[MD] DMB and Me

[david buchanan]

Steve said:

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.


dmb says:

This is another example of the error I've talking about. You're describing the claims of the philosophical mystic in terms of SOM. You're treating the claims of the radical empiricist as if they were traditional empirical claims. As a result, you're criticizing claims that Pirsig never makes. You're taking the post-postivist's stance toward positivism to answer a question about mysticism. The radical empiricist does not claim that words are impediments that stand between us and reality. Those claims don't even make sense within radical empiricism because it begins by rejecting the metaphysical assumptions that assert there is a gap between us and reality. The first great pitfall from which such a radical standing by experience will save us, says James, is a artificial conception of the relations between knower and known. SOM is that artificial conception and SOM is what posits the epistemic gap between subject (knower) and object (known).

In other words, you are taking the mystic's stance as a claim that he can cross the gap but the mystic's claim is that there is no gap. The distinction between the immediate flux of life and the concepts we derive from lived experience is not a claim that one is real and the other is only an appearance. That is also a way of reading the claims as if they were being made by a SOMer or a positivists. Like Matt, you make this error quite consistently. 


Steve said:
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 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.)

dmb says:
Again, you are talking about Rorty's critique of traditional empiricism and this critique can not rightly be applied to philosophical mysticism. Nor can philosophical mysticism be properly understood if its terms are given positivistic meanings. But that's exactly what you're doing here. 

I'd also ask you to think about the incoherence of Rorty's stance. He wants to avoid ontology and focus on language. To say there is no way to get outside the text is to say there is no way that the world as it is (non-text) to hook up with our words and so all we have are words that refer to more words. All the action takes place within the web of beliefs and yet those beliefs refer to nothing. It is precisely this way of avoiding ontology that draws charges of linguistic idealism. Words are tools and yet they operate on a world that isn't there. They're tools made only for fixing other tools. This is the criticism I find in both Hildebrand and Hickman. They say Rorty's view suffers from this incoherence. I guess I'm saying you and Matt caught this disease from him. Here's a particularly succinct version of this same mistake....


Steve said:
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.

dmb says:

Here you're basically translating the DQ/sq distinction into an appearance/reality distinction. This is just the Platonic version of SOM. This is not at all what the mystic claims. Your whole position is predicated on this same conceptual error. Here are four more examples of misreading mystics as if they were positivists....


Steve said:

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 notion of transcendence for the mystic is about getting in touch with something that has always been around,.. 


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."


dmb says:

I already made a detailed case explaining what Rorty's criticisms are aimed at (traditional empiricism) and how they can't be applied as you are applying them (to radical empiricism). This response is just meant to point out specific cases of this misapplication so that you won't have to wonder what, exactly, I'm complaining about. Here are seven examples from just one post, and that's not even all of them. I just picked the clearest examples. Think about it, will you?

 
 		 	   		  
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