A Theory of Spiritual Experience:

A Synthesis of Symbolic Logic and Mysticism of the Ordinary

“Greek Chorus Sings...There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness.”

-- Sophocles (c.496 B.C.–406 B.C.). Antigone.

"The honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. It almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it."

--Ludwig Wittgenstein (Culture and Value,1998, p. 84).

My blogger name is “κύκλος” [pronounced; Key-close] which is a Greek word for "ring" or “cycle” as in the cycle of government forms--Aristocracy, Monarchy, Democracy, Tyranny--that Socrates explains in his dialogue, “Republic.” Or in my case, the cycle of writing, reflecting, rewriting, rethinking the question of spiritual experience.

This blog page will continue my philosophical studies from my late 1970’s master thesis on a theory of spiritual experience. Since that time, I collected notes, wrote essays, and rewrote them again last year, and now yet again. Each version has sharper focus and is more directly to the point. Although the master thesis focused on Thomas Kuhn’s concept of scientific paradigms, my search was really for a theory of spiritual experience. What is the logical status of theological propositions in relationship to scientific empiricist propositions, meta-logical propositions of symbolic logic, and ethical prescriptions?

I want to write in plain simple English and not assume the reader has extensive knowledge of philosophy. My purpose is to stimulate interest and save the reader time exploring this subject. Ernest Hemingway wrote the novel “The Old Man and the Sea” using the Iceberg Theory of writing that is a minimalist style. What if philosophy could be written as clearly, and simply as Old Man and the Sea? A thesis should be minimalist with airtight logic so that counter-arguments have no surface imperfections to hang on and slide off. This minimalism will require clear thinking with clear writing so one cannot hide behind complex technical terminology; although, fine definitions are critical for understanding philosophical problems. Yet, the greatest power of language is its ambiguity.

This discussion will draw from thinkers such as Edmond Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Pre-Socratic philosophers, Theologian Immanuel Kant, Theodore Adorno, Theologian Paul Tillich, Logician Ludwig Wittgenstein, Theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Sociologist Karl Mannheim. Many of the books authored by these philosophers are non-copyrighted with free, or archived pdf copies to borrow by other sites: I will link to them if available.

Critical Theorist Theodore W. Adorno writes about the telos of philosophy and I want to quote it at length since I have spent, in one way or another, studying this one passage for over ten years. I’ll never finish the book. This web page is a constellation of essays in exploring this search to say the unsayable:

“Though doubtful as ever, a confidence that philosophy can make it after all—that the concept can transcend the concept, the preparatory and concluding element, and can thus reach the nonconceptual—is one of philosophy’s inalienable features and part of the naïveté that ails it. Otherwise it must capitulate, and the human mind with it. We could not conceive the simplest operation; there would be no truth; emphatically, everything would be just nothing. But whatever truth the concepts cover beyond their abstract range can have no other stage than what the concepts suppress, disparage, and discard. The cognitive utopia would be to use concepts to unseal the nonconceptual with concepts, without making it their equal (Negative Dialectics, Theodor W. Adorno, 1966; p. 9-10; italics added)."(pdf.)

--Kyklos

“The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.” --Herbert Marcuse. 

"This experience that there is something we want to say...but which cannot be said ...is what philosophy as negative dialectic strives continually to reproduce."--Adorno:The Recovery of Experience (Roger Foster)