[MD] Rorty and Mysticism

[MarshaV]

Matt,   

Okay maybe ""words are so much less than the experience" 
were not the best choice, but I cannot think of any words that 
would be better.  I'm not a master mediation teacher.  I want to 
say something, but I'm at a loss to find the proper language. It 
seems the story of my life.  Sorry.   


Marsha  


On Nov 18, 2010, at 1:20 PM, Matt Kundert wrote:

> 
> Hi John,
> 
> John said:
> I wonder if you could tell me the cash value of pre-conceptual 
> experience?
> 
> Matt:
> If you've been reading my replies to Dave, you'll see that I don't advise 
> buying a lot of stock in that particular concept, so it is difficult for me 
> to say what the cash value is because it is lower for me than others, 
> which means when I try to explain why others find more value in it, it 
> usually comes out in such invidious-sounding terms as Nietzsche's 
> "metaphysical comfort."  But whatever it is, no, it's not usually faith.
> 
> As I see it, the attempt to recoup "pre-conceptual experience" rests 
> on 1) a philosophy of language that rests on Kant and 2) a love of 
> silence.  The former, I've been led to think by Rorty, Davidson and 
> Robert Brandom, won't work.  It's a bad philosophy of language.  
> The latter, on the other hand, is just a reference to sitting and 
> watching sunsets, enjoying walks in the wilderness, etc.  There's no 
> inherent problem with this at all, though it too has a contentious 
> rhetorical tradition that we are becoming more and more conscious 
> of in, for example, literary studies with current interest in ecology.  
> Ecology has a rhetoric, and an occasionally nasty one that the great 
> American progressive historian Frederick Jackson Turner first, ahem, 
> pioneered in The Frontier in American History.  (And if you wonder 
> why I say "nasty," ask an American Indian what "manifest destiny" is.)
> 
> 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.
> 
> Matt:
> That's kind of right.  What one wants to say, on the other hand, is 
> that you can still _experience_ it (which is oddly against Kant).  If 
> you have no concepts, no language, you can still stub your toe.  The 
> empiricist in people cries out for us to acknowledge the existence of 
> the non-conceptual--stuff that isn't an idea.  We might only be able 
> to do this by pointing with an idea, but how is this any different than 
> the old mystic trope of pointing at the moon.  The big deal, as I see 
> it however, is all in the prefix: how do we choose between "pre-" 
> and "non-"?  I have no problems with "non-", but I struggle to see 
> what benefit we get in distinguishing between "non-" and "pre-", 
> and stressing the importance of "pre-".
> 
> For a kind of dialectical tour around the notion of Dynamic Quality 
> and this issue, one that arose if I remember correctly in dialogue 
> with Marsha (and so might be convenient in response to her catcall), 
> you might check out this post: 
> http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/04/dynamic-quality-as-pre-intellectual.html
> 
> For Marsha encapsulates quite well the purity-response I don't 
> understand and the reality-response I think unavailable to 
> pragmatists and Pirsigians (and I would think self-described relativists, 
> too).  In answer to your question above, she said, "Why don't you find 
> out for yourself?  Being a skeptic, I think that might be the only way 
> you might appreciate its value, especially when words are so much 
> less than the experience and you are prone to needing proof."  The 
> rhetorical question is an echo of Bo Skutvik's much acclaimed and 
> applauded response to Struan Hellier in Lila's Child: go find out more 
> about reality.  It has been applauded over the years because of the 
> sense most have of what DQ is, but I think that response should be 
> unavailable to a properly Pirsigian believer in the relativity of static 
> patterns.  And the sentiment that "words are so much less than the 
> experience" exemplifies the grading we find in purity-responses (in 
> this case, more a plenitude-response).  My reaction now is still the 
> same as in the post on my site: the sense that words "lose 
> something" when describing an experience is a function of the 
> difficulty of articulation, of expressing.  If you have a high level of 
> articulation or a low threshold for success, you might think nothing is 
> lost between your experience and your words about the experience.  
> But that relativity in levels on those two different valences obscures 
> completely our ability to be able to tell if something, _in reality_, is 
> lost or not.  If all we have is experience, and _not_ an invidious 
> distinction between reality and experience, then it's tough to attain 
> the authority to tell someone that they may _think_ they've captured 
> their experience perfectly, but they are _actually_ wrong.  You might 
> convince them otherwise, but that takes words.
> 
> Matt
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