Veridical Hallucinations and Circumstantial Evidence

Abstract

Abstract This section asks whether such an alliance between philosophy and mysticism is plausible. It begins by looking at the philosophical tendency to demarcate what is knowledge and what is (mystical) nonsense as a peculiar form of “view from nowhere”—a self-imposed exile that makes philosophy ghostly, a part of the whole that wishes to think (of itself as) the whole, a de-parted part. This is what François Laruelle calls the “unitary illusion” of philosophy, and this allows us to connect Laruelle’s notion of “ordinary mysticism” (which has no such illusions of unity) with our own idea of the supernormal. Alongside a summary of this book’s ideas, this chapter considers the possibility that it may have overreached itself in combining the ideas of Mina and Henri Bergson, or that the theory of the supernormal is less an answer to a problem than a new name for a problem that helps to dissolve it.