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."

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Love is always becoming other than itself because love is characterized by self-emptying (Kenosis). Love opens possibilities, so it must clear away cancerous repetitions of the same, or as the phenomenological "Epoché" would have it, it must "bracket presuppositions," in order to let what gives itself in love appear "as" itself. Love knows through an intercourse that does not reduce the "otherness" of the "Other," which is to unify without the equivalences of identification or of objectification. One of the worst and most persistent misunderstandings about Hegel's dialectical synthesis is that it reduces the positive and the negative terms of the dialectic to a unity in which one becomes the other without remainder. No! it is a holding together of a contradiction in which the otherness of each opposing term makes a third thing appear, which is the failure of synthesis, or the productive contradiction of love. The "refractory zone (Deleuze)" of Lacanian "non-rapport" between lovers that forms when these two terms are "brought near (Deleuze)" in the dialectic is a third non-object, which is unable to become an object, or a conceptual object of knowledge, because there is too much about it to objectively unify. The failure of symbolization at the heart of the Lacanian Real's "absolute resistance" to symbolic unification is the too-much indeterminacy of being "as" a becoming to determine through the equalities of identification. Knowing what is indeterminable through the intercourse of love must be done analogically with the phenomenological "as," which is knowing the beloved "as" it shows itself. The "as" of analogy is what allows being to become in relation to knowing without being determined by that knowing, so that love is always a revelation that makes "visible the invisible in its invisibility" without reduction to what intentionally appears, as Jean-Luc Marion would have it.

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The mystic uses analogy to have a direct experience of the divine, which is, of course, a paradoxical, if not an altogether nonsensical thing to say. Nonetheless, Analogy is a sort of immediate mediation of God's ultimate nature as love itself for the mystic. Love like God is not good because it is the ground of whatever there is including goodness. Love is what makes any other intention appear, so love's intention is that being be an indeterminate becoming, which is a becoming without the determination of a completely unified intention. Love is the intention that undoes itself because its nature is to be self-sacrificial, or an unintentional intention that grounds other intentions, which is what is meant by the "unconditional" or "non-transactional" nature of "Real" love. If love were determinate, it wouldn't be loving because love requires a free choice, so love as the ground of whatever there is, is a dialectical relation between the determinations of being and indeterminacy of nonbeing. But a free choice also requires the relation of the indeterminacy of pure potential to the determinations of the limits of form or structure, which is what Deleuze called, "an actual possibility." Analogy is this relation between potential and limit that determines without complete determination, which is to make present through absence, or through the failure of representation in the distortion of the intention as the failure to unify the phenomenal and the conceptual objects that appear on the subjective screen. Intentional representation gives us our first-person, subjective experience of a world by unifying whatever there is into the objects that appear to us as the world. But what happens when too much aboutness has been given for our intention to unify into phenomenological or conceptual objects, as is the case when the object of our intention is the ground of intention itself. The subject of mystical experience can only be known in its unknowability as the distortion of the intentional field that Lacan called the "Real."

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