[MD] DMB and Me

[Steven Peterson]

Hi DMB,


> 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.

Steve:
Isn't this EXACTLY what you keep trying to do to Rorty?


DMB:
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.


Steve:
I never said anything about radical empiricism above. I'm talking
about the philosophical rhetoric of mystics in general. I'm not
talking about mystical experience itself, but rather the philosophies
that mystics have generated based upon experiences.

You can argue that mystics and mystical experiences are best
understood in terms of radical empiricism, but you will always have to
contend with the fact that mystics are too easily read in their
philosophical talk as Platonists trying to transcend language. The
stuff I wrote in this post to John should be read by you as
suggestions for how the rhetoric of mystics may be improved to avoid
sounding like Platonists.

In the above, for example, I'm definitely not saying that Pirsig is
actually anti-intellectual. I'm not criticizing Pirsig for that. I'm
saying that his choice of rhetoric makes him too easily read as
anti-intellectual as mystics also so often are.

How can you know that there is a danger of being misunderstood with
this choice of rhetoric employed by mystics? Because so many people in
this discussion group over the years have taken Pirsig and mystics as
asserting that we ought to stop thinking, and whenever someone tries
to correct this notion, the anti-intellectuals can support their view
with quotes like "kill all intellectual patterns...and morality will
be served."


DMB:
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.



Steve:
Again, I never said that about radical empiricists. I said that about
mystics. You can say that mystics are best read as radical empiricists
or that mystics would so well to employ the rhetoric of radical
empiricism to get their ideas across, and I would probably agree. The
problem for me in subscribing to talk of mysticism is that mystics so
often talk about getting in touch with reality and insist that we are
out of touch with reality. You yourself insist language is "secondary"
rather than "primary experience." To me that is asking for Platonist
trouble, but as Matt says, to each his own.



DMB:
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.


Steve:
The gist I have gotten from the mystic's I have read is that they
actually often insist such a gap which must be transcended. We need to
awaken to reality as it really is.


DMB:
The first great pitfall from which such a radial 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:
I don't know why you call this an error on my part. I think it is an
error on the mystic's part to use rhetoric suggesting exactly such a
gap in their talk about transcendence, illusion, awakening,
Enlightenment, the true nature of reality, etc. I don't think that
that is what mystics really mean to say (at least I hope it isn't). I
think they also often deny the existence of the gao, but they have a
lot of dificulty saying what they mean to say, which is why they so
often negate every positive assertion they make as soon as they make
it. Or even before making any assertions: "The Tao that can be told is
not the Eternal Tao." I think your argument ought to be that radical
empiricism would give them a better vocabulary to say what they want
to say rather than that I am "in error" about mysticism.

If so, so are Pirsig and James.

In James's "Varieties" he said of mysticism that "It is
anti-naturalistic, and harmonizes best with twice-bornness and
so-called other-worldly states mind." Is James in error here in
thinking that mysticism harmonizes best with otherworldly-ness? Or is
the error in how mystics have talked about their own philosophies and
suggested such otherworldliness to James and I?

Recall that Pirsig left Benares because of this notion of illusion--
this gap between appearances and the way things really are that is
taught in philosophies based on mysticism.

ZAMM:
"During this span of ten years he lived in India for a long time
studying Oriental philosophy at Benares Hindu University.

As far as I know he didn’t learn any occult secrets there.

Nothing much happened at all except exposures. He listened to
philosophers, visited religious persons, absorbed and thought and then
absorbed and thought some more, and that was about all. All his
letters show is an enormous confusion of contradictions and
incongruities and divergences and exceptions to any rule he formulated
about the things he observed. He’d entered India an empirical
scientist, and he left India an empirical scientist, not much wiser
than he had been when he’d come.

However, he’d been exposed to a lot and had acquired a kind of latent
image that appeared in conjunction with many other latent images later
on.

Some of these latencies should be summarized because they become
important later on. He became aware that the doctrinal differences
among Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as
important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and
Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized
statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.

In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit
doctrine of Tat tvam asi, "Thou art that," which asserts that
everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are
undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become
enlightened."

Steve comments:
No one would ever insist, in reality, "Though art that" unless people
already thought that in reality there was a gap between being and
perception, reality and appearance. The appearance-reality distinction
is presupposed in mystic philosophy before it can be recommended that
it needs to be transcended.

Here's where people often find the anti-intellectual bit. Babies don't
distinguish between what is and what is perceived, self and other.
That distinction is learned through all that nasty thinking. It needs
to be unlearned. We have to become intellectually like children. This
is actually a common teaching among mystics that Pirsig does a better
job with in his vocabulary (gumption traps and stuckness in static
intellectual patterns, value rigidity) than the mystics have in
theirs.



ZAMM continiues:
"Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic
is not final wisdom."

Steve:
Mystical philosophy presumes this separation too--as an illusion--so
that this persumption can be transcended--to get in touch with reality
as it really is.


ZAMM:
"The illusion of separation of subject from object is best removed by
the elimination of physical activity, mental activity and emotional
activity. There are many disciplines for this. One of the most
important is the Sanskrit dhy
na, mispronounced in Chinese as "Chan"
and again mispronounced in Japanese as "Zen." Phædrus never got
involved in meditation because it made no sense to him. In his entire
time in India "sense" was always logical consistency and he couldn’t
find any honest way to abandon this belief. That, I think, was
creditable on his part.

But one day in the classroom the professor of philosophy was blithely
expounding on the illusory nature of the world for what seemed the
fiftieth time and Phædrus raised his hand and asked coldly if it was
believed that the atomic bombs that had dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki were illusory. The professor smiled and said yes. That was
the end of the exchange.

Within the traditions of Indian philosophy that answer may have been
correct, but for Phædrus and for anyone else who reads newspapers
regularly and is concerned with such things as mass destruction of
human beings that answer was hopelessly inadequate. He left the
classroom, left India and gave up."


Steve:
If the professor was "blithely expounding on the illusory nature of
the world for what seemed the fiftieth time" then it seems that it is
not just me.  There is some Platonism in mystical philosophy. There is
a world of appearances that needs to be transcended to get in touch
with reality as it really is.




> 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.


Steve:

Your concern here for the way words correctly hook up to reality seems
odd given you don't subscribe to a correspondence theory of truth.
What are you looking for here? Why would you presuppose that words
need to "hook up" with reality as though they were not always already
part of reality? Does Rorty need to describe how we can directly
compare an assertion to reality for agreement to satisy your concerns
about coherence? These don't sound like concerns a pragmatist ought be
having. For a pragmatist, it would seem like enough to say, "When we
say that a belief is, as far as we know, true, is to say that no other
habit of action is, as far as we know, a better habit of action." In
short, language matters. What more needs to be said about the "nature
of language" for Rory to be coherent?

You got all over Rorty's case for saying that the world is out there.
Now you are saying that the problem with Rorty is that in his
philosophy the world is NOT there. It sounds to me like it is this
critique of Rorty that is incoherent.

You don't understand Rorty's philosophy. As far as I know, you haven't
read anything by Rorty beyond the quotes of your favorite Rorty
critics. Why not start from a position of ignorance instead of from
the preconception that Rorty is the great Satan? Why not start with
questions about Rorty instead of criticisms of Rorty? Why not try to
understand what Rorty is actually saying? It seems very important to
you to disagree with Rorty, why not actually read him and try to
understand him so you will know what it is you are committed in
advance to disagree with?

Best,
Steve