[MD] Rorty and Mysticism

[Matt Kundert]

Marsha,

Marsha said:
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.

Matt:
I don't know why you're apologizing (even if it's ironic).  As I see it, 
the idea of "best choice" for words is Platonism anyways.  Being "at 
a loss" conveys what I want to say about difficulty being the primary 
(only?) issue at play in the relationship between experience and 
language, but the fact that you also feel that no other words 
"would be better" effectively expresses that whatever purity-response 
I detect in "words are so much less" is something you are moved by, 
unless you can articulate the source of your difficulty differently, the 
source of why you like those words and not others.  The difficulty is 
always personal, because while conversation helps bring out what 
we think is difficult, the feeling of whether or not we've articulated 
ourselves is always our own feeling, and that feeling is ultimately 
the only guide (which is an expression of the relativism we hold in 
common).

The first thing I told my composition classes was that the effort to 
improve one's own level of articulation is a never-ending task.  The 
idea that language cannot "get at" experience at all ultimately breeds 
the idea that "well, why should I even try if I will never, ultimately, 
be successful?"  It leads to a form of cop-out endemic in American 
public life where we stop with our conviction and won't hear of any 
other alternatives--after all, if words are less, then why try and use 
them to bridge to other people's experience?  I think the feeling you 
have to _want_ to express yourself, to converse with others, is at 
odds with your feeling that "words are so much less than the 
experience" is what you want to say to express the idea you feel 
about experience and language.  I don't think you're wrong that you 
have the desire (only we are the judges of the existence of our own 
desires, and I say that fully in the face of Freud), so I'm not trying to 
express the kind of philosophical arrogance of "I know better than 
you about yourself," but I am trying to suggest that the desires you 
seem to be articulating are in conflict with each other (a conflict that 
_everyone_ here would seem to have given an agreement on the 
language-as-pirate issue).  Because once we eject the idea that the 
"best choice" of words for expression was even an option, an option 
used to say that it's ultimately impossible in the case of "words are 
less," then all we are left with is the same practical problem we've 
always had: finding words to express ourselves.  It was always an 
unending task, but why describe the task as unending _because_ it 
will ultimately always prove unsuccessful?  I think we are quite often 
successful (though just as often unsuccessful).

Matt