I got annoyed by a friend who had an intuitive epiphany concerning ontology and announced the inadequacy of all prior conceptions of ontology.
The annoyance was not about the content of the epiphany, nor about the challenging of any sacred definitions. I am not all that invested in any particular definition of ontology, because ontologies are (according to my meta-ontology) manifestations of an enworldment. This makes me an ontological pluralist, at least with respect to the domain of philosophy.
What bothered me concerned the domain of philosophy — the ethos of philosophy and the ethics that govern and sustain it. Or we could say, the game of philosophy and its rules. Or we could say, the social being of philosophy and the ethnomethods by which participants in philosophy make sense to others, and by which others make sense to us. These are all flavors of what I mean when I say “enworldment”.
Philosophers absolutely can, and should, propose new conceptions of ontology. The most radical ontology will necessarily entail meta-disputing the being of ontology itself.
But these alternative conceptions are philosophical conceptions of philosophical concepts and, as such, are subject to philosophical scrutiny.
In mysticism, one can bluster about making exalted gnostic claims of ineffable knowingness.
In philosophy, we make proposals, demonstrations, arguments, analogies, and the like.
Philosophy is done with others, within the ethos of philosophy, according to the perpetually contested ethical norms of philosophy — and whoever scorns these things should not pretend to philosophy at all.
Whenever mysticism does that infuriating thing it always does — running around comparing itself to philosophy and finding philosophy’s attempts to articulate, convey, or share its intuitions inferior to its own inchoate, felt intuitions — not only is it not doing philosophy, it is not really doing mysticism anymore either.
Rather, it is doing what mature mystics warn neophytes about when they say that esoteric thinking is dangerous. The danger of unguided esoterism is hubristic spiritual inflation, and the aggressive double-ignorance that comes with it — the endemic curse of youth.
This general subject always brings to mind a cold line from Borges: “Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.”
Dreamers dream. Writers write. The difference between a dreamer and a writer is that the writer writes those dreams so others can read them and join them in the dream. Dreamers dream of writing and being read.