From: John Beasley (beasley@austarnet.com.au)
Date: Thu Oct 03 2002 - 12:59:56 BST
Hullo Matt, Scott, Steve (welcome), David (welcome back), Sam, Platt,
others,
I have been away for a while and have just waded through a mountain of moq
posts that were waiting on my return. I had been enjoying Matt's short
course on Rorty, and find much off what he says interesting and thought
provoking. I am particularly taken by his understanding of 'final
vocabularies', and their 'incorrigibility'.
Two recent interchanges in this forum seemed to me to reinforce his
argument. David's 29th Sept posting (on Moral Clarity) argued that
conservatism is dominated by social values, and the response from Roger was
predictable (denial, avoidance, outrage, followed by a smoochin 'We really
don't disagree that much'). I wouldn't blame David for not coming back.
Meanwhile your discussion with Platt, Matt, seemed to have deteriorated to a
point where the tension was obvious. I must say I smiled sardonically at the
confirmation of Rorty's points in your own experience.
Steve asked does Pirsig's "MOQ actually clear up moral issues such as
capital punishment, human cloning, abortion, etc, or is it more of a lens
through which to view such issues that offers a perspective of biological,
social, and intellectual interplay?" I think the answer is obvious. The
problem is that each player seems to have already made a number of key
assumptions into a form of dogma, that no amount of argument can touch. This
is what I understand to be the incorrigibility of their final vocabularies.
I recently had the opportunity to read one of Don Cupitt's recent books,
'After God', which seems a strange celebration of postmodernism in theology.
I have also been reading Hameed Ali's latest book (A.H. Almaas,
'Spacecruiser Inquiry' 2002) which looks in detail at the process of mystic
'cleansing of the doors of perception'. What emerges for me is that there
are only three real options for the exploration of 'reality' available.
The first is the acceptance of any pre-packaged belief system. This can
include any 'ism', including scientism, and most religion, and undoubtedly
includes the MOQ. It does not preclude intelligence, or good will, but is
essentially closed. This would not suit Rorty or Cupitt, who seem to believe
that the time for such belief systems is past, despite the ample evidence
that they are everywhere popular. Fundamentalism would seem to me to provide
the clearest picture of the attractiveness of such systems, and their basic
flaws.
The second option is to take the linguistic 'turn', if that is the correct
term, and accept that we are only temporary aggregations of language and
values, constantly changing. Both Cupitt and Rorty seem to have accepted
this position, and therefore have lost interest in such debates as "What is
truth?", in favour of 'ordinary language'. So Cupitt can say "in traditional
society religious ideas functioned to stabilise the whole 'Symbolic Order';
that is, the whole world of language. A society oriented towards change,
like ours, will not need the older kind of religion any more." In his
ontology, he speaks of 'Be-ing'. "Be-ing is a continuous and gentle but very
dense outpouring of pure contingency; a sort of while noise, which language
differentiates and forms into the world of our experience." (Both quotes
from 'An Apologia for my thinking', 2002) The key to this option is that we
cannot speak of a reality separate to our language, since even if one
exists, and Rorty seems to accept this, if his endorsement of Davidson is
any guide, this reality is not known outside our language, however much it
might manifest in 'causal pressures'.
[Matt: "Davidson's claim that a truth theory for a natural language is
nothing
more or less than an empirical explanation of the causal relations which
hold between features of the environment and the holding true of sentences,
seems to me all the guarantee we need that we are, always and everywhere,
'in touch with the world'. If we have such a guarantee, then we have all
the insurance we need against 'relativism' and 'arbitrariness'. For
Davidson tells us that we can never be more arbitrary than the world lets us
be.]
The third option is one that Platt seems to be fighting for, though he
dresses it in the MOQ, which belongs to the first option. This asserts an
immediacy of experience prior to our manipulation of that by language. The
hot stove serves as the test case. The mystics seem to take this further,
though. Hameed Ali talks about understanding as "not mental or intellectual
comprehension but a direct awareness and experience of oneself that is
insightful and clear - the clear discrimination of the truth of experience."
He argues that Reality is characterised by knowingness, which means we
discriminate the particular quality of presence that arises in experience,
and, critically, "Basic knowledge is there all the time, and exists prior to
commentary."
According to Ali, Scott's credo [Scott: "I think salvation lies in
strengthening the intellect, and the intellect is strengthened by butting up
against mystery. That which we understand is dead, while a nice piece of
mystery keeps it alive and dynamic."] is still sophistry, since the emphasis
is on the intellect, rather than on immediacy.
Some supporters of the intellect may be annoyed to see their position lumped
in with fundamentalism, but the more I reflect on this the more I am
convinced that the difference is not so great. Both believe that there is a
best answer, the one is 'revealed', the other 'discovered'. This whole
outlook is fundamentally challenged by the postmodern understandings that
have come to dominate modern thought in an obsessive way.
The postmodern attempt to view everything through the lens of language is
not all bad. It has forced us to think more carefully about the role of
language in our understanding, and points to a creative role in shaping the
world we inhabit through the language we adopt. It has some fundamental
weaknesses, though.
Firstly, it is unable to account for human development, from a
pre-linguistic infancy to early language use and the later sophisticated use
of language in adulthood.
Secondly, it is very vulnerable to a form of nihilism, which views us as
meme machines, determined by the success or otherwise of the memes we
contact in our society. As Susan Blackmore points out, there is no guarantee
that the memes are good for us. This is in effect a refutation of Davidson,
above, who assumes that "we are, always and everywhere, 'in touch with the
world'." The world of memes is not the world of genes, and vague hopes that
our language is helpfully constrained by the 'environment' seem hopelessly
naive.
Thirdly, language is easily manipulated. Someone like Cupitt seems happily
able to float along in a postmodern pot-pourri of constant change, then in
the last paragraph of the book suggests that somehow it is all going to
Hell! I don't understand his logic, but I can understand his concern. When
the Rupert Murdoch's of this world can insidiously shape how we all think
about things, we have cause to be concerned. Cupitt assumes that change will
be for the better, ultimately, and that manipulation will be ineffective. I
doubt both assumptions.
The mystic assertions of a reality prior to language are surely correct if
we look at human infancy. The question is whether the mystic solution is a
regressive or progressive one. Ali says "To inquire means to begin to
recognize what it is from the past we identify with. The past survives in
our memory knowledge but we can penetrate it by staying in the present and
opening up our experience to our immediate knowingness." "Our experience
keeps moving deeper and deeper, becomes more and more expanded, freer and
more transparent, until at some point it coincides with the qualities of our
true nature." (Spacecruiser Inquiry, p 47) Intellectual knowledge is
therefore a barrier to knowingness, since it tends towards closure, while
inquiry is open. The final vocabulary of the mystic is not a vocabulary at
all, but is a knowing of what arises instant by instant, prior to any
linguistic gloss, though there is nothing to prevent the mystic using
language to speak of his experience.
I am not sure that the mystic position is 'true', but it seems to me the
only viable option, given the weaknesses of the other approaches.
Regards,
John B
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