Steve said:
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.
dmb says:
This is another example of the error I've talking about. You're describing the
claims of the philosophical mystic in terms of SOM. You're treating the claims
of the radical empiricist as if they were traditional empirical claims. As a
result, you're criticizing claims that Pirsig never makes. You're taking the
post-postivist's stance toward positivism to answer a question about mysticism.
The radical empiricist does not claim that words are impediments that stand
between us and reality. Those claims don't even make sense within radical
empiricism because it begins by rejecting the metaphysical assumptions that
assert there is a gap between us and reality. The first great pitfall from
which such a radical standing by experience will save us, says James, is a
artificial conception of the relations between knower and known. SOM is that
artificial conception and SOM is what posits the epistemic gap between subject
(knower) and object (known).
In other words, you are taking the mystic's stance as a claim that he can cross
the gap but the mystic's claim is that there is no gap. The distinction between
the immediate flux of life and the concepts we derive from lived experience is
not a claim that one is real and the other is only an appearance. That is also
a way of reading the claims as if they were being made by a SOMer or a
positivists. Like Matt, you make this error quite consistently.
Steve said:
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 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.)
dmb says:
Again, you are talking about Rorty's critique of traditional empiricism and
this critique can not rightly be applied to philosophical mysticism. Nor can
philosophical mysticism be properly understood if its terms are given
positivistic meanings. But that's exactly what you're doing here.
I'd also ask you to think about the incoherence of Rorty's stance. He wants to
avoid ontology and focus on language. To say there is no way to get outside the
text is to say there is no way that the world as it is (non-text) to hook up
with our words and so all we have are words that refer to more words. All the
action takes place within the web of beliefs and yet those beliefs refer to
nothing. It is precisely this way of avoiding ontology that draws charges of
linguistic idealism. Words are tools and yet they operate on a world that isn't
there. They're tools made only for fixing other tools. This is the criticism I
find in both Hildebrand and Hickman. They say Rorty's view suffers from this
incoherence. I guess I'm saying you and Matt caught this disease from him.
Here's a particularly succinct version of this same mistake....
Steve said:
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.
dmb says:
Here you're basically translating the DQ/sq distinction into an
appearance/reality distinction. This is just the Platonic version of SOM. This
is not at all what the mystic claims. Your whole position is predicated on this
same conceptual error. Here are four more examples of misreading mystics as if
they were positivists....
Steve said:
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 notion of transcendence for the mystic is about getting in touch with
something that has always been around,..
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."
dmb says:
I already made a detailed case explaining what Rorty's criticisms are aimed at
(traditional empiricism) and how they can't be applied as you are applying them
(to radical empiricism). This response is just meant to point out specific
cases of this misapplication so that you won't have to wonder what, exactly,
I'm complaining about. Here are seven examples from just one post, and that's
not even all of them. I just picked the clearest examples. Think about it, will
you?
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