From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Aug 25 2005 - 22:54:54 BST
David,
I'm glad we're having this conversation.
I want to say at the outset that I've sometimes said (and in fact, _just_
said) things to the effect of, "_________ can be assimilated to pragmatism"
or "in pragmatism" or whatever and this is, in retrospect, a little
misleading about what pragmatism is, what it does and can do. The most
important problem area is certainly, as you put it, fusing mysticism and
pragmatism. To my mind, though, this is still misleading and I'd like to
try to explain how I see the two (amongst other vocabularies) working.
I'd like to begin with a little anecdote. There's this interview with Rorty
for some art journal (you can find it on the internet, type into google
something like "rorty interview art lacan" and it'll pop up). Naturally at
several points during the interview the topic of art comes up. You can see
Rorty kind of just shrugging his shoulders about it. At one point, when the
interviewer asks whether Rorty likes contemporary art, Rorty says, nah, I
like 19th-century art and the interviewer replies, "So that's what your
pragmatist eye can appreciate?" and Rorty says, "No, I don't think there's
anything pragmatist about it."
The point of the anecdote is seeing that pragmatism doesn't apply to
_everything_. It isn't supposed to. Rorty typically sees pragmatism as a
specifically philosophical thesis, as pertaining to questions about
systematic epistemology and metaphysics. Not only is it specifically
philosophical, it only applies to certain specific _kinds_ of philosophy,
specific conversations within the scope of philosophy.
The difficulties are what arise when we take things from one conversation
and transplant them into another. For instance, I also agree with Paul's
description of what "undivided reality" is supposed to mean. I take Paul to
be supplying a translation from the original mystical tradition context for
"undivided reality" into a, say, epistemological context. The words change
as one moves from context to context because the traditions that
contextualize the meanings of those words change. If you're speaking to
people in the mystic tradition, they'll for the most part understand what
you mean by "undivided reality," but if you say the same thing to Western
epistemologists they'll go, "Whoa, whoa...what? What are you saying?" They
do that, not because they necessarily don't believe in an undivided reality,
but because the conversation in the West has hooked up different baggage to
different words.
I don't know if you remember this conversation, but this was part of the
point of when Sam, long ago, said that mysticism may not be coextensive with
epistemology (which is how you said I was treating it), but mysticism
sometimes makes epistemological claims. I'm not sure, but I take your term
"epistemological pluralism" to be what you've learned from pragmatism.
Maybe not where you _actually_ learned it from, but from what I can tell,
what you call epistemological pluralism (your name for those parts of Pirsig
dealing with truth) is coextensive with what I follow Rorty in calling
pragmatism. And the way I see it, mysticism and epistemological pluralism
_aren't_ fused together at all. One way to put the relation is to say that
epistemological pluralism is there to police the border between
philosophical mysticism and epistemology, so that every time mysticism wants
to say something epistemological, the pluralism is there to say, "Nah, nah.
I don't think you want to do that." (I'm not entirely sure about how you
see your epistemological pluralism, but that is, I think, one way of putting
how I see mysticism and pragmatism relating.)
This finally leads us to what you call the nihilistic consequences of
neopragmatism. The bit in Lila where Pirsig says that pragmatism has
nothing to say to Nazis and that this is a _deficiency_ is the point where I
think Pirsig has been misled about what pragmatism is there for. Pragmatism
was created in response to the philosophical pressures of the realism and
idealism debate (amongst other things). It _doesn't_ have anything to say
about Nazis, James _would_ have been horrified, but this isn't a deficiency
if for no other reason then because pragmatism isn't supposed to say
anything about Nazis. That's not because morals are unreal in pragmatism,
its not because pragmatism doesn't have a moral philosophy--its because
pragmatism _isn't_ a moral philosophy. And that doesn't mean you can't then
have one (though, in having one, it does police the border between moral
philosophy and epistemology). They are two different conversations. My
reply to the James bit in Lila has been for a long time that James'
pragmatism isn't what's supposed to make James a morally upright human
being--its his politics that does that. And the same thing goes for Rorty.
Rorty has never said, nor have I, that people can't make moral judgements.
We can't help but make moral judgements. We are judging machines, just as
Pirsig's description that we _are_ a set of static patterns of value
suggests. The only thing that Rorty denies is that there is a Universal
Moral Law that can give us some insight as to how to live our lives, just as
Pirsig denies.
Now, even if you buy all this, even if the idea of having different
conversations for different purposes and being careful not to cross wires
between them makes sense and seems reasonable, I still need to say something
about how I actually see the relation between mysticism and pragmatism, how
I see what's going on at the border. I guess the first thing I'd note is
that, from what I understand, both mysticism and pragmatism tells us that we
can't _say_ anything about reality as it is in itself. A border skirmish
starts to brew, though, when mystics tell us they have _knowledge_ or the
_truth_ of the ultimate reality. What do they mean if we can't say anything
about it? The way I see it, pragmatism should tell us to restrict the words
"knowledge" and "truth" to discursive practices. If its formulatable in
language, then its susceptible to all the things we've learned about
justifying our knowledge over the years--argumentation, evidence,
plausibility, elegance, etc. When mysticism tells us that reality _isn't_
formulatable in language, the pragmatist, again, agrees that reality as it
really is is ineffable. The point, though, is that mystics always want to
eff it. As Pirsig says, that's just part of life. And when they do eff
about the ineffable, here comes our practices of justification.
The important part to understand at this point is who I mean by "our." What
context am I talking about? The practices of justification I'm talking
about are the practices of the mystical tradition. This is the point Sam
had some time ago about mysticism being grounded in a tradition. The
mystical tradition is the context in which the mystics' discursive effings
about ultimate reality gain their meaning. It is when they are transported
to different contexts that things start to get a little messed up. Like
when Jerry Falwell says that he speaks for God, or more appropriately, that
God speaks to him. For the moment, I don't want to question whether God
speaks to Jerry Falwell or not. I want to point out the crossed wires when
we move from one context to another. The political context has different
practices, different ways of justification, and moving from the religious or
mystical context to the political context is not always a cut and dried
thing.
I should also say something about the mystical experience. For instance, if
you read the Rorty interview you see Rorty say something that'll set off all
your alarms and red flags. The interviewer asks Rorty about Lacan and
Rorty, trying to explain why he doesn't get Lacan, says at the end, "I guess
I just distrust sublimity so much that the more they talk about it, the more
I run away." The interviewer responds, "But at least you give it a place.
It's not that you say whatever you can't put into words doesn't exist," and
Rorty says, "I guess I do say that actually. I think that there's a
constant temptation to say that there are things that can't be put into
words. But, it's not something I want to indulge in." If you look at what
Rorty's saying, though, I think it matches up again with mysticism. If I
understand correctly, the whole idea of the tetra...humanahumana-thingy
(whatever it is), what Scott also calls the logic of contradictory identity,
is that it isn't proper to say that ultimate reality does exist...or doesn't
or...whatever the other two are (which I take to be Sam's point about
telling his parishioners that he's an atheist). I take Rorty's point about
ineffable things not existing to be that, once you eff it, you've made it
exist in some sense where its no longer ineffable (which is why, I take it,
in the mystical tradition, you have to keep repeating the tetra-mantra, to
keep reminding yourself what you are and are not doing...along with the
other two). This is why, long ago, I said mysticism is analogous to poetry.
Like the poet, they bring things into existence. In trying to express the
inexpressible, eff the ineffable, they expand our language and allow us to
say more.
So for a mystic who has had a mystical experience, they may say, "I have
seen reality directly. I believe X." And then the mystic may spend quite
some time trying to eff that experience beyond X. The description of the
mystical experience does change, though, when we change contexts, from the
mystical tradition to, say, the epistemological tradition. When doing
epistemology (or, I should say, when we are tempted to do epistemology), the
description is more like what pragmatists like Rorty suggest we should say,
"I have been caused to hold the belief X." When we switch contexts again,
though, to say a scientific one, our description will change again. This
time it'll come out something like, "My C-fiber quivered in my lower
cerebral cortex."
The bone to pick that mysticism has had with materialism and science has
always been about reductionism. The mystical experience isn't _just_ my
C-fiber quivering. So it isn't. Neither is a poem _just_ an admixture of
the molecules that make up ink and paper. The non-reductive physicalism
that Rorty suggests is just that respect for different contexts for
different purposes that I take epistemological pluralism to be. Sometimes
Cartesian coordinates are best, sometimes polar.
Matt
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