[MD] Plains Talk and Pragmatism

[John Carl]

Pragmatism oughta be credited to its creator, but I wonder if any
intellectual pattern can stem from one man, lone, mad genius that CS Pierce
was...

Native Americans are highly pragmatic.  I mean, they just are.  Hang around
some sometime and ask them, they'll tell you.  They have always been a
highly pragmatic people.  The American Pragmatism that arose and influenced
the world, could be seen as an outgrowth of this spirit and idea.   Robert
M. Pirsig sure seemed to think so.  He almost wrote a book about it.

But then got distracted by bar ladies and metaphysics.

It happens.

Which reminds me, I came across a good quote yesterday from Pierce, in a
biography of Josiah Royce.  Pierce said that the best statement of
Pragmatism he'd ever read was Royce's World and Individual, and far superior
to anything the so-called Pragmatists had come up with.

Just to bug dave.


But if anybody has read Lila, I have read Lila, and I know this central idea
of the MoQ is congruent with Native American thought, and to Native
Americans, these highly pragmatic people, in tune with direct experience,
who lived in harmony and wellness and fruitful fun for thousands and
thousands of years before European powers came and took over the land, they
lived their lives by orienting around a conceptualized "Great Spirit".

Like I said, spend some time with them, you will see, this is true.

The MoQ, if it does damage to the integrity of these peoples, then it is no
good, as I see it.

Not one of these peoples anywhere ever, were ever, ever "anti-theistic" The
Great Spirit WAS direct experience, to their thinking, and they were shocked
at the attitudes of white men who came and expressed the notion that nothing
had any value but *their* society.  That mere rocks and trees and animals
were dead things to be rendered into profitable enterprise.

So consider the following and tell me how the MoQ could render such
"primitive" people as foolishly theistic?  When their very lives and view
are what is being touted here:

The conclusion of it all:

Maybe when Phaedrus got this metaphysics all put together people would see
that the value-centered reality it described wasn't just a wild thesis off
into some new direction but was a connecting link to a part of themselves
which had always been suppressed by cultural norms and which needed opening
up. He hoped so.

The experience of William James Sidis had shown that you can't just tell
people about Indians and expect them to listen. They already *know *about
Indians. Their cup of tea is full. The cultural immune system will keep them
from hearing anything else. Phaedrus hoped this Quality metaphysics was
something that would get past the immune system and show that American
Indian mysticism is not something alien from American culture. It's a deep
submerged hidden root of it.

Americans don't have to go to the Orient to learn what this mysticism stuff
is about. It's been right here in America all along. In the Orient they
dress it up with rituals and incense and pagodas and chants and, of course,
huge organizational enterprises that bring in the equivalent of millions of
dollars every year. American Indians haven't done this. Their way is not to
be organized at all. They don't charge anything, they don't make a big fuss,
and that's what makes people underrate them.

Phaedrus remembered saying to Dusenberry just after that peyote meeting was
over, "The Hindu understanding is just a low-grade imitation of *this! *This
is how it must have really been before all the clap-trap got started."

And he remembered that Franz Boas had said that in a primitive culture
people speak only about actual experiences. They don't discuss what is
virtue, good, evil, beauty; the demands of their daily life, like those of
our uneducated classes, don't extend beyond the virtues shown on definite
occasions by definite people, good or evil deeds of their fellow tribesman,
and the beauty of a particular man, woman or object. They don't talk about
abstract ideas. But Boas said, "The Dakota Indian considers goodness to be a
noun rather than an adjective. "

That was true, Phaedrus thought, and that was very objective. But it was
like an explorer noticing that there's a huge vein of pure yellow metal
emerging from the side of a cliff, jotting the fact down in his diary, and
then never expanding on the subject because he's only interested in facts
and doesn't want to get into evaluations or interpretations.

Good is a noun. That was *it. *That was what Phaedrus had been looking for.
That was the homer, over the fence, that ended the ball game. Good as a noun
rather than as an adjective is all the Metaphysics of Quality is about. Of
course, the ultimate Quality isn't a noun or an adjective or anything else
definable, but if you had to reduce the whole Metaphysics of Quality to a
single sentence, that would be it.