[MD] Dog Dishes and Direct Experience

[118]

Hi Matt,
Thank you for your response.  Perhaps Faith is an overused word.
Maybe a better word to work from would be "assumption", as you
present.  I could claim that any assumption is based on faith but then
we are back to where we started.  Before we can form knowledge, we
work off of certain assumptions.  When these assumptions come into
question, the knowledge changes.  If we do not question the
assumptions, then the knowledge stands and grows in a directed way.
This is of course necessary for us to be able to interact on common
ground.  When a schism appears as perhaps did to Pirsig, it is often
necessary to start at a place farther back; reboot to an earlier
operating system, as it were.  The book "A Crack in the Cosmic Egg"
comes to mind since it influenced me about the same time as ZAMM.

Often this reevaluation happens in middle life, and Carl Jung deals
with this quite a bit.  Of course many philosophers deal with this
including Kierkegaard and Nietzche to name a couple.  In many ways
this can be regarded as a questioning of faith (or assumptions).
Faith is not mindless, it is supported through logic in a circular
way.  That is, assumptions lead to logic which then turns around to
support the assumptions.  Sorry to confabulate faith and assumptions
again (I am incorrigible).

Religion is another "Pangeneral" word (I may have made that word up,
but you know what I mean, maybe it will catch on).  I assume you are
referring to the dogmatic beliefs that people hold in order to give
their lives meaning as exemplified by the Great World Religions that
Huston Smith speaks of.  Let us not forget, however, that the age of
Enlightenment had its basis in such religions, and can not be strictly
separated from them.  What were once monasteries are now universities.
 One can consider this simply a change in label.  We feel comfortable
in our current paradigm in the same way that man has over the ages,
and there is no real fundamental distinction of the Ground on which
that is based.

But let's stick with the Enlightenment being different from the older
religions, I am fine with that.  My concern with modern psychology is
with the box it attempts to place us in.  The restrictions imposed by
psycho-thought are slightly demeaning to the human condition.  It
claims to provide a view in to our nature, but in truth it creates
that nature in the same way any knowledge does.  I can certainly use
psychology to help explain a point I am making, but I do not see it as
fruitful to confine myself by current trends in psychology.  I also do
not see it necessary to confine MoQ within psycho-generalisations.
MoQ does not arise from psychological tendencies, it is the other way
around.  Psychology can be defined in MoQ terms like branches are
defined by the tree.

One can read both Lila and ZAMM within religious contexts.  Zen or
Taoism can be considered as religion, although this blurs the line
between philosophy and religion.  Mysticism can also be considered a
"religious inroad" to awareness, but I do not think this is correct
either.  Mystics come from many religions and philosophies or from
neither of these.  In my opinion, a mystical moment is a complete
break down in the logical fiber we find ourselves in.  Since such
logic is restrictive, the emotional feeling is one of liberation.
Often this can lead to a complete dissociation from the regular
reality that we are so comfortable in.  This may indeed be what Pirsig
experienced.  Without a firm ground on which to "correctly" reason, he
may have had to resort to a different paradigm.  Explaining his
paradigm within the accepted trends of modern metaphysics is indeed
difficult as we can see with Lila.  More questions can arise than
answers.  A certain leap is required to say "OK, I will accept all of
this is true and not try to relate it to what I currently "know" and
see where it takes me".  This may be a James' approach.

A useful conversation is of course how does MoQ relate to Mysticism
whether it be Christian, Sufi, Kabalistic, Buddhism, Hermeticsm,
Alchemy, Vedic, Existential, Sophist, Babylonian, Scientific (I often
enter into a trance when trying to figure out a problem), or whatever.
 There are plenty of good books which develop a ground for mysticism
which I am always adding to my library, but the "personal experience"
is always difficult to encode.  Zen Buddhism speaks of direct
experience which is akin to the way DQ is considered.  (Of course
everything is direct experience since it cannot be otherwise.  Even
imagination and conceptualization are a form of direct experience
since we are constructing them directly as they happens (in real time
if you will).  This of course begs the question as to whether "we"
experience the workings of our brain, another tangent for another day
since that brings into question "what we are".)  So, if we say that
the mystical moment is akin to being DQ, we can perhaps relate the
two.  A divination of criteria for both which can then be related is
necessary.  A simple list would do.

I am not sure if Pirsig uses Mysticism as a foil for Western logic.
If this is so, mysticism is what logic is not.  Of course this may not
help in a logical discussion except to say that it exists "out there".

Still going to read your essay today.

Cheers,
Mark
On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 9:02 AM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Mark,
>
> Mark said:
> Where does Faith end?  I am fine with categorizing it, but we do seem
> to draw a distinct line between a religious faith and a scientific belief.
> I do not find such a line easy to draw.
>
> Matt:
> We do draw the line, and I don't want to say that the line is easy.  I
> find it harder than a lot of my fellow non-theists.  I've been too
> impressed by James' "The Will to Believe" to think that while the
> political scorecard is easy to keep, the conceptual one is harder.  (By
> that I mean that the Enlightenment was right, religion has got to go
> from the political scene, and that this just becomes more and more
> obvious as the years wile by.  However, religion leaving the broader
> cultural scene is a different question and requires a closer look at the
> conceptual apparatus in question.)
>
> I wasn't placating when I said "it might be important": it might be
> quite important to begin the investigation into what faith is by seeing
> the analogies between faith and assumption.  And we should know by
> now that assumptions are necessary to thinking.  But saying faith is
> necessary to thinking seems weird to me, and the weirdness stems
> from the fact that I think it causes us to lose our grip on the distinction
> between religion and science.  To lose that grip is important for some,
> those "some" including most importantly my political enemies, if you
> will, who want to stuff religion back into the public forum of political
> deliberation.  (Philip E. Johnson calls this the "wedge strategy" in his
> polemic against Darwin, or I should say, "biology.")  So I take
> "assumption" to be the genus and "faith" a species.  And I also put at
> a much lower priority the problems of those who are concerned
> about science-fanatics (of which, I take it, you've been articulating a
> concern for, lately in your polemic against psychology).  I consider
> religious fanatics much, much more dangerous to civilization than
> any "cult of science" or " of experts" or whatever label people who,
> like Pirsig and Heidegger, want to question the cultural pedestal
> European culture has seemed to put the natural sciences.  I'd rather
> accidentally aid and abet the science fanatics than the religious,
> though I'd rather do neither.
>
> I think an investigation of this kind is terribly important for Pirsigians
> in getting a handle on Pirsig's relationship to religion.  Some of the
> discursus on Pirsig's beliefs in this area borders on a virulent
> anti-theism, what Dewey called "militant atheism," that blurs the
> distinction between the political and cultural question.  But I think
> keeping those questions bright and clear might be the only way to
> properly appreciate Pirsig's relationship to mysticism.
>
> Matt
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