From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Sun Feb 06 2005 - 18:14:49 GMT
Matt,
(Part two of two)
Matt said:
Well, maybe I should've been more careful. It isn't really your reason, but
my reason. I'm not sure what your reason was (outside of space
constraints), but the reason I was alluding to was my claim that a
pragmatist answer erodes the stability of the question. As I hoped to show
after that selection, because of the pragmatist answer, the original
question ("Is Quality what experience really is?") is destroyed, or at least
relieved of any force or relevance.
Scott:
Yes. Somehow, metaphysics (assuming one still wants to do metaphysics, as I
do) has to learn to stop thinking of itself as answering "what is X" type
questions, and replace them with "what is a more useful vocabulary for
dealing with 'things in general'". And for that one must acknowledge one's
purpose in doing metaphysics.
Matt said:
Yeah, the meta-/philosophy distinction is trouble sometimes. There is no
general clear, definite line between the one and the other, but sometimes it
can help to deploy it. So when you ask if I consider metaphilosophy to be
included in philosophy, I would certainly answer yes. Part of philosophy is
clarifying what you are doing when you do philosophy (as one of the first
"Problems of Philosophy" they teach you about in Phil 101 is "What is
Philosophy?"). Stanley Cavell, a philosopher I admire, wrote in the late
60's, during the time of "metaphilosophy's" hey-day as a term, that he
didn't see the point in the distinction. The way Rorty uses it, though, I
think retains some usefulness in keeping track of the conversation you are
having. (The essay that the Rorty quote comes from is from one of his first
essays, "Recent Metaphilosophy," in 1961. Most of Rorty's early essays were
about "metaphilosophy" or had metaphilosophical reflection in them. I think
it shows a lot of what his motivations were in philosophy reading them.)
...
So, as for what I take "metaphilosophy" to be, I think it's where we decide
what it means to be "philosophical." Metaphilosophy is about communicating
between philosophers of very different stripes. You start talking about the
assumptions with which you are using to do philosophy and then have a
conversation about those assumptions and whether they are any good. This
process can keep leading you further and further back, as the only way to
have a conversation is to have a working set of assumptions you aren't
currently questioning, but it is the process of communication that is key.
Just keep the conversation going.
Scott:
I go along with this, but in the way I have been going it is looking more
and more the case that there is no philosophy beyond the metaphilosophical.
By this I mean that I see philosophy as a way of life, as the ancients did
(as explained in "What is Ancient Philosophy" by I forget who), but that in
this postmodern era, that way of life is going to center on one's motives
for doing philosophy, and what one thinks one is doing in doing philosophy.
Scott said:
In particular, do you see the rejection of metaphysics as a
metaphilosophical move or a philosophical move?
Matt said:
I'm not really sure, but I think it makes the most sense as a
metaphilosophical move. If we take metaphilosophy to be answering the
question of "What counts as philosophy?", the pragmatist is saying that
Plato wrapped the bad appearance/reality distinction into the very core of
what it meant to be philosophical-getting past appearances to reality. The
pragmatist wants to rescind that move, unwrap philosophy from that
distinction.
Scott:
Whereas I would say that the pragmatist who has a secular outlook can do
away with A/R distinctions entirely, but a pragmatist with a religious
outlook (if such a thing is possible) is going to try to reformulate it, not
do away with it.
Scott said:
For me, "experience" is pretty much another word for "consciousness",...
Matt said:
I'm not sure what to do about the notion of "consciousness." As far as I
can see the notion of "consciousness" is wrapped up in notions of a
Cartesian "mind." And once you start trailing down that way, all sorts of
bullcrap arises (from my perspective, at least ;-). And this is where you
confuse me. I see "consciousness" as wrapped up with "mind" and so pretty
much floating in league with Cartesian dualisms and problems, but to say
that "experience is semiotic" is to put yourself in league with one of
Rorty's heroes, Wilfrid Sellars: "all awareness is a linguistic affair." To
say that philosophy is "mostly a matter of working on linguistic
formulations" is perfectly in line post-linguistic turn, but I'm not sure
how working on our linguistic formulations could say anything about your
working hypothesis, that experience is semiotic, how it could "flesh it
out."
Scott:
My different take is that the bullcrap arises because of the Cartesian
separation of nature from mind. So as I see it, the Dennett's of the world
accepted that separation, saw the problems that creates with respect to mind
(and therefore consciousness), and decided to do away with mind. Berkeley
took the opposite tack. My response is to go back to the thought before the
separation took place and reformulate it in a modern vocabulary. (Barfield
is my major mentor in this).
I should have added that I, like Pirsig, totalize experience/consciousness,
so I am saying very baldly that nature is a semiotic affair -- a play of
signs complete with interpretants -- with or without human beings. So by
"fleshing out" I mean giving the rationale for making this bald claim, which
involves both why I make this claim in the first place, and what the
consequences are, that is, what needs to be rethought and redescribed in
order to turn it into common sense.
It occurs to me that I have just contradicted myself in that above I said
that one doesn't get past the metaphilosophy, and here I am in the thick of
metaphysics. Well, I'll have to think about that some more.
Matt said:
To see what I mean, I would take the difference between science and
philosophy. I would take an adequate description of doing science as taking
a hypothesis, constructing relevant experiments, and then gaining evidence
to prove your hypothesis. This I can see as "fleshing out." But evidence
is exactly what we can't have for philosophy (if I understand the line you
were taking before, that I was commenting on). If philosophy is about our
linguistic formulations, philosophy is all about ironing out the problems of
our linguistic formulations, what you call "pseudo-problems." I not sure
that it is at all clear what relevant evidence would look like for a
philosophy. If philosophy is the game of changing the rules, than relevance
would be up for grabs much of the time between philosophers. Evidence is
something all parties can agree on, something that occurs in Kuhn's "normal
science." However, I think philosophy is largely a matter of shifting
patterns of discourse, which makes philosophy more like "paradigm shifts"
and in paradigm shifts the term "evidence" is out of place because nobody
can agree. In the broad metaphilosophical conversation where most of the
rules are up for grabs, I think focusing on our linguistic formulations is
exactly what is called for and the skill there is to smooth out problems as
they arise.
Scott:
Yes, there is no empirical evidence to use in my fleshing out, although one
can argue that it gives a more satisfactory interpretation of empirical
evidence (I am thinking of quantum mechanics and evolution).
Scott said:
But I do see the need for two distinctions that have been called A/R
distinctions. One is in quantum physics, where one needs to be able to refer
to the unmeasured. The whole philosophical problem with QM is that we cannot
fit what is going on subatomically into the categories of sense phenomena.
Matt:
I'm not sure why we need an appearance/reality distinction to grasp quantum
physics. Why not just have a measured/unmeasured distinction? Part of why
I'm not sure is because I've never been able to understand what "the whole
philosophical problem with QM" is. I would think any problem with fitting
"what is going on subatomically into the categories of sense phenomena"
would go away once we stop basing knowledge on the metaphor of sight (and
sense generally).
Scott:
Ok, we'll call it a measured/unmeasured distinction. Regardless, "the whole
philosophical problem with QM" is that it leaves a loophole for crackpots
(like, possibly, me) to drive truckloads of crackpottery through. Hence you
will find many books saying that QM justifies mysticism, or whatever, and
many other books explaining why it doesn't.
Scott said:
The other distinction needed is in the philosophy of mysticism. Somehow one
needs to refer to the difference between "what it is like to be the Buddha"
and "what it is like to be me". To make this distinction, I would give up on
both appearance and reality, and I don't think that "illusion" works very
well either. Merrell-Wolff uses "absolute consciousness" versus "relative
consciousness", and I think one can go places with that, though not without
the logic of contradictory identity, in which the absolute is not other than
the relative, and the relative is not other than the absolute. Otherwise,
one ends up reifying the absolute, and one has an A/R distinction again, or
dualism.
Matt said:
Well, I definitely see the historical roots of the appearance/reality
distinction in mysticism, but I'm not at all sure that we need a kind of
mysticism that banks on it. I think we can rehabilitate the notion of
"mysticism" sans appearance/reality distinction, or at least give sense to
it. For instance, your very nice distinction between "what it is like to be
the Buddha" and "what it is like to be me." It definitely seems as though
we need that distinction for mysticism and its notions of enlightenment to
work. But the way you phrase it, "What it is like to be the Buddha,"
reminds me of an old, very influential paper by Thomas Nagel, "What is it
like to be a bat?" In Nagel's view, there is something which it is like to
be a bat that goes beyond behavior. In the pragmatist view, we have no idea
what this something could be besides behavior. I think this is part of
Sam's reconstruction of mysticism sans experience and based in a tradition.
A tradition would have ways of verifying a mystic, though I'm not sure what
these would be besides behavioral ways. And this leads to the difficult
problem (that I'm currently constructing) which we might call, "How do we
know she's saying shibboleth?" How do we know she's the real deal?
Scott:
Yes, I was thinking of Nagel, though I haven't read the paper, just Rorty's
reactions. As I said in the other post, I think Rorty is arguing as a
materialist and not a pragmatist when he says one should just stop having
such intuitions. The reason why I reject this, and this is also the reason
that led me ultimately to my metaphysical views, is that I had such
intuitions, and that is all they were, for a long time, and then one day the
"vague intuition" was replaced by something definite. What it is about pain
beyond nerve firings is eternity, that is, non-spatio-temporality. Any
conscious phenomena spans a segment of space and/or time, and hence cannot
be itself spatio-temporal (see my last post to Platt for a little more
"fleshing out").
On your last two questions, see below.
Matt said:
And to confess, I've never understood what the "logic of contradictory
identity" is or does.
Scott:
It is what Buddhists call a "skillful means", a way of thinking that acts to
deconstruct one's tendency to see things as inherently self-existent.
Several writers have noted the similarity between Derridean *differance* and
the use of Buddhist logic to decenter one's thinking -- I recommend Robert
Magliola's "Derrida on the Mend". The phrase "logic of contradictory
identity" is Nishida's, continuing in this tradition. What it does is "empty
out emptiness", that is, prevents "emptiness" (or DQ) from becoming a
center, and so prevents idolization.
Scott said:
I say "mystical experience" a lot because I don't want to get sidetracked
with qualifying it. I would like to have an X-out key to express that it
should be "under erasure". But, then, how does one refer to a time period in
someone's life about which they say "it was timeless", or in some way
indicate that it was completely out of the ordinary?
Matt said:
I'm not sure if this last part was just a toss off, or if it had anything to
do with the stuff before, but I think it does in a way. Just as, following
Sam, I think mystics gain intelligibility only within a tradition, saying a
time period was "timeless" doesn't raise any philosophical problems (as some
have claimed in the past) because it is embedded in a language game where
the rules of that particular language game tell you how to interpret the
meaning of the phrase. I think the same thing with mysticism and religion
and philosophy and everything else. They are all embedded in a context, or
a language, or a linguistic formulation, or social practices, or traditions,
or forms of life, or whatever else they've been called. I think your toss
off musing about the clash of "timelessness" with a specific (timely) event
is a good way into the view which Sam and I are promulgating.
Scott:
Well, it wasn't a toss-off, just saying that I don't like the phrase
"mystical experience", but have felt compelled to use it. But your last
sentence provides an obvious alternative: "mystical event". I wasn't
actually concerned with the timelessness of a timely event, just that that
is an example of the extra-ordinariness of mystical events. (For the problem
of time and timelessness, one needs the logic of contradictory identity.)
I think that my position is somewhere between DMB's and Sam's. I think that
Sam is right that until recently mysticism gains intelligibility only within
a tradition, but that now things are, or are becoming different. In the
first place, one can make cross-tradition comparisons and find
commonalities. In the second place, since we now live in a pluralist
society, it is possible that something like "generic mysticism" could become
a reality. In fact, I have sometimes dreamed of creating a new monasticism
completely independent of all religious traditions (though adequately
stocked with libraries from those traditions), one which is based on
questioning language games as a "skillful means". So is that just another
language game or an aufhebung? I don't know. I like to think of it as a
language game of permanent self-critique ("self" being the language game,
but which in turn critiques the self of the language-user).
As to validating in the absence of a tradition, I would say one is left with
reason to do the validating. It is fallible, but then so is tradition, as in
the notorious case of Eckhart. (For more fallibility within a tradition, I
recommend Janwillem van de Wettering's *AfterZen*. It is amusing, as well as
informative of what Zen life is like on the ground, and not idealized as so
many Westerners treat it.)
- Scott
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