What does materialism have to do with mysticism?

Not only is materialism indebted to mysticism - as Marx implicitly acknowledged when he correctly described the Christian Neoplatonist Hegel’s philosophy as mystical1 - mysticism and its influence pervade Western culture.

The contribution of mysticism in all areas has been profound - to literature, the visual arts, religion, particularly to and through philosophy with its concealed priesthood (which priesthood was identified by the overt priest Nietzsche), to science - it inspired Copernicus to the greatest scientific hypothesis, and Kepler. In the West, its primarily Neoplatonic form, in reflecting the contradictory, poetic dynamism of the world - and having been stood on its feet by Marx - became the engine of dialectical materialism itself.2

We, in the West, on the back of all that has been achieved, believe a monumental lie, a monumental arrogance, a monumental delusion - that while others worship idols, stare at their navels, are committed to 'failed' or 'backward' ideologies or are obsessed with filial piety, we have risen above this to become the triumphal bearers of millennial ‘Reason’. We wear this self-awarded badge of ‘Reason’ as a cultural definition. It is the belief we have relied on to most distinguish the West from the rest.

The impact of mysticism argues against this. Linguistic reason, a core tool of all authoritarians from Plato onwards, is not the only form of reason. At the heart of mysticism is another - powerful and fluid, complex, subtle and evanescent. And in the inspiration of its 'connectedness', immensely creative.

Linguistic reason draws on this 'connectedness' as its proponents seek to contain and deny it. The artist and theologian Plato is a prime example. I refer you to the lyrical power of the Ion:

For a Poet is indeed a thing ethereally light, winged, and sacred...

Linguistic reason, while reason’s jewel, is but its tip. When we wake in the middle of the night with the solution to a long-standing problem, had we been dotting every ‘i’ and crossing every ‘t’, or might trotting chairs and fluttering wings have borne fruit in creative 'space'?

Or when you round a corner and bump into a stranger - no time for considered words and structured sentences - think of the richness, at multiple levels, of what has taken place in your brain - in a moment's silence. Such a cognitive experience (that of 'first impressions') is so intense it merges seamlessly with the physical. This thinking is the ever-present underlay of what is done linguistically.

Intuitive thought draws most directly on our connectedness - to all that comprises us, to what we remember, and to the world. It provides us with perhaps our deepest cognitive experience of the world. That this has been given not only religious but mystical meaning does not detract from its objective nature and potential.

In considering what comprises 'reason', the materialist must begin with how the brain functions in its totality, recognising that those functions bear on the whole dialectically, that they are inseparable and plastic, and not focus only on the brain's capacity for its highest product - linguistic expression.

Notes
1. Marx wrote: ‘I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker...The mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.‘ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Postface to the Second Edition 1873, Penguin, London, 1982, p. 103.

2. See William Franke's two volume anthology On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, 2007

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