Howard L. Parsons on mysticism revisited

In my two previous posts on Parsons, I commented, inter alia, on his essay essay "Theories of Knowledge: A Dialectical, Historical Critique", with some complimentary and non-complimentary remarks. Revisiting it, I want to emphasize that this essay is unique and invaluable.

It's an example of how much philosophy arrives in the public sphere DOA, while academic philosophy, like the intellectual world at large, rolls on addicted to familiarity and fashion. I don't participate in the star system in philosophy any more than in any other area. My goal has been to rescue noteworthy work from oblivion. Parsons belonged to a particular tradition in Marxism too heavily indebted to CP/Soviet-style Marxism: these people produced some good work even though they took questionable positions in other instances.  And the more "worldly" philosophers get now, the more they lose perspective: the merger of popular culture and intellectual culture demonstrates how thoroughly the culture industry saturates the souls of people in our time.  But back to Parsons.

Of particular interest in this essay is Parsons' treatment of mysticism, especially its psychophysical aspects.  Parsons makes a number of interesting statements, including this one:

As a theory of knowledge and of reality, mysticism is false. It absolutizes a moment in man's interaction with the world—the sense of qualitative unity. It statically identifies that moment with reality and with knowledge. It destroys the distinction between man and the world and obliterates the dialectic between them. Mysticism is the practice and ideology of men bent on escape from their conflicts and struggles in the real world. It is a flight of the attention from continuous intercourse with things, events, and people to concentration on a single quality or experience. It is a flight of fantasy insofar as it elaborates a theory in defense of this flight in practice. In the Western Christian Church heretical movements have often been associated with mysticism because it represented a counter‑movement against abstract and verbal orthodoxy. But it remained an alienated protest against the ruling form of alienation, a religious answer to a religious mistake. That mistake, especially in Western supernaturalism but also in various forms and mysticism, is the division and falsification of reality in thought. Things and events are interpreted as static, fixed, and isolated from one another, with no real interpenetration, conflict, development, or qualitative change. Such an interpretation serves the interest of the ruling class, which wishes to keep things and classes as they are, and to avoid conflict, change, and development into a new kind of class society or into a classless society. Mysticism perpetuates this mistake by emphasis on an experience which presumes to absorb and transform (aufheben) all parts and conflicts into a final and unified whole. But the mistake of mysticism is that while the world is felt to be unified, it goes on, in separated processes that interact and change without ceasing, outside the skin of the mystic.

Howard L. Parsons: East meets West (2): Naturalizing the religious impulse

I have uploaded three excerpts from this book I started to review in a previous post:

Parsons, Howard L. Man East and West: Essays in East-West Philosophy. Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1975. xi, 211 pp. (Philosophical Currents; v. 8)

Howard L. Parsons on the Role of the Philosopher

This is Parsons' general prescription for the philosopher's task and not specifically tied to the theme of the book.

Howard L. Parsons on Naturalist vs. Supernationalist Perspectives on Value

Parsons is skeptical both of Barth's neo-orthodoxy and Tillich's liberal theological palaver about 'being'. We should seek the natural basis of human dependencies instead of railing against modern man and hyping his dependence on a transcendental source. Progress means that theology tends to become anthropology. Parsons seeks to preserve some of the traditional concerns, but with an updated, naturalistic world view. This is an example of how he typically expresses himself:

Yet a full anthropology, which sees man in society, history, and nature, in the full stretch of space and time, might bring modern humanism to affirm, in a new and qualified way, some of the assertions of ancient religion.

While I've seen much worse in my time, I find this sort of formulation conceptually muddled. Parsons also evinces an excessively deferential attitude toward sacred figures and what others call the great spiritual teachers. On the plus side, Parsons sees the human symbolizing capacity as having from the beginning taken a wrong turn into superstition. Parsons also criticizes Sartre's mournful nostalgia for the outmoded supernaturalist position.

Howard L. Parsons on Naturalism & Religion: Conclusion

Parsons sums up his position in the final pages of the book. Parsons is mostly on track, but I object to his characteristic formulations, e.g.:

Is it possible to combine the best of the religious perspective with the power of scientific knowledge and control now in our hands? It is not only possible; it is necessary, if we are to be saved from a science determined by men who do not understand or appreciate the evolutionary role of man in nature and his responsibility toward it, and from religions that do not understand and even repudiate science. The first would give us man divorced from nature and from values grounded in nature; the second, values divorced from man and nature. In both cases, values become arbitrary and, in the event of conflict, subject to settlement by capricious preference and arbitrary power.

 In his essay "Theories of Knowledge: A Dialectical, Historical Critique" Parsons evinces an awareness of the interplay between positivist and irrationalist tendencies in the ideological life of bourgeois society. However, he tries too hard to have it both ways, affirming modernity and criticizing tradition while fudging his analysis of the allegedly admirable facets and impulses of pre-modernity. There is both sophistication and epistemological repression going on here, which I suspect is related to his brand of Marxism with its lack of recognition of the ineluctable impossibility of socialism in rapidly modernizing peasant societies.

Howard L. Parsons: East meets West = New Age + Stalinism (1)

The 20th century was replete with the literature of the meeting of the East and West, in respectable philosophical literature, in pop philosophy, New Age thought, and popular culture. As the ideological trend of postmodernism gained ascendancy in the 1980s, the older literature gave way to a whole new basis for combining the most obscurantist currents in Western and Asian thought. Under the postmodern dispensation, it is easy to forget what the older literature looked like.

The entire East-West paradigm formed the basis for the suppression of Marxism as an analytical approach, and Marxism gave the lie to the ahistorical metaphysics underlying the concepts of East and West. While individuals might embrace elements of both, disciplined intellectual inquiry never did so. As bad an influence as Soviet Marxism was, it was not ethnocentric in limiting its purview to Western philosophy. Marxism has a long history of engagement with Indian and Chinese philosophy, for example, and from an entirely different perspective than East-meets-West literature.

I have always been averse to Marxist philosophers who were part of or gravitated to the Soviet camp. In the 1970s and 1980s the Amsterdam publisher B.R. Grüner was a major outlet for their writings. Examination of their output reveals both highs and abysmal lows. Over the years I largely passed by the American philosopher Howard L. Parsons, both in print and in person. Recently, however, picking up one of those old Grüner volumes I had perused several times before, I found something by Parsons I found worthwhile:

"Theories of Knowledge: A Dialectical, Historical Critique" by Howard L. Parsons

I wrote the following on 23 October:

I was surprised to find Berkeley getting credit for something, not to say that pleases me much, but Parsons is dealing with philosophical reactions to the inadequacies of contemporaneous thought, not just for the obscurantism of the alternatives. I find especially interesting his take on mysticism, which he probably polished in his other writings on Eastern philosophies (e.g. Man East and West), which I've passed over until now, but now I think I'll return to them. The weaknesses of bootlickers of the USSR are all too evident to me (and I used to see several of them in action in person), but this essay showed that in certain respects, some of them do have something to offer. B.R. Grüner published all these people, and their offerings were mighty uneven, but still there is some salvageable material. I should also say that material like this provides a perspective that the American atheist/humanist movement has entirely excluded, and which Marxist literature such as this implicitly criticizes.

Then I came across this book, which had been lying about for years, unread:

Parsons, Howard L. Man East and West: Essays in East-West Philosophy. Amsterdam: B.R.Grüner, 1975. xi, 211 pp. (Philosophical Currents; v. 8)

While this took me back in time, I don't recall reading anything on this theme quite like this book. Neither New Age literature nor various Marxist analyses of religion produced this sort of thing in my experience. It reads like a fusion of historical materialism and metaphysical typology, or Stalinism and New Age.

Actually, Parsons' writing style is quite vivid, and this is a plus. There are a number of oddities in the book, though. For example, Parsons deploys Sheldon's physiognomic typology (ectomorph-mesomorph-endomorph, certebrotic-somatotonic-viscerotonic), a peculiar scheme I've not seen promoted since the days of Aldous Huxley. Mao is alleged to possession feminine facial features. Socialism is victorious in the East, which presumably is a plus for the Eastern mindset.

Parsons is not an unqualified partisan of Eastern philosophy; his perspective is congruent with the popular notion of the complementarity of East and West, akin to that of female and male, that both supply qualities the other lacks. Unlike New Agers or other advocates of East-Meets-West, Parsons is critical of the authoritarian, hierarchical, feudal social institutional and ideological dimension of Eastern thought. This deficiency is incorporated into his complementarity model. In other ways, Parsons fails to be critical of the metaphysical conceptions of Indian and Chinese thought he incorporates into his framework.

Parsons provides some detailed analyses of the development of Indian religion and Chinese thought. Oddly, he relates Lao Tzu to social class and revolution (95-97), in contrast to the patriarchal, hierarchical disposition of Confucianism. Incredibly, Parsons relates Sheldon's body typology to differentials between Eastern and Western civilizations (98). (Mesomorphy is Western?) The book is like this, painting a vivid picture in which sociohistorical analysis is fused with pseudoscience and metaphysical fragments.