modernity and the mystical 51lation between science and religion. I’d like here to frame our discussion of
that relation by focusing on the categories of the “modern” and the “mystical,”
and I choose this focus because it is perhaps the mystical dimension of reli-
gious thought and experience that is most often and almost automatically as-
sumed to exclude religion from the rationality and practice of a truly modern
science or technology. I will, of course, want to challenge such an assumption,
and I will do so on the basis of my suspicion that we are in the course of
witnessing not only a period of extraordinary technoscientific change but also
a reemergence of something resembling or resonating with the mystical in just
those rationalized, technoscientific contexts that have long been thought by
scholars and theorists to exclude any trace of the mystical from our modern
experience. As I’ll suggest, such a reemergence or resonance of the mystical
in the modern should leave us vigilant to the senses in which technological
science today, like the history of mystical religion, can render the “human”
fundamentally unstable—and hence leave it irreducibly open—both as a cat-
egory of thought and as a form of “experience.”
Modernity and the Mystical at Odds: “Disenchanted” Rationality
and the Will to MasteryThe common assumption that modernity stands at odds with the mystical goes
back in decisive ways, of course, to those Enlightenment traditions according
to which the human subject would achieve his freedom—which here means
his individual autonomy or self-determination—through the exercise of a ra-
tionality or science that yields a full and accurate understanding of the natural
and social worlds we inhabit. To comprehend the rational order and operation
of our natural and social worlds is, from this perspective, to acquire the means
to manipulate or master those worlds.
Central to this search for practical control by means of rational compre-
hension would be the ongoing attempt to eliminate from our relation to reality
any form of “ignorance” or “unknowing.” The best scientists are, indeed, those
who can most thoroughly and most precisely define and measure the bound-
aries of their ignorance—which they do, of course, not at all in the hope of
reaching the kinds of “mystical unknowing” or “learned ignorance” sought
and cultivated by mystics throughout the history of religions but rather in the
hope of overcoming their ignorance by subjecting all of the hitherto unknown
to the power and reach of a purely rational and purely human comprehension.
By contrast to those mystical traditions that one might trace in the Christian
world, for example, from Pseudo-Dionysius (ca. 500) to Nicholas of Cusa
(1401–1464) and beyond, the celebration or cultivation of “unknowing” or “ig-
norance” as a good and a goal in itself simply does not belong to the attitude
that defines modern scientific approaches to reality—and at this level, despite