All, >John: > I like my experience like I like my wimmun- a little impure. Dave: You mean like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbthHZNAbPk With a special dedication to Marsha of course :-)
>John: >What good is pure experience if you have to be an infant, insane or severely >brain-damaged to "experience" it? .... Dave Oh, but you can do drugs to get there too, so it's not all bad ;-o But seriously I think what both James and Pirsig are point too is that there is always a gap between what we experience and what we think we experience. So the best policy is to trust but continually try to verify birth until death because many truths will surely die during that journey. And many others will just a surely be born. >John: >I think Steve's comment about "pragmatic backsliding is entirely apropos. > Steve: > That is my understanding, but that all sounds very Cartesian to me. > For a pragmatist to adopt that view seems like backsliding into the > sorts of dualisms (appearance-reality, absolute-relative, in here-out > there, essential-accidental) that pragmatism (hopefully) cured us of. Dave: I understand that hope, but.... How realistic is it suppose the work of one mystic*, James, extended by another mystic*, Pirsig, is going to do that when you have problems with the whole concept of mystic experience? Don't misunderstand, I think leaning on mysticism can be a fatal flaw. It is one thing to say, Truth is a species of what is good in way of belief. It is a totally different thing to conclude that everything is a good and arranged in a fixed ascending hierarchical order from inorganic to dynamic, with dynamic or mystic trumping all. *mystic-in this instance meaning one who has had an extraordinary experience who then spends a great deal of time usually the whole rest of their life trying to integrate, understand, and/or duplicate that experience. > Steve: > Where I think this stuff becomes especially problematic is when you > add the notion that we need to get ourselves in touch with reality as > it really is beyond mere appearances. That's the old Catesian > Platonistic junk that we are better off without--the real reality out > there behind a veil. > > Steve: > The question here is the value for this sort of talk for doing > epistemology. Is this "pure experience" the true method for justifying > beliefs? How is that supposed to work? Is he mystic's knowledge about, > say, the best form of government more certain that other people's > knowledge about such questions for having access to "pure experience"? > How is "pure experience" used in the process of justifying a belief > such as the superiority of democracy over fascism? I just see dmb's "I > have something that you don't have" talk about radical empiricism as > doing absolutely no epistemological work when it comes to practical > questions and what is true about the world or what we should do to > improve it. Dave: Exactly. Big Problems, relativity of Rorty is totally inconsequential in comparison. I started to raise this issue earlier in "Taking off the glasses" thread. > On 11/14/11 7:37 AM, "Steven Peterson" <[email protected]> wrote: > >>>> RMP: >>>> "Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: >>>> Plotinus, Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others. They share a >>>> common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; >>>> that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality >>>> is undivided. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of >>>> dividedness can be overcome by meditation. The Native American Church >>>> argues that peyote can force-feed a mystic understanding upon those who >>>> were normally resistant to it,..." (LILA, ch 5) >>> >> >> Steve: >> I think this bit relates to the "why isn't the MOQ more popular?" >> question. As I understand it, the idea that reality has a true nature >> was already out of style when Lila came out....... Where Dave started to say: Steve I think you focused on the wrong "M" word. Isn't ironic that Phaedrus of ZaMM dismissed James' work because he (James) had the mendacity to title ONE essay "Varieties of Religious Experience." In which we read: "One may say truly, I think, that personal religious experience has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness." (Varieties of Religious Experience-William James) Then this, "William James, a forefather of American psychology and spirituality, said that every religion claims that there's something wrong with the human condition, and that it has the solution." (Working on God-Winfred Gallagher) Marry those two quotes together and don't you have what RMP does over the course of ZaMM & Lila? Yet in ZaMM Pirsig seemed more concerned with the claims of mystics than those of Western science or philosophy. Then slow forward 15 years and Phaedrus of Lila embraces James and espouses mysticism as a central and overriding tenet of the MoQ. IMHO the elephant in the MoQ room is "mystic experience" or in James' vernacular "mystic states of consciousness." I think this ties directly to the question of "taking off the glasses." I think Pirsig's "following DQ" suggests that pursuing mystic experience is a form of "taking off the glasses." And if you are really successful you might even permanently change your prescription. Then again if history is any guide you'll just meet God, but you have no assurance he/she/or it will be a peaceful one. Just a thought, Dave 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
