American Academy of Religion

Jaspers's Critique of Mysticism

Author(s): Alan M. Olson
Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Jun., 1983), pp. 251-266
Published by: Oxford University Press
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Journalof the AmericanAcademyof Religion,LI/2

Jaspers'sCritique of Mysticism
Alan M. Olson

relation to mysticism is both fascinatingand frustrating.On

the one hand, Jaspers seems to be never more himself than when he
Saspers's
is providing extended commentary and exposition on such spiritual
giants as Jesus, Socrates, and the Buddha. And when he provides mono-
graph or book-length treatment of mystical philosophers such as
Plotinus, Cusanus, and Spinoza, one has the distinct impression that
Jaspers finds himself mirrored almost perfectly in these thinkers-so
much so, in fact, that it is sometimes very difficult to ascertain who is
speaking, Jaspers or his subject. Thus, when Jaspers says that "prayer,"
for Plotinus, "is a philosophizing self-movement toward God" and that
"the love of man for God," in Plotinus and Spinoza, "is the foundation of
all authentic life" (GP:II,50ff.), the reader of Jaspers knows instinctively
that such utterances are descriptive avowals and not merely statements
of fact. But while the depth of Jaspers's self-identification with mystical
thinkers is fascinating, it is simultaneously the feature of his work which
invites suspicion on the part of those who question the validity of highly
existential historiography, since Jaspers, as we will see, is rather selective
about what he chooses to accept and to reject in certain mystics.
Jaspers's critique of mysticism, therefore, may be viewed as follow-
ing a strategy somewhat analogous to what Ricoeur has called the her-
meneutics of "sympathetic reenactment" (SE:3ff.). But Jaspers is not as
methodologically self-conscious as Ricoeur, and herein lies the primary
reason for what I will argue is a cause of inconsistency in Jaspers's
understanding of the nature, meaning, and value of mysticism. In saying
this, I am not implying that the meaning of mysticism is self-evident or
that it is "unconfused," for it is one of the most supremely confusing
subjects one can ever explore. I do believe, however, with J. N. Findlay,
and against someone like Bertrand Russell (1917:1-32), that "what char-
acterizes myticism is a refusal to accept and use the notions of identity

Alan M. Olson (Ph.D., Boston University) is chairman of the Department of

Religion at Boston University. He is the author of Transcendenceand Herme-
neutics (1979) and of journalarticles, the coauthorof The Seeing Eye: Herme-
neutic Phenomenologyin the Study of Religion (1982), and the editor of Myth,
Symbol,and Reality (1980).

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252 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

and diversity which ordinary logic applies so confidently, whether in the

relation of finite objects to the Absolute or of finite objects to one
another" (LM:154). "While the theorems of the propositional calculus
can be understood without passion, being adjusted to our normal state of
alienation," Findlay goes on to assert, "the theorems of mysticism can
only be understood with passion; one must oneself live through, consum-
mate the identity which they postulate" (155).
Jaspers is unable ultimately to "live through" a great deal of the mysti-
cism about which he writes. One of the reasons for Jaspers's resistance in
the face of certain types of mysticism (especially the "devotional" forms
about which I will speak) may be located in his predilection for the radical
worldlessness of certain Buddhist thinkers, such as Nagarjuna, or the radi-
cal Transcendence of the "One" in Plotinus which is epekeina in every
sense of the word. While Jaspers, in other contexts, vehemently opposes
"world-denying, world-negating" formt of mysticism, it is nevertheless this
"One" beyond all ciphers-this still center of nirvana which is hongaku
with dharma from eternity-which seems to be, for him, the magnetic
origin and the goal of transcending-thinking. Indeed, Jaspers's discussion
of mysticism may be viewed as a kind of wavering between the two possi-
bilities he describes. There are two basic ways of "thinking beyond all
ciphers": on the one hand, there is the "meditative transformation of con-
sciousness" and, on the other, "speculative thinking which the intellect
performs but cannot fathom" (PFR:276). Ontologically he prefers the
worldlessness and the wordlessness of the Buddha and Plotinus; morally he
prefers the world-transforming and world-affirming positions of certain
Christian mystics such as Eckhart and Cusanus. The reason is simple
enough, for by the meditative tradition Jaspers usually has in mind East-
ern forms of spirituality, especially Buddhism, where the purest forms of
meditation are always "objectless." In Christianity, by contrast, we
encounter a highly "objective" meditative-contemplative tradition ulti-
mately focused upon the incarnate Christ. But Jaspers's radical insistence
that Transcendence must not be corporealized in any manner and his
critique of the more orthodox christological formulations based on revela-
tion and/or theories of instantiation prevent him from being at home in
Christian mysticism as such.
In what follows, I try to ascertain more clearly the nature of Jaspers's
relation to mysticism by trying to locate what it is about mysticism, in his
view, which prevents him from more candid self-identification with mys-
ticism as such. In the first part, I focus on his understanding of mysticism
by discussing his views in relation to what I view as the two basic types of
mysticism, viz., devotional and speculative. In the second.part, I suggest
that his highly suggestive theory of ciphers opens a way to a more produc-
tive understanding of mysticism, and that Ricoeur's most recent work in
hermeneutics may be viewed both as a response to Jaspers'smystical intent

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 Olson: Jaspers's Critique 253

and as a far more adequate differentiation of his approach. Finally, I con-

clude by indicating that when Jaspers's theory of ciphers is fully devel-
oped, as it is in Ricoeur, a great deal of the apparent tension between
devotional and speculative forms of mysticism is overcome.

I
While Jaspers's views on mysticism are scattered throughout his
works, some of his most sustained treatment (in addition to his exposition
of individual mystics in The Great Philosophers) can be found in the
mature work Philosophical Faith and Revelation. This work is moti-
vated, in large part, not only by Jaspers's desire to indicate the proper
place of the language of "faith" in the modern "godless" age of science
and technology, but also to indicate how he might himself be located vis-
a-vis the religious philosophies with which he has been persistently and
sometimes erroneously identified. In this work, Jaspers says that mysti-
cism has to do with the ultimate elucidation of the reality of Transcen-
dence "beyond all ciphers." As such, mysticism represents the ultimate
stage of "human liberation" through the "transcending-thinking" that
characterizes his entire Existenzphilosophie: "The liberation of man pro-
ceeds from dark, savage forces to personal gods beyond good and evil to
mortal gods, from the gods to the one God, and on to the ultimate Free-
dom of recognizing the one personal God as a cipher. We may call this
last liberation as the ascent from God to the Godhead, from the ciphers
to what makes them speak. It is our liberation from the hobbles with
which our own conceptions and thoughts prevent us from reaching the
truth that halts all thinking" (284).
This path of ultimate transcending (so obviously parallel to Plato's
"transcendence of the cave" or Hegel's dynamic phenomenology of spirit)
is authentic, for Jaspers, when it has the following positive consequences:
(a) the end of religious exclusivism; (b) the end of God-talk as a form of
self-justification in matters of truth and value; and (c) the end of rational-
ism, i.e., the identification of Transcendence-Itself (God) and human rea-
son (284-85). In this definition and its consequent conditions, we note
several features about Jaspers's understanding of mysticism. First, Jaspers
clearly is oriented towards a decidedly speculative, as opposed to a devo-
tional, form of mysticism; that is, mysticism is viewed, by Jaspers as by
medieval thinkers such as Bonaventure, as the culmination or "crown" of
metaphysics and the fulfillment of self-being. Second, Jaspers does not
wish, like Hegel, to render the mysterious "other worldly" essence of mys-
ticism as completely "this worldly" by identifying reason and the Absolute.
He insists, like Heidegger, on a kind of "reserve" for the Holy within the
domain of ciphers (even though Jaspers's language is largely teleological
with respect to the reality and value of this reserve, whereas Heidegger's is

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254 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

primordialistic). Third, Jaspers always retains a highly humanistic notion

of Lebenspraxis as the final test of the truth of mysticism or, for that mat-
ter, the truth of any other mode of awareness and knowledge. Jaspers does
not, however, develop any kind of axiology to demonstrate the truth of
ultimate notions of value, such as can be found, for example, in Scheler or
Findlay.
In the remainder of this section, I will address this cluster of issues
by discussing further the differences between speculative and devotional
forms of mysticism, both formally and in relation to Jaspers's views.
By devotional mysticism, I understand intensive and highly disci-
plined types of spirituality which have as the object (or objects) and even
the end of devotion some thing or entity. Such "things"or phenomena are
usually symbols of revelation or manifestation that are officially sanctioned
by a religious group or cult; for example, Jesus, the Blessed Virgin, or
special saints as depicted in the figurative and iconographic art of Christi-
anity; Shiva and Vishnu in Hinduism and the numerous avatars of the
latter, especially Krishna; or specific representations of the Buddha in his
various moods and functions in Mahayana, especially the Buddha of the
Future in Amida or "Pure Land" Buddhism. All of these examples, and so
many others, fall very neatly into what the Eastern philosopher would
term bhakti yoga, the aim of which is a metamorphosis of the subject by
total devotion to, identification with, and transformation through the
object of devotion. Evidence of such transformation can be found in
St. Paul's Christ mysticism-"It is no longer I who live, but Christ who
lives through me" and "Have this mind among yourselves that you have
through Christ Jesus," etc.; the stigmatic transformation of Saint Francis;
the ecstasies of Julian of Norwich, or even the iconic mandala of Cusanus
in his famous devotional treatise, The Vision of God.
Speculative mysticism, on the other hand, has to do with transcend-
ing through thinking itself: sustained or disciplined thinking about the
"unthinkable" Transcendence-Itself before which all thought finally van-
ishes. In the West this kind of mysticism has its first definitive form in
Plotinus, who devotes his entire life to the cultivation of Plato's dialectic
as "the way" to the knowledge of the One. Through dialectic, it is
argued, reason has the power to go beyond the contradictions in human
experience through or by means of reason's own oppositions, negations,
and sublations, to an All-Encompassing Reality utterly free of all depra-
vation and deficiency. It is out of Plotinus that a dialectical-speculative
metaphysics flows into distinctively Christian forms of mysticism: first, as
fused with the narrative-historical images of biblical literature in some-
one like Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in late-classical, early medieval
Christianity, and then into its most sublime examples in German specu-
lative mystics such as Eckhart and Cusanus.
These are precisely the thinkers with whom Jaspers most closely

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 Olson: Jaspers's Critique 255

identifies himself, and in each instance (namely, the Pythagorean-

Platonic-Hegelian tradition of logic Russell identifies as responsible for
the philosophical ills of the West) we have a conception of a dialectical
logic able to mount up oppositions and paradoxes in consciousness and to
steer a course through and beyond them to a vision of the Absolute. But
as in the jna-nic traditions of yoga (especially the most radical schools of
Buddhism), the Absolute Transcendence of Jaspers cannot be spoken for
there is nothing to say. Indeed, for Jaspers, as for Nagarjuna's prijiha-
pdramitw, the distinctively authentic feature of transcending in the
ciphers of speculative metaphysics is a "foundering" on the shoals of the
reality which is "as much Being as Nothingness" (PFR:255).
Thus, it is not surprising that Jaspers should find Cusanus's notion of
the coincidentia oppositorum so congenial, for just as the lines of infinity
are encased within and transcended by that Infinite-Itself beyond all
mathematical conceptions of infinity, so also the modes of transcending-
thinking, for Jaspers, converge in an Encompassing which contains but is
neither exhausted nor diminished by any of them. Because he adheres so
strictly to docta ignorantia, (viz., the strictly negative dialectical notion
that "all our knowledge of God is the knowledge of our ignorance of
God "), Jaspers finds in the speculative mysticism of Cusanus the foresha-
dowing of his own periechontology, namely, the "basic knowledge" that
can be discerned about reality through "being in the situation of possible
Existenz" or what he might regard as a kind of prudent mystical sobriety
(PFR:202). As Jaspers puts it:

Purely, soberly, simply, Cusanus thinks his way through the

world under a speculative empyrean. He does not polemicize
against the mystical union that would remove him from the
world, but he is factually unready for it. Nor is he ready to think
himself into God's nature as if one might set foot there, as if the
gulf between the finite and the infinite might be vaulted directly.
There is only one possibility of an indirect leap: formal tran-
scending in the pure concepts that rescind their definitionsin the
coincidentia oppositorum.
Cusanusthinks in a direction where nothing is conceivable,
definable, imaginable any more, in the direction of that which
really is-and which is nothing as well. (PGR:261)
For Jaspers, then, Cusanus is willing to philosophize from the penulti-
mate situation of Kant and not the ultimate situation of either Hegel or
revealed theology: "To think one's way through the world under" and
not beyond "a speculative empyrean"-this is all the human condition
permits.
Thus, there are for Jaspers two fundamentally different kinds of
mysticism, just as there are two kinds of metaphysics. On the one hand,

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256 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

there is a purely "intellectual" form of metaphysics and, on the other

hand, an "existential" form (GP:II,5-6). The former has the dubious
quality of being a kind of academic sport, whereas the latter has the
religious or near-religious function of being a kind of philosophical ordo
salutis culminating in the kinds of transformations or conversions I men-
tioned at the beginning of this section. The latter type attempts "to real-
ize the meaning of life as a way to Transcendence by our actions in the
world, as Existenz in the realm of ambiguous ciphers," whereas the for-
mer type "steps out of the world . . . through a meditative ascent to
Transcendence" (PFR:355-56).
Ideally, it would seem that the most adequate kind of mystical philo-
sophizing should be a combination of both these types: the austere,
potentially worldless mental-physics of jnnic gnosis should be blent
with a healthy, practical dose of karmic resolve; and the potential fanati-
cism of bhAkti devotion should be neutralized through the self-
annihilating teleology of sunyatw. Jaspers himself identifies this paradox
as the contradiction inherent to mysticism; for, as he puts it, on the one
hand there are the phenomenal "visions" understood to come from the
"supersensory" realm whereas, on the other hand, there is unio mystica
in which everything, subject and object, self and Divine Other, are
"blent into one" (PFR:280). The way to control, if not overcome, this
contradiction, according to Jaspers, is through the "disciplined thinking
on Being" as in Cusanus.

II
A "disciplined thinking on Being," for Jaspers, is very much bound to
his theory of ciphers. But because his theory of ciphers is itself highly
enigmatic, some might be prone to question in what sense this kind of
thinking is "disciplined." It is of the nature of cipher, for Jaspers, to remain
evanescent-"floating" or "hovering," so to speak, and it is impossible, in
the final analysis, to contain or account for ciphers by any formal theory of
analysis and explanation. The validity of ciphers, he maintains again and
again, is for possible Existenz and this alone. Indeed, a formal containment
of cipher through some scheme of objectivation is the "death" of the
cipher, just as it is the death of Existenz.
The problem with this largely neo-Kantian approach is that it effec-
tively neutralizes the ontological ground mystics presuppose and conse-
quently also what they assert. Here again I think that one must agree
with Findlay when he says that, whatever one's personal or philosophical
attitude, "mystical moods and persons are above all assertive, and they
put something before us as true, as real, whether anyone thinks so or
not" (LM:148). Jaspers, however, cannot ultimately uphold this notion
because he cannot accept the grounds upon which mystical assertions are

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 Olson: Jaspers's Critique 257

proffered. In each of the speculative mystics named thus far (with the
exception of classical Buddhists such as Ndgdrjuna) we have assertions
regarding an ultimate mystical reality grounded in substantialistic or
quasi-substantialistic notions of the soul. Whether in the case of Plotinus
(with whom Jaspers probably has more in common than any other
thinker since theism, as such, is not an issue), Eckhart, or Cusanus, we
find operative notions of anamnesis upon which speculative transcending
is based and from which images of the One or the Absolute derive their
power. To be sure, Jaspers, perhaps more than any other recent thinker,
has done everything possible (through the language of Existenz) to rein-
vest the meaning of the self with traditional dignity in a posttraditional
world. But a nonsubstantialistic doctrine of the self it remains and hence
one fraught with all the ambiguity that characterizes contemporary
philosophical anthropology.
In fact, it might be said that the anthropocentrism of Jaspers is the
most vexing aspect of his critique of mysticism. For example, Jaspers
says that much of the "confusion" surrounding his notion of cipher has to
do with the tendency of many (especially in Christianity) to view them
as instances of "embodied Transcendence," which, for him, they most
emphatically are not (PFR:100). It is rather the reality of "freedom" and
its mystery that ultimately underlies the truth of ciphers: "The truth of
the cipher . . . depends on whether that moment's decision will be for-
ever acknowledged and accepted as my own, whether I identify with it
and renew it in repetition" (107). The truth of ciphers, therefore, cannot
be demonstrated either from "below" through a doctrine of the soul, or
from "above" through a doctrine of revelation. The only suitable logic of
demonstration is the metaxy of possible Existenz in the concrete life
situation. Yet this attitude greatly perplexed Bultmann, for it was against
Bultmann, in the famous demythologizing debate of the 1950s, that
Jaspers seemed to hold out for more than a mere existential reduction of
the meaning of ciphers even though he was hard-pressed to account for
what that "more" might be./1/ Insisting upon what Peter Berger would
term a "rumor of angels" in the mythic-symbolic expressions of religion
but being deeply critical of Bultmann's confessional loyalties, Jaspers was
charged by Bultmann with clinging to an undifferentiated "magical
language" of cipher. And, of course, it was in a similar vein that Ricoeur
leveled at Jaspers the charge of a certain "aestheticism" of cipher, of
playing court, like Don Juan, to every conceivable symbol system but
committing himself to none./2/
Such comments were characteristic of Ricoeur in the earlier days
when he was, perhaps, very much under the sway of Barth. And while it
may be argued that the religious side of Ricoeur is still conservative, it
must also be recognized that Jaspers is a major source of inspiration-
and challenge; for Ricoeur's philosophical project of his statement on

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258 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Transcendence (in the projected Poetics of the Will, vol. 3 of Philoso-

phie de la volonte) is to be sharper than Jaspers's in Metaphysik,
(Philosophie, book 3). Hence, Ricoeur's exceptionally fine work on her-
meneutics and the symbolic, metaphoric, and narrative structures of
language and meaning during the past two decades may be viewed, both
directly and indirectly, as a continuing attempt to differentiate Jaspers's
theory of ciphers in view of this challenge./3/ This attempt is highly
manifest in some of Ricoeur's most recent work: first in his insistence
upon the uncompromising specificity of religious language and, second,
in his attention to ascertaining more precisely how it is that the "symbol
gives rise to thought" through a detailed examination of Hegel's under-
standing of Vorstellung. Through a brief discussion of both these aspects
of Ricoeur's work, it may be possible to obtain a closer understanding of
Jaspers's theory of ciphers as it relates to his critique of mysticism.
With respect to the "specificity" of religious language,/4/ we see a
continuation of the theme introduced with The Symbolism of Evil (1960),
namely, that a philosophical-hermeneutical exposition of the meaning of
evil must commence, if possible, from a position characterized by the
"fullness of language." With this insistence, Ricoeur is also picking up on
the work of Jaspers'ssuccessor at Heidelberg, Hans-Georg Gadamer; for it
is Gadamer who maintains that religious "speaking" or discourse cannot
be identified with or split between the domains of "philosophic-scientific"
discourse on the one hand and "poetical" discourse on the other. Religious
discourse is not merely about the object qua object, nor is it simply the
expression of the subject qua subject. It does not have the universal inter-
changeability of science, a validity irrespective of location in space and
time, nor does it have what Gadamer calls the mode of "anonymous"
address characteristic of poetic utterances./5/ To the contrary, religious
speaking (especially of the type one associates with the Bible) is homolo-
gous in the sense that it is spoken from faith to faith, from witnesses to
witnesses or from the "witnesses of witnesses" to those who believe or wish
to do so. Thus, religious speaking can be identified very clearly in its
"form of address as 'testimony,'" but it can also be identified more univer-
sally, Ricoeur points out, as having the quality of "manifestation." Here
Ricoeur (out of Jean Nabert) picks up on a theme highly developed in
phenomenology of religion (especially van der Leeuw): "In testimony
there is an immediacy of the absolute without which there would be noth-
ing to interpret. This immediacy functions as origin, as initium, on this
side of which we can go no further. Beginning there, interpretation will
be the endless mediation of this immediacy. But without it, interpretation
will forever be only an interpretation of interpretation. There is a time
when interpretation is the exegesis of one or many testimonies. Testimony
is the anagke stenai (fixed necessity) of interpretation. A hermeneutic
without testimony is condemned to an infinite regress in a perspectivism

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 Olson:Jaspers'sCritique 259

with neither beginning nor end" (HT:4).

It goes without saying that Ricoeur's contempt for what Jaspers also
termed "the dead end of interpreting interpretations" is a shared view
regarding our present state of affairs. But how, more precisely, does the
"manifestation" or immediacy of the Absolute present to the discourse of
"testimony" take place? Here Ricoeur turns to Hegel (which suggests that
his "post-Hegelian return to Kant" is ever more by way of Hegel), since it
was Hegel, in Ricoeur's view, who most effectively mapped out a dialecti-
cal hermeneutics of Vorstellung which is accurate in relation to the unique
case represented by religious discourse./6/ On Ricoeur's view, Vorstell-
ung, in Hegel, should not be characterized as "idea," as in Kant, but very
strictly as "figurative" or "picture thinking," i.e., as the imagistic re-
presentation of immediate experience or Anschauung. As such, it is a kind
of thinking that is not yet conceptual even though it already harbors
within itself the speculative moment. The problem, of course, is that as
mythic-symbolic Vorstellungen yield to the speculative moment, that is, to
clarification in the life of the concept, there is a progressive loss of the man-
ifestation of immediacy in experience giving rise to the discursive utter-
ances of testimony. Thus, the double-danger implicit in the dialectic of
Vorstellung: either (a) the danger of remaining with an undifferentiated
experiential "surplus of meaning" or (b) the danger of yielding to Begriff
and a progressive loss of immediacy culminating in highly abstract forms
of alienation. H6lderlin (as I have argued elsewhere) may be properly
viewed as remaining with the bottom side of this dialectic, whereas Hegel
exemplifies the top side of this dialectic in extremis./7/
So it is that if we are to fully acknowledge and appreciate the auton-
omy of religious discourse as a kind of speaking that is neither merely
scientific nor merely poetic, but both and more, what is required is what
Ricoeur calls depouillement, or a "divestment" of autonomy, especially
when highly voluntaristic philosophies of reflection are the bases of
adjudicating the truth of mystical assertions. It is a notion very close to
Heidegger's views on Gelassenheit, which, as we know, are grounded in
the mysticism of Eckhart./8/ Such a position, obviously, strikes rather
directly at Jaspers's anthropocentric repudiation of revelation. For with-
out this act of active renunciation, precisely that renunciation which
Jaspers finds so unpalatable as a "denial of world," it is impossible in
Ricoeur's view to fully appropriate the meaning of those instantiations of
the Absolute which may be present in specific ciphers of transcendence,
not least in the focal cipher of Christianity, Jesus as the Christ.

III
In this brief essay I have suggested the following regarding Jaspers's
relationship to mysticism:

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260 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

1. Even though Jaspers does not regard himself as being a mystic,

and while his philosophizing does not satisfy the conventional criteria as
to what constitutes mysticism, the general tenor of his work is mystical
throughout. This quality is especially evidenced where Jaspers deals with
mysticism as such wherein he follows a hermeneutical strategy somewhat
similar to what Ricoeur defines as "sympathetic reenactment."
2. The mystics with whom Jaspers most easily identifies himself are
those whom I have termed "speculative" as opposed to "devotional"
mystics; that is, Jaspers feels most comfortable with the Plotinian tradi-
tion of transcending speculative dialectic (inclusive of such Christian
mystics as Eckhart and Cusanus) and is rather ill at ease with devotional
types such as Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, or Juan de la Cruz.
3. What distinguishes devotional from speculative mystics within
Christianity is a radical incarnationalism in the former as distinct from
the primacy of a disincarnate, noetic emphasis in the latter. Of course, it
is precisely the incarnationalistic-revelational emphasis within devotional
mysticism which provides warrants and sanctions for canonization in the
eyes of the church, whereas its lack of emphasis or absence, in the case
of the speculative mystic, is the basis of suspicion and even charges of
heresy.
4. Jaspers's theory of cipher is both informed by and accommodates
the speculative mystic, whereas it tends to exclude or compromise the
devotional type. From a theological perspective, Jaspers'stheory of cipher
may be almost perfectly aligned with post-Kantian moral interpretations
of Christology and may be viewed as excluding not only substantial or
forensic interpretations of the atonement but also the mythical.
5. One of the major problems, however, with aligning Jaspers with
speculative mysticism is that he does not, like Plotinus, have a notion of
dialectic that is grounded in the soul; he does not, like Bonaventure,
have a conception of speculative metaphysics as "affective rationality"
grounded in an emanationalistic exemplarism; he does not, like Eckhart,
have a notion of the Godhead grounded primordially in the soul; nor
does he have, with Cusanus, a notion of infinity grounded in a
"revealed" system of mediation which is avowed unconditionally. As a
result, when these antecedent grounding conditions are removed or
bracketed, when the ontological or ecclesiological "substance," so to
speak, is removed, a great deal of the power implicit in traditional forms
of mystical philosophizing is lost. This, of course, is the problem with all
modern forms of mysticism or, at least, with those forms that would be
both mystical and epistemologically self-critical.
6. Conversely, what Jaspers finds objectionable in Buddhist meta-
physics, on the one hand, and in Kant and Hegel, on the other, is a loss
of the mystery implicit in the experience of world; in Buddhism, because
the consistency of world is annihilated in samAdhi; in Kant because the

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 Olson:Jaspers'sCritique 261

numinous is excluded through an uncompromising theory of phenom-

ena; in Hegel, because the numinous is absorbed by a notion of Begriff
viewed as one with the Absolute of Vernunft. Consequently, we are left
with a theory of ciphers "hovering," as it were, between these two
domains of the devotional and the speculative types of mystical philoso-
phizing. It may be said that this is precisely where one would want to
remain (Voegelin's philosophy of metaxy being a prime example). But
then there is the issue of specificity, namely, what remains of mysticism
as such?
7. Therefore, I suggest that, as a critique, Jaspers'streatment of mysti-
cism, while highly sympathetic, is ultimately inconclusive in so far as it is
incapable (a) of doing more than describing mysticism or (b) of being
incorporated as a historical foundation for this "philosophy of freedom."
Indeed, Jaspers leaps over the centuries with very little attention to contex-
tual considerations that might modify either his critique or his appropria-
tion of certain mystical notions. Through his theory of ciphers, however,
Jaspers has opened a path of understanding which is potentially very
productive. One of the primary lines of this productiveness can be
located in Paul Ricoeur's continuing work on mythic-symbolic-
metaphoric language, the work which has preoccupied him for the past
twenty years and is directly inspired by Jaspers's theory of ciphers.
8. Ricoeur's work in this area may be viewed as an attempt to radi-
cally differentiate the structure of ciphers in terms both of what they are
and of what they mean. Here Ricoeur insists (a) that a unique character-
istic of religious discourse and symbolization is "specificity" and a "sur-
plus of meaning" (here agreeing with Gadamer, Heidegger, and Otto).
He also insists (b) that the fullest possible appropriation of the meaning
of this "specificity" and "surplus" depends upon the "disengagement" or
depouillement (following Nabert and, to a degree, also Barth) of the
reflective ego and its autonomous claim to authority. Both conditions
obviously strike at the idealistic and the voluntaristic aspects of Jaspers's
theory of ciphers, but both conditions simultaneously affirm Jaspers's
view of Grenzsituationen as being characteristic of all philosophical
projects.
9. Ricoeur, by way of Hegel, provides an epistemological structure that
accommodates the material and existential dynamics outlined in (8), and
with it a way to mediate effectively between the devotional and the
speculative types of mysticism present to all religious and philosophical
traditions. The key, according to Ricoeur, lies in Hegel's concept of
Vorstellung. Vorstellung in Hegel, according to Ricoeur, should not be
translated as "eidetic representation," as in Kant, but as "visual" or "picto-
rial thinking." As such, Vorstellungen occupy that middle ground between
Anschauung and Begriff, that is, between the undifferentiated experience
of epiphany or immediate manifestation, and a logical, dogmatic

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262 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

"ontotheological" clarification of the meaning of experience in the life of

the concept. As such, we have a dialectical differentiation of the nature of
cipher both from "below," so to speak, and from "above." Ciphers as
Vorstellungen owe their semicognitive mysterious "hovering" quality to a
dialectic between immediate experience and imagistic representations of
this experience; and they owe their cognitive and "moral" quality to a
dialectic between imagistic representation and the logic of the concept.
Thus Ricoeur locates symbol, with its prelinguistic, presemantic features,
in the midst of these first level dialectical interactions, whereas myth (and
the metaphoric) is at the second level of these dialectical interactions; for
myth and metaphor, Ricoeur insists, are "already in the realm of logos"-
myths being an interpretation of the meaning of experience/existence./9/
10. From this perspective (see diagram) we see that what I have
identified as "devotional" mysticism is properly placed at the intersection
between Anschauung and Vorstellung, whereas speculative mysticism is
properly placed between Vorstellung and Begriff. What is critical is a
maintenance of the validity of the entire structure, for such a preserva-
tion is identical with a phenomenological insistence on the integrity of
experience in its fullness. From this perspective we can see complemen-
tarity and not contradiction between the devotional and the speculative,
between the symbolic and the metaphoric, between the experiential and
the notional. While the weakness in the lower level is nondifferentiation,
its strength is an experiential surplus. While the strength of the higher
level is abstract notional differentiation, its weakness is a progressive
distantiation from immediate experience. Indeed, as Ricoeur insists, "the
concept is the endless death of the representation" upon which is it
parasitical. This is why, Ricoeur continues, any hermeneutics of religious
discourse must "keep starting from, and returning to, the moment of
immediacy in religion, be it called religious experience, Word-Event, or
Kerygmatic moment" (SV:87).
11. Why then, and finally, does this epistemic complementarity so
frequently become, in practice, a dichotomy or a "polarity," as Peter
Berger has suggested recently, between "interior" and "confrontational"
forms of religiousness?/10/ The existential reality of what Ricoeur calls
depouillement (and what I have elsewhere developed as "renunciation")
plays a critical role: it denies the autonomous ego or will, whereas the
tendency of all philosophies of reflection is to claim absolute status even
within preacknowledged limits./11/ Such "renunciation" or "disengage-
ment" or "divestment," whatever it be termed, is fundamental to the
mystical traditions of both Eastern and Western religions; and, apart
from its active deployment, all talk about union with or enlightenment
through Absolutes remains empty and spurious. It is precisely such a
movement, through renunciation, that is implied in the well-known
phrases of Ricoeur and Findlay, namely, the necessity of a "dimming of

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 Olson:Jaspers'sCritique 263

reflection and returning to the tragic," and that all "speleological"

attempts to elucidate the "furnishings of the cave" through projects of
"transcendence" require, in the end, a "return to the cave."/12/ It is
precisely this kind of movement that is required if Jaspers's question
"Can the two faiths [philosophical and religious] meet?" is to be
answered affirmatively./13/

SCHEMATISM ON MYSTICISM AND LANGUAGE/14/

(Ricoeur) (Jaspers) (Hegel)

Transzendenz

IdealityLimits Begriff
(Voluntary) (Conceptual Differentiation)
1

!
Met/aphor Geist i < - [Speculative Mysticism]
f de..
/
- -
Myth < Me~aphr,,,
Ciphers < Weltsein,
% Vorstellung
(Imagistic Representation)
SymbolDasein b/ I < - [Devotional Mysticism]

ObscurityLimits Anschauung
(Involuntary) Manifestation)
(Experiential

Existenz

NOTES

/1/ See Jaspers'sspiriteddebate with Bultmann(MC).

/2/ See LeonardEhrlich'sdevelopmentof this objection(72f.).
/3/ I have argued for this connectionand extension(TH:156f.).
/4/ See David Pellauer'sfine developmentof this notion in Ricoeur.
/5/ Gadamer has argued this point in various contexts, as has his student,
Wolfhart Pannenberg.One of the more compact treatmentsis the essay "Reli-
gious and PoeticalSpeaking."
/6/ This careful and critical examination of Hegel is important not only

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264 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

because it elucidates the hermeneutical character of Hegel's philosophy of reli-

gion, but also because it shows how Hegel's position informs that of Ricoeur
(SV).
/7/ I have developed this in some detail (1982).

/8/ For two exceptionally good studies in this connection see John Caputo
and Reinar Schurmann.

/9/ See Ricoeur's succinct treatment of symbol and metaphor (HT).

/10/ This typology and its limitations are worked out very effectively in
Berger.
/11/ See my essay (MR).

/12/ See Ricoeur (CI:304ff.) and Findlay (TC:356ff.).

/13/ This is the title of the final section in Jaspers (PFR).

/14/ This schematism is extrapolated from the "Diagram of Being" in Karl

Jaspers (VW:142), with my parallel applications to Ricoeur and to Hegel. The
reader may wish to compare this epistemic-linguistic schematism with the chart
prepared by Stephen Dunning (405). In Dunning's example we have a schematism
organized in the principle of depth rather than height (as I have indicated, espe-
cially in relation to Hegel); thus, the metaphoric inversion of Hegel typically asso-
ciated with Marx (as the material level) and with Kierkegaard (as the psychological
level). Viewing these two schematisms comparatively, we can see the parallel
between the emotive-visual immediacy of music and drama, and the reflective-
conceptual mediacy of drama and poetry, in Kierkegaard, with what I have des-
cribed as the "devotional" and the "speculative" forms of mysticism in Hegel,
Jaspers, and Ricoeur respectively. In Hegel the movement of dialectic is very
strictly "upward" whereas in Kierkegaard it is "downward." In Jaspers, and even
more so in Ricoeur, these dialectical modalities are balanced both materially and
formally. What all have in common is a view of the metaxy-to use Voegelin's
term out of Plato-as the midpoint of differentiation regarding both noetic height
and apeirontic depth with respect to the meaning of Vorstellungen, whether this
be the cipher language of Jaspers or mythic-symbolic-metaphoric language as in
Ricoeur. Thus construed, the metaxy represents the nodal point of what the medi-
evals termed the double dialectic of credo ut intelligam and intelligo ut credam.

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