From: david buchanan (dmbuchanan@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Sep 25 2005 - 02:31:43 BST
Matt and all MOQers:
Here's another long, Horse. I'd be grateful if it gets through without too
much delay.
>DMB had 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 replied:
>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 says:
As I understand it, this really gets at the differences between yours and
mine. To put it in terms of the MOQ this pragmatist assertion (that there
couldn't literally be a pre-intellectual experience) states that there is no
such thing as DQ and sq is all we can ever have. This is what I'm refering
to when I say you want to take the Metaphysics and the Quality out of the
MOQ. That's what it means to deny the pre-intellectual or pre-linguistic
experience. I can still hang on to a little hope with respect to changing
your mind, however, because I don't think you understand what is being
rejected here. Naturally, my aim in this post will be to explain what it is
you're rejecting. We do agree on the idea that language is built upon
analogies all the way down, but I'm saying that this assertion only applies
to static quality and not to DQ simply because the primary empirical reality
is pre-linguistic.
>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 replied:
>That's exactly what I mean about participating in a tradition (and Sam,
>too,
>which I believe at the time you disagreed with).
dmb says:
Before getting to the heart of the matter, I have to complain about your
jargon once again, not just to vent my frustration but hopefully to clarify
things... It never occured to me that a person might refer to things like
the scientific method and valid empirical data as a "tradition". That word,
according to common sense, the dictionary AND the Oxford Companion to
Philosophy, refers to "customary sets of belief, or ways of behaving of
uncertain origins, which are accepted by those belonging to a tradition as
persuasive or even authoritative and which are transmitted by unreflective
example and imitation". As you can see, by this definition, tradition and
the scientific method are lightyears apart and can be quite hostile to each
other. As I understand it, tradition would be considered a social level
value while science would be considered an intellectual level value. But
even if we leave the MOQ's levels out of the discussion, its still pretty
clear to me that you're using the term in a way that is bound to confuse. It
seems that you are using the word to describe various fields, academic
disciplines and schools of thought within them. And since those words are
just as easy to type as any other, I sincerely wonder why you'd refer to
scientific experimentation as a tradition. Makes about as much sense as
saying brain surgery is one of our quaint little custom. If you absolutely
insist on using the word that way, please be careful to point out that you
are using a very odd definition, one that defies the usual understanding.
And here it comes again along with another confusing term...
Matt said:
>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.
dmb says:
Again, as I understand the word "tradition" it simply isn't possible for a
hack philosopher like myself, or anyone else for that matter, to create one.
But rather than beat that dead horse, I'd like to complain about the term
"contextualize". I looked it up in several different places and I'm still
very confused. It seems the word has theological origins and was used to
describe the process of explaining Christianity to and translating the bible
for non-Christian cultures. Its basically all about cross-cultural
communications. (Wikipedia) The word doesn't even appear in my dictionary or
in the Oxford Companion. So I'm hereby asking you to explain what you mean
in conventional English. And I suppose it wouldn't hurt to explain what
"recontextualization" means too. Just for the sake of clarity let me add
that all I've ever tried to do here is explain philosophical ideas in
conventional terms and/or Pirsig's terms simply because those are the terms
we all share in common. Everyone here is expected to have read Pirsig's
books and to be able to speak English. It doesn't matter if the idea in
question comes from Classical Indian Buddhism, from the Navaho tribe or the
pre-Socratic philosophers. In every case, I always try to put it in terms
that anyone with a dictionary can understand. I simply don't know how to do
it any other way and, frankly, I'm quite baffled that this isn't already
totally obvious. I mean, who among us has forgotten how to talk like a
regular person?
Now, finally, we can begin to get at our differences in terms of the
substance of the matter...
>DMB had 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 experience is when we "'wake up'
>to
>the world which is concrete and actual, as distinct from that which is
>purely abstract and conceptual."
>Matt replied:
>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
>purchase 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?
dmb says:
Witchdoctors and multi-colored demons? You can bet your bottom dollar that
I've been treated by medical professionals many times but I've never seen a
witchdoctor or a demon except in movies and comic books. But more
importantly, I really don't think my assertions about the primary empirical
reality are analogous in any way to the belief in demons, no matter what
color they are. Further, I honestly don't care which words are used to
describe this pre-linguistic experience. I'm trying to get an idea across
here, one that can be and actually is described in many, many ways. So long
as the concept is clear, it doesn't really matter what we call it. I'm not
insisting on any particular description. Far from it.
Now this is where I finally get to that Richard Hayes article I mentioned a
couple weeks ago. Actually, I have two of his papers. The one I already
mentioned is titled "Ritual, Self-deception and Make-Believe: a Classical
Buddhist Perspective" and the other is titled "Did Buddhism Anticipate
Pragmatism?". Hayes is using terms that differ from Pirsig's but I think
it'll be fairly easy to see that they are both referring to very similar
ideas and hopefully this will help you see that I'm not talking about
colored demons or Tibetan robes.
"According to Dignaga, every cognition falls into exactly one of two
possible categories. The deciding characteristic that separates these two
categories is the presence or absence of some kind of judgment (kalpana), by
which Dignaga means the mental activity of associating a sensation with past
or future sensations or with language. The word kalpana is a verbal noun
that literally means the act of producing or creating or regulating. In
everyday language, the word could be used to refer to the act of building
something mechanical or composing a piece of music or a poem. To capture the
sense of the word, let me refer to it not merely as judgment but as creative
judgment.
A cognition in which there is a complete absence of creative judgment is
called a pure sensation (pratyaksa). An example of pure sensation for
Dignaga is the act of seeing a patch of colour without associating it in any
way with previously seen colours, or with simultaneous sensations of sound,
odour, taste, texture or temperature; this pure sensation is also free of
any associations with words. In a pure sensation, a sensible property is
being experienced just as it is in itself and for itself. In contrast to
this pure sensation, Dignaga recognizes another kind of cognition in which
creative judgment is present; in this kind of cognition, sensed objects are
no longer experienced simply as they are; rather, they serve as signs that
indicate other experiences. They may indicate experiences from the past by
triggering memory, or they may indicate possible future experiences by
triggering anticipation." (from the paper "Did Buddhism Anticipate
Pragmatism".)
dmb explains:
At the risk of insulting your intelligence, I'd like to point out that these
two categories of experience roughly correspond to Pirsig's static/Dynamic
split, with "pure sensation" being the primary empirical reality or Dynamic
Quality and "creative judgment" being the static patterns left in the wake.
Pirsig is making this distinction in a pithy way when he points out that
empirical science, with its assumptions about pre-existing subjects and
objects, isn't quite as empirical as it seems. Or, as Alan Watt's puts it,
this pure sensation is what allows us to "'wake up' to the world which is
concrete and actual, as distinct from that which is purely abstract and
conceptual." But its also important to understand that the "experiencer" in
this view is not the same as the Western subjective self. Pirsig agrees with
this kind of Buddhism with regard to the self as well as these two
categories of experience.
"...the Buddhists argued for a modular view of personal identity. According
to this view, there is no characteristic or set of characteristics that
remains constant throughout the life of a complex organism. This being the
case, a complex organism doesn't really have an identity, at least in the
etymological sense of the word identitas, which literally means sameness; a
complex being, at the end of its existence, need not have any parts that
were present at the beginning of its existence. Insofar as an organism has
any identity, it consists of no more than an agreement within society to
regard a cluster of properties or an assembly of events as a single being -
as in the apocryphal story of the museum that proudly displayed a hatchet
that once belonged to George Washington, although the blade had been
replaced twice and the handle three times since it had left Washington's
hands. The Buddhist theory also does not regard an organism as an
individual, at least in the etymological sense of the word,which indicates
the fact of being indivisible. Rather, an organism is seen as an aggregation
of distinct parts that may cooperate with one another and to some extent
depend upon one another in order to function, but which are nevertheless, in
principle at least, quite separable from one another. It might be more
accurate, according to Buddhist anthropology, to call a person a party, that
is, a group of individuals - in this case, individual simple properties -
assembled for a particular purpose."
"This view of the human being and its place in the world that I have been
describing in not the view of any one Buddhist thinker. Rather, it is a
mosaic put to gether over the course of some fifteen centuries by scores of
Buddhist philosophers from south and central Asia. These philosophers
differed from one another in many respects, but they shared a preoccupation
with the problem of change and transformation, and they agreed on the
principle that modularity is the only way to account for such change. Like
Charles Darwin and other 19the century biologists of Europe, who built their
theory of evolution upon the ideas of modularity and dissociability and in
so doing argued against the essentialism of anti-evolutionists such as the
the paleontologist Georges Cuvier, the Buddhists of India developed the idea
that change is possible only in modular beings who are capable of replacing
their various components at differing rates of change. ...In the second
century, for example, the philosopher Nagarjuna argued that no chages of
character would be possible if the self were of a fixed nature. Buddhist
tradition already had a special term for the idea that a party has no fixed
nature of its own; they called this condition EMPTINESS. Nagarjuna argued
that empty being are the only beings subject to change." (from "Ritual ,
Self-deception and Make-Believe")
dmb explains:
Again, at the risk of beating you over the head with this point, I think its
pretty easy to see that the MOQ's view of the static self is a kind of
modular self too. As Pirsig puts it, we are an ever changing forest of
differing levels of static patterns and these levels are often in conflict
with each other. And yet we in the West habitually think of ourselves quite
differently, one that we tend to indentify with entirely. That's the little
self, the pre-existing self, the ego self that Pirsig refutes or rather
distinquished from the Big self.
Matt said:
>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.
dmb says:
Well, this post is already too long, but the paper I've sited on Ritual and
Self-deception goes a long way toward explaining the value of understanding
the two categories of experience and the idea of the modular self. I mean,
its not like I'm asking anyone to accept any moral obligations on the basis
of faith or because it would please some authority. I'm just trying to
explain and clarify some of the most important aspects of the MOQ, ones that
you seem to be rejecting before you've even comprehended them. As the paper
explains, the conventional Western conception of individuality is a very
destructive form of self-deception. This belief is classifed as an
incompetant mental state, one that causes a great deal of suffering for
those who hold the belief. I guess you could say its a moral duty in some
sense of the word, but certainly not in the Victorian sense of moral duty,
which is all about obedience to the very beliefs under attack by the MOQ. I
mean, as I understand it, the reason and purpose of adopting philosophical
mysticism is your own happiness and contentment. As Pirsig puts it,
improvement of the world begins in your own heart and hands and moves out
from there. Why? Because miserable and delusional people generally don't
help to improve anything. Quite the opposite. I think that passes the
pragmatist test of truth.
Finally, let me make the point about jargonless communication one more time
this way: as I see it, to be effective in this forum, and in life generally
I suppose, one must be able to translate philosophical ideas into standard,
conventional english. I would even go so far as to say that the inability to
translate big ideas into everyday language pretty much proves that one does
not understand the ideas very well at all. The inabiltiy to be flexible and
creative in our descriptions and explanations only shows a lack of
comprehension and imagination. I'm much more impressed with writers and
thinkers who can use ordinary language that anyone can understand. Anyone
can see that you're smart enough to do that kind of thing quite artfully.
So, please impress me.
Thanks for your time dear reader,
dmb
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Sep 25 2005 - 13:13:02 BST