[MD] Rorty and Mysticism

[david buchanan]

Steve said:
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.


dmb says:
Watching a sunset can be totally static. In fact, the whole idea of being moved by a sunset is a corny cliche. On the other hand, even the oldest routine can be taken in a fresh way. I mean, static and dynamic are not ontological categories so much as phases in the ongoing stream of experience. I suspect that Rorty has everything to do with the way strange baggage always gets attached to my explanations when I talk to you and Matt about this stuff. I can't be sure, but he does seem to spin you both in the same direction. Please remember that Rorty side-steps all the stuff I find most Pirsigian in pragmatism, especially radical empiricism and mysticism. I'm fairly certain that he's not going to help you with this. Quite the contrary. It really does seem to me that the Rortian lens will be very misleading in this area. James and Dewey, on the other hand, are going to be very helpful. 

Here, for example, you seem to be concerned about the privileged status implied by terms like "primary", "pure" and "direct" experience - as oppose to the secondary status of our conceptualizations and abstractions. This sort of talk sets off all kinds of alarms for a Rortian, no? That's when the baggage comes flooding in. That's when the warnings about Platonism and representationalism begin. I'm fairly certain that this is a case of barking up the wrong tree. 

But yes, I think the main idea is that Quality comes first. Even back in ZAMM, the main complaint was that Quality became subservient to intellect at the very beginning of philosophy and the central aim is to reverse that old mistake. The epistemological details of radical empiricism support that move quite neatly and firmly. It's the cherry on top and I sincerely wish you could enjoy it as much as I do. Anyone can see that you're a perfectly smart dude. But there is a conceptual glitch or something, I don't know what. But again, I strongly suspect Rorty's prints are on it.


The distinction is question came up in another thread. Maybe it would help to repeat a small chunk. Inspired by Andre, I said:

This notion of truth is very different from observational science and yet it is profoundly empirical. An idea is true when it successfully guides your experience, when it works in practice. And I think it's also important to see how ideas work WITH the leading edge of experience. As you rightly pointed out, "Phaedrus suggests that 'The leading edge is where absolutely all the action is. The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities of the future. It contains all the history of the past'." (ZMM,p277) The idea used to guide experience will inevitably be derived the the past and aimed at the future. The present moment is where all the action is but this is going to be aimless without the patterns of the past. To describe the nature of experience, James uses images like riding the crest of a wave (cue the surf music) or a line of flame moving across a dry autumnal field. The idea, i think, is that the nature and quality of the present moment is intertwined with where it's been and where its going. And I think this is a good picture of how DQ and sq are constantly working together. Intellectualization is not OPPOSED to pure experience. They are not mutually exclusive. The distinction is simply that. DQ is different from sq for the same reason that the present is different from the past and the future. To use yet another of James's images, the stream of experience is different from the conceptual buckets we take from it.