The Mystical is Rational
Mysticism and Philosophy are means by which we express contact with the Absolute, and although the two traditions may not seem commensurable, Hegel claims his own philosophy is a type of mysticism.
Christian mysticism is the element of Christian belief and practice that concerns the direct and transformative presence of God. The adjective 'mystical' means 'hidden' in Greek and refers to 'secret' realities of beliefs, rituals and practices, or the mystical meaning of the Bible itself, i.e. the inner message about attaining, knowing, or experiencing God. Mystical life is essentially a process, or a journey to God, not just a moment or brief state of mystical union. Instead, the mystic's journey consists mostly of preparation for God's intervention in one's life.
This mystical union, could be an experience of a perfect harmony of becoming in an ecstatic state. For many mystics in history however, there have been other means by which one speaks of special contact with God, such as contemplation, vision, deification, birthing, unending desire and so on. Therefore, to reduce mystical experiences to a simple fusion, dissipation, absorption in or with God or Oneness, or an archaic pre-modern/ancient illusion that entails a regression or "return" to the inorganic as Freud said about the"nirvana principle" doesn't suffice today.
In the seminar on feminine sexuality, Lacan says:
"What was tried at the end of the last century, at the time of Freud, by all kinds of worthy people in the circle of Charcot and the rest, was an attempt to reduce the mystical to questions of fucking. If you look carefully, that is not what it is all about. Might not this jouissance which one experiences and knows nothing of, be that which puts us on the path of ex-istence? And why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as supported by feminine jouissance?" - Jacques Lacan, Seminar on Feminine Sexuality
The question whether feminine, or Other jouissance is the means by which one can come into contact with God is beyond the scope of this article. The one thing that will be said about it is that when one speaks of feminine jouissance, one should keep in mind that nothing can possibly be said about it, nothing that does not reduce it to a relation to the phallus.
Similarly to feminine jouissance, mystical experiences are generally thought of as ultimately not reducible to words or representation, but we should attempt conceptualising them anyway since it is at the same time language itself that creates the standard to which those words fail to express the experience, as mysticism tries to do. The fact that this standard can be proven to be mutable (take the inadequacy of Kantian epistemology that has given rise to all post-kantian philosophy), means that we cannot rely on positing an ever elusive thing-in-itself that would provide the eternal exception to the universality of the categories of the Understanding. This exception, this noumenon, is an insufficient excuse that motivates one to shirk from Truth, since the encounter with it has something traumatic about it.
Psychedelic substances taken in the proper sacred space (one which will be able to take up and not stimulate one to stay stuck with bad infinity) are one of the means to apprehend and experience the mystical core of one's own notionally actual self-relation. It is like one will find in the mystics, an encounter or opening up of finitude to infinity, and the coming down of infinity into finitude, the experience takes place at the reverberating core of the subject, at its oscillations and as the indivisible division, or intersection of thought and being. Hence, it is reminiscent of what Bernard Mcginn said about Eckhart's mysticism:
"In perfect self-surrender, God's self-knowing becomes our self-knowing; or better, since there is no distinction in the one ground, there is only a single essential self-knowing." - Source
A Scientist of Spirit, thrown into his own Otherness, can, in the mystical experience, learn about the nature of God, sexual difference, the masculine ego and the feminine soul, and the different psychical registers through which one mediates the self, i.e. imaginary-symbolic-real. These registers, as well as the three narrative-forms (mythos-logos-pathos), here fall into themselves and into each other. One is lodged within a perfect becoming where blessedness is at once absolute negativity and the perfection of division is One. Other and I are self-same; through and as Absolute Difference.
“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” - Meister Eckhart
Alain Badiou has expounded his own theory on the relation between mysticism and philosophy. It is of interest here as it provides a starting point to understand Hegel's speculative philosophy as a form of scientific mysticism. In one of his lectures, Alain says:
"Philosophy is not mysticism. Mysticism is the idea that the movement from inside nihilism to infinite affirmation is the same experience. The same experience which goes across nihilism and to infinity itself. [...] It's not philosophy, but is the same movement as philosophy but as pure experience, outside language, outside rational transmission. A pure experience of the infinite inside nothingness" - Alain Badiou, Mysticism and Philosophy (2010).
He goes on to describe how, unlike nihilism and positivism, mysticism is definitely not an enemy of philosophy. According to Badiou, they're even the same kind of process, but differ in their form. Philosophy, according to him requires a labour, patience, and systematisation that is not 'mystical'. For Badiou, the mystical ceases to be rational. Along with Hegel, I believe this isn't the case, or at the very least not the full story, it only happens to be so if one reduces the rational to the law of non-contradiction. Hegel's philosophy does not fit in as either mysticism or philosophy as Badiou has described them, and the solution is that we either posit Hegel's philosophy as the unity of both and/or a difference between both. The systematical manner by which Hegel conceptualises being within mystical preparation and experience (,e.g. the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic) are therefore not a negation of mysticism but it's being taken up into a sort of distillation where the purity of the Notion, the exercising of explication is a high level form of mystical experience, or spiritual practice. The evidence for this is that the bifurcation that Badiou's claim rests upon, namely that mysticism doesn't separate the nihilism (nothingness of negation) from the affirmation, whereas philosophy in its systematisation does, does not apply to Hegel's philosophy, for he writes:
"By anguish is expressed that which we know as the absolute negativity — that is the self-conscious, self-experienced, the self-relating negativity which is therefore absolute affirmation." - Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Section One.
For Hegel, speculative philosophy is the same thing as that which was formerly understood as 'mystical' by religious consciousness, albeit in a scientific form, in line with an objective method and system, inclusive of the subject. Colloquially, one can understand the mystical to be synonymous with the mysterious and incomprehensible, and as such inconceivable. Depending on one's historical education, this could be regarded as something genuine and true, perhaps even the sole truth, or by others as superstition, deception and archaic naivete.
“As regards the significance of the speculative, it bears mentioning here that the same thing is to be understood by it as formerly used to be called the mystical, especially when referring to religious consciousness and its content.” - Hegel, Encyclopedic Logic.
For Hegel, the mystical is mysterious for the Understanding, because abstract self-identity is its principle. The mystical taken as synonymous with the speculative is however the concrete unity of those determinations that count as true for the understanding only in their separation and opposition. In other words, what is concretely comprehended, inclusive of the inseparability of its oppositional determination in its Notion, is barred from the Understanding since it can only grasp these determinations in their separation and opposition. A trap one can fall into while comprehending truth as mystical/speculative is to be content with calling it mysterious or unsymbolizable and leaving it at. This is another way one traps oneself within the Understanding, in a mode of thinking that deems itself to be merely able to occupy itself with positing abstract identities, thinking about thinking as a standpoint unable to be a still-point and at peace with the loss of substance in the abyss of spiritual reflections that find unity or even direct equation in oppositional determinations. A thinking based on the Understanding, however 'mystical' it might think itself to be, attempts to renounce itself in order to attain to what it understands to be an imageistic, mystical truth. Therefore it holds on to its own already established determinations and refuses to trust itself to be able to take up the contact with God as a truthful self-encounter, in whatever form it comes up. The firmness to which one holds on in the Understanding is constantly sublating itself and changing over into its opposite, but unlike for Reason, which has this truth as its inner movement, the Understanding determines itself in opposition, as it does not take responsibility for Spirit's self-sublating.
To be mystical, or speculative, means going beyond the Understanding and is therefore only regarded to be absolutely inaccessible and incomprehensible insofar as one has not triumphed over the finitude of Other-imposed limitations through a holy yes-saying to the non-all of one's self-experience. Everything concretely rational is therefore mystical.
Hegel's speculative philosophy, hinges on grasping substance as subject, it relies on a type of Reason that goes beyond the faculty of the Understanding which only grasps one-sided abstract self-identity. Speculative philosophy helps one to not be led astray in an attachment to simple, undivided Oneness, intuited in (mystical) experience. Instead, what this philosophy helps us to do, is to emphasize and affirm the actuality of division, alienation and absence of this One as the One's own self-becoming. Since Hegel's Reason is beyond the law of non-contradiction, it can comprehend and affirm determinations in a manner that is speculative, i.e. it is mystical in a properly scientific sense.