From: Scott R (jse885@spinn.net)
Date: Mon Mar 24 2003 - 02:45:05 GMT
Matt,
> Mat said:
> I hope you didn't take my week long silence as reason to go digging. I
> doubt you would've found it. It came out of a discussion with Scott R,
and
> I have no idea where it is. I don't think I really developed the thought
> much there, anyway.
Well, let me see if I can start it up again :-)
> The mysticism I'm thinking of is the kind that uses notions
> of "maya". They say that the world around us is an illusion (a "mere"
> appearance) and that reality is something else (depends on what kind of
> mysticism you are talking about). This is the most clear cut version of
an
> appearance/reality distinction.
True enough. What bothers me, though, is that you assume that such a
distinction is, philosophically, a red herring. In doing so, you de facto
assign the status of "reality" to common sense. I gave an argument to show
that if one assumes the canons of common sense (time, space, and the notion
that perception arises from spatio-temporal activity of the nervous system)
one comes up with a contradiction: there can be no perception in that
setting. So I am saying that common sense cannot be real. It seems you
dismiss my argument because it would deny that one can do away with the
appearance/reality distinction. That sounds like dogmatism to me. I would
argue the same with holding to anti-essentialism. You present it as
"searching for essences has never got anyone anywhere", and promoting
nominalism in its stead. But this sidesteps the fact that you need essences
(concepts) to even state a nominalist position. So to claim nominalism you
are in effect postulating a materialist metaphysics, which requires the (in
my view) hopeless task of showing how concepts are fully explainable as
atoms moving in the void.
> This is the kind that Pirsig is talking
> about when he describes the two most forceful attacks the MoQ would
> receive: from logical positivism and mysticism. "Mystics will tell you
> that once you've opened the door to metaphysics you can say good-bye to
any
> genuine understanding of reality. Thought is not a path to reality. It
> sets obstacles in that path because when you try to use thought to
approach
> something that is prior to thought your thinking does not carry you toward
> that something. It carries you _away_ from it." (Lila, Ch. 5)
Pirsig is here making the common mistake (that John B also made) of focusing
on anti-intellectual mysticism (of which there is plenty), and ignoring
mysticism that finds no conflict with the intellect (eg, Nagarjuna,
Shankara, and Franklin Merrell-Wolff).
As
> pragmatists would have it, the mistake of mysticism is to think that
> reality is an object that one needs to move towards.
Showing how misinformed pragmatists are. The whole point of mystical
philosophy is to deny formulations like this ("reality is an object that one
needs to move towards"). Mystics (the ones I pay attention to, at least),
are more likely to say: nirvana is samsara, or, there is nothing to attain.
This is the same
> mistake we charge modernists with when they hypostatize Truth and Goodness
> and make them objects of inquiry, something we need to move towards. In a
> way, Pirsig provides a good answer to the mystics when he says that we are
> always and everywhere in touch with Quality (i.e. reality). We don't need
> to move towards it because it isn't an object "out there," it is
> ubiquitously everything. It is hard not to be in touch with something
that
> is everything. This is why I find Pirsig's "mysticism," his refusal to
> define Quality, so in link with Rorty. Rorty doesn't think we should
> search after an underlying reality, either; we are always and everywhere
in
> touch with it.
Only we are not. See my post to DMB on original sin. We are out of touch,
and that is why, in Buddha's phrase, life is suffering. (I realize that
seems to contradict what I quoted above: "there is nothing to attain". But
this is just to say that SOT, or at least Aristotelian logic, can't handle
the paradox.)
> So I struggle with Pirsig's mysticism because it wants to
> incorporate an appearance/reality distinction while repudiating it by
> saying we are always in touch with Reality.
Some good advice I read once: Don't stop the question. There is no
appearance/reality distinction. There is an appearance/reality distinction.
You (anyone) are wrong if you affirm one and not the other, and if you
affirm or deny both.
- Scott
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