Mistica ruvida. L’esteriorità oikologica e Stanislas Breton

Starting with Wittgenstein’s challenge: «We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!», the aim of this article is to propose a path towards Stanislas Breton’s proposal about mysticism that we will define as “rough”. By this adjective, we will point out that the French philosopher’s proposal about mysticism takes this experience out of the personal experience of the mysticism in order to seek a “rough ground” that offers mysticism itself the friction necessary for it to be a way of dwelling, and thus one of the possible ways in which what will be called “oikology” is declined. And if topology is a thought that under-stands every dimension of existence in the light of place and that finds its centre of gravity in place before temporality, an oikological thought will not merely speak of place but of the way one is in the place understood as oikos, dwelling. Oikology will then mean being in a place insofar as in this place one lives, grows, dwells. And if a topology privileges the spatial di-mension of philosophy, oikology privileges this dimension less in order to emphasise dwelling, so to speak, actively. Therefore, oikology will interro-gate space or place from the point of view of who in space lives, that is: “who” is dwelling. Given this sense of oikology, “rough mysticism” will grasp mysticism as an experience rooted in a ground in which one dwells and inhabits; or even, it will be one of the ways in which one experiences dwelling. And as unusual this proposal may seem, such a sense of “mysticism” is not without precedent, and in order to explain it Stanislas Breton offers important pointers to its clarification by showing that mysticism, as a mode of dwelling, is also and first and foremost an affaire of human experience. “Rough mysticism”, finally, is not a lemma that Breton uses. It is, however, an expression that he would legitimise and even authorise, given his proposal. A legitimacy that nevertheless needs to be motivated and, to this end, after having started precisely from a suggestion by Breton, 1– the traits of what will be called “non-rough mysticism” will be quickly set out, a mysticism that is the exceptional experience of the individual, 2– in order to move towards the proposal of an experience of oikological exteriority that 3– starting with Breton will finally allow us to motivate the rough reasons from which we have chosen to speak of “mysticism”.