Apophatic?
Years ago, in the early days of the internet, I was a lurker on, and occasional contributor to, various forums (fora?) related to martial arts and Daoism. On one Daoist forum, long since inactive, there was a frequent poster named Raymond who always had a very particular take on one of the most important Daoist texts, the Zhuangzi (also written Chuang-tsu). At the time, the Zhuangzi was my favorite Daoist text, and had been from undergraduate school, when I did a translation project on one of the chapters for a Chinese class, all the way through graduate school, where I continued to study classical Chinese. I was pretty familiar with the most popular translations, each with its own way of describing the significance of the text, and it was always interesting to read Raymond’s take on it. His was different; very personal, but also compelling in a way that was different from most interpretations.
Being a recent refugee from academia, I started off somewhat skeptical of his approach, but as he continued to post and interact with everyone on the forum, his earnestness and willingness to engage with people started to grow on me. And then, at one point, he announced that he had written a book explaining his particular take on Zhuangzi’s approach to mystical practice - In Love With Everything. So I ordered it.
In Love With Everything
The first time I read it, it struck me as weird, almost painfully personal despite not including more than a small amount of autobiographical information, but very well-written, and possibly profound. But I didn’t quite know what to make of it. He described his approach as “Apophatic Mysticism,” which was a term that I had not heard much before reading the book. Doing a little research, I learned that the word comes from Greek and refers to knowledge, often in a religious or mystical sense, gained through negation, as opposed to knowledge gained through affirmation. As an approach to spiritual practice, the seeds of it were present in the pre-Socratic philosphers, and the approach became more developed as time went on, eventually influencing aspects of not only Greek philosophy but also Christianity, Islam and Judaism. It also parallels an approach to the divine in the Vedantic tradition of India, characterized by the famous phrase “neti, neti,” meaning something like “not this, not that,” that is, achieving mystical unity with the divine through negating all the things it is not. In the twentieth century, it was expressed in the philosophy of the Richard Rose in terms of becoming a reverse vector; he pointed out that since we don’t know what the truth is when we start searching, we must “back away from untruth.”
Raymond’s particular way of using the term “apophatic mysticism” is best illustrated with some quotes from the book:
We might describe mysticism as an uncannily responsive dynamic whose presence can become all-pervasive; a phenomenon by which we can continually establish harmony with whatever comes our way and, thereby, profoundly increase our enjoyment of life.
Apophatic mysticism is the uncanny state of psychic integration resulting from the suspension of all mental estimates of the source, identity, meaning, purpose, or value in the world of phenomena.
Apophaticism implies giving up guarantees, for guarantees are incompatible with the openness apophaticism requires . . . To capture what we are aiming for, we have to let go of any guarantee that it will be found.
The apophatic mystic does not care about what is true . . . she is only concerned with what is mystically effective.
Zhuangzi As Apophatic Mystic
More specifically in terms of the text of the Zhuangzi, here is a passage where he breaks down a particular Chinese phrase from the text in a way that, while probably not impressive to scholars of classical Chinese, was nonetheless something that I found very compelling:
清靜為天下正 Clarity and Tranquility cause things to fall into place.
清 To obtain a clear and open view, one must eliminate anything which is preventing a lucid vision of the entire perceptual field.
靜 Clarity allows me to see and perhaps correct misperceptions. With those continually corrected as needed, I no longer have to spend time and energy defending inconsistencies, which is a subconscious waste of energy that is felt as agitation. Clarification resolves conscious and unconscious contradictions that previously agitated me, and I achieve tranquility.
When the surface and depths of the mind are quiet, the deep intuitive processes may detect and take advantage of the many opportunities to be found in the perceptual field. With clarity and tranquility, coincidences in the field of perception become nearly continually evident, as if by magic.
為天下正 The mystic has made no prior plan or agenda for what he might like to happen . . . The mystic's power is neither directive nor sovereign; it is catalytic and collaborative.
As I kept rereading Raymond’s book off and on over the years, playing with his approach in my own various meditative and contemplative practices, his basic ideas about what mysticism is, and how and why to practice it, started to make more sense as I not only experimented with them on a personal, perceptual level, but also continually cross-referenced them with other approaches that were very meaningful to me. Including, eventually, Stoicism.
Josh Discovers Stoicism
When I first started to learn about Stoic philosophy, from the ‘Stoic Week Handbook’ from 2013, it was exciting and engaging in a way that was different from other philosophies I had studied and practiced. After three decades spent immersing myself to varying degrees in some of the major East and South Asian contemplative and philosophical traditions, especially enjoying the more abstract and mystical aspects of them, Stoicism was like a splash of cold, practical water in the face. It pointed out what our main problems are in very direct and down to earth terms that spoke directly to me, and offered solutions that were not only rational and logical, but which had also stood the test of time, as evidenced by the fact that some of the most important aspects of modern psychotherapy, such as Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (and its various derivatives) are based explicitly on Stoic ideas and practices. And as a philosophy that informed the fundamental basis of the Western intellectual and cultural tradition, the basic ideas were already a part of the language and education I had grown up with, without me even knowing it, so there were fewer cultural and linguistic layers that needed to be translated in order to be understood.
A Problem Arises
As I started to delve deeper and deeper into Stoic philosophy, graduating from reading books and web pages about it, to reading the Big Three authors directly (Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca), to reading more in-depth academic works analyzing those authors, I started to notice a problem that needed solving. The problem being that Stoic philosophy is based in large part on a teleological cosmology, where the universe runs according to Universal Reason, meaning that everything in it has a purpose and reason for being the way it is. The Stoics also often mention God (meaning Zeus) as a being who designs the world and imbues the things in it with purpose. The Stoic conception of God, while being very different from the Judeo-Christian concept of God, still did not resonate with my fundamentally naturalistic and scientific point of view of how the universe works. The rest of Stoicism, however, made so much sense that I needed to figure out where the problem was, to what degree the aspects of Stoic philosophy that resonated with me were actually dependent on its underlying cosmology, and to what degree the ideas still made sense without it.
Part of the solution involved hints found in the Stoic texts themselves, particularly in Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, when they reference the intellectual rivalry between the Stoics and the Epicureans. I won’t go into all the details here, as there are plenty of places on the Web where you can read about it (like here). The gist of it is that both philosophies attempt to provide a way to live a happy life, starting from very different assumptions about how the world works (which is what is called physics in classical philosophy), and ending up with very different suggestions about how to act in the world in order to be happy. In many ways, Epicurean physics are more closely aligned with modern physics (if we ignore quantum mechanics) - the universe is composed of atoms that are bouncing off each other, producing all phenomena through random interactions without meaning or purpose, especially not from any supernatural source. This was much closer to my own assumptions about the world, yet the philosophy that arose from it was considered completely wrong by most Stoics. Now what?
Maybe Not Really A Problem
It turns out that despite the rivalry, important Stoic thinkers like Seneca and Aurelius were perfectly fine with aspects of Epicurean philosophy. Seneca notes multiple times in his letters how Epicurus was right about a number of things, even going so far as to promote emulating certain Epicurean practices. But that wasn’t really enough to defuse the tension between the Stoic and Epicurean (and, by extension, my own) view of the world. Marcus Aurelius, however, points out that on a practical level, it actually doesn’t matter whether or not your fate is determined by Divine Providence or random atoms smashing against each other - you still have to figure out how to act, right now, and your capacity to make that decision right now is all that matters.
Reading that idea from Aurelius was the first thing that started to solve that puzzle, by suggesting that if you want to be happy, understanding the logic behind thinking and acting in certain ways is the determining factor, not your concept of how the world actually works. So it started to become obvious that the fundamental logic of a philosophy like Stoicism, which explains how certain attitudes and actions promote happiness, can be largely independent of its physics.
Interestingly, after coming to this conclusion, I discovered that I was not the first person who felt like they had to wrestle with this topic. It turns out that the American philosopher Lawrence Becker wrote A New Stoicism, a book that interprets Stoicism, according to the blurb, “without the metaphysical and psychological assumptions that modern philosophy and science have abandoned.” I will probably post more on it later after I’ve had a chance to digest it.
Back To Apophaticism
While working through these ideas, it started to become obvious that the approach to Stoicism that I was being drawn to was fundamentally apophatic, in the sense that Raymond’s work was describing. It was pointing to a Stoicism that not only had no teleological, Divinely-designed cosmology, but actually functioned best while holding no certainty about how the world actually works or what the world actually means. And in suspending those assumptions and certainties, it becomes a Stoicism that has more room for the potential for mystical experience that Marcus Aurelius hints at occasionally. It becomes a Stoicism where the moment to moment acceptance of whatever reality wants to present to you is not just a begrudgingly accepted practical necessity, or, as Aurelius points out, treated like you are throwing garbage on a bonfire to make the flames fan even higher. It becomes a Stoicism where the momentary suspension of judgements about events is itself the doorway to the possibility of eudaemonia, the Stoic state of well-being.