Ecstasy (philosophy)


Ecstasy is a term used in ancient Greek, Christian and existential philosophy. The different traditions using the concept have radically different perspectives.

Ancient Greece

According to Plotinus, ecstasy is the culmination of human possibility. He contrasted emanation from the One—on the one hand—with ecstasy or reversion back to the One—on the other.
This is a form of ecstasy described as the vision of, or union with, some otherworldly entity —a form of ecstasy that pertains to an individual trancelike experience of the sacred or of God.

Christian mysticism

Among the Christian mystics, Bernard of Clairvaux, Meister Eckhart and Teresa of Ávila had mystical experiences of ecstasy, or talked about ecstatic visions of God.

Existentialism

The term is used in existentialism usually to mean "outside-itself". One's consciousness, for example, is not self-enclosed, as one can be conscious of an Other person, who falls well outside one's own self. In a sense consciousness is usually, "outside itself," in that its object is not itself. This is in contrast to the term which means from "standing-within-oneself" which relates to contemplation from the perspective of a speculator.
This understanding of enstasis gives way to the example of the use of the "ecstasy" as that one can be "outside of oneself" with time. In temporalizing, each of the following: the past, the future and the present are the "outside of itself" of each other. The term ecstasy has been used in this sense by Martin Heidegger who, in his Being and Time of 1927, argued that our being-in-the-world is usually focused toward some person, task, or the past. Telling someone to "remain in the present" could then be self-contradictory, if the present only emerged as the "outside itself" of future possibilities and past facts.
Emmanuel Levinas disagreed with Heidegger's position regarding ecstasy and existential temporality from the perspective of the experience of insomnia. Levinas talked of the Other in terms of 'insomnia' and 'wakefulness'. He emphasized the absolute otherness of the Other and established a social relationship between the Other and one's self. Furthermore, he asserted that ecstasy, or exteriority toward the Other, forever remains beyond any attempt at full capture; this otherness is interminable or infinite. This "infiniteness" of the Other would allow Levinas to derive other aspects of philosophy as secondary to this ethic. Levinas writes: