From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 27 2003 - 05:43:11 GMT
Sam,
Sam said:
Now that I've read the Kingsley book, I'm a bit more aware that I am
sometimes careless when I use the term 'Platonist'. Perhaps neo-Platonist
would be more accurate, ie that the intellect is the highest value, and that
it depends upon a particular Socratic/definitional/essentialist approach to
be developed; plus which, it is best developed when divorced from emotions.
That probably summarises what I think neo-Platonism and Pirsig have in
common re the intellect.
Matt:
Yeah, I like that. That sounds like a good way to contextualize things.
Sam said:
OK, I see the point, but (as always) we need to remember that not all
mysticisms are the same. In the 'Cloud of Unknowing' all concepts are
abandoned - so, I would argue, the classical Christian mystics don't see
reality(God) as an object. It's all about stopping the mind's grasping (ie
leading the fly out of the fly-bottle, to use Wittgenstein's image).
Matt:
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. For any
particular version of mysticism (or religion or philosophy, for that
matter), they may not fall in with this distinction, but that's a
scholastic issue as opposed to the metaphilosophical point I just made.
Now, as for a "conflation of appearance/reality and mysticism in Pirsig," I
don't want to say that Pirsig conflates them. I would more say that Pirsig
characterizes the mysticisms he's talking about _because_ of the
appearance/reality distinction I see him using. This is a scholastic
question, but I've thought of the easiest way to catch him doing
it. Pirsig describes Dynamic Quality as the "pre-intellectual cutting edge
of reality" and as unmediated experience. The notion of us stripping away
our language and concepts to get at _real_ experience dips into the
appearance/reality distinction. Pirsig says in Ch 9, "The purpose of
mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from experience but to bring
one's self closer to it by eliminating stale, confusing, static,
intellectual attachments of the past." The problem with this statement
from my standpoint is that we are always in connection with experience, we
can never remove ourselves from it. Pirsig's statement makes no sense when
you compare it to his statements that we are everywhere in touch with
Quality. You can't really have it both ways. I read Wittgenstein's
fly-bottle picture as philosophical therapy, as a suggestion that we leave
the headache of Platonic and Kantian problems off to one side. I don't
read him as suggesting that we set our concepts and language aside,
particularly to get at something beyond them.
With the picture of Dynamic Quality as unmediated experience, we can read
another piece of evidence as not just an over-embellishment. In Ch 8
(beginning), Pirsig uses the glasses analogy. He says, "The culture in
which we live hands us a set of intellectual glasses to interpret
experience with...." This is great. However, historicists say that its
intellectual glasses all the way down. Pirsig however says, "If someone
sees things through a somewhat different set of glasses or, God help him,
_takes his glasses off_, [my emphasis] the natural tendency of those who
still have their glasses on is to regard his statements as somewhat weird,
if not actually crazy." It might be easy to try and gloss this as Pirsig
simply going a little too far over the top and that we shouldn't take him
so literally. However, in light of "DQ as unmediated experience" and his
later discussion of insanity, it seems to me clear that Pirsig does think
we can get behind our language, our concepts, our appearances.
The last piece of solid evidence that I've had roiling around in the back
of my head, and I've yet to produce, is Pirsig's concluding slogan in Lila:
"Good is a noun." There are several ways we can interpret this, but when
we make "good" a noun rather than as an adjective, as pragmatists wish to
make it, we make it an object of inquiry. There is a way of reading this
out, but I don't think Pirsig would have opposed "Good as a noun" to "Good
as an adjective" if he didn't want to make "Good" something "out
there." This, to me, is a profound mistake for a pragmatist to make.
These are just preliminary presentations of textual evidence. They don't
have the accompanying interpretive apparatus that I hope to someday
surround them with. However, I hope they open up the case for some of the
things I have been arguing for in the past 6 months.
Matt
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