embodiment in mystical literature Based on Marloponty's phenomenology

Document Type : Original Article

Author
Rasool Kamali Dolat Abadi
Faculty member at Sepehr Higher Education Institute of Isfahan and doctoral student in Wisdom of Religious Arts at the University of Religions and Denominations of Qom.
Abstract
According to Merleau-Ponty, without the body, there is no being-in-the-world and no perception of objects and their subjects. Rejecting the "transcendental and disembodied subject" in his philosophy, Merleau-Ponty proposes a subject that is inseparable from the body: the flesh-subject (Flesh). Thus, perception is the manifestation of meaning or an act through the body, and the perceptual experience of each individual—as something embodied, pre-reflective, pre-conscious, real, and physical, and hence as "body-consciousness"—reveals obscure states of existence. States that even encompass the realms of imagination, emotion and feeling, inner understanding, creativity, and artistic-literary creation.
Based on this perspective, mystical experiences are regarded as intertwined with the body, and this does not imply a conflict between the origin of the mystical world and the world of tradition: the mystic, as an embodied subject, through intentionality (Intention)—that is, orientation and directedness toward perceptible phenomena and being affected by them—establishes a common world between tradition and the body, so that the mystical subject may emerge for him through an embodied experience and manifest itself in his literary work during the creative process. In other words, the lived world of the artist-mystic is the very world and tradition, but his work reveals the origin of tradition as it appears to the flesh-subject.
This article, while examining Merleau-Ponty's views on the four subjects of the subject, the world, the other, and God, seeks to employ his phenomenological method—after critiquing and overcoming his atheistic attitude—to describe and explain the "process of the mystic's embodied experience and consciousness of the subject of tradition (knowledge and worship of the Truth) and its manifestation in mystical literature."
Keywords
Embodiment
Marloponty
mystical literature
Phenomenology

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