[MD] Language Games (was Theatre and Definitions)

[Matt Kundert]

David, Anthony,

David said:
I agree with DMB that DQ is simply a matter of experience, it is the most 
obvious aspect of experience, it dominates it so much that it cannot be 
differentiated from the whole. When we differentiate anything within 
experience it is SQ, DQ is what is left behind and obscured by all 
differentiation. DQ is Nothingness, the flux, movement, what everything 
appears out of and returns to.

Anthony said:
"DQ is Nothingness, the [indeterminate, aesthetic] flux, [creative] 
movement, what everything [static] appears out of and returns to."

Matt:
Here's my problem: I don't really have any problem with most of the above 
formulations.  I also, however, don't see how the intuition/postulation 
distinction is relevant.  I don't see how it is supposed to help, play a 
role, have a function, what its doing.  It seems superfluous to me.  The 
only thing I see it doing is creating distance between us and reality, which 
Pirsig and the pragmatists want to deny.  Temporal distinction?  Fine.  But 
DQ/reality as something that's obvious (no distance) and yet "obscured by 
all differentiation" (lots of distance)?  Why the paradox?

The thing I've never understood is how, if DQ is the low negative value 
proceeding everything else when we sit on a stove, how _language_ or 
anything else could get in its way, how it could obscure it?

There seems to be something very strange about all this talk about 
obviousness on the one hand and large scale blindness on the other.  In the 
end, I think all of it cashes out to the adoption of a set of practices.  
Until one adopts a set of practices (which entail a particular way of 
"seeing the world") certain things aren't going to be obvious.  But on the 
other hand, are people blind for not adopting the practices or are they just 
not compelled to?  I doubt DMB is moved all that much when a Christian tells 
him he's blind to the Will of God.  DMB is not compelled to adopt Christian 
practices to give him better sight of God.

That's why I asked why I should become a Buddhist.  I know you're tongue was 
a bit in your cheek when you suggested we all should be, Anthony, but I 
think your suggestion was in point in exactly this way: what practices we 
employ, what vision of the world we hold, are important to who we are (they 
are who we are).  My purpose in asking for Eastern purposes and the like was 
to generate reasons for why I should be compelled to take up Eastern 
practices.  My instinct, where I stand now in all of my Westernness, is that 
I won't get anything more from the East than I get from the West.  That the 
East will teach me to be just as good a pragmatist as the West will.  You 
talk about benefits to, say, our political situation.  But I agree with all 
the things you say the East teaches: but I'm a product of the West.  That 
tells me that the West has the same types of resources available.  Benefits 
to our spiritual situation?  I feel fine spiritually.

Dewey taught us that our ends change as our means change, that the types of 
practices we employ for particular purposes changes the purposes we desire, 
a dialectical mash that slowly moves forward.  I'm not saying I wouldn't be 
changed, and changed for the better, by reading more widely in the Eastern 
traditions or practicing meditation.  But there are a lot of different 
activities out there that promise to enrich my life and change me for the 
better.  Why should I become a Buddhist rather than read Shakespeare?

That question, which I ended with earlier, is in its way a trap.  I don't 
think you can answer it very well except in the way Marsha did "You might 
find it interesting to experience no-mind.  It is an awakening."  If you 
could answer it better, like give me knock-down arguments that didn't hinge 
on a change of practice ("try looking at it this way" suggestions), then you 
would be commiting the mistake of Platonism, of telling me that I'm ignoring 
something in reality that is there whether I acknowledge it or not.  
Ignorance means something in common sense, but it doesn't mean anything but 
Platonism in philosophy.  Marsha appealed to my curiosity and suggested I 
give it a whirl, that I'll never really understand until I give it a whirl.  
I think that is, more or less, about right.  The trouble is _for everybody_ 
that there isn't enough time in the world to try everything that you're 
curious about.  That's why Pirsig suggested just making a stand somewhere 
and going from there--you're never going to read all the philosophers.

I think, in its own way, Pirsig's advice about philosophy, and his talk of 
static patterns, is kind of like Socrates' philosophical imperative "Know 
Thyself" and Rorty's talk about contingency and ethnocentrism: by getting to 
know yourself, you'll get to know what you want (and, in some way, what your 
culture wants because you are an instantiation of it), and you can begin the 
dialectic of changing yourself, and thereby your culture, for the better by 
ironing what you want, employing practices to get it, having your desires 
and purposes changed by those practices, then employing different practices, 
then changing purposes, changing practices, purposes, practices--it keeps 
going.  I think that's the dynamic between Dynamic and static.  I think all 
of that---but it still leaves me in the same place I was, not really knowing 
whether I'll read the Daodejing or Hamlet next.

Matt

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