[MD] Rorty and Mysticism

[Matt Kundert]

I'm not around much on the MD any more these days, so I'm 
unfamiliar with current themes in the dialogues, and with new 
partners to the conversation (or with old partners who have perhaps 
evolved).  But pragmatism is a source of interest for Pirsigians, and 
one of the more well-known Anglo-American philosophers to 
self-identify as a pragmatist at the end of the 20th century was 
Richard Rorty.  I don't know if anyone talks about Rorty much these 
days, but if newcomers have found his association with Pirsig 
strange, then I'm likely the one to be blamed.  I wasn't the first to 
bring him up, but I made him ubiquitous for a while, and had I to do 
it all over again, I would've done it differently.

Be that as it may, my most passionate and dogged interlocutor in the 
last decade has been David Buchanan.  Dave has long contended that 
the radical empiricism of James (which can be found in Dewey's 
Experience and Nature) is the gateway to wisdom in the area of 
philosophy, being especially a kind of philosophical mysticism.  He 
has further excoriated pragmatisms without an attendant radical 
empiricism, along the lines Pirsig laid out in Lila, but also along the 
lines that to deny radical empiricism is to deny a place for mysticism 
within one's philosophical vision.

I have ho-hummed my way through defenses of Rorty over the past 
few years, mainly because the problem eludes me.  If James and 
Dewey's radical empiricism isn't a kind of Platonic realism, then it is 
nothing that Rorty would've felt strongly about.  His extant remarks 
about radical empiricism have always appeared to me easily 
rectifiable with most of what Dave takes Pirsig to be saying.  Dave 
takes--as well he should--solace in the fact that many philosophers 
excoriate Rorty for the same things he's always had a problem with 
in Rorty.  I just sigh and patiently wait for the target to be removed 
from the most infamous American philosopher in the last 30 years.  
Too much heat, not enough light.

The toughest part of my ho-humming has been the mysticism part.  
Dave has taken his silence to be deafening, speaking volumes.  I've 
always been skeptical about so construing it.  One of his rare 
off-hand remarks was recently flipped out into my conversation with 
John.  "Overcoming the Tradition," Rorty's first essay comparing the 
philosophical visions of Heidegger and Dewey, was written in the 
context of Heidegger's avoidance of philosophical conversation--the 
kind exemplified by American philosophy journals--and though not 
exactly "mysticism" as we usually understand it, it has always 
structured my understanding of what Rorty thought about mysticism, 
which is to say, how it functions in the conversation of humankind.  
For years I've tried to construe mysticism as a kind of poetry, an 
idea that first came to me in reading that essay, but it never really 
seemed to catch on much (though it's the same thing Santayana 
was saying, too, something I take solace in).

But a couple days ago, a posthumous book, An Ethics for Today: 
Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion, came 
out which contained a paper Rorty read at a conference in Italy in 
2005.  The paper opposes "fundamentalism" to "relativism" (the 
latter defined, characteristically, as the "denial of fundamentalism") 
and dialogues with a few of the current pope's writings about 
relativism and different worldviews.  Nothing new is elucidated 
about Rorty's position in the paper, though a few new turns of 
phrase are thrown out that might be helpful for us secular 
humanists who are anti-clerical though not anti-spiritual.

The interesting part was the Q&A.  Somebody finally asked him 
directly about mysticism.

-----
A MEMBER OF THE AUDIENCE -- The problem that concerns me is 
whether mysticism is absolutely to be excluded from your way of 
thinking, or not.  The real sense of mysticism, I mean something 
transcendental--does it exist or not in your vision?

RICHARD RORTY -- I think that the mystics, like the poets, are 
among the great imaginative geniuses who have helped human 
moral and intellectual progress.  Where I think we disagree is on 
the question of whether the mystical must be a way of putting us in 
touch with the transcendent.  As I see it, mystical experience is a 
way of leaping over the boundaries of the language one speaks.  
Leaps over those boundaries lead to the creation of new language.  
And the creation of new language leads to intellectual and moral 
progress. (18)
-----

This just confirmes the hunches I always had about Rorty.  It's 
hard not to see the relationship between Dynamic Quality and 
static latches in those lines.  It's not an argument against Dave, of 
course: the argument isn't about what Rorty thinks, but what the 
best way forward is.  I like the rhetoric of mysticism-as-poetry; 
Dave likes the rhetoric of mysticism-as-radical-empiricism.  I don't 
know how to debate the two.

Matt