[MD] DMB and Me

[Steven Peterson]

Hi John,

> Is the claim that the fundamental nature of reality is outside of language,
> mean that reality transcends language, and thus transcendant reality could
> be described then, as an absolute?
>
> Not a Hegelian idealized absolute, of course, but a Pirsigian personalized
> one?

I don't have much directly to say about absolutes, but I can try to
explain my understanding of Pirsig and pragmatism with regard to
mysticism and transcendence.

Both the pragmatist and the mystic urge us to drop the project of
nailing down the fundamental nature of reality with words. Nailing
down fundamental natures of things is a linguistic practice, so the
mystic's claim that the fundamental nature of reality is outside of
language it to say that such a "nailing down" can't be done.

The mystic maintains the Platonist notion that reality has a
fundamental nature, but asserts that that fundamental nature cannot be
accessed with words. Thoughts are veiwed as an impediment to getting
in touch with this fundamental nature called God, the Tao, the ground
of being, etc. Thoughts, they say, stand between us and reality as it
really is. That is why they say that to get in touch with reality, we
need to stop thinking. This is the anti-intellectual bit in Pirsig's
philosophy that I wish weren't there--as if we would all be better off
if we just stopped thinking. As if language can take us further from
or closer to reality.

The pragmatist addresses the same issue (the failure of language to
hand us the fundamental nature of reality) by avoiding ontology. The
pragmatist suggests we should stop viewing reality as the sort of
thing that has a "fundamental nature," and she (he, really since I'm
always talking about Rorty's view of pragmatism) urges us to stop
viewing language as something that tries to nail down other things.
For the pragmatist, language doesn't fail to adequately represent
reality because it doesn't represent at all. (It does in the common
sense way, but not in the metaphysical or Platonist way.)

Language is one human practice among many pursued for various purposes
such as helping us get what we want and predicting what other humans
will do.. Pragmatists drop the notion of language as the attempt to
adequately represent reality in favor of a notion of language as a way
of using reality for various purposes. "Representing reality" in the
metaphysical sense is just one of these purposes that humans first
started having only very recently in the history of language use, so
even if language actually does have a "fundamental nature,"
"representing reality" is certainly it.

The failure of language to nail down the fundamental nature of reality
then amounts to nothing more than the problem of using the wrong tool
for the wrong job. Once you have dropped the metaphysical
appearance-reality dualism, the mystic's claim that the fundamental
nature of reality is outside of language is no more deep than saying a
hammer isn't very helpful for turning screws or saying that the screw
in question is one that need not be turned.

Language can't separate us from reality. Language is a part of
reality. Coming up with new words and new descriptions of reality is
to add something new to reality rather than to encapsulate a
preexisting static world. The pragmatist agrees with the mystic in
that reality can't be nailed down with words because words can never
exhaust reality. We can come up with an unlimited number of
descriptions of reality, but no particular description or set of
descriptions will ever offer us a substitute for reality and hand us
reality's "fundamental nature."

The difference between the pragmatist and the mystic here is that
transcendence for the mystic is getting past language to reality as it
really is while the pragmatist doesn't see why we need to think of
ourselves as out of touch with reality to begin with. How could humans
invent a tool that could take them outside of reality? What are we if
not a part of reality?

While language itself is not something seen as the sort of thing that
can be transcended or something needing to be transcended,
transcendence for a pragmatist lies in unleashing the creative
possibilities for the use of language. Language as a whole is not a
pragmatist's target for transcendence as it is for the mystic.

To use some of Rorty's turns of phrase, while Platonist philospher may
see transcendence as concerned with "perceiving an order that brings
together all possible worlds," the pragmatist may be more likely to
relish in diversity and see language use as "commanding new worlds
into being." While the notion of transcendence for the mystic is about
getting in touch with something that has always been around, the
pragmatist who has replaced certainty with hope, sees language as a
way for us to bring something new and awe-inspiring into the universe.

As my favorite amature philosopher, Matt Kundert, explained to me, "to
transcend one bit of language would simply mean to call another bit of
language into existence that can encapsulate the old and extend into
something new." As an example he points out that Einstein's notion of
curved space-time can hold Newton's gravity, space, and time in its
grasp, and also give us more.

I have a feeling that this is not the sort of transcendence that you
were interested in when you asked the question. Your idea of
transcendence seems much more concerned with the rreligious impulse of
orienting yourself at the deepest level toward something pre-existing
yet personally transformative. As William James described the
religious impulse in The Varieties of Religious Experience, "it
consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our
supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto." Since
you've supported theism in your recent posts, you may be quite
disposed toward the notion of an unseen order with which we would do
well to get in touch. Obviosly there is MOQ support for such an order
if you try to read it as traditional metaphysics.

Transcendence for the pragmatists is not seen as a matter of getting
in touch with the Truth or an unseen order, but as making fruitful use
of our imaginative power--the power that human beings have to
transform our future into something richer than our past. The power
that Jesus and the other religious prophets wielded was the ability to
use metaphor to redescribe the familiar in unfamiliar terms to open
hearts to the possibility of new conceptions of community. This power
seems to me to be the similar to the power of such scientific prophets
as Newton and Einstein to imagine new and transformative pictures of
the physical universe.

Scientific, moral, and artistic uses of imagination all can enable us
to transcendently understand ourselves in new ways. They can remake us
into something new. The MOQ is also itself such a use of human
imagination that enables us to see ourselves in new previously
unimagined ways and invites us to become something new.

It would help if you explained what you mean by an absolute. An
absolute in the above seems to me a teleology for what that something
new must be to qualify as transcendence. Such a notion is tied up in
the philosphical urge to try to, as Rorty put it, "lend our past
practices the prestige of the eternal." It is the sort of notion that
has the danger of putting undue limits on our imagination of
possibilities for the future. It sounds like looking toward a power
not ourselves to do what we ourselves ought to be doing.

Best,
Steve