Keith, Krimel and y'all:
Keith said to Krimel:
When I first read that term in Wilber [Spirit], I immediately thought God,
complete with mythic interpretations and the grey beard. I don't know if it
conjures something similar for you or not. I don't think that's what he
means by the term, though. I interpret Spirit as a metaphysical null similar
to Pirsig's undefined Quality. It's just the central term of his
metaphysics. I see Spirit as undifferentiated, unmanifest divinity that
provides the ontological "value proposition" for AQAL in the same way that
Quality provides it for MOQ.
dmb says:
I'm with Keith here. Wilber's quasi-theological terms make me queasy
sometimes too, but Krimel's suggestion that he shares anything with the
religious right really isn't even plausible. One could quote Wilber's
criticism of that sort of religiosity all day long even if this forum's
archives were the only available source. That's how many times I've invoked
Wilber against theism here already. Like all major thought systems in
history, he can find some truth in it but he also criticizes religious
conservatives as cognitively underdeveloped mythic thinkers, egomaniacs who
hide from rational evidence. In this sense, I think both he and Pirsig are
anti-theistic. And yet they both criticize scientific materialism for being
spirtually empty. I think they both offer a vision of reality that allows us
to have spirituality and a brain at the same time.
Krimel said to Keith:
He claims that because all these "traditions" refer to spiritual matter we
should swallow them hook line and sinker. But for no particular reason I can
tell other that veneration of history.
Keith replied:
You set him up as a straw man to knock him down. Wilber thinks that the
"wisdom traditions" should be contextualized in an overarching scheme. He
doesn't think they should be dismissed out of hand as useless myths, but
also certainly doesn't accept every claim of every tradition in a literal
fashion. He does think that whatever truth exists in any tradition should be
honored--that's the essence of his integral approach--but that doesn't mean
he accepts every claim, spiritual or otherwise, as correct.
dmb says:
Again, I'm with Keith here. (Well put too, Keith.) Any man who swallows
every thing as a act of veneration is surely a straw man. I guess he'd be
pretty fat too. I think the "essence" of Wilber's approach, to glean the
wisdom of tradition without swallowing hook, line or sinker, is similar
Pirsig's advice that we should dust them off and re-examine them
impartially. I think they both consider it disasterous to dismisss it all as
obsolete. Instead, the task is re-discover the point and purpose of the
these inherited forms and to sort that out from the obsolete features and
the unsupportable claims. You know, keep the baby but throw out the bath
water. Include, but transcend.
Keith said Krimel:
Wilber doesn't claim that any supernatural agencies result in altered states
of consciousness. He readily admits that there are brain state changes
associated with meditative practice and the other ways of achieving altered
conscious states. These are the Right-Hand "exterior" correlates of the
Left-Hand "interior" states (qualia?) of consciousness. For Wilber, though,
consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain. He's not a materialist.
Instead, he believes that consciousness ("interiority") extends down the
holarchic chain. It is, in some sense, a primal characteristic of Spirit.
Krimel asked:
If Spirit is the undetected principle underlying matter and consciousness is
not dependant on brain states only correlated to them how can he claim this
is not supernatural?
dmb says:
In Wilber's conception "Spirit" is detectable and natural. Likewise,
Pirsig's system makes no claims about anything outside of experience and yet
it can include philosophical mysticism without violating its own empiricism.
But more specifically, the correlation of brain states and consciousness is
not so much the problem as is the reduction of consciousness to brain
states. I mean, Pirsig and Wilber aren't denying the scientific data
produced by such examinations. They are criticizing some of the most common
interpretations of that data, especially insofar as they are reductive
explanations. The kind of scientific materialism that would reduce human
consciousness to brain states is a pretty fine example of the worldview that
reduces "I" and "We" to "it". This is what Wilber calls flatland, the
collaspe of the Komos. As Keith points out, this materialism gutts the
interiors.
Keith said:
..At our stage of evolution, we intellectualize the world into subjects and
objects, so it seems that these interior states of consciousness we
experience are somehow divorced from the exterior electrochemical
fluctuations of the cerebral cortex. ...Similarly, Pirsig would tell you
that the whole subject-object division is a deduction from our primal
experience of Quality. The same Quality event that generates our subjective
consciousness creates the appearance of objective brain correlates.
Krimel replied:
These are Piaget's stages of intellectual development: [snipped by Keith]
..We even name these stages of consciousness in our society. We call it
First Grade, Second Grade... But we generally dispense with the color coding
except perhaps in the lower grades. [Krimel later added] ...one can as
easily say that rational thought transcends and includes "higher" states of
consciousness. This is the direction that Piaget's work points toward.
dmb says:
If memory serves, for Piaget, rationality was more or less the end of the
developmental road. He was working with children and interested in the
formation of rationality. Wilber thinks its good stuff as far as it goes but
he also thinks it doesn't go far enough. Wilber is interested in the more
advanced forms of consciousness, ways of seeing that are a little more rare
but which are more or a continution of increasingly complex cognitive
structures outlined by Piaget. For anyone familiar with Piaget, this part of
Wilber's view is easy to imagine. Just go further up the same road.
But I was surprized to learn that Piaget's work shed so much light on the
subject-object distinction. Against Freud, Piaget argued that infants did
not repress memories because of their dark or shameful (Oedipal) nature but
simply because they lacked the cognitive tools to form a memory. Lacan later
picked up on this work and re-interpreted Freud's Oedipal phase in terms of
Piaget's stages. The upshot of all this is that it explains how the infant
moves from a psychologically undifferentiated state so that it does not yet
make any distinction between itself and the world. The young infant is One
with mommy, so to speak. But then the father enters the scene to shatter
their coziness. This is not to be taken literally, of course. The father
here represents the intrusion of what Lacan calls "the symbolic order",
which is basically the acquisition of language and the transmission of
cultural values that go with it. This is when the infant begins to form a
conception of itself as distinct from the world, from its mother. As
Eagleton describes the point of agreement among them all, "at an early point
in the infant's development, no clear distinction between subject and
object, itslef and the external world, is yet possible" (Literary Theory
182). Or as Pirsig puts it in Lila (opening of chapter 8), "The culture in
which we live hands us a set of intellectual glasses to interpret experience
with, and the concept of the primacy of subjects and objects is built right
into these glasses".
Its interesting that the infant lives in that unified state of consciousness
but of course babies are not mystics. One has to acquire an ego
consciousness before it can be transcended. As Wilber would say, confusing
pre-rational babies with trans-rational mystics is a pre/trans fallacy
Krimel provided a SES reference for Keith:
It is several paragraphs into chapter 6 Pre/Trans Fallacy.
Keith replied:
OK, thanks, I found it. ...Remember that Wilber's point in this section is
to rail against New Agers and other mystics who confuse archaic mythic
archetypes and instinctual biological urges with spiritual union. Similarly,
Pirsig, in his own version of the pre-/trans- fallacy, rails against hippies
who worship biological Quality because it's not Social Quality, when they
should be seeking Intellectual Quality instead.
dmb says:
I'm not sure what the Wilber quote was about but I'm looking at the opening
of chapter 6 of Wilber's SES. "The essence of the pre/trans fallacy is
itself fairly simple: since both prerational states and transrational states
are, in their own ways, nonrational, they appear similar or even identical
to the untutored eye. And once pre and trans are confused, then one of two
fallacies ouccurs: In the first, all higher and transrational states are
REDUCED to lower and prerational states. Genuine mystical or comtemplative
experiences, for example, are seen as regressions or throwbacks to infantile
states... In these reductionistic accounts, rationality is the great and
final omega point of individual and collective development, the high-water
mark of all evolution. No deeper or wider or higher context is thought to
exist. Thus, life is to be lived either rationally or neurotically... Since
no higher context is thought to be real, or to actually exist, then whenever
any genuinely transrational occasion occurs, it is immediatley explained as
a REGRESSION to prerational structures." He explains the other pre/trans
fallacy as one that "still CONFUSES pre and trans" but instead of dismissing
trans as pre, they "ELEVATE all prerational states to some sort of
transrational glory". He invokes Tertullian's "I believe BECAUSE it is
absurd" as an example of this second kind of pre/trans fallacy. Kierkegaard
springs to mind but it describes new agers just well. Anti-intellectualism
of this sort isn't confined to religion or existentialism either. It seems
almost everybody is confused about this.
"The term mystic is sometimes confused with occult or supernatural and
with magic and witchcraft but in philosophy it has a different meaning. 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." (keith quoted Lila)
Thanks,
dmb
_________________________________________________________________
Like the way Microsoft Office Outlook works? Youll love Windows Live
Hotmail.
http://imagine-windowslive.com/hotmail/?locale=en-us&ocid=TXT_TAGHM_migration_HM_mini_outlook_0507
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.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
