From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Sep 15 2005 - 20:30:41 BST
DMB,
DMB said:
Metaphysics means "one's assumptions" or "the appearance reality
distiction"?! Well, there's one thing we agree upon here. We better slow
down or we'll end up talking past each other. I've never understood the word
to have EITHER meaning. To my mind the word refers to new-age bullshit or to
the biggest, broadest branch of philosophy, the one that tries to get
everything to hang together in a coherent way. Its a theory of everything.
Matt:
I really don't see the difference between my "roughly, one's assumptions
about the world" and your "get everything to hang together in a coherent
way." Your definition is the same as Sellars' (seeing how things, in the
broadest sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the
term) and as I've said many times, that definition, following Sellars, is
usually one of the ways I characterize philosophy, as opposed to
specifically metaphysics. We seem, contrary to the way you put it, to be in
agreement.
DMB said:
If you equate the appearance/reality distinction with metaphysics, then
rejecting one is rejecting the other. But the MOQ rejects the
appearance/reality distinction even while it calls itself a metaphysical
system. The vocabulary you're using to describe this distinction is another
source of confusion.
Matt:
No, not really. Like I said before, "I get criticized for 'taking out the M
from the MoQ,' but according to the terms of my criticizers I don't take out
the M." According to the terms you just laid down, I perform the activity
of metaphysics. You call what you and I do "metaphysics," I call what you
and I do "philosophy."
My criticism of people (Pirsig or otherwise) is not that they use the word
"metaphysics" (though I suggest they don't for various reasons), its that
the things they say in explicating their metaphysics/philosophy seem as if
they require the appearance/reality distinction to make it work. I see them
backsliding into something they wish to eschew, just as others see me
backsliding into something I wish to eschew.
DMB said:
As the label [epistemolgical pluralism] suggests, we are now talking about
our epistemolgical assumptions. Sensory experience is the basis of those
truth theories. I usually think about human eyeballs as if they were little
cameras, the retina as the film and the brain as the lab where the film is
processed into an image I can use. I think the standard SOM view of truth is
something like this mechanical reproduction of an analogy in the mind. And,
as I understand it, the neo-Pragmatist retains this view, but insists there
is no way to take any accurate, well, focused pictures, that we're all just
looking through different lenses and there's no way to look out at anything
anyway. The MOQ's kind of Philosophical mysticsim, on the other hand, says
the camera and the scene it surveys are the very assumptions that we're
rejecting in the first place. The MOQ says the very idea of sensory data is
itself an assumption, an anatomical explanation of experience that rests on
the very assumption of subjects responding to an objective reality.
Matt:
I think that's a decent description of the SOM view of truth, based on the
analogy of sensory experience. Pragmatists don't retain that view, but I'm
curious about how you say you reject that view. What I don't get is that,
so far as I understand it, science provides a good explanation of why we see
tigers: light bounces off the tiger, into our eye, which makes nerves quiver
in our brain. You seem to be saying that _that's_ an analogy we need to get
rid of. I don't see science's description as a problem. The problem is
when we draw analogies between how our brain reacts to stuff and how we tell
when propositions are true.
DMB said:
And if all we have is language and rhetoric and analogies all the way down,
then there can be no such thing as a pre-intellectual experience, no
pre-linguistic experience. And that, my friend, precludes the kind of
mysticism Pirsig is talking about.
Matt:
That's true, there couldn't literally be a pre-intellectual experience given
pragmatist philosophical redescriptions. What I'm trying to suggest is that
what is called a "mystical experience" is likewise redescribed, and in a way
that retains all the parts people, being post-appearance/reality, wanted.
DMB said:
First a misunderstanding. I wasn't clear about this, but I think it is the
"moral consequences" of pragmatism that you seem to put in a lesser
category, not pragmatism itself. I was refering to the notion that Rorty and
James are free to be righteous dudes despite their being pragmatists. I was
refering to the idea that morality is a side dish for those with a taste for
it.
Matt:
But this is where I think you are misunderstanding me. I'm not saying
"morality is a side dish." I'm saying it is a _different_ dish. Like
splitting up Plato's political philosophy from his Theory of the Forms.
Pragmatism wasn't supposed to have any consequence over our descriptions of
moral issues (except where they tread into epistemology), its only supposed
to have consequences over our descriptions of truth and knowledge.
DMB said:
In the MOQ, by contrast, we see this effort to present physicists as artists
and mystical experience as valid empirical data. In the MOQ we see this
effort to get these various vocabularies to work together. See, in terms of
taking part in the conversation of Western history, I think Pirsig is
addressing this kind of compartmentalization and fragmentation that leads to
conflicts between science and religion.
Matt:
The idea pragmatism is after is that sometimes to work together, sometimes
in getting "everything to hang together in a coherent way," the best thing
to realize is that not everything applies to everything else. Sometimes the
best thing to do is to stay out of the way. For instance, if Pirsig isn't
saying that a scientist would do better scientific research if he had an
artist with a paint brush in the room helping him by painting his portrait,
then as far as I can tell Pirsig is saying that same thing as pragmatism.
Pirsig's dissolving the _metaphysical_ distinctions (which is to say
distinctions based on the appearance/reality distinction) between science
and art, but not the practical ones.
DMB said before:
...that scientists has to go to school for many years, learn the math, the
chemsitry, the physics, the engineering principles and the principles of the
scientific method itself BEFORE he can expect to be taken seriously in
reporting what he saw and what it means. Think about how complex all that
really is. Same thing goes for"spiritual" data.
Matt said:
That's exactly what I mean about participating in a tradition (and Sam, too,
which I believe at the time you disagreed with).
DMB said:
Huh? I mean, I think you've missed my point in several ways. I'm talking
about what was lost. I'm talking about an empire of knowledge that is
conspiciously absent from the tradition. ... Eastern philosophy has been
changing this sad fact for nearly two hundred years, but I think one would
be hard pressed to indentify a mystical tradition in the West. Like I said,
that's just not the world we live in. We believe the physicists and mock the
mystics.
Matt:
I wasn't talking about the empirical state of Western philosophy departments
or the state of respect for mysticism in the West. I was talking about what
it means to be in a tradition when it comes to dissolving the
appearance/reality distinction. But I think you're being a little to
monolithic in your conception of the "Western tradition." One, I think
there's more mysticism in Western philosophers then you seem to imply. But,
more importantly, two, the notion of "tradition" I'm talking about is
smaller in scale. It's like how communitarians criticize the Enlightenment
Liberal Tradition, "the only political tradition we have." That's just not
true. The communitarians are drawing on resources from somewhere, which is
the tradition of civic republicanism. The way I see it, we have lots of
traditions at work in the West, just as they do in the East. Some
traditions compete with each other (like the tradition of pragmatism with
the tradition of Platonism), some don't (like the tradition of classical
physics and early 20th Century expressionism), and some used to, but changed
enough so they no longer have to (17th Century astronomy and 17th Century
Christianity). We each take part in many traditions.
And even if there is no mystical tradition in the West, you're trying to
change that. Drawing on the conceptual resources of the East, you're trying
to create a mystical tradition in the West. What I'm saying is that your
practices, statements, utterances, your philosophy would be contextualized
in that tradition.
Matt said:
On the "i don't understand this equation where a mystical experience leads
to belief X," I'm simply talking about the fact that when people have any
experience, they are left with a belief from it. "I saw a rock." "I saw a
tiger." "Shakespeare wrote Hamlet." Anything. In the case of mystical
experiences, they leave you beliefs like...I don't know, actually, because
I've never had one (so far as I know, being as I've never been trained to
identify them). But whatever it is, its contextualized in the mystical
tradition.
DMB said:
Its not that we are led to certain beliefs. To use Watts' terms, its more
like "the 'seers' of this reality are the 'disenchanted' and
'disillusioned'." In the same spirit Pirsig points out the Native American
view of peyote as a "de-hallucinogen". And Pirsig's assertion that classical
empiricism, with its assumptions of subjects and objects, is actually an
abstract interpretation of a more primary, preintellectual experience is
echoed in Watts' words when he says this experince is when we "'wake up' to
the world which is concrete and actual, as distinct from that which is
purely abstact and conceptual." I'm not going to sit here and claim to be
enlightened, but I have had a few interesting experiences. Even going on
this small taste, it seems to me that it shakes things up just like these
guys say. Avalanches of thought tumble down, complex webs of ideas form
effortlessly, things connect in new ways, whatever. Things just take on a
whole new dimension. One doesn't walk away convinced of any particular fact
or belief, its more like all facts and beliefs have been altered. But there
I go trying to eff it again. I'm a very naughty philosopher.
Matt:
I said "leaves you with" rather than "leads you to" because I wasn't talking
about inference, thinking about an experience. You have an experience--we
can describe what is "left behind" by the experience as a belief (I see a
tiger, left behind by seeing a tiger; Shakespeare wrote Hamelt, left behind
by seeing pen marks inscribed on a page; I see colorful demons, left behind
by seeing colorful demons)--then you eff it, say something about it, think
something about it. Everything after your first sentence, from Watts and
Pirsig to altering avalanches, is, as you say at the end, you effing the
experience. Your effings are contextualized in the mystical tradition, in a
mystical understanding of reality. My earlier description you bucked
against was an austere pragmatist description for epistemological purposes.
What I'm saying is that those two descriptions of the event, your effings or
my effings, are not in competition with each other. They are deployed for
two different purposes. As you said long ago, mysticism has nothing to do
with epistemology. I have taken that utterance very seriously. If that is
the case, then I think in one moment you can tell anglophone philosophers in
love with neuroscience that a mystical experience is crazy nerve firings in
your brain caused by something in the world (whatever that may be), and then
in the next moment tell readers of Pirsig and Watts that your experience
opened your eyes, altered your perception of the world, allowed you to see
reality.
DMB said:
I'm pointing to a blindspot and you're telling me there's nothing to see and
I'm telling you that you only think there's nothing to see because of the
blind spot, see?
Matt:
My point about blindspots is that the entire notion doesn't work because,
since we are enabled to "see" different things according to the traditions
we've been raised in, the sword cuts both ways. If ever there was a notion
based on bad, bad ocular metaphors, its that one. Because a blind Westener
like myself goes, "No, I'm not blind. I see that you've had a mystical
experience. _I_ don't call it a mystical experience, but then I've never
found the use in doing so. I see the mystical traditions, Tibetan Buddhists
in their robes. I've read enough to know who some of them are. But I don't
find their way of describing things helpful."
Telling me that a mystical experience is only correctly described in the way
that you tell me (voicing the tradition of mysticism), and that I'm blind to
it otherwise, is like a witchdoctor telling us that the demons he sees
surrounding a sick person (differently colored demons corresponding to the
different kinds of mushrooms that'll cure the patient) can only be correctly
described _as_ demons, in the way he and his tradition tells us. Otherwise
we are blind to demons. We don't care, though, because demon-belief was
used to help cure sickness and we've since found better ways of diagnosing
and curing sickness. Those are two descriptions that conflict because they
have the same purpose for being around and, predictably, cultural evolution
chooses the one that works better. Everyone can _insist_ that things be
described as they want them to be, but that insistence isn't proof of
purchace on our imaginations. What we need is to be told _why_ we should
describe things as you do. What purposes is that tradition satisfying and
what reason are we to suppose that we get the best satisfaction from that
tradition rather than another?
Obviously, most of the time such explanations won't come out like that, talk
about satisfaction, purposes, reasons. But that's the general gist. I get
the idea that mysticism is something you think _everyone_ has a moral duty
to believe in and practice. I'm just not certain why.
Matt
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