From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Tue Apr 01 2003 - 03:53:56 BST
Matt, Sam, Rick, and all:
Matt said:
Granted that not all mysticisms are the same. The main point I want to
make about mysticism is that if it has a concept of "maya," a notion that
if we move past the illusion of our senses or concepts or language or
whatever, that we will then see Reality as it truly wants to be seen, then
I would interpret it as having an appearance/reality distinction.
DMB replied to Matt:
You're hunting in the wrong ocean, Ahab. Your great white whale, the
appearence/reality distinction, swims in the sea of epistemology.
Metaphilosophically or otherwise, mysticism is not the same as epistemology.
Pirsig is only making a distinction about two kinds of experience, mediated
and unmediated, static and Dynamic.
Sam responded to the chat:
I think it indubitable that mysticism is not the same as epistemology, but I
don't think it makes the point that DMB wants it to make. Mysticism is
different from all philosophical disciplines, surely? The issue is what is
claimed on behalf of mystical insights, and those claims can have
epistemological status.
DMB says:
Mysticism is not epistemology. Right. This is my central objection to Matt's
argument. Its not so much that mysticism has no impact on our claims about
knowledge, its just that the appearence/reality distinction is specifically
a creature of philosophy and not of spirituality. From Plato to Kant and
beyond Philosophers have wondered if reality is really as we see it.
Especially starting in Modern times, there were lots of questions about the
way our sensory organs and brains shape our perceptions of world. Even more
recently, we've turned to neuroscience and psychology for answers.
Postmodernism offers the insight that our understandings are culturally
determined, and Pirsig goes along with that to a large extent. The point
here is that the appearence reality disitinction has a long history and
mysticism doesn't figure in it. Its always been about the problem of
mediation, a static patterns problem.
Besides, the bigger issue at stake in my main objection, that epistemology
is not mysticism, is that Pirsig spells out his epistemological position and
there we find no such distinction. Its almost as if Matt were disappointed
to find he could not pin it on Pirsig, and so went looking for it in
inappropriate contexts, such as discussion of mysticism or cultural filters.
I think that's like looking for dinner at the hardware store.
SAM said:
However, that perspective of Pirsig's does not necessitate an equation of DQ
with Reality. I think that DMB is equating DQ and Reality, whilst Matt is
denying it (I'm not sure where Scott stands).
DMB says:
I think it the other way around. Matt wants DQ to be Reality in order to
interpret the MOQ as having an a/r distinction, while I'm saying it is just
a different order of experience.
Matt had said:
This is why I think Pirsig is totally ambivalent on the subject. The
concept of "mediated experience" doesn't make any sense to me except to say
that something is getting in the way of experience. Something is
distorting it, like, say, green glasses. If we can shed the distortion,
the green glasses, we will have unmediated experience, something
undistorted, something pure.
DMB says:
Mediated. It just means that experience comes through your sense organs.
This are the biological static patterns through which the world comes. You
cultural values and beliefs filter experience too. These are the social
level patterns, and if you're lucky experience will be mediated through
intellectual static patterns too. This is not "in the way" of experience, of
our normal everyday waking consciousness, it IS our experience. At the risk
of sounding like an imperious scold master, this is an indispensible idea in
the MOQ. One can hardly understand the first analytic cut, the
static/Dynamic split, without it. As for UNmediated experience,...
SAM said:
I think that it is important that Pirsig leaves DQ indefinable. Another way
of putting that is to say that it cannot be talked about. As soon as we
start to talk about something, it is no longer dynamic.
DMB says:
Right. Its unspeakable and unimaginable because speech and imagination are
built of static patterns. One can try. The people who have had and report
these kinds of experiences can try to describe it, but can never really
convey the impact.
SAM SAID: Let us take the difference between
Copernican and Ptolemaic astronomy as the paradigm example. When the
conceptual leap from the earlier to the later conceptions was made, there
was an increase in quality of worldview.
The question is - how best to characterise this shift? Can we do it without
making reference to a concept of reality (or Reality) at all? What is the
status of the 'new' - that is, how are we to describe it epistemologically.
DMB says:
I'll go along with Matt. This ain't epistemology either. Its not only a
Kuhnian paradigm shift, its THEE classic paradigm shift. Perhaps its
interesting to not that a shift from of set of static patterns to another,
from one cosmology to another, is quite momentus and changes the world.
Wonder what that says about a shift from one set of static patterns to DQ.
Seems like a further way to go, if you ask me.
Thanks for your time.
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