Against mystical and dialectical knowing

Analytic philosophy, in a manner similar to Russell's famous analysis of statements like "The present king of France is bald," can be used to show that claims of hypocrisy, as a form of argument tu quoque or by performative contradiction, fail. (I believe this has been argued by someone; I want to find where, and the argument, exactly.)

I believe the error is to treat the enunciative positions of the speaker (and listener) of propositions that are asserted as statements as if they are part of the statement.

In many dialectical arguments, a statement is contradicted if some aspect of the world in which the statement is asserted is (when represented or thematized and also asserted) contradictory to it. The paradox of the Cretan who says all Cretans are liars is a form of this.

The claim of Jesus in the Gospel that an accusation is wrongly made if the accuser is guilty of either the same fault himself, or of any other fault, must be a form of this also.

With this also fail, for similar reasons, all identity politics. And the political is not the personal or vice-versa, because things have no necessary relationship to that to which they are somehow related. This too is an error of dialectical thinking.

We must instead understand that what appears prima facie as relevant to some statement about the present situation or the world of which it is a part and to which it belongs, is only recognizable in the first instance as possibly relevantly related in this or that particular way. That possible relationship must be formulated as an hypothesis, which can be true or false, revealed as such only by experiential, experimental investigation. The meaningful totality of possibly relevant associated ideas or thoughts (statements) supplies only a set of elements for possible hypotheses and investigations, ideas for research. Granted, we all would like, often anyway, to understand completely the situation we are in at the present time and the world of which it is a part. (Whether there is but one world or many is perhaps a secondary consideration to this one, since it applies in either case; the relevance of possible statements surely derives from something like a project, which begins by ‘naming’ a situation, saying what is ‘the matter’, what it is that is here, now, for us.). What ‘God’ knows (already) may turn out to be true or false.

Perhaps the essence of the problem in dialectical arguments is that the dialectician credits a 'truth' that is larger than what is asserted, and drawn into it by a notion of implication. The truest truth, so to speak, is always the whole. It is the totality of possible statements that can be truly asserted at one moment. Truth is all of the properties of a situation or world inhabited by the speaker and addressee, and all of the statements that can be rightly asserted about it. Of course this excludes science as involving hypothetical statements that are true only of some part of reality; it excludes it in favor of a religious or spiritual notion of the situation or world of the speaker or thinker, in a manner that is essentially romanticist. The truth for the one who thinks this way is the totality of things an all-knowing 'God' knows about the state of affairs in the speaker's here and now. This truth may as well be Platonic reminiscence, since it consists entirely of statements that can be correctly asserted about the situation at the present time, with all its past embedded as memories, but excluding the new, the unexpected, the undiscovered, chance, and thus the event and time, and the Other along with it.

Mysticism, the knowledge of 'God' and world as totality that is achieved through contemplation, and this knowledge as a worship or 'spiritual' practice, rests on such grounds. Its excluded contrary is neither reason, or the mathematical and metaphysical thinking based on it, nor that idea of reason's excluded other; it is science and the experimental, excluded not by an idea of reason but an idea of totality. Nor is the problem the exclusion of individuals or the sensible; it is the exclusion of novelty, excluded by Being as meaningful totality, and thus also of the desire to sanctify or render 'meaningful' what is presented, what is. Plato rightly recognized that philosophy becomes the pursuit of death, a way of dying, when it has the closure given it by the identification of truth with Being understood as what is and was, and so as reminiscence.