[MD] Rorty and Mysticism

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Dave,

Dave said:
Okay. You're using the term "poet" in a much broader sense than 
usual. (That's probably worth mentioning if you want to be 
understood.)

Matt:
Apologies.  To save on space and avoid pedantic repetition of things 
commonly understood, I assumed a common understanding of 
Rorty's basic terms.  I don't mean to respond with the cattiness you 
just showed, but you do still bring Rorty up a lot as punching bag, 
don't you?  Maybe I'm mistaken in that, but understanding a thinker 
from "the inside," as it were, must be some kind of prerequisite 
before beating up on "their thoughts" (the inside view being what 
establishes the possessiveness of "their").  Even if he doesn't come 
up a lot in your writing here, if he looms large in your imagination 
as the thing you don't want to be, I'd advise a more sensitive 
understanding of what he stands for (by which I mean, a better 
understanding than such heavyweights as Hilary Putnam and 
Bernard Williams showed when they punched the image of Rorty).

Dave said:
But that expansion of the term doesn't really address the point 
because all those thinkers are working within language at the same. 
In fact, the notion that mystical reality is outside language is a view 
that all philosophical mystics have in common.

Matt:
Yes, you are right, it does avoid the point, but it does so as a matter 
of rhetorical convenience.  The residual difficulty with the rhetoric of 
radical empiricism (which accompanies some, but not all, 
mysticisms--the rhetoric has a much different function in 
Romanticism) is this: if one has already rejected the goal of 
transcendence (in its Platonic guise), then it is unclear to what 
purpose the idea of "purity" plays in any remaining distinctions 
between reality or experience, on the one side, and language, on the 
other.  Experience as something pure that language muddies is not 
something I can make sense of in non-Platonically transcendent ways.  
Experience as "immediate" whereas language is "mediating" is not 
something I can think of many uses for for nonrepresentationalists 
either.  The only use I can think of for them is the use to which 
Romanticists like Wordsworth and Emerson put them, which is 
heightening the agon against what Dewey called the "crust of 
conventionalized consciousness."

I think that is where the matter has rested between us for some 
time.  I don't understand why language is looked askance at, 
considered impure.  Rorty taught me to think of the moral concept 
of "purity" as a remnant of what Heidegger called the 
onto-theological tradition, and I take the impetus to escape from 
that tradition to be the same impetus as people have in saying that 
theism is peculiar to Western monotheism, opening non-Western 
modes of spirituality like one finds in many American Indian 
cultures and Buddhism as resources.

The last productive cycle of responses we had went in this same 
direction (posted here: 
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2010/01/discussion-with-dave-buchanan.html).  
At that time I said that the move that is unavailable to a pragmatist, 
pushed into explaining why there is an invidious distinction between 
experience and language, is to say that that is just the way things 
are, the way reality composes itself.  I think you agree on that point, 
but I'm still unclear on what move you do make.  You make on 
occasion, in different kinds of conversation, the same move Pirsig 
makes in Lila when pressed on this kind of question, that this way of 
thinking is more beautiful, makes so much sense of the world, works 
better.  (That move is made in the conversation in the 
aforementioned post.)  But that move just signals that the 
conversation is over, for what is left to the other conversant who 
disagrees other than, "Hunh--I disagree about what is more beautiful, 
makes more sense, works better"?  What is needed to move on is a 
delineation of specifically what it is that works better, which means 
specifying a problem and the tool that needs to be used but can't be 
by others who don't agree on that special issue.

As it is, I'm not sure I can even follow very far in such progressively 
technical discussions.  I'm not a professional philosopher.  So 
perhaps our differences can be put in the relative sense of beauty 
we find from different objects.  When you want to be stunned into 
sublimity, you go outside to watch a sunset.  When I want to be 
stunned into sublimity, I go to my bookshelf and read Stevens' Opus 
Posthumous.  Spiritual texts are still texts, but I'm not sure why 
we're grading levels of spiritualness, one more pure than another.

Matt