[MD] Rorty and Mysticism

[Ian Glendinning]

It seems telling to me Matt that Rorty uses the phrase "mystical
experience" as opposed to "mysticism" ... being the creative process.

I think your problem (Dave's problem with Rorty) is not so much
difficulty with mysticism-as-(radical)-experience, but
"radical-experience-as-poetry"

Sounds good to me. Any language used expresses the experience without
need of any kind of objectification.

Ian

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 3:54 AM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
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