[MD] Rorty and Mysticism

[MarshaV]

Hi Matt,

I'm not trying to be cagey, but it is more that a language 
experience.  The truest analogy I know is the one about looking 
at the picture that contains the image of an old woman and a 
rabbit exclusively.  You start by seeing one, but not the other,
and it can be some time before you shift your awareness from 
one to allow the other to reveal itself.  There's that moment of 
ah-ha... That moment is not linguistic, it's not visual, it is 
realization.  The difference I had  was not between old woman 
and rabbit, but one of one reality-perspective to another 
reality-perspective.  Or I might say in my case, a jump from 
subject-object perspective to a NOT subject-object perspective - ah-ha...   
It was only for a while, minutes, I think.   

So I've described it, I've used an analogy that I hope is familiar, 
but it doesn't even come close to describing the burst of insight.   
  
 
Did I make sense about the actual realization not being 
linguistic?   


Marsha  
 



On Nov 19, 2010, at 1:27 PM, Matt Kundert wrote:

> 
> 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
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