Hi DMB,
> 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. Steve: Isn't this EXACTLY what you keep trying to do to Rorty? DMB: 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. Steve: I never said anything about radical empiricism above. I'm talking about the philosophical rhetoric of mystics in general. I'm not talking about mystical experience itself, but rather the philosophies that mystics have generated based upon experiences. You can argue that mystics and mystical experiences are best understood in terms of radical empiricism, but you will always have to contend with the fact that mystics are too easily read in their philosophical talk as Platonists trying to transcend language. The stuff I wrote in this post to John should be read by you as suggestions for how the rhetoric of mystics may be improved to avoid sounding like Platonists. In the above, for example, I'm definitely not saying that Pirsig is actually anti-intellectual. I'm not criticizing Pirsig for that. I'm saying that his choice of rhetoric makes him too easily read as anti-intellectual as mystics also so often are. How can you know that there is a danger of being misunderstood with this choice of rhetoric employed by mystics? Because so many people in this discussion group over the years have taken Pirsig and mystics as asserting that we ought to stop thinking, and whenever someone tries to correct this notion, the anti-intellectuals can support their view with quotes like "kill all intellectual patterns...and morality will be served." DMB: 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. Steve: Again, I never said that about radical empiricists. I said that about mystics. You can say that mystics are best read as radical empiricists or that mystics would so well to employ the rhetoric of radical empiricism to get their ideas across, and I would probably agree. The problem for me in subscribing to talk of mysticism is that mystics so often talk about getting in touch with reality and insist that we are out of touch with reality. You yourself insist language is "secondary" rather than "primary experience." To me that is asking for Platonist trouble, but as Matt says, to each his own. DMB: 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. Steve: The gist I have gotten from the mystic's I have read is that they actually often insist such a gap which must be transcended. We need to awaken to reality as it really is. DMB: The first great pitfall from which such a radial 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: I don't know why you call this an error on my part. I think it is an error on the mystic's part to use rhetoric suggesting exactly such a gap in their talk about transcendence, illusion, awakening, Enlightenment, the true nature of reality, etc. I don't think that that is what mystics really mean to say (at least I hope it isn't). I think they also often deny the existence of the gao, but they have a lot of dificulty saying what they mean to say, which is why they so often negate every positive assertion they make as soon as they make it. Or even before making any assertions: "The Tao that can be told is not the Eternal Tao." I think your argument ought to be that radical empiricism would give them a better vocabulary to say what they want to say rather than that I am "in error" about mysticism. If so, so are Pirsig and James. In James's "Varieties" he said of mysticism that "It is anti-naturalistic, and harmonizes best with twice-bornness and so-called other-worldly states mind." Is James in error here in thinking that mysticism harmonizes best with otherworldly-ness? Or is the error in how mystics have talked about their own philosophies and suggested such otherworldliness to James and I? Recall that Pirsig left Benares because of this notion of illusion-- this gap between appearances and the way things really are that is taught in philosophies based on mysticism. ZAMM: "During this span of ten years he lived in India for a long time studying Oriental philosophy at Benares Hindu University. As far as I know he didn’t learn any occult secrets there. Nothing much happened at all except exposures. He listened to philosophers, visited religious persons, absorbed and thought and then absorbed and thought some more, and that was about all. All his letters show is an enormous confusion of contradictions and incongruities and divergences and exceptions to any rule he formulated about the things he observed. He’d entered India an empirical scientist, and he left India an empirical scientist, not much wiser than he had been when he’d come. However, he’d been exposed to a lot and had acquired a kind of latent image that appeared in conjunction with many other latent images later on. Some of these latencies should be summarized because they become important later on. He became aware that the doctrinal differences among Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself. In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, "Thou art that," which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened." Steve comments: No one would ever insist, in reality, "Though art that" unless people already thought that in reality there was a gap between being and perception, reality and appearance. The appearance-reality distinction is presupposed in mystic philosophy before it can be recommended that it needs to be transcended. Here's where people often find the anti-intellectual bit. Babies don't distinguish between what is and what is perceived, self and other. That distinction is learned through all that nasty thinking. It needs to be unlearned. We have to become intellectually like children. This is actually a common teaching among mystics that Pirsig does a better job with in his vocabulary (gumption traps and stuckness in static intellectual patterns, value rigidity) than the mystics have in theirs. ZAMM continiues: "Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom." Steve: Mystical philosophy presumes this separation too--as an illusion--so that this persumption can be transcended--to get in touch with reality as it really is. ZAMM: "The illusion of separation of subject from object is best removed by the elimination of physical activity, mental activity and emotional activity. There are many disciplines for this. One of the most important is the Sanskrit dhyna, mispronounced in Chinese as "Chan" and again mispronounced in Japanese as "Zen." Phædrus never got involved in meditation because it made no sense to him. In his entire time in India "sense" was always logical consistency and he couldn’t find any honest way to abandon this belief. That, I think, was creditable on his part. But one day in the classroom the professor of philosophy was blithely expounding on the illusory nature of the world for what seemed the fiftieth time and Phædrus raised his hand and asked coldly if it was believed that the atomic bombs that had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory. The professor smiled and said yes. That was the end of the exchange. Within the traditions of Indian philosophy that answer may have been correct, but for Phædrus and for anyone else who reads newspapers regularly and is concerned with such things as mass destruction of human beings that answer was hopelessly inadequate. He left the classroom, left India and gave up." Steve: If the professor was "blithely expounding on the illusory nature of the world for what seemed the fiftieth time" then it seems that it is not just me. There is some Platonism in mystical philosophy. There is a world of appearances that needs to be transcended to get in touch with reality as it really is. > 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. Steve: Your concern here for the way words correctly hook up to reality seems odd given you don't subscribe to a correspondence theory of truth. What are you looking for here? Why would you presuppose that words need to "hook up" with reality as though they were not always already part of reality? Does Rorty need to describe how we can directly compare an assertion to reality for agreement to satisy your concerns about coherence? These don't sound like concerns a pragmatist ought be having. For a pragmatist, it would seem like enough to say, "When we say that a belief is, as far as we know, true, is to say that no other habit of action is, as far as we know, a better habit of action." In short, language matters. What more needs to be said about the "nature of language" for Rory to be coherent? You got all over Rorty's case for saying that the world is out there. Now you are saying that the problem with Rorty is that in his philosophy the world is NOT there. It sounds to me like it is this critique of Rorty that is incoherent. You don't understand Rorty's philosophy. As far as I know, you haven't read anything by Rorty beyond the quotes of your favorite Rorty critics. Why not start from a position of ignorance instead of from the preconception that Rorty is the great Satan? Why not start with questions about Rorty instead of criticisms of Rorty? Why not try to understand what Rorty is actually saying? It seems very important to you to disagree with Rorty, why not actually read him and try to understand him so you will know what it is you are committed in advance to disagree with? 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
