[MD] Language, SOM, and the MoQ

[david buchanan]

Matt (Sam mentioned too) and all MOQers:

Matt said:
And yes, I am a one-trick pony more or less.  I thought that's what I was 
saying in my post.  Question is, why is that wrong?  Why can't somebody do 
one thing and not have to do another?  Again, as I said before, you're the 
one that talks to me.  I don't hound you or anyone else all around the face 
of the MD with my questions.  I pick my spots and say things when I feel 
like it, when I think it might have a good effect.

dmb says:
I pick my spots too. I'm "hounding" you because disagreement is always more 
fun and educational. I think the problem with being a one-trick pony, beyond 
the obvious problem of being too limited in scope, is that you are 
performing that trick on the wrong stage and in front of the wrong audience. 
In fact, your obsession with removing all traces of representationalism have 
only led you to repeatedly misunderstand what I'm saying. You repeatedly 
misconstrue things as representationalism and thereby miss the actual points 
being make. Apparently, this one-trick-ponyism interfers with your ability 
to conduct a conversation. That's why its wrong. That's why its bad. It has 
clogged your ears.

I was thinking about your brand of contextualism the other day and had 
another one of those "AH ha!" moments. Later, I'll explain that as a way to 
get specific about this "clogged ears" charge. I think I finally realized 
what that's about and how you've applying it inappropriately here. Bet 
you're really looking forward to that, eh? Until then...

Matt said:
You can declare victory now if you'd like to (and you gotta' admit, my 
willingless to declare a loss has got to be better than Bo's quickness to 
declare victory at the drop of a hat).  But please, don't keep this up 
unless you finally understand what I mean by "I don't reject metaphysics in 
the sense of 'paradigm for thought.'"  Until you're ready to distinguish 
between two senses of metaphysics, and are willing to say that I don't 
reject metaphysics in the sense that people are supposed to be using it 
around here, then there's really no point in moving forward with anything 
else.  There's just too much misleading static for any meaningful 
communication to happen.

dmb says:
I'm still convinced that you haven't yet really grasped what I've been 
saying and so admitting defeat at this point is handing me a very hollow 
victory. Plus I have at least one more thing to say. The conversation can 
end with this post, but I want you to see that the MOQ's claims about DQ 
can't be criticized with your pony. I want to try to show you why such a 
critique is inappropriate. I want to explain how it doesn't apply and isn't 
relevant. I think we've actually made some progress in that we both now 
agree that Pirsig has NOT given us "mere metaphysics", which usually 
consists in making assertions about otherworldly abstract entities like 
"God" and the Platonic "forms" for which there is no evidence. I was under 
the impression that you saw the MOQ as one of these, and was criticizing as 
such. See, its not that you fail to distinguish between the kind of 
speculative metaphysics about absolute and eternal truths that can never be 
proven and the less grandiose systems of coherent and rational descriptions. 
I think the problem is that you are reading the mystical aspects of the MOQ 
as if it were that kind of mere metaphysics, as if it weren't based on 
reality as we actually experience it. Remember when I asserted that you are 
doing battle with a bunch of dead religious fanatics who aren't here? Here 
is a quote that gets at the connection between your dreaded Platonists and 
the dead fanatics of which I speak rather succinctly...

Robert Morrison in Volume 1 of the WESTERN BUDDHIST REVIEW:
"In the West, this Platonic world-view provided the theological framework 
for Christianity. As Augustine tells us, 'Christianity is Platonism for the 
people'. 8 Plato's 'True World' becomes Christianised as the 'Kingdom of 
God', which is now accessible to more than philosophers as one can enter it 
by faith alone. However, the object of faith can only be verified at 
death-what is called 'eschatological verification'."

As I understand the problem, you are rightly rejecting Plato's 'True World' 
but wrongly equating that "true world' with Pirisg's pre-intellectual 
reality. I think you've confused DQ, which is a category of experience and 
can be empirically verified, with the Christian 'Kingdom of Heaven', which 
has no basis in experience and can only be verified after death, which means 
it can't be varified at all. I think it sort of interesting that 
"Christianity is Platonism for the people", that you are so thorough in your 
rejection of Platonism and yet you have no problem with Sam's Christianity. 
I also think its interesting that "the death of God' is the end of both 
Platonism and Christianity, that these are part of the same historical 
developement...

Robert Morrison in the WBR:
"Nietzsche's assertion that 'God is Dead' is not simply a theological 
statement. Nietzsche hasn't come up with the definitive argument to prove 
beyond all reasonable doubt that God could not possibly exist-except in the 
minds of men. This statement, although it certainly does have its 
theological aspect, is essentially a statement proclaiming the plight of 
modern Western culture. Succinctly stated, the 'Death of God' refers to the 
complete loss of belief in the accepted religious and metaphysical 
world-view along with the system of values it upholds, in particular its 
moral values. The 'Death of God' announces the advent of the age of 
nihilism, an age of cultural barrenness arising from this loss of belief, 
and which may well end in catastrophe as far as any truly human existence is 
concerned."

I think this pretty well describes "the problem" that Pirsig's MOQ tries to 
solve. I think this is not just a philosophological problem, but a cultural 
and historical problem. I think the "plight of modern Western culture", the 
one that "may well end in catastrophe", is all about the loss of moral and 
values. I also think your anti-Platonic approach does not address this 
catastrophe and in fact only tends to magnify it. Basically, you're throwing 
the baby out with the bathwater. (Or you just don't have much to say about 
the baby and see no urgent need to distinguish it from the bathwater, in 
which case I don't think you appreciate what Pirsig is up to, don't quite 
get the point of the MOQ.) I think Pirsig wants to get rid of Platonism and 
theism and even empty catagories like Kant's realm of things-in-themselves 
without getting rid of values, morals and mysticism.

Having said all that, now I'd like to return to your brand of 
contexualization. Here's a pretty typical example of your response whenever 
I say something about mysticism....

In the "Rhetoric" thread, Matt said:
There are differences between the mystical vocabulary and the neurological 
vocabulary.  But there's no way to compare the two to see who's excluding 
what.  One could say that different things exist in the different 
vocabularies.  You use one when you want to talk about the set of things 
that exist in _it_, and the other when talking about the things that exist 
in the other.  Vocabularies don't rise and fall because they are adequate or 
inadequate to experience or reality.  They rise and fall because they are 
either useful or not for our purposes.

dmb says:
This is the sort of thing that really had me baffled, but now I think I know 
what you're talking about here. And if I'm correct, this is just another 
aspect of the same critique and it is also being inappropriately applied. If 
I'm right, your one-trick pony doesn't belong on this stage either.

Here's Ken Wilber from THE MARRIAGE OF SENSE AND SOUL:
"The fact that meaning is context-dependant - the second important truth of 
postmodernism, also called 'contextualism' - means that a multiperspective 
approach to reality is called for. Any single perspective is likely to be 
partial, limited, perhaps even distorted, and only by taking multiple 
perspectives and multiple contexts can the knowledge quest be fruitfully 
advanced. And that 'diversity' is the third important truth of general 
postmodernism.   Jean Gebser coined the term INTEGRAL-APERSPECTIVAL to refer 
to this pluralistic or multi-perspectives view, which I aslo refer to as 
VISION-LOGIC or NETWORK-LOGIC. 'Aperspectival' means that no single 
perspective is privileged, and thus, in order to gain a more holistic or 
INTEGRAL view, we need an aperspectival approach. ...Where perspectival 
reason privileges the exclusive perspective of the particular subject, 
vision-logic ADDS UP ALL THE PERSPECTIVES, privileging none, and thus 
attempts to grasp the integral, the whole, the multiple contexts wtihin 
contexts that endlessly disclose the Kosmos..."

You see where I'm going with this yet?

It seems to me that this is the postmodern truth behind your vocabulary 
talk. Your vocabulary talk is motivated by the desire to privilege no 
perspective over another. It is motivated by the rejection of the idea that 
there can be a single exclusive truth about anything. This is not a problem 
for me or my understanding of the MOQ. The problem is that you are attacking 
my assertions about the pre-intellectual experience in particular and 
mysticism in general as if they were claims about a single exclusive truth, 
as if they were claims about one particular perspective. But they aren't. 
How so?

This is where I have to back up a bit and remind you that Pirsig's brand of 
philosophical mysticism is based on the perennial philosophy, which is 
already a view based on the added perspectives of the world's great 
religions as well as the perspectives of tribal peoples, Eastern and Western 
philosophers, motorcycle mechanics and on Pirsig's own personal experiences. 
You see, the problem with objecting to my insistence on "one particular 
description" is that it isn't. The philosophical mysticism embraced by the 
MOQ is based on the view produced by adding up all these perspectives. The 
perennial philosophy, by definition, is already the sum of a wide variety of 
perspectives. It already includes a variety of descriptions from a wide 
variety of contexts - and not just different fields within Western culture.

And so, when I object to neurological descriptions, its not because I want 
to privilege one perspective over another. Quite the opposite. Its just that 
it smacks of materialistic reductionism and the belief that mystical 
experience can be explained in terms of brain activity. It introduces the 
very perspective that excludes mysticism. I mean, the neurological 
description is often advanced in order to preclude the kind of descriptions 
that come down to us through the myths and religions of the world. And it 
seems to revert to the representational theory of truth wherein the 
subjective experience corresponds to an event in objective reality, the kind 
that brain scientists can observe. But the simple fact is, neurons don't 
have mystical experiences and neither do observing scientists. In short, the 
"brain fart" theory of mysticism fails on many levels. But the objection has 
nothing to do with insisting on a particular description. In fact, the 
perennial philosophy is supposed to be an alternative to any one 
perspective. It says that its wrong to assert Christian mysticism or any 
particular sectarian view over the other kinds of mysticism, which can be 
found in the context of virtually any culture on Earth.

See, I think you're taking a different approach than is really called for 
here. Instead of adding up the various contexts in order to produce a more 
holistic view, you seem to be making a different move. Instead of trying to 
work out what the native American vision quester has in common with the 
Eckharts and Buddhas and adding that to the other relevant perspectives, 
you're just saying they're all right in their own contexts. That's just a 
little to egalitarian even for me. But the biggest problem with this is that 
you're not adding the contexts to together, you're trying to equal weight 
and validity to the various descriptions from the various contexts as if 
each one were an isolated island unconnected to any other place. But this is 
the kind of equality we find in grave yards. Everbody is equal because 
they're all equally dead.

"Science supercedes old religious forms, not because what it says is more 
true in any absolute sense (whatever that is), but because what it says is 
more Dynamic." (LILA Chapter 17)

"Mythology is true enough in its own world-space; its just that perspectival 
reason is 'more true'; more developed, more diffferentiated-and-integrated, 
and more sophisticated in its capactiy to disclose verifiable knowledge. 
Thus the higher truths of rationality pass judgement on the lower truths of 
mythology, and for the most part mythology simply does not survive those 
more sophisticated tests. Moses did not part the Red Sea, and Jesus was not 
born by a biological virgin. Those claims, in the light of higher reason, 
are indeed bogus.  ...And if religion is to survive in a vialbe form in the 
modern world, it must be willing to jettison its bogus claims, just as 
narrow science must be willing to jettison its reductionistic imperialism." 
(KEN WILBER)

"Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: 
Plotinus, Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others. They share a 
common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; 
that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality 
is undivided. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of 
dividedness can be overcome by meditation. The Native American Church argues 
that peyote can force feed a mystic understanding upon those who are 
normally resistant to it, an understanding that Indians had been deriving 
through Vision Quests in the past." LILA

"In the spiritual traditions of both East and West - I am thinking not about 
particular religions, but about the mystical element to be found in them all 
- we find the claim that eventually one must let go of the activites of 
thought and imagination in order to enter a region of consciousness that
such symbolic activity cannot reach." Guidebook to ZAMM, p22

See? Mysticism can be found in all spiritual traditions, both East and West, 
as well as among the most honored philosophers. Philosophical mysticism is 
most definately NOT a single, exclusive perspective. I can hardly imagine a 
broader view that includes so many different contexts and perspectives. And 
the idea of a pre-intellectual experience comes from adding them all 
together in an inclusive, holistic picture.

I sincerely hope this explanation makes mysticism more acceptable. I hope 
you can see how Pirsig's claims about mysticism can be made and are made 
without resorting to mere metaphysics and without insisting on any exclusive 
truth or particular descriptions.

But I'm not holding my breath.

Thanks.
dmb

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