[MD] Sympathy for the Devil

[david buchanan]

Marsha quoted from dmb's thesis:
"I conclude by making a case that James and Pirsig are offering an empirically based form of philosophical mysticism that is comparable to a non-theistic religion like Buddhism."

Ant said to Marsha:

Above all, it's clarity of thought that I'm after here so you'll need to put that quote from David Buchanan in context.  (Though, as it stands, it still sounds to me like the static perspective of the everyday world as provided in LILA).  ...I have sympathy both with the Dynamic viewpoint you tend to take in the conversations here and the static viewpoint that David takes.  ..Seriously, as you implied in your last response to me in the "self" thread yesterday, both perspectives are useful in the right context.  I just have a feeling (..) that the static viewpoint is the default one in LILA and so should be the default one here.  It's MOQ Discuss; not Mystic Discuss.  If you want to use the Dynamic viewpoint, the Tetralemma (..) or whatever esoteric perpective that Scott Roberts was going on about years ago (..), these viewpoints should be qualified before use.  It help keeps that little intellect of mine clear about what's going on...
...So, what I'm trying to do here (rather badly it seems) is to clarify these two perspectives.   From what I was reading in this thread - and elsewhere - David Buchanan takes the conventional static perspective of the MOQ (as laid out in LILA) while Marsha tends to take a Dynamic "World of Buddhas" perspective.  As I said above, by not qualifying the latter perspective, it confuses things and results in people talking over each other; sometimes even being a little rude and frustrated.


dmb says:
That's very diplomatic of you, Ant, and wildly unfair. As I see it (as should be clear from the quote from my thesis), the MOQ is a form of philosophical mysticism and, of course, this includes the BOTH the static and the Dynamic. My objection to Marsha's perspective is NOT an objection to Mysticism or the Buddhist perspective. It's about the use of contradictory terms  (ever-changing static patterns) and the incoherence of her claims. But she's not just a very bad writer. She's also still clinging to the Bodvarian SOM=intellect thing and otherwise quite confused.

In a nutshell, her confusion is a result of misapplication. And her definition of the self is a prime example of this. Instead of using the mystic's criticism of essentialism and realism to explain the MOQ's self or to support the MOQ claims about the self, she misapplies this criticism by using it against the MOQ itself. She uses it to denigrate and undermine static quality in general and intellectual static patterns in particular. She has no interest in the MOQ's pragmatic truth, for example. 

More specifically, please notice the effect that her contradictory definition has. Pirsig has already rejected the independent self and described the self instead as a "migrating forest" of static patterns, one that can respond to DQ and those complex migrating static values are engaged in an evolutionary battle. For Marsha, it's not enough that the static self is responsive to DQ, is migrating and evolving. She has to take the stability out entirely by describing static patterns as "ever-changing". At best, this is a sloppy way to talk. If this contradictory language is supposed to be the expression of some mystical paradox (Marsha claims it's not), then she say so and she certainly shouldn't call it a definition.

As I understand it, the primary empirical reality (DQ) is ever-changing. We hear this ever-changing quality in James's phrases; the stream of experience and the flux of experience. Static patterns, one the other hand, can't be ever-changing. The definitions of words change and evolve, sure, but without stability of meaning you can't have language at all. Nobody could know what anyone else was saying. It would just be random noises. Same with concepts and truths, the rituals of life and your own heartbeat. Static quality is not the enemy of life or freedom or even mysticism.

Sigh.

According to Marsha's brand of mysticism, thinking and talking clearly is not only unimportant, it's something to be ashamed of.