Greetings,
It always strikes me as odd that despite the insights of the MoQ, in this case with regards to
things not being either/or, subject/object, A/not A, etc, people still seem to require discrete
definitions of terms such as 'mysticism.'
More useful is the Wittgensteinian notion of 'family resemblances' which can be applied with great
effect to most such terms. With this in mind we can say that all mysticism may be characterised by
the following;
1) A belief in insight or intuition as against analytic knowledge. (In this way 'a priori'
understanding has not even entered the equation at the point mysticism bites)
2) A conception of a reality behind the world of appearance and utterly different from it.
3) A belief in unity (cf, Heraclitus, 'the way up and the way down is one and the same,' or, 'We
step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and we are not.')
4)A denial of the reality of time (A consequence of the denial of division)
5) A denial of the reality of evil.
Of course some manifestations may contain fewer than all five characteristics analogous to myself
being recognisable as my father's son, despite my not having his nose.
On a final (but important) note, I would suggest that setting up mysticism and materialism as
irreconcilable opposites is to misunderstand both. Any coherent materialism does not claim that all
phenomena are entirely physical - for if it did even absolute idealism could claim to be a
materialism - instead it must claim that there are non-mental and non-experiential phenomena as well
as mental or experiential phenomena and that in a materialist position each mental or experiential
phenomena MUST ALSO have a non-mental or non-experiential phenomena as part of its make up. Coherent
idealism holds the reverse to be true. Materialism thus holds that every event has a non-mental,
non-experiential aspect, WHETHER OR NOT it also has mental or experiential being.
It seems clear that if one holds a coherent view of materialism then mysticism can easily be
accounted for within its structure and it seems equally clear that any attempt to formulate an MoQ
without both aspects would be an utter disaster and the antithesis of what many would see Pirsig as
trying to achieve. The whole point is to show that these things are compatible if one views them in
the 'right' way. Indeed, to put it more strongly, both are essential to a proper understanding of
the world from whichever starting point one takes. Superstring theory is one excellent example of
the mystical side of materialism in that it is characterised by 2), 3) and 4) (and more often than
not 5)) as listed above. It is also understandable in purely materialistic terms.
In MoQ terms there is therefore no difficulty in seeing mysticism as a subset of materialism which
is itself, in turn, a subset of the MoQ.
Struan
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