[MD] static/pure

[david buchanan]

Ant McWatt said:

Is there such thing as "pure experience"?   That reminds me of Matt "politics is scary" Kundert who used to go round and round in circles with you about about this subject at MOQ Discuss, seven or eight years ago.  It kind of got boring after a few posts but I think Matt was correct in bringing this issue up.


dmb says:
Yea, I think Matt faithfully repeated arguments that are also made in the philosophy Journals. A guy named Katz, for example, denies the possibility of mystical experience on the same sort of grounds that Rorty denies the possibility of truth theories in general. In both cases, however, they are denying a claim that Pirsig and James never make. In both cases, they are denying that we can have direct access to ultimate reality, to the "real" reality behind appearances. In other words, they both conceptualize the issue in terms of the basic dualism that Pirsig and James reject. In doing so, they are denying a claim that is very different than the claims that Pirsig and James actually do make. I don't think Matt or Steve could ever see how to understand "pure experience" except in terms of an appear-reality dualism or a subject-object dualism and so they both ended up dismissing Pirsig's central term and pretty much ignored the mystical dimension of the MOQ. Little sample of that long debate....

>From the Relativism thread, May 21, 2010:

dmb said to Steve:
"...Trust me here, Steve. Rorty's arguments against the possibility of getting outside language have absolutely nothing to do with the claims of mystics. That's what we're talking about here, NOT the claims of Positivists. It's very, very important to NOT confuse mystics and positivists. ...The fundamental reality he's talking about is DQ or pure experience. This is NOT a claim to have direct access to the world as it actually is because, again, that just an idea that's derived from experience, a conceptual interpretation of experience. The primary empirical reality is just experience itself, not experience OF things-in-themselves."




Ant McWatt said:
Anyway, I have to say the highest quality idea is that, yes, pure experience, must exist as very few people have any memories before the age of one.  The reason is, I guess, is that intellectual static latching just isn't happening in the first few months of life; it's all biological and social latching going on.  So Dave when you later quote Pirsig (from LILA) quoting James: "Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what...." We can see that James was well ahead of the game!



dmb says:
Pirsig is more explicit about pure experience as it might be had by adults. Babies and mystics are different, of course, and we don't want to mistake the mystical experience for an act of mere regression, but they both know pure experience in some sense. Things like meditation, Peyote, and all kinds of spontaneous and surprizing triggers can be involved but the basic idea is just to stop thinking, stop with the conceptual chopping, at least relatively speaking. 


"Thou art that, which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To fully realize this lack of division is to become enlightened." -- Robert Pirsig

"To know immediately, then, or intuitively, is for mental content and object to be identical." -- William James

"Taking it all in all, Zen is emphatically a matter of personal experience; if anything can be called radically empirical, it is Zen. No amount of reading, no amount of teaching, no amount of contemplation will ever make one a Zen master. Life itself must be grasped in the midst of its flow.." -- D.T Suzuki


"Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics... They share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of dividedness can be overcome by meditation. The Native American Church argues that peyote can force-feed a mystic understanding upon those who were normally resistant to it,..." (LILA, ch 5)