From: Scott R (jse885@spinn.net)
Date: Wed Nov 20 2002 - 02:52:41 GMT
Matt,
Buddhism (well, some Buddhism, in particular the Madhyamaka school) has been
saying the same thing as Rorty for two millenia, but they add that one *can*
realize the reality behind all linguistic awareness, which they call
Emptiness.
Now the question is: does this count as an appearance-reality distinction or
not? In past posts you have tried to categorize it as such, but this (the
Buddhist) claim is very different from the distinction of, say, modern
realist philosophers, that our word-knowledge corresponds to reality (if it
is true, or asymptotically does so, etc.). The Buddhist, on the other hand,
says there is no objective reality beyond our "conceptual designations".
Realizing Emptiness is realizing in some absolutely certain way THAT all our
"objective" experience is "empty of self-existence". It is not experiencing
some new "reality" called Emptiness. But it is realizing something
infinitely more than understanding the concept that "all things are empty of
self-existence" or "there is no pre-linguistic awareness". That is, it is
liberating, redemptive, salvific...
[By the way, I responded -- twice -- to an earlier post of yours, but both
times, my post seems to have disappeared. So I suspect I'll wait for the
same issues to arise again, as they always seem to do. I'll just throw in
one comment from that post: the thought of a dog is not a dog. The thought
of 42 is 42. I'm not sure about the thought of dogginess.]
- Scott
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt the Enraged Endorphin" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 19, 2002 4:58 PM
Subject: Re: MD Individuality
> Sam,
>
> >Doesn't Pirsig explicitly say that he is continuing the philosophical
school
> >of pragmatism (ie James, Pierce) so that is the best place to locate him?
>
> Christ, I've been trying to make that argument for, what? 6 months now?
> Granted, though, certain aspects of Pirsig may coincide with certain other
> aspects of Dewey, James, and Pierce that Rorty (as my representative
> pragmatist) may want to gloss over. For instance, Dewey's supposed
> metaphysics (which is called a "metaphysics of experience," in case
anybody
> is interested in looking into the comparisons).
>
> >Also, to Matt: why do you think Pirsig has continuities with Heidegger?
>
> That passage that caught my eye was "Religion isn't invented by man. Men
> are invented by religion," (Ch 28) which is very, very much like
> Heidegger's (roughly) "Man doesn't use language, language uses man." Not
> only do the phrases show strong, eerie similarity, but the message of them
> is the same: a person is in many ways the same as the person's culture.
>
> >Are you saying that you cannot have a
> >non-linguistic experience, or rather that you simply cannot talk about
such
> >an experience intelligibly?
>
> There are two slogans, one from the Continental tradition, one from the
> Analytic, that cash out to mean the same thing: "Everything is a social
> construction" (Foucault) and "All awareness is a linguistic affair"
> (Sellars). Here's Rorty:
>
> "Both are ways of saying that we shall never be able to step outside of
> language, never be able to grasp reality unmediated by a linguistic
> description. So both are ways of saying that we should be suspicious of
> the Greek distinction between appearance and reality, and that we should
> try to replace it with something like the distinction between 'less useful
> description of the world' and 'more useful description of the world'. To
> say that everything is a social construction is to say that our linguistic
> practices are so bound up with our other social practices that our
> descriptions of nature, as well as of ourselves, will always be a function
> of our social needs. To say that all awareness is a linguistic affair is
> to say that we have no knowledge of the kind which Bertrand Russell ...
> called 'knowledge by acquaintance'. All our knowledge is of the sort
which
> Russell called 'knowledge by description'. If you put the two slogans
> together, you get the claim that all our knowledge is under descriptions
> suited to our current social purposes."
>
> Now, this is what Heidegger means by "Man doesn't use language, language
> uses man" and, as I would interpret it, what Pirsig's gesturing towards
> when he said, "Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by
religion."
>
> So, when Platt says that Rorty has an idea that "that a pre-linguistic
> reality doesn't exist," (and that I'm defending it) he's not exactly
> accurate. A more accurate statement is that we can't have knowledge of a
> pre-linguistic reality.
>
> Matt
>
>
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