Mind, Matter and the Danger of Subjectivism

Learning - Mysticism - Relationship to the material world

This essay was originally published in German over at Fragmente. I will post English translations of a selection of my German essays here.

It has often been claimed that the material world plays a subordinate role and must take a back seat — behind mind and spirit, or even behind the supernatural world.

However, this move carries dangers since it threatens to steer the gaze inwards a little too much. Thus, Goethe rightly remarked that "Know thyself" is often no good advice: rather, he argued, we urgently need to look into the mirror that other people hold up to us. The trick here is to distinguish between those individuals who are well-disposed toward us and who themselves are far along in their development, and those who are pursuing their own destructive agenda and threaten to draw us into their downward spiral.

No, withdrawing into our own minds is not a solution and quickly leads to irrationality and subjectivism.

The mystic at least has the advantage here of acknowledging a divine or spiritual world and thereby presupposing an external truth to which he has access through introspection. Indeed, if this access is genuine, contact with the higher world prevents the arbitrariness of pure subjectivism. However, there is a risk of self-deception: then the mystical access to the higher world becomes a merely theoretical argument for rejecting the inconvenient truth as it is reflected to us from the outside.