I've just posted a new, longish sequence of thoughts about mysticism on my website:
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2011/01/notes-on-mysticism-madness-directness.html It was nearly done before I left for Christmas, and might be my first use of Pirsig for his philosophical powers (rather than as a topic of a piece, or as a way of bridging the understanding for who I sense to be my audience: for example, in the latter sense, I dare say I've never used Heidegger for his philosophical powers). The impetus for the piece was my use of the map analogy during discussion with Dave last month. Two paragraphs are adapted from two posts on Dec. 4 and Dec. 6. The rest tries to illustrate what I've learned in the last two months about how to articulate my understanding of how the rhetoric of mysticism works. Here's the introductory two paragraphs "Notes on Mysticism: Madness, Directness, Tears, and Contingency" Madness I would like to add a few notes about the surface of mysticism, which is to say the language and discourse that surrounds the mystic experience. The rhetoric of mysticism has often dovetailed with the rhetoric of madness. “Enthusiasm,” often used in older ages to describe the Western mystic, comes from the Greek entheos, which means quite literally “full of God,” and is often interpreted as “divine madness.”[fn.1] The rhetoric of mysticism also often uses the diction of directness, such that our common, conventionally appreciated reality is really an appearance behind that which is the real reality (think of maya from the Hindu tradition). A direct appreciation of the real reality, then, will appear mad or crazy to those still within the conventional modes of appreciation. This creates a problem, for we use the epithets “insane,” “mad,” or “crazy” to identify exactly those who are out of touch with reality. So who is right? So direct of an antithesis is there between the two that rather than go straight at this question, we should perhaps first contemplate their agreement: variance with conventions. Reality or madness lies beyond conventions—perhaps such a consequential gulf embodied in this disjunct is what creates a sometimes thrilling anxiety. Since at least Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (though Freud’s description of neurosis surely got the ball rolling), Western intellectuals have become increasingly aware of how the position of an “outsider,” specifically in this case the “crazy person,” is created by how we count “insiders”—the conventional canons of inclusion. In order to approach the problem of what’s beyond conventions, I should like to briefly investigate how we break conventions, and thus occlude ourselves. 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
