[MD] Rorty and Mysticism

[david buchanan]

John said to Matt:
I wonder if you could tell me the cash value of pre-conceptual experience? 

dmb says:
Pre-intellectual experience is another name for Dynamic Quality and for the mystic reality. If you want to understand the MOQ or the nature of enlightenment, it's an extremely valuable idea. We're talking about thee central feature of Pirsig's metaphysics. If you're actually interested in understanding it and making it work coherently, that notion is priceless. Explaining Quality is pretty much the whole point of both books.
The pragmatist says ideas are good and right and true when they work in actual practice. Ideas are valuable AS ideas, not as commodities. They "work" when they function smoothly in relation to all the other ideas within the larger thought system. To trot out one of my old analogies, leaving this feature out of the MOQ is like taking the engine off the motorcycle. Without it, you're going nowhere. Without it, the rest of MOQ might as well be sold for scrap. 

John said:
.. It seems to me, that if something is pre-conceptual, then we can't concieve it, think about it, talk about it, poeticize it or contemplate it in any way. Pragmatically speaking, it doesn't even exist. Pragmatism then, obviates Radical Empiricism. That just seems so obvious that I figure I must be missing something. Do you know what it is?


dmb says:
Well, no.
We CAN think about it and talk about it. That's what we're doing right now, in case you hadn't noticed. But talking and thinking isn't it. There must always be a discrepancy between the two. One is not the other. 

But you know it in experience. It is direct and immediate experience. In what sense is that not real? As a matter of fact, another name for this pre-conceptual experience is "the primary empirical reality". The primary empirical reality isn't real? 

According to Pirsig, that's as real as it gets. (William James calls it "pure experience".) To say that it doesn't exist because it's not conceptual is to say that conceptual reality is the only reality there is.

Pirsig is saying there certainly IS more than conceptual reality. In fact, he's saying that conceptual reality is secondary, that all concepts are derived from this immediate experience and they should be subordinated to this primary empirical reality.