Ant McWatt said:
Is there such thing as "pure experience"? That reminds me of Matt "politics
is scary" Kundert who used to go round and round in circles with you about
about this subject at MOQ Discuss, seven or eight years ago. It kind of got
boring after a few posts but I think Matt was correct in bringing this issue up.
dmb says:
Yea, I think Matt faithfully repeated arguments that are also made in the
philosophy Journals. A guy named Katz, for example, denies the possibility of
mystical experience on the same sort of grounds that Rorty denies the
possibility of truth theories in general. In both cases, however, they are
denying a claim that Pirsig and James never make. In both cases, they are
denying that we can have direct access to ultimate reality, to the "real"
reality behind appearances. In other words, they both conceptualize the issue
in terms of the basic dualism that Pirsig and James reject. In doing so, they
are denying a claim that is very different than the claims that Pirsig and
James actually do make. I don't think Matt or Steve could ever see how to
understand "pure experience" except in terms of an appear-reality dualism or a
subject-object dualism and so they both ended up dismissing Pirsig's central
term and pretty much ignored the mystical dimension of the MOQ. Little sample
of tha
t long debate....
>From the Relativism thread, May 21, 2010:
dmb said to Steve:
"...Trust me here, Steve. Rorty's arguments against the possibility of getting
outside language have absolutely nothing to do with the claims of mystics.
That's what we're talking about here, NOT the claims of Positivists. It's very,
very important to NOT confuse mystics and positivists. ...The fundamental
reality he's talking about is DQ or pure experience. This is NOT a claim to
have direct access to the world as it actually is because, again, that just an
idea that's derived from experience, a conceptual interpretation of experience.
The primary empirical reality is just experience itself, not experience OF
things-in-themselves."
Ant McWatt said:
Anyway, I have to say the highest quality idea is that, yes, pure experience,
must exist as very few people have any memories before the age of one. The
reason is, I guess, is that intellectual static latching just isn't happening
in the first few months of life; it's all biological and social latching going
on. So Dave when you later quote Pirsig (from LILA) quoting James: "Only
new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may
be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is
not yet any definite what...." We can see that James was well ahead of the game!
dmb says:
Pirsig is more explicit about pure experience as it might be had by adults.
Babies and mystics are different, of course, and we don't want to mistake the
mystical experience for an act of mere regression, but they both know pure
experience in some sense. Things like meditation, Peyote, and all kinds of
spontaneous and surprizing triggers can be involved but the basic idea is just
to stop thinking, stop with the conceptual chopping, at least relatively
speaking.
"Thou art that, which asserts that everything you think you are and everything
you think you perceive are undivided. To fully realize this lack of division is
to become enlightened." -- Robert Pirsig
"To know immediately, then, or intuitively, is for mental content and object to
be identical." -- William James
"Taking it all in all, Zen is emphatically a matter of personal experience; if
anything can be called radically empirical, it is Zen. No amount of reading, no
amount of teaching, no amount of contemplation will ever make one a Zen master.
Life itself must be grasped in the midst of its flow.." -- D.T Suzuki
"Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics... 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)
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
