From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Feb 21 2005 - 21:29:34 GMT
Hey Scott,
This was supposed to be at the beginning of the "Philosophy and Metaphysics"
post, but it woulda' made it too big, so I'm sending it separate. It bears
indirectly towards our discussion there.
Scott said:
I think [saying that neither materialism nor immaterialism can win] is
overlooking the anecdotal evidence for the immaterial, that a Rorty or a
Dennett is just not likely to consider, which is to say they have already in
place a criterion for excluding evidence for the immaterial. There is no
absolute criterion (short of personal experience), but how likely is someone
like Rorty to read of others' personal experiences, Merrell-Wolff's, say?
Matt:
First, I can’t see why you’d say that either materialism or immaterialism
could win out in an argument, particularly on the use of evidence, based on
what you’ve said about Darwinism being simply a “theory.” I thought you
were saying in those passages about the metaphysical nature of certain
doctrines that the “world,” i.e. evidence, couldn’t force us to be one way
or the other.
Second, I wouldn’t want to guess about Rorty’s reading habits. He’s a
voracious reader and I have no doubt that he’s read some of the major
mystics (probably historical, maybe not contemporary). But the more
important question for me isn’t whether Rorty’s ever been confronted with a
personal account of a mystical experience. It’s what should any of us do
when confronted with a personal account? What are we supposed to think of
them, and why?
For example, the other day my roommate and I were sitting around talking and
she recounted a dream she had. She dreamt she was in a store somewhere
holding three black objects and then she suddenly dropped them. Two days
later she was at Target with her mother. Mom was buying three watches, each
in a black case. She asked my roommate to hold on to them, and a minute
later she dropped them—three black objects. She had a major case of déjà vu
and I off-handedly commented that she was experiencing some precognition in
her dream. She said, “Yeah…isn’t it weird how sometimes you’re really
connected with these things. Sometimes you can be more with it and you
start getting those things more.” I smiled and she’s like, “Ah, I’m
guessing you’re a non-believer.” Yeah, militantly so.
But how am I supposed to receive first-hand accounts like that? Obviously
my roommate is no mystic, but it was a personal experience of “something
else” wasn’t it? I told her that, though I don’t believe for a second that
she suffered from precognition, or you could be more “with it,” more
“connected,” the one thing I couldn’t do was tell her that she didn’t
experience it. I could only give her alternate explanations of what it was.
But how am I supposed to take those personal experiences? Are we to take
any damn fool thing a person says seriously (assuming they say it
sincerely)? This is what I call the shibboleth problem. The story goes
that one of the Israelite Judges, Jephthah, went to war and not all of the
tribes went with him. Well, Jephthah won and when the tribes were coming
home he wanted to weed out the ones who hadn’t supported him. One of the
tribes had trouble pronouncing the word “shibboleth.” So Jephthah had
everybody coming over the river say “shibboleth,” and whoever said
“sibboleth,” as the one tribe would pronounce it, was killed.
So, because of the story, shibboleth has come to mean a “key word.” To tell
the real mystics from the fakers, or worse, the simply wrong, we need to be
able to tell if they are saying “shibboleth” or not. The problem isn’t
whether they are saying “shibboleth,” whether they are real mystics, the
problem is _how would we ever know if they were?_ How can we tell the
Buddhas from the Call-In Cleos?
The only answer I can figure is through conversation, but the end result of
that answer means that the only way we can tell a real mystic from someone
who hasn’t penetrated appearance to reality is by behavior, which means that
they must be behaving according to the conventions of an established
tradition, a tradition that would deem them a mystic. The end result of
this line, I think, is that the only practical thing that matters, then,
isn’t whether there was any penetration or not, but the results of the
conversation itself. The conversation is what matters, the inquiry is what
matters, not whether we say that they penetrated beyond appearances.
Matt
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