From: david buchanan (dmbuchanan@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Aug 14 2005 - 23:40:32 BST
Matt and all MOQers:
Matt said to dmb:
... The message of that reading was our loss of mysticism. My assent or not
of that message, though, demands that I know what "mysticism" means first.
I am more confused then ever about what mysticism is supposed to mean or not
mean, not because of anything you or anybody else has said in particular,
but because of the time I've spent meditating on the ruminations in Pirsig's
books
and the MD, let alone any of the other books I've read. Kinda' like what
"post-modernism" turned into as a term, I've never been able to pin down a
least common denominator to "mysticism" to have a clear idea of what is
being conveyed. Sometimes it seems like what counts as mysticism is easily
assimilated into pragmatist terms. Sometimes it doesn't. So I'm not sure
if mysticism is still lost in the philosophy I tout. The way Pirsig talks
sometimes, it doesn't look it to me at all, like when it means things like
the everyday experience of life, being one with yourself, or excellence.
But sometimes, yeah, mysticism seems like something that I don't think is
possible, like when it means being put in touch with something otherwordly.
dmb replies:
Thanks for the generous response. You seem genuinely open here and for my
own part I have to say that Dean Summers' paper on Pragmatisim in the MOQ
has seriously altered my attitude. Suddenly, I'm very interested in working
our how mysticism and pragmatism are fused by the MOQ. I can't quite see it
in terms of concepts, but a hunch tells me it can be done. There shouldn't
be two camps. I'm sure there are forms of pragmatism that wouldn't rightly
fit into the MOQ, forms that would never accept the claims of philosophical
mysticism for example, but its pretty clear that the MOQ fuses mysticism
with SOME KIND of pragmatism. This is the bridge where we'll finally meet,
eh?
Now let's get to the substance of the matter. It seems to me that the
"mystical" elements you find easy to swallow, things like excellence and
everyday experience, are easy to assimilate because they CAN be understood
without any reference to mysticism. And of course things like "being put in
touch with something otherworldly" are hard to assimilate because they CAN'T
be understood without reference to it. I wouldn't describe it as
"otherworldly", but I think I know what you mean. We're talking about
enlightenment, the mystical experience, right? This is not the kind of thing
that likes to get pinned down, but there is a description of one man's
experience in ZAMM. But if you've already read all that and thinking about
it only has you more confused than ever, then I hardly know what to say.
Maybe if you had specific questions or objections, I'd have a better idea
about where to begin. Or I could begin here...
Matt continued:
While I still don't think "blind spot" is a good term for describing the
differences between vocabularies, one way of getting at our differences is
through the Sophists, since we both want to appropriate them. If I'm
reading you right, you think of the Sophists as the last generation of
philosophical mystics before Plato (though more specifically Aristotle)
turned subsequent philosophy away from mysticism by focusing our attention
on dialectic-turn-logic-turn-science. My preferred description of the
Sophists is as the first generation of metaphysical skeptics, the first
generation of practical philosophers who attempted to turn us away from the
Parmenidean search for the Absolute Reality behind the Shifting Appearances
to focus on our day-to-day problems of living life excellently---before
Plato (though not specifically Aristotle) turned subsequent philosophy away
from the practice of life by focusing our attention on
dialectic-turn-logic-turn-theory.
dmb replies:
First of all, I'm pretty sure that "blind spot" is Pirsig's phrase. I've
been harping on it because I think the MOQ can't be properly understood
without mysticism. I usually speak in unequivical terms for the sake of
clarity, but I pretty much have no doubt about this assertion. See, the
existence of this blind spot in Western culture IS the loss of mysticism.
Mysticism is exactly what we can't see. I realize that it takes alotta nerve
to do this after all the nasty things I've said about lenghty essays, but I
have to say that this little piece on "Rhetoric" is best understood as a
supplimental comment on my paper and I'd ask you to take a look at that. The
whole rock star movie hero thing is a bit of a schtick. One of the things I
was getting at there was the idea that mysticism is not some metaphysical
abstraction, but something lived. We can talk about DQ in terms of
epistemolgy and such, but its really not a metaphysical chesspiece or an
abstraction. What we're really talking about is human transformation and the
experiences that lead to it. We're talking about experiences that change
people's lives. Its most definately NOT about some other world. Its all
about improving this one, and its about improving yourself first. Again, to
see what such a thing CAN look like, think about the autobiographical
narrative in ZAMM. And then put the Sophists in THAT context. This, I think,
casts "everyday experience" and "excellecnce" in a whole new light. The
Quality that the Sophists were teaching was about mysticism and everyday
life and excellence all at the same time. These are not really two different
readings. Their excellence was not just about being good at stuff, or about
virtue and duty in the conventional sense, it was about finding one's
dharma. As I understand it, when the center of your life is discovered, when
you discover your dharma, your "bliss" as Campbell would call it, that's
when you really become the creative agent in your own life. This is not the
kind of thing that can be discovered with the help of a career counselor or
a vocational aptitude test. This is when you start to follow DQ instead of
sq, if you will. We can see this same sort of thing in the peyote ceremony,
in the vision quest of the young men in Native American cultures, where the
Great Father speaks to them about who they really are. In our culture,
hardly anybody is teaching this. Cuzza da blind spot.
Matt continued:
I'm not sure if those two readings of the Sophists can't go together, can't
live in harmony. It depends on what is meant by "mysticism," not to mention
"rhetoric" and "dialectic," as in your hands (as I've made it out) dialectic
turns into science (since, as I understand it, the emphasis for the enemy is
on reducto-materialistic accounts) and in my hands dialectic turns into
theory (since the emphasis for the enemy is on theoretical "encapsulating,"
or reductionistic, accounts). (I'm not sure if we have a noticeable
difference in our use of rhetoric because of two different senses of
rhetoric. One sense is that rhetoric is a tool that can be picked up or put
down, which is a sense that Aristotle gave us and that I think Pirsig
misleadingly uses in one of the selections you provided, and the other sense
is that it is the ground out of which all linguistic meaning springs, which
is what I think Pirsig eventually comes to identify rhetoric with (so
instead of rhetoric being a tool in dialectical space, as in Aristotle's
account, dialectic is a tool in rhetorical space, as when Pirsig says that
everything is an analogy).)
dmb replies:
Not sure I follow you here. Let me just try to make a point or two on the
topic. And let's say that I get extra bonus points if anything ends up
actually addressing your comments.
There is a sort of hierarchy from myth to rhetoric to dialectic to logic to
science. I don't dispute it at all. And this line of cultural development is
important in understanding the oft disputed shift from the social to
intellectual levels within the MOQ. But I think the most useful terms and
the most important shift for our purposes is the shift from Dynamic to
static. As I understand it, Plato's Good was different from the Quality that
Phaedrus sought precisely because Plato had encapsulated it, made it into a
fixed and rigid form. He tried to capute DQ in a static form. That rigidity
just so happened to be an intellectual static pattern, but social level
religious forms do exactly the same thing, so its not really about this or
that level. Its about turning DQ into somthing static. That's how mysticism
was lost. That's how the excellence that springs from one's dharma has been
reduced in our culture to virtue and duty in the conventional, Victorian
sense, which is just about the opposite of DQ. Hopelessly static, hopelessly
stupid, unaware of its own purpose and origins.
In going for those bonus points, I'd say that rhetoric is more a tool than
"the ground out of which all linguistic meaning springs". I'd say Quality is
the ground of all those various modes of expression. The thing that makes
the rhetoriticians special in ZAMM is there capacity to teach Quality
without encapsulating it. Rhetoric allows them to refer to it through
imagination and metaphor, through art, which is about the only way to do it.
If you try using dialectic, logic or science, you'll only end up killing it
with definitions. That's how it got lost in the first place. In this case,
style is substance.
Thanks,
dmb
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