Existentialism And Mysticism-Shake, Don’t Stir

Dr. Folkart’s Mysticism Class
Jan. ’78 pics S, N, N, H, D, K


My Mysticism class was not your typical class, but it sure was a lot of fun.
Before starting the class, I already had an appreciation for the
mystical traditions. The best part of the class, for me at least,
came when Dr. Folkart asked me if I would read and report back to him
on a book that he had not read. The author, Keiji Nishitani, a
Japanese Philosophy Professor, had studied under Martin Heidegger. My
professor knew I had studied Existentialism, and he wanted some input
on that part of the book. After I wrote my report on the book entitled
Religion and Nothingness, I wrote a summery to make it easier to
understand. That summary should be helpful here also:

The Cartesian division of reality into an immaterial, invisible
consciousness and the material world is not the
whole story. In fact, basically, that's just plain wrong---both
mysticism and existentialism move beyond this limitation.
For instance, Kierkegaard tells us that movement inward is
movement forward, and, if pushed far enough, this movement results in
an intense religious experience. The short story here is that an inverse
relationship exists between a person's outward ego and the gap that
separates a person from God. In other words, big ego-big gap, little
ego-gap closes. For Kierkegaard, "one's nothingness before God" is the
end goal.

A similar thing is going on in the thought of Heidegger. Dasein,
in thrownness, begins in nullity and ends with authentic being.
This is ditto for Nietzsche. His nihilism is not an attack on
differences per-se, rather it is the "eternal recurrence" of the
destruction of everything, hence the affirmation of everything.
In the philosophy of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Nietzsche,
one discovers the theme of liberation. That
theme is not so obvious in Sartre. His path to deeper subjectivity
takes us no further than the freely chosen act. His cogito is so shut
up within itself that it can never escape from its own nothingness.
Sartre's philosophy is a dead end, or so says Nishitani, who then goes
on to describe a much more powerful liberation theme.