Hi John, > Is the claim that the fundamental nature of reality is outside of language, > mean that reality transcends language, and thus transcendant reality could > be described then, as an absolute? > > Not a Hegelian idealized absolute, of course, but a Pirsigian personalized > one?
I don't have much directly to say about absolutes, but I can try to explain my understanding of Pirsig and pragmatism with regard to mysticism and transcendence. Both the pragmatist and the mystic urge us to drop the project of nailing down the fundamental nature of reality with words. Nailing down fundamental natures of things is a linguistic practice, so the mystic's claim that the fundamental nature of reality is outside of language it to say that such a "nailing down" can't be done. The mystic maintains the Platonist notion that reality has a fundamental nature, but asserts that that fundamental nature cannot be accessed with words. Thoughts are veiwed as an impediment to getting in touch with this fundamental nature called God, the Tao, the ground of being, etc. Thoughts, they say, stand between us and reality as it really is. That is why they say that to get in touch with reality, we need to stop thinking. This is the anti-intellectual bit in Pirsig's philosophy that I wish weren't there--as if we would all be better off if we just stopped thinking. As if language can take us further from or closer to reality. The pragmatist addresses the same issue (the failure of language to hand us the fundamental nature of reality) by avoiding ontology. The pragmatist suggests we should stop viewing reality as the sort of thing that has a "fundamental nature," and she (he, really since I'm always talking about Rorty's view of pragmatism) urges us to stop viewing language as something that tries to nail down other things. For the pragmatist, language doesn't fail to adequately represent reality because it doesn't represent at all. (It does in the common sense way, but not in the metaphysical or Platonist way.) Language is one human practice among many pursued for various purposes such as helping us get what we want and predicting what other humans will do.. Pragmatists drop the notion of language as the attempt to adequately represent reality in favor of a notion of language as a way of using reality for various purposes. "Representing reality" in the metaphysical sense is just one of these purposes that humans first started having only very recently in the history of language use, so even if language actually does have a "fundamental nature," "representing reality" is certainly it. The failure of language to nail down the fundamental nature of reality then amounts to nothing more than the problem of using the wrong tool for the wrong job. Once you have dropped the metaphysical appearance-reality dualism, the mystic's claim that the fundamental nature of reality is outside of language is no more deep than saying a hammer isn't very helpful for turning screws or saying that the screw in question is one that need not be turned. Language can't separate us from reality. Language is a part of reality. Coming up with new words and new descriptions of reality is to add something new to reality rather than to encapsulate a preexisting static world. The pragmatist agrees with the mystic in that reality can't be nailed down with words because words can never exhaust reality. We can come up with an unlimited number of descriptions of reality, but no particular description or set of descriptions will ever offer us a substitute for reality and hand us reality's "fundamental nature." The difference between the pragmatist and the mystic here is that transcendence for the mystic is getting past language to reality as it really is while the pragmatist doesn't see why we need to think of ourselves as out of touch with reality to begin with. How could humans invent a tool that could take them outside of reality? What are we if not a part of reality? While language itself is not something seen as the sort of thing that can be transcended or something needing to be transcended, transcendence for a pragmatist lies in unleashing the creative possibilities for the use of language. Language as a whole is not a pragmatist's target for transcendence as it is for the mystic. To use some of Rorty's turns of phrase, while Platonist philospher may see transcendence as concerned with "perceiving an order that brings together all possible worlds," the pragmatist may be more likely to relish in diversity and see language use as "commanding new worlds into being." While the notion of transcendence for the mystic is about getting in touch with something that has always been around, the pragmatist who has replaced certainty with hope, sees language as a way for us to bring something new and awe-inspiring into the universe. As my favorite amature philosopher, Matt Kundert, explained to me, "to transcend one bit of language would simply mean to call another bit of language into existence that can encapsulate the old and extend into something new." As an example he points out that Einstein's notion of curved space-time can hold Newton's gravity, space, and time in its grasp, and also give us more. I have a feeling that this is not the sort of transcendence that you were interested in when you asked the question. Your idea of transcendence seems much more concerned with the rreligious impulse of orienting yourself at the deepest level toward something pre-existing yet personally transformative. As William James described the religious impulse in The Varieties of Religious Experience, "it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto." Since you've supported theism in your recent posts, you may be quite disposed toward the notion of an unseen order with which we would do well to get in touch. Obviosly there is MOQ support for such an order if you try to read it as traditional metaphysics. Transcendence for the pragmatists is not seen as a matter of getting in touch with the Truth or an unseen order, but as making fruitful use of our imaginative power--the power that human beings have to transform our future into something richer than our past. The power that Jesus and the other religious prophets wielded was the ability to use metaphor to redescribe the familiar in unfamiliar terms to open hearts to the possibility of new conceptions of community. This power seems to me to be the similar to the power of such scientific prophets as Newton and Einstein to imagine new and transformative pictures of the physical universe. Scientific, moral, and artistic uses of imagination all can enable us to transcendently understand ourselves in new ways. They can remake us into something new. The MOQ is also itself such a use of human imagination that enables us to see ourselves in new previously unimagined ways and invites us to become something new. It would help if you explained what you mean by an absolute. An absolute in the above seems to me a teleology for what that something new must be to qualify as transcendence. Such a notion is tied up in the philosphical urge to try to, as Rorty put it, "lend our past practices the prestige of the eternal." It is the sort of notion that has the danger of putting undue limits on our imagination of possibilities for the future. It sounds like looking toward a power not ourselves to do what we ourselves ought to be doing. Best, Steve Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
