"Mysticism is the art of union with Reality [God]." - Evelyn Underhill
The Transcendentals: The Good, The True, and The Beautiful.
The fundamental properties of all being, where reality is desired, discovered, and delighted in.
Roughly expressed:
The Good: That which is desired in reality and fulfills our nature.
The True: That which discovers reality and fashions our mind.
The Beautiful: That which delights in reality and floods our whole being.
Ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle outlined them. Christian theologian-philosophers like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas clarified them. Even modern integral philosophers like Ken Wilber still use them:
The Good, the True, and the Beautiful, then, are simply the faces of Spirit as it shines in this world. Spirit seen subjectively is Beauty, and I of Spirit. Spirit seen intersubjectively is the Good, the We of Spirit. And Spirit seen objectively is the True, the It of Spirit....And whenever we pause, and enter the quiet, and rest in the utter stillness, we can hear that whispering voice calling to us still: never forget the Good, and never forget the True, and never forget the Beautiful, for these are the faces of your own deepest Self, freely shown to you.
My calling has to do with philosophy, seeing it expressed in new and old (or timely and timeless) ways. I’ve argued that there are at least three modes of philosophy, each oriented toward a different transcendental. All use reasoned inquiry leading to perplexity, but their focus and emergent outcomes differ.
A practical philosophy is oriented toward the Good and reasons through personal and situated matters, helping result in practical clarity and wise action. Examples include philosophical counselors, modern Stoicism, and applied ethics.
A theoretical philosophy is oriented toward the True and reasons through abstract and general matters, helping result in theoretical clarity and wise thinking. Examples (not necessarily “good” ones) include philosophy found in academia and modern philosophy since René Descartes, including both the analytic and continental traditions of the 20th century.
A poetical philosophy is oriented toward the Beautiful and reasons through imaginal and felt-sense experience, helping result in aesthetic clarity and wise resonance. Examples may seem harder to come by, because poetical philosophy, unlike its practical and theoretical counterparts, is not an established term. For that reason, a few examples will be needed.
A simple example of poetical philosophy comes from anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson’s “syllogism in grass.”
Grass dies
Men die
∴ Men are grass
While not valid as a formal syllogism, it can be argued that it is a form of non-Aristotelian argumentation that resonates with a deeper truth, gesturing toward the interconnectedness of life.
Bateson’s argument maps to what philosopher and poet Jan Zwicky calls “lyric philosophy,” a way of reasoning that is non-linear yet still not irrational.
It’s a different form of reasoning, one that leaves holes in an argument, allowing one to better feel the whole.
Lyric is an attempt to comprehend the whole in a single gesture.
Such gesturing is grasped through resonance.
Resonance is a function of the integration of various components within a whole. (Integration, not fusion. Resonance occurs in the spaces between.)
Hence, lyric philosophy finds its way to speak to the whole person.
Lyric philosophy desires to speak to whole humans; but for this to occur, the language of thought would itself have to be made whole.
A third example of poetical philosophy comes from the “father of metaphysics,” Parmenides, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher born in the 6th century BC. His only known work, On Nature, is a philosophical poem that serves as a visionary journey.
In it, a lover of wisdom meets a goddess (Sophia?!) who presents two paths: the Way of Truth (aletheia) and the Way of Opinion (doxa).
The former path leads to Being—unchanging, eternal, whole. The latter, by contrast, is an illusion: a world of false opposites that preoccupy the minds of men, a path that leads to “two-faced” foolishness, as the goddess warns:
I hold thee back from this first way of inquiry, and from this other also, upon which mortals, knowing naught, wander two-faced; for helplessness guides the wandering thought in their breasts, so that they are borne along stupefied like men deaf and blind. Undiscerning crowds, who hold that it is and is not the same and not the same, and all things travel in opposite directions!
Modern philosophy, since Descartes’ demon and the dividing of body and mind, has largely been theoretical. Classically logical, linear, and binary, it builds conceptual castles in unreadable papers and unlistenable podcasts.
Yet, as Zwicky argues, such conceptual delineation and logical reasoning need not be abandoned—or worse, demonized—but rather complemented, enriched, and set free by a poetical reasoning that speaks to whole persons who can sense the Whole.
Poetical philosophy, then, is a mode of philosophy, our missing bridge, that fundamentally shifts one's being and opens them to the Whole. It trans-forms by moving to, through, and beyond the forms.
In essence, just as practical philosophy results in praxis (practice), and theoretical philosophy results in theoria (theory), poetical philosophy results in poiesis (poetry, which etymologically means “to make”), a creative bringing-forth of something new.
In the case of today’s post, that something is a new philosophy, or a very old one.
Toward Mystical Philosophy
There is a fourth transcendental, the ground of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful:
The One.
Choosing the Way of Truth and attuning oneself to oneness—the Whole—allows for the realization that you are already whole, leading to a full-bodied resonance with reality itself, the way of all mystics.
Mysticism, as defined by the Underhill quote that opened this entry, is the art of union with Reality (God). Those who are drawn to spirituality and have mystical proclivities tend not to embrace philosophy, seeing it instead as a Way of Opinion, fundamentally in tension with their spiritual project.
Instead, they tend to embrace more somatic-based approaches—ones full of resonance: bodywork, breathwork, losing-your-mind work, etc. The reason why IFS, psychedelics, ecstatic dancing, and other forms of non-conceptual knowing are so popular today among those interested in wisdom is that these practices fundamentally restore the connection between body and mind, a project needed to heal Descartes’ wound.
In short, all mysticism requires a deep stillness, where the mind dwells in a body fully felt.
One can argue, as mystical scholar Peter Kingsley does in In the Dark Places of Wisdom, that philosophy itself was discovered in such stillness, by Parmenides himself, not through the kind of theoretical philosophy fashionable in academia today, but through the ancient practice of “incubation.”
This involved lying down in a dark, sacred space, such as a temple, tomb, or even a cave, sinking the mind into the body and the body into deep stillness, awaiting a visionary journey through which the Way of Truth might be revealed.
Today, since philosophy is unfortunately seen as synonymous with theoretical philosophy, stillness is no longer considered necessary. Instead, “philosophy” often arises from anxious bodies reasoning away from the Whole, trapping themselves in further delusions. No wonder somatic practitioners that seek wisdom have largely abandoned philosophy, and reasoning more generally.
However, while this is understandable, it leads to its own form of foolishness: a kind of sloppy reasoning that produces poorly argued philosophies used to justify spiritual bypassing. It is possible to have both mysticism and philosophy. The way forward is to recognize the fourth transcendental as an invitation to a “mystical philosophy.”
A mystical philosophy is oriented toward the One, or, if you're Christian, toward God. It reasons from wholeness toward Wholeness, helping result in holy clarity and wise being. The Neoplatonists call this henosis, and Orthodox Christians call it theosis:1 a different telos, but similar in their mystical goal of union.
A Holier Way to Philosophize
One can, and should, specialize in one mode of philosophy if they are called. But for a holy philosophy to emerge, a philosophy that can hold all the transcendentals, a broader approach is needed. Such a philosophy follows a proper order of unfoldment: The Good, The True, and The Beautiful, or practical philosophy, theoretical philosophy, and poetical philosophy.
For such proper unfolding to begin, the kind of spiritual stillness that practices like incubation afford is necessary. Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper refers to this state as leisure, the basis of all culture, one that lifts the mind out of time and places the body into a timeless state. It is a place where one does not reason solely from the mind, nor merely from the body, but directly from the heart.
According to Pieper, true leisure is “an attitude of mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to receive the reality of the world.” It is “not the attitude of the one who intervenes but of the one who opens himself; not of someone who seizes but of one who lets go, who lets himself go.”
Once you let go, philosophy begins, practically.
Practical philosophy, which is what I do in my own practice, is the starting point, as the initial content for the inquiry should be existentially salient, even urgent—that is, personal and situated. This will either move away from philosophy into a non-philosophical inquiry, such as coaching or therapy, or it will move into theoretical philosophy, coming to terms with one’s fundamental understanding of what is.
One could remain here, of course, which risks the trap that the Way of Opinion brings: getting lost in metaphysical abstractions and assuming they are reality itself. Or worse, falling into the meta-trap of seeing the Way of Truth and the Way of Opinion as fundamentally opposed and irreconcilable, leading to the abandonment of reasoned inquiry altogether.
However, if one has a fuller sense of reason, the kind that poetical philosophy can afford, they may reason beyond conceptual dichotomies, sensebreaking through the “reality” that classical logic claims to know. Their reasoning becomes more courageous, which is to say, more beautiful: arguments full of holes, so they can feel the whole.
This is when doing philosophy undoes philosophy.
This, momentarily, allows one to be whole. Yet, if one continues with this kind of philosophizing, inquiry becomes a form of prayer, and a mystical philosophy is born.
Inquire, or …
Clarification: I do not believe the practice of philosophy-as-prayer in mystical philosophy is sufficient for theosis (it’s not), nor necessarily critical to it, but I offer it as another form of prayer for those with philosophical callings.