Hi Dave, Dave said: Okay. You're using the term "poet" in a much broader sense than usual. (That's probably worth mentioning if you want to be understood.)
Matt: Apologies. To save on space and avoid pedantic repetition of things commonly understood, I assumed a common understanding of Rorty's basic terms. I don't mean to respond with the cattiness you just showed, but you do still bring Rorty up a lot as punching bag, don't you? Maybe I'm mistaken in that, but understanding a thinker from "the inside," as it were, must be some kind of prerequisite before beating up on "their thoughts" (the inside view being what establishes the possessiveness of "their"). Even if he doesn't come up a lot in your writing here, if he looms large in your imagination as the thing you don't want to be, I'd advise a more sensitive understanding of what he stands for (by which I mean, a better understanding than such heavyweights as Hilary Putnam and Bernard Williams showed when they punched the image of Rorty). Dave said: But that expansion of the term doesn't really address the point because all those thinkers are working within language at the same. In fact, the notion that mystical reality is outside language is a view that all philosophical mystics have in common. Matt: Yes, you are right, it does avoid the point, but it does so as a matter of rhetorical convenience. The residual difficulty with the rhetoric of radical empiricism (which accompanies some, but not all, mysticisms--the rhetoric has a much different function in Romanticism) is this: if one has already rejected the goal of transcendence (in its Platonic guise), then it is unclear to what purpose the idea of "purity" plays in any remaining distinctions between reality or experience, on the one side, and language, on the other. Experience as something pure that language muddies is not something I can make sense of in non-Platonically transcendent ways. Experience as "immediate" whereas language is "mediating" is not something I can think of many uses for for nonrepresentationalists either. The only use I can think of for them is the use to which Romanticists like Wordsworth and Emerson put them, which is heightening the agon against what Dewey called the "crust of conventionalized consciousness." I think that is where the matter has rested between us for some time. I don't understand why language is looked askance at, considered impure. Rorty taught me to think of the moral concept of "purity" as a remnant of what Heidegger called the onto-theological tradition, and I take the impetus to escape from that tradition to be the same impetus as people have in saying that theism is peculiar to Western monotheism, opening non-Western modes of spirituality like one finds in many American Indian cultures and Buddhism as resources. The last productive cycle of responses we had went in this same direction (posted here: http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2010/01/discussion-with-dave-buchanan.html). At that time I said that the move that is unavailable to a pragmatist, pushed into explaining why there is an invidious distinction between experience and language, is to say that that is just the way things are, the way reality composes itself. I think you agree on that point, but I'm still unclear on what move you do make. You make on occasion, in different kinds of conversation, the same move Pirsig makes in Lila when pressed on this kind of question, that this way of thinking is more beautiful, makes so much sense of the world, works better. (That move is made in the conversation in the aforementioned post.) But that move just signals that the conversation is over, for what is left to the other conversant who disagrees other than, "Hunh--I disagree about what is more beautiful, makes more sense, works better"? What is needed to move on is a delineation of specifically what it is that works better, which means specifying a problem and the tool that needs to be used but can't be by others who don't agree on that special issue. As it is, I'm not sure I can even follow very far in such progressively technical discussions. I'm not a professional philosopher. So perhaps our differences can be put in the relative sense of beauty we find from different objects. When you want to be stunned into sublimity, you go outside to watch a sunset. When I want to be stunned into sublimity, I go to my bookshelf and read Stevens' Opus Posthumous. Spiritual texts are still texts, but I'm not sure why we're grading levels of spiritualness, one more pure than another. Matt 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
