Mystical Vision: When the Invisible Appears

How does the mystic see ultimate reality? She sees it through analogy, as we have been discussing. Analogy is an indirect way of knowing through the prepositional "as," which connects something known to something unknown without making an equality or an eidetic identification. It is analogy's productive failure to identify in a complete or total way that makes analogy the proper approach to the divine. But how might analogical knowing give one a direct experience of the unknowable as the mystic claims?

Edmund Husserl invented the phenomenological "Epoché" to reduce prior assumptions about what appears to us on our subjective screens, so that whatever appears might appear "as" itself. Prior assumptions can block what appears from appearing as itself because they filter out what doesn't appear according to a given conceptual schema. Giles Deleuze pointed out how concepts can mold reality in such a way as to reduce difference or block it out entirely. But is it even possible to bracket our given concepts in such a way as to encounter what appears in a state of utter Naiveté? For Jean-Luc Marion when something appears from "elsewhere," it appears as invisible, or its is visible as invisible. This is not what appears as visible because of the phenomenological epoché. Reducing or eliminating prior assumptions doesn't reveal its invisible content, so that its "Primary Naiveté," in the words of Paul Ricoeur, is built into its phenomenological structure or way of appearing. It is revealed as unseeable. In order to get a grasp on this apparent contradiction, we'll have to review Marion's phenomenology, especially his great addition to the phenomenological tradition, "Saturated Phenomena."

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co