This course is concerned with “mysticism,” those varieties of experience, often counted as religious, that are felt and held to be extraordinary and, therefore, revealing of “truths” in the human condition and the nature of reality. By engaging with works of art—principally poetic and other literary works, but also painting and objets d’art executed in other media—we will query how it is that human beings are: (1) capable of taking in and developing an understanding of what it is one experiences in life, (2) inclined to make judgments about the relative value of some experiences over others, and (3) able to develop a sense of the meaning of human life on the basis of experience, whether that meaning is related to practical aims in life (such as a successful career) or the “higher” meanings of life, such as the nature of reality, the existence of divine being(s), and like concerns. The overall aim of this course is to query a particular and special kind of experience in order to gain a better understanding of human experience in general, also the ways in which experience and ideas are mutually formed and how they direct us to live life in certain ways and in preference to others.
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