Clearing Up Some Misconceptions About Mysticism

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West! This is Philosophize This!

A lot of people believe that an important part of our thinking is to be able to have freedom of the will; to be able to will yourself onto situations whenever you choose to.

But is it also just as important for a person to have freedom from the will?

Last time we talked about Martin Heidegger, and a question like this is exactly the sort of thing he asked all throughout his later work. After Being and Time. After Dasein. After showing the limitations of only framing things in terms of subjects and objects, willing ourselves onto reality—he moves on to a very interesting stage of his philosophy where the main thing that he wants to explore in his work is what he calls “releasement” or “letting-be.”

See to Heidegger: if the world around us is made up of a bunch of people that have a technological enframing of everything—where every thing and every one is just an object that we need to will ourselves onto, structure, manipulate, and optimize—and if by doing that it leads to a world where we’re constantly seeing everything in terms of how to manipulate it to produce the most efficient outcome, then what would happen if someone decided there was more to life than doing that all the time?

What if someone didn’t buy the whole sales pitch that you’re a bad person if you aren’t constantly trying to educate yourself about the problems of seven and a half billion people? What if there’s more to what we are than constantly trying to save the world all the time through rational utilitarianism?

What if somebody instead decided to focus on trying to understand the nature of their own being better—putting in the work to maybe try to uncover a far more meaningful, richer, fuller experience of what it is to even exist?

Well, first of all: real question. Should this person have to apologize for spending their time in this way?

In other words, is this just a poorly disguised move of a selfish person who’s ignoring all of the really important work we have to do of projecting ourselves onto the world and fixing it?

Or could this more meaningful connection with the world be something that we’re sadly missing in the modern world—something people have not only forgotten as they spiritually