J. N. Findlay’s Rational Mysticism

Abstract

The philosopher John Niemeyer Findlay (1903–1987) held that the insights of mystical experience can be philosophically analyzed and articulated in rational form. Findlay provided two routes to the “mystical pole of the cosmos.” In the first, he appealed to the related notions of impersonality and impartiality to transcendentally deduce a “firmament of values,” which coalesce into an apical point, the Platonic/Plotinian One or Good. In the second, he again appealed to impersonality/impartiality to argue that the philosophical perplexities of our earthly existence, including the antinomies of space and time, the problem of “other minds,” and the difficulties of ethics and axiology, can be resolved through the positing of a higher world, complementary to and interdependent with our own, where the distinctions between universal and particular, mind and matter, and individual minds, attenuate and eventually dissolve. This higher world culminates in a unique and all-embracing “absolute” that embodies a pure and necessary love and zeal for the highest values, which Findlay equates with the divine. Our world, with its attendant chance, destruction, and evil, is the arena within which these values are actualized, and this actualization completes an “ascent to the absolute” and is an essential component of “the life of God.”