Across the Great Divide

In order to be sympathetic to the continentals and the mystics, I must understand their position. Perhaps this very phrase itself is representative of the great divide between them and I? They pursue the universe as a story of Being, of Life-World, of Void, where we analytics are left only with matter, energy, and mechanisms.

I feel sometimes my loathing is more for mystics than for mysticism, more for the continental philosophers than continental philosophy. I hate the bland truisms that mystics use to describe their meaning, to gesture only with the notion “everything is connected” without trying to convince us what this connection means, or why it is so difficult to detect, or what manner we may come about experiencing that connection, and why it works that way for us.

I think perhaps there is a connection, a bridge out somewhere in the shapeless mists between these two worlds, a bridge that leads onward to what is Real, where mystics, scientists, empiricists, and Heideggarians can travel together. A place where the persistent questions of the analytics have been answered, and the slipperiness of cheap mysticism has been banished.

If we could, for example, articulate a theory of mind that explains why what we experience the world to be like is not the only available or coherent story to tell, if we could explain our brain mechanisms, explain our experiences in a different light, to perform a philosophical reversal, then what strange worlds might lie ahead!