Joe and all,
Joe: "I like music. The old Latin chants, hymns, new melodies are a
connection to
many. I am RC. Crusades and Inquisitions. The scientific method looks to
experience for truth. Experience is of something outside of you (real
existence). Whatever exists inside of you, apart from your physical body is
uprovable [sic] and only accessible to you as an individual (intentional
existence). Communication by defined words is trustworthy but not certain.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the end of life on earth. SOM developed with fits
and starts over 2,000 years.
"Persig [sic] pointed: look closely at your experience. Quality is value! I am
certain of DQ, I am certain of Existence, I am certain of existing Purpose.
I will use a phrase MoQ. From a change in the theory of knowledge it will
take many years for a new metaphysics to develop. In the social order I
use communication by defined words (static quality). I can evolve to
intellect: communication only by metaphor, a pointer to certain experience
which I experience when I lower my awareness threshold to the new experience
(existence, existing purpose). There is a process to the certainty needed
for action: rhetoric, a salesman, revelation. I act. A new morality and
maybe we will continue to exist."
This is a very interesting piece of "academic" poetry, one I wish to use to
introduce another facet of Rorty: Bloomian strong misreadings. A "strong
misreading" is a stance taken towards a text. Rorty describes three such
stances: the traditional "humanistic" conception, "Newreading" or
"textualism", and "strong misreading". A traditional, "humanistic" reading
asks the reader to attempt to understand what the author intended for his
language and symbols to mean. Texualism asks the reader to concentrate
only on the text; to treat the text as internally coherent with itself.
"Alternatively," Rorty says, "the textualist may brush aside the notion of
the text as machine which operates quite independently of its creator, and
offer what [Harold] Bloom calls a 'strong misreading.' The critic asks
neither the author nor the text about their intentions but simply beats the
text into a shape which will serve his own purpose. ... He does this by
imposing a vocabulary ... on the text which may have nothing to do with any
vocabulary used in the text or by its author, and seeing what happens. The
model here is not the curious collector of clever gadgets taking them apart
to see what makes them work and carefully ignoring any extrinsic end they
may have, but the psychoanalyst blithely interpreting a dream or a joke as
a symptom of homicidal mania." ("Idealism and Textualism" from Consequences
of Pragmatism)
In this case, Joe's phrase, "There is a process to the certainty needed
for action: rhetoric, a salesman, revelation. I act." is a very nice way of
putting the process of changing beliefs. When beliefs are changed
causally, the experience of a changed belief can sometimes feel like a
revelation. There is the rhetoric involved in the persuasion, the salesman
(be it you or somebody else) attempting to persuade you, and then either
success (revelation) or no success.
Matt
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