[MD] Rorty and Mysticism

[Steven Peterson]

> Matt said:
> ... The residual difficulty with the rhetoric of radical empiricism 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.
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> dmb says:
> Well, I don't know why you're hanging all this Platonic baggage on radical empiricism. It hopelessly complicates any exchange of ideas on the topic and yet it becomes unclear to you without that baggage. I honestly don't know why you persist in this year after year. I don't understand how you can still read this stuff as any kind of essentialism or representationalism or how you can try to understand Pirsig's mysticism in terms of what the Pope thinks. Honestly, it seems like you don't understand this stuff on purpose. I suppose that has something to do with protecting Rorty but I don't know. You're obviously a smart guy, but when it comes to this particular topic you're just completely incorrigible.



Steve:
I am just as incorrigible or perhaps as dense as Matt is on this
issue. I can't see why the negative quality of a hot stove is any more
pure or direct than the quality of a poem or a verbal insult. And I
don't think that Pirsig means to say so, even though he may too easily
be read that way. What Pirsig wants to say is that Quality comes
first. The static quality that is recognized as rocks, or trees, or
words is derived from that Quality experience. But words don't have
any lower ontological or epistemological status than do sunsets. A
poem isn't any less pure than a sunset. Knowledge of each is both
purely derived from Quality and equally secondary. The experience of
each is pure Quality and equally primary.