Elephant to all,
I'd like to get a new thread going on mysticism. We spend a lot of time
talking about the relation of MOQ to science, which is just fine, because
Prisig spends a lot of time on this too, and what he says is very
interesting. We don't spent so much talking about the relation of MOQ to
mysticism, and this is understandable, because what Prisig has to say on the
matter in Lila is confined to the two page passage that I've appended below.
However, I think that what Prisig has to say on mysticism in this short
passage is just about the most intelligent, perceptive, and important things
that have ever been said on the subject, bar-girls and all. And this is in
an area where the much regarded Wittgenstein and my own favourite Iris
Murdoch have written books and books, to discuss what Prisig has captured on
two pages. More precisely, Prisig's first page and a half outlines
something like what Wittgenstein has to say on the matter, and the last half
page outlines something like Murdoch's response. Wittgenstein thought that
language, thought, should keep out of Qualities way; Murdoch that this
puritanism about language and thought is on a hidding to nothing, and that
we must learn to start from being the picture-making language users that we
are. Already I am explaining this less clearly than Prisig.
Below I have simply reproduced Prisig's text, and inserted my three short
comments in square brackets [ ], and with some relevant comments from Plato,
Hume, Wittgenstein and Murdoch appended. I'd like to hear and discuss any
thoughts that you might have about this. Any.
With apologies for the elephantine post,
Pzeph
_______________
QUOTATION:
Lila pp73/74
"Of the two kinds of hostility to metaphysics he considered the mystics'
hostility the more formidable. Mystics will tell you that once you've
opened the door to metaphysics you can say good-bye to any genuine
understanding of reality. Thought is not a path to reality. It sets
obstacles in that path because once you try to use thought to approach
something that is prior to thought your thinking does not carry you toward
that something. It carries you away from it. To define something is to
subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do
that you destroy any real understanding.
The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had
called "Quality" in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess peice.
Quality doesn't have to be defined. You understand it without definition,
ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independant of and
prior to intellectual abstractions.
Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense
that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these
things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable, and knowable, or there
isn't any metaphysics. Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of
dialectical definition and since Quality is essentially outside definition,
this means that a "Metaphysics of Quality" is essentially a contradiction in
terms, a logical absurdity.
It would be almost like a mathematical definition of randomness.
The more you try to say what randomness is, the less random it becomes. Or
"zero" or "space" for thtat matter. Today these terms are almost nothing to
do with "nothing". "Zero" and "space" are complex relationships of
"somethingness". If he said anything about the scientific nature of mystic
understanding, science might benefit, but the actual mystic understanding
would, if anthing, be injured. If he really wanted to do Quality a favour
he should just leave it alone.
[This is essentially the Wittgensteinian possition in the Tractatus, where
value is a "That whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent".
Similarly, in my veiw (and Murdoch backs this up), Wittgenstein's
Philosophical Investigations are an attempt to construct a picture of
language minus the Quality "whereof we cannot speak" which is the constant
spur to our active language use.]
What made all this so formidable to Phaedrus was that he himself
had insisted in his book that Quality cannot be defined. Yet here he was
about to define it. Was this some kind of sell out? His mind went over
this many times.
[I have come to the connclusion that the important distinction is between a
definition involving synthetic judgements, and a 'definition' involving only
analysis. I the relevant sense, I think, the analytic 'definition' says
exactly the nothing that we need it to say: it isn't a picturing of Quality,
but a comment on it's unpictureablity.]
A part of it said, "Don't do it. You'll get into nothing but
trouble. You're going to start up a thousand dumb arguments about something
that was perfectly clear until you came along. You're going to make ten
thousand opponents and zero friends because the moment you open your mouth
to say one thing about the nature of reality you automatically have a whole
set of enemies who've already said that reality is something else."
The trouble was, this was only one part of him talking. There
was another part that kept saying "Ahh, do it anyway. It's interesting."
This was the intellectual part that didn't like undefined things, and
telling it not to define Quality was like telling a fat man to stay out of
the refrigerator, or an alcoholic to stay out of bars. To the intellect the
process of defining Quality has a compulsive quality of its own. It
produces a certain excitement even though it leaves a hangover afterward,
like too many cigarettes, or a party that lasted too long. Or Lila last
night. It isn't anything of lasting beauty; no joy forever. What would you
call it? Degeneracy, he guessed. Writing a metaphysics is, in the
strictest mystic sense, a degenerate activity.
But the answer to all this, he thought, was that a ruthless,
doctrinaire avoidance of degeneracy is a degeneracy of another sort. That's
the degereacy fanatics are made of. Purity, identified, ceases to be
purity. Objections to pollution are a form of pollution. The only person
who doesn't pollute the mystic reality of the world with fixed metaphysical
meanings is a person who hasn't been born - and to whose birth no though has
been given. The rest of us have to settle for being something less pure.
Getting drunk and picking up bar-ladies and writing metaphysics is a part of
life. That was all he had to say to the mystical objection to a Metaphysics
of Quality. He next turned to those of logical positivism."
[Quite. This other kind of degeneracy is what Murdoch calls the
"ontological approach", which is the demand that everyday life conform to
the standards of absolute being required by philosophy. Of course it
cannot, and then the response of someone like Wittganstein is to say that in
that case it doesn't exist at all: this is his attitude to private language
and the inner, personality, the referent of 'red' etc. Plato, on the other
hand, sees these objects as part of the world of becoming, not the world of
pure being. He sees these objects as having some lessser, less pure, degree
of reality, and so does not require them to ammount to a pure being, simply
in order to allow that they have any degree of being at all. These things
are not pure, but they exist, and we cannot do without them, for all that.
This is the line Murdoch takes. It is evidently Prisig's line, and if it's
of any interest, mine too.]
FURTHER QUOTES FOR DISCUSSION:
... not even this stays constant, that the flowing thing flows white, but it
changes, so that there's flux of that very thing, whiteness, and change to
another colour, ...since that's so, can it ever be possible to refer to any
colour in such a way as to be speaking of it rightly? -How could it be
Socrates? Indeed, how could it be possible to do so with any other thing of
that kind, if it's always slipping away while one is speaking; as it must
be, given that it's in flux? [Plato: Theaetetus 182d].
Plato makes the assumption that value is everywhere, that the whole of life
is movement on the moral scale, all knowledge is a moral quest, and the mind
seeks reality and desires the good, which is a transcendent source of
spiritual power, to which we are related through the idea of truth. ŒGood
is what every soul pursues and for which it ventures everything, intuiting
what is, yet baffled and unable to fully apprehend its nature.¹ (Republic
505e.) [Iris Murdoch: Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Pub. PB Penguin
1993 (hereafter MGM) p56]
[For Wittgenstein in the Tractatus] ŒThe correct method in philosophy would
really be the following: to say nothing at except what can be said, i.e.
propositions of natural science - i.e. something that has nothing to do with
philosophy - and then, whenever someone wanted to say something
metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to
certain signs in his propositions¹ (6.521, 6.522, 6,53; trans; Pears and
McGuinness) [MGM p30]
The Œpropositions of natural science¹ [in the above quote from the Tractatus
(6.521, 6.522, 6,53)] means ordinary demonstrable factual statements...
Facts are what can be expressed in a plain non-evaluative language. There
is no place for any idea of Œmoral facts¹, or for the development of a
Œmoral vocabulary¹.... The Tractatus may in general be regarded as an
extreme and pure case, or by some as a reductio ad absurdum, of the idea
that fact and value must not be allowed to contaminate each other. [MGM
p30/31]
The thought is not the words (if any) but the words occurring in a certain
way with, as it were, a certain force and colour. [Iris Murdoch,
Existentialists and Mystics, hereafter EM, p34]
If we think of conceptualising rather as the activity of grasping, or
reducing to order, our situations with the help of a language which is
fundamentally metaphorical, this will operate against the world-language
dualism which haunts us because we are afraid of the idealists. Seen from
this point of view, thinking is not the using of symbols which designate
absent objects, symbolising and sensing being strictly divided from each
other. Thinking is not designating at all, but rather understanding,
grasping, 'possessing'. [EM p41]
ŒAn ³inner process² stands in need of outer criteria.¹ (Investigations 580.)
Œ³But surely you wouldn¹t deny that, for example, in remembering, an inner
process takes place...² The impression that we wanted to deny something
arises from our setting our faces against the picture of the ³inner
process²...¹ [PI 305][Quotations from Wittgenstein discussed at MGM 271,
Murdoch¹s italics.]
Sometimes, since thoughts are queer phenomena, we may find it hard to offer
a clear and unambiguous description - but this will be true in the same way
of other kinds of queer phenomena with which we have to deal. Sometimes too
we may be puzzled about how exactly to relate the event-character of a
thought to its meaning-character in the description. But there is nothing
here which points to the presence of a special sort of item which is
sharply separate from other items of experience. The mental event, as an
experience, is not connected with 'meaning' in a way which is different
from that in which any other experience may be connected with meaning. [EM
p50-1]
Œ³Are you not a behaviourist in disguise? Aren¹t you at bottom saying that
everything except human behaviour is fiction?² If I do speak of a fiction,
then it is of a grammatical fiction.¹ (PI 305-7.) By a grammatical fiction
Wittgenstein presumably means something entertained by a philosopher. At
295 he speaks of pictures we see ŒWhen looking into ourselves as we do in
philosophy¹, and at 299 of Œbeing unable, when we surrender ourselves to
philosophical thought, to help saying such-and-such¹. All right, we do not
need an inner thought process which coincides with and produces outer
speech. I think that Schopenhauer explained this more clearly than
Wittgenstein. Such beliefs, if held by philosophers, are rightly pointed
out by other philosophers as philosophical mistakes or Œfictions¹. Ordinary
people [on the other hand], if left alone, get on perfectly well holding, or
not holding, similar vague pictures of their inner mental existence... [MGM
271]
We must distinguish here between the case of otiose dualism, for instance,
the Œinner process¹ which is supposed to articulate and present the finished
outer speech; and the very general idea of Œprocesses¹ as stream of
consciousness, inner reflection, imagery, in fact our experience as inner
(unspoken, undemonstrated) being. It is this huge confused area which is
being threatened, even removed [by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical
Investigations]. [MGM 273].
An ontological approach, which seeks for an identifiable inner stuff and
either asserts or denies its existence, must be avoided. [EM. p38]
What is the criterion for the sameness of two images? -What is the criterion
for the redness of an image? For me, when it is someone else¹s image: what
he says and does. For myself, when it is my image: nothing. And what goes
for ³red² also goes for ³same². [Wittgenstein: PI p377]
What am I to say about the word ³red²? -that it means something
Œconfronting us all¹ and that everyone should really have another word,
besides this one, to mean his own sensation of red? Or is it like this:
the word ³red² means something known to everyone; and in addition, for each
person, it means something known only to him? (or perhaps rather: it refers
to something known only to him.) [Wittgenstein: PI p273]
What is observable is that we need and use the idea that thoughts are
particular inner experiences. This is an idea which connects up with our
notion of the privacy and the unity of our 'selves' or 'personalities'.
There is here, if I may borrow a psychological term, an important and
necessary 'illusion of immanence'; only to call it an 'illusion' risks
giving the description an ontological flavour. It is rather a necessary
regulative idea, about which it makes no sense to ask, is it true or false
that it is so? It is for us as if our thoughts were inner events, and it is
as if these events were describable either as verbal units or in
metaphorical, analogical terms. [EM p38-9]
There must be different concepts of experience. Here Wittgenstein has in
mind the dictum about the inner needing outer criteria. May a doubt be
thrown on this? What about the Œexperience¹ of being guided or influenced,
for instance in copying a figure. While being guided I notice nothing
special. Afterwards if I wonder what happened I feel there must have been
something else. ŒI have the feeling that what is essential about it is ³an
experience of being influenced², of a connection ... but I should not be
willing to call any experienced phenomenon the ³experience of being
influenced²... I should like to say that I experienced the ³because², and
yet I do not want to call any phenomenon ³the experience of the because².¹
([Philosophical Investigations] 176.) This anxiety connects with
Wittgenstein¹s more general problem about inability to continue a series,
Œhow to go on¹, how to trust to memory. We (I) reading Wittgenstein here
feel the compelling presence of Œlogic¹, and also a sense of void.
Wittgenstein cannot find (and really does not want) any Œbecause¹. The
Œexperience¹ of being guided is an illusion. But what is to count as an
experience? Back in ordinary language we may say, all right, often (for
instance, counting, adding) we do not have any Œpalpable¹ experience - but
also, often, we are in situations where the concept of experience is clearly
in place. ŒIs it seeing or is it thought?¹ Well, usually it is both, one
cannot, necessarily, Œlogically¹ prise experiences apart. Experience is
consciousness. (Wittgenstein avoids the latter word.) It is deep and
complex, it has density, thoughts and perceptions and feelings are combined
in the swift movement of our mode of existence. (Swift, as pointed out by
Schopenhauer.) Can we experience an influence? Yes, of course, when (for
instance) we sit wondering whether we have been wrongly persuaded by another
person. Physical feelings as well as mental images attend such anxiety. In
Œsetting his face against the picture of the inner process¹ Wittgenstein
seems to have banished not only (as in the example at 305-7) a naive error
(or grammatical fiction) but the whole multifarious mixed-up business of our
inner reflections, though-being, experience, consciousness. [MGM 278/279]
It is impossible, upon any system, to defend either our understanding or our
senses; and we but expose them further when we endeavour to justify them in
that manner. [Hume: Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, Part 4, section 2,
quoted in MGM p286]
Language just does refer to the world, we just do posses the essential
talent of knowing that something is the same again. Without this human
nature would perish an go to ruin [allusion to Hume: A Treatise of Human
Nature, Book 1, Part 4, Section 4]. Here we can see it as a Kantian-Humian
deduction. It just has to be so for us to be as we are. [MGM p286]
Wittgenstein is Œembarrassed¹ by the concept of experience. This huge
concept directs us toward the messiness of ordinary life and it¹s mysteries.
He persecutes sensation S. He denies Œexperiential volume¹ to meaning,
intending, being influenced (p. 217). He also denies it (II xi p. 219) to
the expression Œthe word is on the tip of my tongue¹. In more relaxed and
less logical mood, in Culture and Value, p.79, he describes Œcases where
someone has the sense of what he wants to say much more clearly in his mind
than he can express in words. (This happens to me very often.) It is as
though one had a dream image quite clearly before one¹s minds eye, but could
not describe it to someone else so as to let him see it too. As a matter of
fact, for the writer (myself) it is often as though the image stays there
behind the words, so that they seem to describe it to me.¹ He goes on to
say: ŒA mediocre writer must beware of too quickly replacing a crude,
incorrect expression with a correct one. By doing so he kills his original
idea, which was at least still a living seedling. Now it is withered and no
longer worth anything. He may as well throw it on the rubbish heap.
Whereas the wretched seedling was still worth something.¹ Here, with a free
and apt use of metaphor, with swift intuitive imagination, Wittgenstein
describes the experience of thinking. Yes, it is like that. We can come
close to these things and do them justice. [MGM 282/283]
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