From: Joseph Maurer (jhmau@sbcglobal.net)
Date: Wed Dec 08 2004 - 19:52:47 GMT
On 6 December 2004 3:18 PM Sam writes to David MB and anyone interested in
our mysticism discussions.
Hi Sam, DMB, and all,
[joe] Yes, I am interested in a discussion of mystical experience. I do not
know if that is the same as 'mysticism discussions'.
[Sam] Is it accurate to describe the MoQ as simply a redescription of
Schleiermacher's scheme, that is, is not Dynamic Quality merely a Kantian
'pure experience', and the levels of Static Quality merely a redescription
of phenomena? If not why not?
joe: IMO no! Schleiermacher's schema has roots in a division between
mind-will-soul and matter. The term 'immediate consciousness' used by Grace
Jantzen reflects the presence of a mind- will-soul. IMO following the MOQ's
description of experience, DQ/SQ, Quality has evolved the levels and the
emanations between dq/sq is mystical experience of the levels. In The Edge
of Chaos Mark M uses the term 'sweet spot'. For me this is a description of
the emanation of coherence between sq and sq.
[Sam] This is not to suggest a direct borrowing, only to point out that
Pirsig's work-probably via William James-has inherited a conceptual shape
from Schleiermacher, and that conceptual shape is very largely discredited
within the academic community.
joe: it is true that No man is an island! IMO the academic community has not
fully explored the MOQ so what it says about Schleiermacher is irrelevant. A
description of a 'direct borrowing' by Pirsig from Schleiermacher would not
return value for value.
Joe .
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sam Norton" <elizaphanian@kohath.wanadoo.co.uk>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Monday, December 06, 2004 3:14 AM
Subject: MD Is the MoQ still in the Kantosphere?
> Hi David MB, anyone interested in our mysticism discussions (this was the
> Pirsig, James, Mysticism
> thread)
>
> I've sent this to Horse as a possible essay to be posted on the website -
> and I wasn't going to send
> it in to MD as well - but it's germane to several discussions still going
> on, so, what the heck.
> It's very 'raw' and condensed, but perhaps some discussions will help to
> clarify it. I just think
> there are some questions that need to be answered.....
>
> Regards to all,
> Sam
> ~~~
>
> Pirsig, Schleiermacher, Mysticism and the MoQ
>
> This essay was sparked by a desire to recapitulate some of the central
> points about mysticism that I
> have attempted to argue for in the MD forum (normally against David
> Buchanan). In the course of some
> revision, I was greatly struck by a description of Schleiermacher's
> understanding of mysticism, and
> so it seemed worthwhile to put the material that I was gathering together
> into the form of an essay,
> rather than a long post on MD. Without wishing to sound grandiose, I think
> I have located a
> potentially serious problem with the 'metaphysics' part of the Metaphysics
> of Quality.
>
> Central to any account of Western intellectual history is the figure of
> Immanuel Kant, and
> considerations of mysticism are no different. A key concept to understand
> is what has come to be
> known as the 'Kantian problematic', which, in summary, goes something like
> this: all of our
> knowledge comes to us from experience. However, since experience is always
> our experience, it is
> never a pure experience, but is always mediated and conditioned by the
> structure of our minds and
> apprehension. What we experience are the phenomena, that which is provoked
> in us by the thing in
> itself; things in themselves are noumena, and unknowable.
>
> This raised problems for religious believers. For although Kant accepted
> the existence of God, it
> was in such an attenuated form as to be unrecognisable as a focus of
> devotion, and his account of
> human knowledge (his epistemology) ruled out any possibility of
> relationship between a believer and
> God; we are simply physically incapable of enjoying such an experience. At
> best, God is a useful
> idea, a means of moral regulation.
>
> This is the Kantian problematic: the notion that we cannot experience God
> directly. It immediately
> brought forth a response, which, whilst retaining the Kantian
> epistemology, argued that in certain
> circumstances it was possible to have a 'pure' experience, i.e. to
> experience the 'noumena'. This
> was the Romantic movement, which argued that whilst reason cannot enjoy
> such a pure experience, it
> was possible to circumvent the Kantian problematic through the operation
> of the feelings, most
> especially through intense, visionary or ecstatic experiences.
>
> In the development of the Romantic understanding, a key thinker is the
> theologian Friedrich
> Schleiermacher (1768-1834), who was strongly influenced by the Idealism of
> his time. Schleiermacher
> believed that the source of religion was an immediate feeling or
> consciousness, which is a precursor
> to rational awareness. I take the following from a discussion of
> Schleiermacher by Grace Jantzen :
>
> "...immediate consciousness points to the stage before subject and object
> are differentiated. There
> is, Schleiermacher suggests, a primal stage of consciousness in any
> experience, a stage before the
> objective content is discriminated from the subjective participation. This
> consciousness cannot be
> consciousness of anything, it cannot have any specificity, because by the
> time the object of
> consciousness has been specified one has already moved away from the
> primal undifferentiated state.
> Such movement is of course necessary for thought or knowledge to take
> place: in this Schleiermacher
> agrees with Kant. But the truly religious moment is the moment before such
> differentiation into
> subject and object has taken place: this is what he means when he speaks
> of religion as immediate
> consciousness."
>
> Jantzen goes on,
>
> ".any claim of religious belief or knowledge is secondary to this pure
> experience, and is nothing
> more than our stammering attempt to articulate its essence. The attempt is
> natural and right; but it
> is not right if we then become wedded to these articulations and make them
> into dogmas which must be
> believed, or, even worse, treat them, rather than the spring from which
> they arise, as the essence
> of religion.. The original feeling, the immediate consciousness,
> Schleiermacher holds to be
> essential to human nature, and. this is everywhere the same; but the way
> in which it is articulated
> varies with the language and culture and situation of the experiencer.
> Hence arise the different
> religions of the world. Their differences of dogma and ritual are simply
> different expressions of
> the same essential experience, more or less adequate according to the
> degree of authenticity,
> balance, or corruption of its proponents, but all of them only efforts at
> expressing the
> inexpressible pure experience."
>
> Jantzen then outlines aspects of Schleiermacher's system which are
> essential for understanding the
> modern conception of mysticism - for Schleiermacher called himself a
> mystic and saw his work as
> defending the insights of mystics through the ages. These aspects are:
> 1. mystical experience consists of pre-rational immediate consciousness or
> feeling;
> 2. mystical experience removes the distinction between subject and object;
> 3. mystical experience is prior to language and is therefore ineffable;
> 4. mystical experience dissolves or annihilates the self;
> 5. mystical experience cannot be sustained, and is therefore transient;
> 6. mystical experience is nevertheless noetic, that is, it imparts
> insights about the nature of
> Reality.
>
> Schleiermacher's influence on the way in which mysticism was studied was
> huge, and his conception
> dominated academic studies of the question from his own time until very
> recently. The academic
> studies built up through the nineteenth century all shared an acceptance
> of the Kantian problematic,
> i.e. that division between the 'phenomenal' and the 'noumenal', and viewed
> mystical understandings
> as in some way bypassing the normal constraints of intellect, in order to
> access reality directly.
> Hence Rudolf Otto, for example, whose 'numinous' is the same as Kant's
> transcendent realm.
>
> At the end of the nineteenth century, and drawing on this body of academic
> studies, William James
> wrote his "The Varieties of Religious Experience" (published 1902), and he
> argued that mysticism has
> certain characteristics (the inheritance from Schleiermacher's account is,
> I trust, obvious). He
> argues, "[I] propose to you four marks which, when an experience has them,
> may justify us in calling
> it mystical", and the four 'marks' (two major then two minor) are:
> 1. Ineffability - "it defies expression, no adequate report of its
> contents can be given in words.
> It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it
> cannot be imparted or
> transferred to others. In this peculiarity mystical states are more like
> states of feeling than
> states of intellect."
> 2. Noetic quality - "Mystical states seem to those who experience them to
> be also states of
> knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by
> the discursive intellect"
> 3. Transiency - "Mystical states cannot be sustained for long." And
> 4. Passivity - "when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set
> in, the mystic feels as
> if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were
> grasped by a higher power."
>
> It is William James' version of mysticism, derived from Schleiermacher,
> which has dominated the 20th
> century investigations, and for my purposes here I would point out that,
> in this understanding - let
> us call it the "Modern synthesis" - mystical experience is rare, private
> and experiential; those who
> enjoy such experiences are spiritually significant and blessed; but they
> are the inheritors of the
> great spiritual teachers of the past, and they have access to the common
> root which supports all the
> different religious traditions of the world.
>
> This understanding has developed in various different thinkers through the
> twentieth century, and we
> could pick out three representative 'streams':
> 1. John Hick and William Johnston focus on mystical experience as the
> 'common core' to all religious
> belief, transcending the culturally bound expressions in different
> traditions;
> 2. Don Cupitt and Matthew Fox emphasise the dynamism associated with those
> who enjoy mystical
> experiences, especially in contrast to religious authorities and those who
> would insist on some sort
> of orthodoxy; and
> 3. Joseph Campbell and Alan Watts see the mystical experience in much more
> Jungian terms as the
> symbol or sign of the inner psychic transformation attainable by those who
> pursue religious paths.
>
>>From my point of view it is what these thinkers have in common which is of
>>interest, viz. that
> mystical experience is not bound by a historical community or culture, but
> is rather focussed on the
> self-realisation of a particular individual.
>
> The academic community, for all its problems, does not stay still, and
> this "Modern synthesis" has
> come under increasingly sustained criticism over the last twenty years. It
> would be fair to say that
> it is now largely rejected as a coherent account, certainly of religious
> mysticism within the
> Christian tradition, and, by and large, as a description of mysticism as
> such. I will run through
> the principal problems under two headings, philosophical and historical.
>
> Philosophical problems:
> - the notion of 'pure experience' depends upon the Kantian epistemological
> framework for its
> coherence. If this is removed, then the concept becomes unworkable. As the
> Kantian framework is - to
> put it mildly - heavily contested in the academy, it is difficult to
> sustain this conception unless
> you are also prepared to accept the wider Kantian understandings;
> - the problem of 'essentialism', that is, the assumption that there is a
> 'common core' underlying
> all the different manifestations of mystical experience. This is an
> inheritance from the Cartesian
> program, seeking a reductive explanation of phenomena. If you accept,
> e.g., the Wittgensteinian
> notion of 'family resemblance' then it becomes problematic to insist upon
> a common core lying
> underneath difference;
> - in discussing the ineffable characteristics of mystical experience, the
> expression
> 'non-conceptual' (and equivalents) are being used to stand for conceptual
> terms. Put differently, if
> a mystical experience has some impact upon a person's understanding then
> it must be 'ascribable' to
> that person, by themselves or another, and so the insistence on
> 'non-conceptuality' is
> self-contradicting;
> - the "Modern synthesis" depends upon an individualist epistemology, again
> deriving from Descartes,
> which makes what happens to a particular ego central. If this is rejected
> (which it generally has
> been) then, once more, the synthesis breaks down.
>
> The historical problems are related. One of the more surprising things I
> have learnt about William
> James is that in researching his Varieties he did no reading amongst the
> primary sources himself,
> relying on the work of his student who had gathered together a collection
> of short extracts. It is
> not surprising that those who follow in James's footsteps are confused as
> to what the mystical
> tradition is actually about.
>
> - The French church historian Henri de Lubac laid a great deal of the
> foundations for the revolution
> in understanding mysticism in the early decades of the twentieth century,
> showing how the
> understanding of mysticism had shifted sense during the 11th and 12th
> centuries, looking
> particularly at the nature of the Eucharist. One of his most important
> conclusions was that
> mysticism was a public and accessible phenomenon.
> - More recently, Louis Bouyer has articulated the transitions that have
> occurred in the
> understanding of mysticism down the centuries, including the most recent
> ones outlined above. To
> quote from one relevant part of his writings, "The links of Denis, the
> first and most influential of
> the great mystical theologians, with Neoplatonism are undeniable. But
> precisely that which, for
> Denis himself, constitutes mysticism, is not what these experiences which
> he describes my have in
> common with, for example, those of Plotinus. It is, on the contrary, their
> position at the
> intersection of a whole specifically Christian spiritual tradition of
> scriptural interpretation and
> the ecclesiastical experience of the liturgy, the eucharistic liturgy. His
> mystical theology, as he
> understands it himself, is his manner of recognising the Christ, at the
> breaking of bread, in all
> the scriptures."
> - As more research has been done directly on the Christian mystical
> tradition, it has become more
> and more clear that not only are the Christian mystics themselves not
> interested in their own
> 'experiences' (understood as private, ineffable, noetic etc), but that
> their precise arguments are
> to undermine and critique the emphasis upon such exotic experiences, as a
> snare and spiritual
> delusion, leading to the vices of self-absorption and Titanism.
>
> The foregoing is a very rough and ready overview of current academic
> debate on the subject of
> mysticism. I hope that if nothing else it has imparted a flavour of the
> debate, and the points that
> are at issue. However, if this was all there was to it, it could have
> remained as an MD post. I
> think there is something more. If the academic community is right in
> rejecting the Kantian
> problematic, and therefore the 'Modern synthesis' understanding of
> mysticism - and the grounds for
> doing so are really quite overwhelming - where does that leave Pirsig and
> the MoQ? For the links
> between the MoQ and Schleiermacher's project seem profound, even down to
> some of the language used.
> Is it accurate to describe the MoQ as simply a redescription of
> Schleiermacher's scheme, that is, is
> not Dynamic Quality merely a Kantian 'pure experience', and the levels of
> Static Quality merely a
> redescription of phenomena? If not, why not? This is not to suggest a
> direct borrowing, only to
> point out that Pirsig's work - probably via William James - has inherited
> a conceptual shape from
> Schleiermacher, and that conceptual shape is very largely discredited
> within the academic community.
>
> I don't yet have positive answers to put forward to the questions that
> this raises, but I felt it
> would be worth sharing the questions.
>
>
> Sam Norton
> December 2004
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