[MD] Language Games (was Theatre and Definitions)

[David M]

> 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?

DM: I don't see why taking some care about the difference between describing
SQ and DQ should be seen as a paradox. I would say, if you become dominated
by SQ talk you end up with scientism, if you play the DQ card too strongly 
over
SQ you end up with the excesses of obsrurantism and excess holy talk (Simon
Critchley points out these polar dangers in his introduction to Continental 
Philosophy).
I think some talk (largely poetic) about experience and the pre-concepetual, 
causal,
practical, felt, & value-based ground that makes science possibe is 
important if we
are going to have a richer life-world than the reducedone offered to us by 
scientism
or Wittgensteinian shoulder shrugging and silence.

>
> 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?

DM: Maybe seeing a new type of flower for the first time may be less
of an experience if you start immediately to try and clasify it and avoid
its strangeness and unique beauty.
>
> 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.

DM: Well, for me, DMB seems to lack tolerance on this one, and therefore
seems not to get the openness to options that getting the DQ into your 
outlook
clarifies, but options does not mean we have to embrace any kind of nutty 
theory
but should mean we can see why someone else might and can.

>
> 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.

DM: You know we live in globalising times, I think to really understand
what being western might mean you need to take a good look at what it
means in relation to the alternatives. I kinda suspect that what the east is
missing the west has and vice versa.


>
> 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?


DM: What would really challenge and make you know your self better? I 
certainly
think we need to be thinking more about our global problems and west vs rest
of world differences. One of the reasons I think the English-Indian 
philosopher Roy
Bhaskar is so interesting with his two look at enlightenment in its 
inner/outer movement.