Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-1983

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

Philosophy

Major Professor

Charles H. Reynolds

Committee Members

Glenn Graber. Rem Edwards

Abstract

The intent of the author of this thesis is to endeavor to explore possible definitive characteristics of the experience of transcendental consciousness and to explicate about this experiencing in rationally credible terms via methodologies of phenomenological hermeneutics and through recognition of the often tacit centrality of this dimension of experiencing to all the concerns of Philosophy and Religion. The author hopes hereby to provide some possible directions for the development of an ontology of transcendence. It is the author's contention that this can best be done by focusing on the antithesis of transcendence, or the modalities of alienation and the existential facticities which give rise to such modalities. In the activity of such focus we are struck by the requisite need of humankind for modes of transcendental experiencing and we may come to disclose the sense in which it is an existential possibility.

The author's concern is to explore the potentials of consciousness in disconnection from absorption in the more peripheral, tangential content of philosophical and theological polemics. There is an exigent need for a philosophia which can present a coherent map of consciousness which is a definitive ontology of transcendental experience which somehow integrates the nexus of divergent philosophical concerns in the unifying principle of the factical reality of such experiencing. In other words, the urgent task to which we address ourselves here is the demystification of mysticism. We do not mean by this, the eradication of "mystery" from the mystical dimension. Mystery is and always will be the very character of this dimension. The intent is to clarify the accessibility of this dimension to all concerned with it and to attempt to describe the factors which may lead to its discovery.

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