[MD] Rorty and Mysticism

[david buchanan]

Matt said:
.., 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.

dmb says:
The gateway to wisdom? I don't think my claims are as broad or grand as you suggest here. It's just that the philosophical vision of James, Dewey and Pirsig includes radical empiricism and their vision is profoundly altered when that part of it is removed. I think that the MOQ becomes something else, becomes a different vision when radical empiricism is removed from it. Same with the mysticism. If you take that out it isn't the MOQ anymore. 

Matt said:
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.


dmb says:

As I understand it, Platonism is a kind of anti-empiricism and so it would be approximately the opposite of radical empiricism.  



Matt said:
... "Overcoming the Tradition," Rorty's first essay comparing the philosophical visions of Heidegger and Dewey,  ..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. ... 


dmb says:
Again, to construe mysticism in terms of poetry or the way it functions in language is approximately the opposite of mysticism as Pirsig construes it. As you know, Pirsig says that mystical reality is the primary empirical reality, that it is pre-verbal or pre-conceptual experience. On this view, it is not possible for the experience itself to function in conversation. Of course, poets and mystics are sometimes the same people. William Blake springs to mind. I think mystics sometimes turn to art in order to give some kind of expression to the ineffable. But mysticism AS poetry? I honestly don't know what the means but it seems dismissive and it clashes with the central assertion of philosophical mystics, namely the notion that mystical reality is outside of language. 


Matt said:

... a paper Rorty read at a conference in Italy in 2005... 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. ...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?

dmb says:
Before addressing Rorty's answer, I'd just like to point out that philosophical mysticism is very different from fundamentalism, the Pope's views and the quest for transcendental realities. As you know, the MOQ is not a form of theism and radical empiricism was practically built to keep trans-experiential realities out of our philosophies. On this view, the mystical experience could be described as transcendent only in the sense that it's extraordinary or special to those who go through it.
 

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.
 -----
MATT commented on the Rorty quote:
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.



dmb says:

I see what you're saying but only up to a certain point. I think Pirsig would join Rorty in rejecting the notion that mystical experience puts us in touch with "the transcendent" as it would be conceived by a fundamentalist, the Pope or mystics of the theistic variety in general. And I suppose all pragmatists would applaud the moral and intellectual progress that follows. The actual, practical effects occur when you draw conclusions about this experience and then put those ideas into practice. That's where new language will latch or not. 

But poetry is poetry even when it's about mystical experience. It's better than prose but it is still language. And the mystical reality is outside of language so the phrase "mysticism as poetry" seems dismissive and it seems to defy the MOQ's central distinction.