Yes, Platt, a radical empiricist should explain why he accepts any experience
as valid and real but "will not allow" certain interpretations or attributions
of that experience. And I think I did exactly that. Just as Sam Harris
explained it (Thanks, Steve) the mystical experience itself cannot be denied
without contradicting the principles of Radical Empiricism but attributing a
particular god as the cause or as the true content is another matter. As Steve
says, I "would never deny such experiences" but when such experience is held up
"as somehow being proof of 'facts' like the virgin birth" or "the historical
veracity of the bodily resurrection of Jesus" then supernatural events and
entities have been asserted and the empirical principles have been violated. In
Pirsig's case, for example, his experience took the form of an identification
with Orpheus. He became Orpheus and Chicago became the underworld, the land of
the dead. This, I would point out, did not result in his adoption of
polytheism. He did not become an Orphic priest or assert that Orpheus was the
supernatural agent who provided this gift. As Pirsig puts it in the film,
Arrive Without Traveling, "...I became Orpheus and interpreted everything
around me in terms of his understanding. I lived inside the film. [Cocteau's
Orpheus] South Chicago was the city of the dead and my mission there was to
find out its secrets and bring it back with me to the living. That delusion
weakened when I left the mental hospital but in an abstract sense it's never
disappeared, really. The structure and content of the Metaphysics of Quality
are those secrets." In other words, Pirsig did not interpret the experience so
as to give validity to the ancient belief in Orpheus. Instead, his
interpretation of the experience produced a fresh and original vision of
reality as a whole. He took the hero's journey and brought back a great
treasure, namely the MOQ, which is what we're all here to discuss. Obviously.
dmb
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