John,
It would take a long-ish essay to respond adequately. I'm working on
one, but can't promise when or if I'll finish. So meanwhile,
It is not idealism. It is anti-realism, perhaps. The main point is to
break the SOM-ish habit of privileging reality over language. To make
one objection to what you say, why do you seem to regard reading as not
being an "immediate experience"? The problem is attachment, whether when
using words or walking through a forest.
It is not inconsistent. Perhaps I should have said "there is no terrain
that is not itself a map (of another terrain, etc. forever)".
Mathematics might be an exception, in that the thinking of a
mathematical object is the object, but that's another essay.
Robert Magliola differentiates between what he calls "centric" mysticism
from "differential" mysticism, and I'm working the differential side of
the street. Centric mysticism might be thought of as mysticism from a
SOM perspective, where there is typically some goal: union with God, for
example. Differential is more about skillful means, emphasizing
detachment by deconstructing whatever one has glommed on to. Each has
its value, though I think differential is the better tool for this
modernist-to-postmodern age. YMMV.
- Scott
John Beasley wrote:
> Scott, others
>
> "There is no terrain. It's maps all the way down." This seems to me as much
> a half truth as the equally simple belief that Dr Johnson's rock against
> which he refuted something or other is 'objective' reality.
>
> Taken at face value your statement is a form of idealism. But it also lacks
> internal consistency, since it takes one half of a relationship and reifies
> it. By this I mean that the word 'map' only makes sense in the context of a
> 'terrain'. Mapping is about a particular form of relationship, similar to
> modelling. The relationship of a model to that being modelled seems to me
> clear enough. The model extracts certain information from a more complex
> reality, and presents that in a way that can be used for certain purposes.
> So the usual map of the London Underground gives useful information about
> the serial arrangement of train stations, and the linkages between lines,
> but only a vague and often misleading view of the geographical location of
> the stations, which can be shown on another type of map. Mapping is a form
> of human activity, a purposeful simplification.
>
> The aspect of your statement that is useful is the recognition that there is
> no level of human understanding that cannot be seen as a form of mapping, of
> extraction of meaning from a more complex whole. One reason that most of the
> well known physicists of the past century were mystics in outlook was
> because they became aware that the scientific understanding of reality was a
> very incomplete mathematical model. It worked well enough as a model, but
> was inadequate to 'explain' lived experience. Something more than
> mathematics was required to do justice to that experience.
>
> This is where Pirsig, in my opinion, takes the appropriate middle road. He
> argues that a SOM is a useful enough map for certain contexts. The problem,
> as Wilber shows, is when anything that falls outside that map is minimised
> or denied. The so-called 'objectivity' of science has been a huge problem
> only because it denied any value to the 'subjective' dimensions of human
> experience. Otherwise it becomes just another more or less useful map, great
> as a basis for technological innovation, useless for art criticism.
>
> The MOQ is also a useful map, in that it creates a model of how we as human
> beings might know 'our' world, while accepting that the world is not the map
> that we can construct of it. It is a meta-map. It is, at best, as far as we
> can go in understanding the world, but it omits as undefinable our total
> experiencing of the world, while rightly pointing to the primacy of that
> experience.
>
> The suggestion that it is maps all the way down is a subtle inversion of
> this. At its worst it becomes an idealism that denies any reality outside
> our mental mapping of it, something Pirsig is careful to avoid. It ignores
> the 'arrow of simplification' that underlies all mapping and modelling. And
> it ignores the immediacy of experience, what Pirsig calls 'quality' or
> 'value', which is not mapped, but experienced. The mapping is the static
> latching. It is a human processing of a more primordial experience.
>
> The mystic, in my view, is dedicated to living this immediate experience,
> and recognises the distancing that always occurs when it is mapped. Hence
> the mystic disempowers the familiar maps, which always use past experience
> to predict the future, and concentrates on the immediate moment, unmapped,
> but nonetheless real. To the mystic, the statement "It's maps all the way
> down" is just another barrier to immediacy.
>
> John B
>
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