myself. If your lifestyle qua philosopher revolves around dubitativeness and inquisitiveness, then my understanding is that you are, in principle, willing to entertain even those claims that seem far removed from your established corpus of work. I understand the practical constraint of not having enough resources to explore every theme, but I am here thinking about one’s attitude: a philosopher will consider every position on its own merits and treat it fairly. We still have opinions and are wrong about things, though we at least try to have a rounded understanding of the matter at hand and are prepared to change our mind accordingly.

My personal journey as a philosopher has also made me appreciate how we are more than just rational agents. There were times when I operated on the basis of faith, or intuition, or “gut feeling”, or however we call that which we experience beyond the confines of verifiable evidence. When I had a strong resonance with something, when I could know it once I had experienced it, I was convinced that reason alone was insufficient. I thus broke the rationalist mould that my university education put me in.

For me, philosophy was not—and is not—an academic project but an epiphany of a different life characterised by lightness. It is about accepting who I am as a human in my multifacetedness and not worry about appearing as something else. This is a life of honesty and its concomitant simplicity.

Those who limit their thinking to rationality, such as the average scientist, do it by reducing their human experience to one of its facets for a very narrowly defined end. They can only do so in certain contexts, while their nature still contains all the non-rational parts. The rationalist is not a rationalist throughout. Those people still have emotions and biases, even though they pretend otherwise. As such, the scientific enterprise is lauded as an unrealistically high achievement of pristine rationality, when its day-to-day realities are much more messy.

On the topic of the mysteries at Eleusina, or mysteries in general, we know that words like “mystic”, “mysterious”, “mystical”, and “mystique” all are Greek in origin and relate to the Greek word for “initiation” (μύηση). Something mysterious is not secretive or inscrutable per se: we simply cannot penetrate its true meaning without the requisite training (or ritual initiation) and so it appears to us as incomprehensible. Hence the common understanding of something being a mystery to us.

Mysteries are not inherently religious, as any body of knowledge will seem alien to those who have not trained to understand it. Put your average non-technical fellow in front of a computer program’s source code, for example, and behold what something mysterious looks like to an outsider (i.e. to the uninitiated).

I do not know if the Eleusinian mysteries had anything special to them, because I do not have enough information to judge for myself. I can infer though that they were at odds with the worldview of the Roman emperors who turned their empire into an intolerant theocracy and banished all ancient wisdom in the process.

The morale of Platon’s stance on mysticism is that we should not be dogmatic. The philosopher is open-minded to the best of their abilities and the most excellent societies in outlook are those that genuinely tolerate (i.e. not in the form of political correctness) the person’s need to ask difficult questions and entertain alternative answers.