ELEPHANT TO JOHN LAWTON AND RICHARD RIDGE
How long is a length of thread?
>> ELEPHANT WROTE: I'd like to get a new thread going on mysticism..... I think
>> that what Prisig has to say on mysticism in this short passage[P72/3 LILA]
>> is just about the most intelligent, perceptive, and important things that
>> have ever been said on the subject, bar-girls and all.
>>
>> JOHN LAWTON WROTE: I really enjoy this turn in the tide. I'm reminded of
>> Martin Heidegger's "turn". Where-in he became much more poetic in his
>> language and thought. Herein is a clue I think. The usual discursive
>> grasping of thought finds greater freedom and accuracy in the ambiguity
>> (from a standard perspective) and richness of poetry. I'm more inclined to
>> find greater depth and comprehension in the poet rather than the
>> philosopher. Let's not forget, Pirsig wrote a novel not a philosophical
>> treatise. In the language of poetry opposites are often unified, neat
>> boudaries transgressed, ignored, obliterated and transcendance and immanence
>> enjoy a mutual collusion. The riddle of language reaching for "Reality" or
>> mapping it is untied in the great poems IMO.
>>
>> ELEPHANT: Poetry in itself. But I wonder. Certainly poetry isn't
>> discursive. But do you think that it can actually get to the mystical? Or,
>> perhaps, is it rather the (flawed) attempt that counts and reveals: the
>> strain and effort of it? The stuggle is itself a kind of signpost,
>> indicating a reality that the poet is struggling with. This seems to be how
>> Murdoch interprets a saying of Paul Valery:
>>
>> A difficulty is a light. An insurmountable difficulty is a Sun.
>>
>> The Sun, of course, is an old Platonic Image for the form of the Good.
>> Quality as an insurmountable difficulty, indicated both by our straining to
>> reach it, and by our straining to describe it - how does that sound?
JOHN LAWTON WROTE:
> Certainly it doesn't attain the mystical. For that seems to be beyond
> language and thought. The unsayable. A flawed attempt to reveal or point
> perhaps. It just seems to me to be more congruent to the mystical as opposed
> to logical/discursive constructions. SOM is usually transcended or ignored
> by the great poets. Yeats Eliot etc. I don't think any content can be
> acribed to the mystical via language or thought. In absence of content
> (ideas) there is only song or praise or lament etc.
ELEPHANT:
Only song - I like that. So, better that poetry, music? Better than Plato,
Bach? But I don't know, and an old question: what of the music that played
in concentration camps? I think what I really think is that you just can't
do without ideas and discursive thought of some kind, and that the opposite
of ideas is quiet meditation, not Bach. Certainly not Wagner!
There is narrative in Wagner all right, events and causes, subjects and
objects, desires and fulfilments. Not in words, but it's there alright.
None of the Wagnerian song of longing is the mystical, although it is often
mistaken for such. And when this mistake is made? Wagner is a warning from
history if ever there was one. This example shows that the mere doing
without words isn't enough. One has to have the right kind of quiet
attentiveness in the place where the words were. And that means that words
do have their place: to let the adept know where musings depart from
meditation. So it seems to me.
Your mention of T.S.Eliot is interesting for me. Eliot was a philosopher
pretending to be a poet if ever there was one (I'd class Plato as exerting
his effort in the other direction, but as being both). Eliot is always
alluding to the classics: Plato is in there, Heraclitus is in there, the
East is there too (Prisig wasn't the first to make this connection).
With Eliot the tone of delivery was important - one of the first well known
poets to be famous in his own voice over the radio and in recording. There
is dispassion, dessication almost, or something meditaive, like the
troat-drone of (buddhist) monks.
Something that not many people know about Eliot is that he wrote a doctoral
thesis on the English Philosopher F.H.Bradley - a much underated figure, in
my veiw (the fashion turned against him when Russell cam along). If anybody
is brave enough, and read's some Bradley (it can be hard going, very old
fashioned English), they will find that he maintained not only that the
subject / object distinction is an illusion, but also that the subject /
predicate world of synthetic judgements is an illusion. The stuff of
everyday life, certainly, but not what one sees on enlightenment. Bradley's
ultimate reality was something he called "the absolute". Lots of people
nowadays have a label for Bradley: "neo-hegelian". I don't think that does
him justice at all at all, I don't think that does him justice at all (nor
is it meant to).
Eliot was well read and is a Philosopher's poet. Sometimes his poems read
like reading lists, but at their best (The Four Quartets) I think he is
successfully emulating, not just Heraclitean content, but the Heraclitean
style. That style stands comparison with the eastern Koan. Yes, this is a
poet who manages to indicate the mystical (shown not said), but the way he
does it, IMO, is rather like the way a Philosopher does it, or a
Philosophical Novelist (Prisig, Murdoch), or a philosophical dramatist
(Plato). There is an apparent freedom with language, but that is just on
the surface. If anything, it is the internal effort of his wanting to find
just the right word which indicates the mystical, not the poetic "freedom"
which is supposed to separate poetry from prose. In my opinion, there is
much that is said about Poetry that is right out of the Romantic manifesto.
I think that the romantics had it wrong about the distinction bewteen poetry
and prose: it isn't as sharp as they supposed (the work comes from the greek
root "make" (poesis) - in greece if you made a play you were a poet), nor
can it be defined in terms of freedom, or even ambiguity. There are many
thoroughly ambiguous bills passed in law. Adverts can be ambiguous.
JOHN WROTE:
> Of course many words
> have been applied to the mystical but it is very debatable with what
> accuracy and appropriateness. Wittengenstein gets to this when he commented
> (paraphrased) that when someone understands the "meaning of life" the sense
> of the question or doubt evaporates. You don't get an answer in the standard
> sense. This is very zen-like I think.
ELEPHANT:
I've often puzzled about whether Wittgenstein was a genuine mystic (as he
sometimes seems to be) or just a logical positivist (later behaviourist) in
drag (as he at other times seems to be). Like any human being, I think he
borrowed little devices when they seemed to suit him. Whether he really
committed himself here is hard to say. Perhaps Wittgenstein thought of
himself as a mystic - yes that has to be true. But I side with Prisig and
Murdoch: anybody who thinks you can be a mystic and do away with metaphysics
is quite mistaken - infact, more of a metaphysician than the self-proclaimed
metaphysicians. Aleast the latter group acknowledge the human condition: we
cannot but use thought discursively - that's what "thought" is. We have to
be honest about this whatever we are after: 747s and Quiet Minds alike.
What we we need is an honest philosopher, a mystical metaphysician. Well, I
can count you Five: Plato, Buddha, Bradley, Murdoch, Prisig.
The relation of art to the mystical is an interesting topic. John, Thanks
for directing my attention this way, and I hope there might be further to
go.
ELEPHANT HAD WRITTEN:
> And this is in an area where the much regarded Wittgenstein and my own
> favourite Iris Murdoch have written books and books,
RICHARD WROTE:
> How odd that you should mention that. I have recently read 'Metaphysics as a
> Guide to Morals' and noted that it has quite a few similarities with
> Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality - Murdoch takes her starting point by
> dissolving the distinction between ethics and aesthetics (as otherwise
> contained within the broader category of axiology) wherein art effectively
> becomes a Platonic form of good. Conversely, Pirsig commences by dissolving
> the distinction between aesthetics and ontology, returning to ethics in
> Lila. Has Murdoch been discussed much on this list?
ELEPHANT:
I'm glad to meet a perceptive reader of Murdoch - many so called
Philosophers just don't know what to make of her, or think of her (quite
wrongly) as a mere moralist. More often they would be unable to put her in
any box, and not be able to think about her at all. 'Crank' might not be
too far from their lips, and in this case it's praise indeed.
I don't think Murdoch has been much discussed, to tell the truth, but that
won't stay the case very long if I have anything to do with it. I haven't
been with MOQ that long (I only read Prisig's work this last summer), so I
can't speak from experience, but I have had a trawl though the achives, and
I've found the odd inconclusive mention, but no informed discussion. Lets
see if we can put this right, because I the comparison with Murdoch can
throw light on Prisig, and maybe also on their common heritage: Plato and
Buddhism.
ELEPHANT IN THE MAMMOTH POST HAD IN PASSING NOTED:
> [This [anti-metaphysical mysticism] 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.]
RICHARD WROTE:
Or to put that in the terminology favoured by linguistics, minus the
'difference.'
ELEPHANT:
Careful. It's really important how we conceive of 'the difference'.
Witgenstein thought that his latter philosophy, in which he paid particular
attention to the 'criterion' of a words meaning something, was a faithfull
application of the approach of William James and Frank Ramsey: attending to
'the difference it makes'. But Wittgenstein had in his head one fixed idea
about what the 'difference' could look like: it had to be public, open,
describable. And ofcourse that gets rid of Quality from the start,
safeguarding the "purity" of the mystical by sending it to siberia.
ELEPHANT HAD SAID TO JOHN (SEE ABOVE):
>But do you think that it [poetry]can actually get to the mystical? Or,
>perhaps, is it rather the (flawed) attempt that counts and reveals: the
>strain and effort of it?
RICHARD WROTE:
I don't think it can get to the mystical. Wittgenstein's attempt to strip
language of difference/quality (or, for that matter, the similar endeavours
of Tarski or Russell) is of limited value outside of his own thought. For
example, the discovery of a group of deaf children in Nicaragua who had
independently formed a grammatical system of signification, does a great
deal to validate the existence of an innate (genetic) drive to form
grammatical rules in language from a minimal input, but does little to
determine how that impulse manifests itself under normal circumstances
wherein the child is exposed to a fully-formed language.
ELEPHANT:
Yes. Absolutely. 'Genetic' I like, in it's root meaning (that is "from
creation", not the scientific borrowing to mean "from genes"). Language is
so necessary to it all that language is a sine qua non, a without which not.
It is basic. And what is basic is a kind of creative deployment of
distinctions and metaphor. The deaf children make a language up from
scratch because, in an important sense, so do we: we only borrow from our
parents vocabulary, we not absorb it, but not like some limp towel. We are
not mere tabulets of wax onto which the envirment presses it's image, no -
we are the image makers.
RICHARD WROTE:
..,difference [Quality difference] is an inherent feature of language use -
hypothesising conditions
under which it is not present says little of language.
ELEPHANT:
I couldn't agree more, and this has long been the mainstay of my defence of
Plato against Wittgenstein. Murdoch is an ally I picked up along the way,
and now Prisig too. Language is art (or techne, technology), after all, and
only makes sense as one part of the pursuit of the good (Quality). The
reality of the Good must come first. Otherwise what is the *point* of
saying 'the cat sat on the mat'? This purposive element of language is
something that has been lost in most of the discussion since Russell
(actually since Frege), and with it Quality. The way Wittgenstein talks
about language games you would think that soccer could be described by the
rules. The whole fluid experience of trying to get the ball in the net and
the enourmous challenging difficulty of this is left completely out of the
equation.
RICHARD WROTE:
To quote Rorty on
Derrida:
"Derrida thinks of Heidegger's attempt to express the ineffable as merely
the
latest and most frantic form of a vain struggle to break out of language by
finding words which take their meaning directly from the world, from
non-language."
Or in this case from any transcendental experience - a particularly
difficult case.
> Thinking is not designating at all, but rather understanding,
> grasping, 'possessing'. [Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics p41]
And so, in greek, the word poet means 'maker.'
>Let's not forget, Pirsig wrote a novel not a philosophical treatise.
I rather thought Pirsig was at pains to state that Zen was not a novel in a
conventional sense?
ELEPHANT:
If ever a novel looked like a philosophical treatise, Prisig's is it! But
then, there's no reason why a novel shouldn't be a philosophical treatise,
any less than a poem (Parmenides, Heraclitus), or a play (Plato). Perhaps
all novels poems and plays are in some way treatises, the philosophers
merely being conscious of this, bringing it to the center of their art. You
understand Murdoch well, and the the greek root of 'poet' comes to my mind
too when I'm trying to understand her. But there are a two separate of
points mixed up in this contribution of yours, and I want to apply some
classical logic to unfuzzy them. (I haven't read Heiddeger, and maybe one
day I will. Derrida neither, although the reports and quotes I've read
aren't so encouraging.)
On the one hand, the mystical and the linguistic are undeniably distinct.
But on the other hand, I don't think we can say that 'breaking out of
language' is a "vain struggle". If it were, the whole project would never
have go started in the first place (where's the quality in a vain struggle?
- and why would those deaf children be after it if it's all a pointless
fraud?). Structuralists like Derrida talk as if language was totally cut
off from the mystical reality (with language conducting it's own affairs,
like a sovereign state). But it's not like that at all, the structuralists
have got it all wrong. Sure, language can't *refer* to the mystical reality
(in the sense of flux, aesthetic continuum), and that's just because the
reality is prelinguistic: it doesn't consist of objects. But that doesn't
mean that language is a walled city, with mystical reality off lurking in
some far forest. No, the reality isn't a referent of language, sure, but it
is a *target* of our speach, and an everpresent immediately experienced
target at that: what we aim at every moment of the day. Quality is inside
the City, it is the whole reason for the city being there in the first
place.
Art (language, philosophy, poetry) isn't Quality. But it is the most
enourmous signpost, which is, after all, it's purpose in life.
Any of this make any kind of sense?
Pzeph
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