Matt said:
.., my most passionate and dogged interlocutor in the last decade has been
David Buchanan. Dave has long contended that the radical empiricism of James
(which can be found in Dewey's Experience and Nature) is the gateway to wisdom
in the area of philosophy, being especially a kind of philosophical mysticism.
He has further excoriated pragmatisms without an attendant radical empiricism,
along the lines Pirsig laid out in Lila, but also along the lines that to deny
radical empiricism is to deny a place for mysticism within one's philosophical
vision.
dmb says:
The gateway to wisdom? I don't think my claims are as broad or grand as you
suggest here. It's just that the philosophical vision of James, Dewey and
Pirsig includes radical empiricism and their vision is profoundly altered when
that part of it is removed. I think that the MOQ becomes something else,
becomes a different vision when radical empiricism is removed from it. Same
with the mysticism. If you take that out it isn't the MOQ anymore.
Matt said:
I have ho-hummed my way through defenses of Rorty over the past few years,
mainly because the problem eludes me. If James and Dewey's radical empiricism
isn't a kind of Platonic realism, then it is nothing that Rorty would've felt
strongly about.
dmb says:
As I understand it, Platonism is a kind of anti-empiricism and so it would be
approximately the opposite of radical empiricism.
Matt said:
... "Overcoming the Tradition," Rorty's first essay comparing the philosophical
visions of Heidegger and Dewey, ..has always structured my understanding of
what Rorty thought about mysticism, which is to say, how it functions in the
conversation of humankind. For years I've tried to construe mysticism as a kind
of poetry, an idea that first came to me in reading that essay, but it never
really seemed to catch on much. ...
dmb says:
Again, to construe mysticism in terms of poetry or the way it functions in
language is approximately the opposite of mysticism as Pirsig construes it. As
you know, Pirsig says that mystical reality is the primary empirical reality,
that it is pre-verbal or pre-conceptual experience. On this view, it is not
possible for the experience itself to function in conversation. Of course,
poets and mystics are sometimes the same people. William Blake springs to mind.
I think mystics sometimes turn to art in order to give some kind of expression
to the ineffable. But mysticism AS poetry? I honestly don't know what the means
but it seems dismissive and it clashes with the central assertion of
philosophical mystics, namely the notion that mystical reality is outside of
language.
Matt said:
... a paper Rorty read at a conference in Italy in 2005... opposes
"fundamentalism" to "relativism" (the latter defined, characteristically, as
the "denial of fundamentalism") and dialogues with a few of the current pope's
writings about relativism and different worldviews. ...The interesting part was
the Q&A. Somebody finally asked him directly about mysticism.
A MEMBER OF THE AUDIENCE -- The problem that concerns me is whether mysticism
is absolutely to be excluded from your way of thinking, or not. The real sense
of mysticism, I mean something transcendental--does it exist or not in your
vision?
dmb says:
Before addressing Rorty's answer, I'd just like to point out that philosophical
mysticism is very different from fundamentalism, the Pope's views and the quest
for transcendental realities. As you know, the MOQ is not a form of theism and
radical empiricism was practically built to keep trans-experiential realities
out of our philosophies. On this view, the mystical experience could be
described as transcendent only in the sense that it's extraordinary or special
to those who go through it.
RICHARD RORTY -- I think that the mystics, like the poets, are among the great
imaginative geniuses who have helped human moral and intellectual progress.
Where I think we disagree is on the question of whether the mystical must be a
way of putting us in touch with the transcendent. As I see it, mystical
experience is a way of leaping over the boundaries of the language one speaks.
Leaps over those boundaries lead to the creation of new language. And the
creation of new language leads to intellectual and moral progress.
-----
MATT commented on the Rorty quote:
This just confirmes the hunches I always had about Rorty. It's hard not to see
the relationship between Dynamic Quality and static latches in those lines.
It's not an argument against Dave, of course: the argument isn't about what
Rorty thinks, but what the best way forward is. I like the rhetoric of
mysticism-as-poetry; Dave likes the rhetoric of
mysticism-as-radical-empiricism. I don't know how to debate the two.
dmb says:
I see what you're saying but only up to a certain point. I think Pirsig would
join Rorty in rejecting the notion that mystical experience puts us in touch
with "the transcendent" as it would be conceived by a fundamentalist, the Pope
or mystics of the theistic variety in general. And I suppose all pragmatists
would applaud the moral and intellectual progress that follows. The actual,
practical effects occur when you draw conclusions about this experience and
then put those ideas into practice. That's where new language will latch or
not.
But poetry is poetry even when it's about mystical experience. It's better than
prose but it is still language. And the mystical reality is outside of language
so the phrase "mysticism as poetry" seems dismissive and it seems to defy the
MOQ's central distinction.
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