From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 20 2003 - 18:49:28 BST
DMB said:
By denying the distinction, you deny the very existence of the object of discussion. You, sir, have begged the question. And worse than that, we are suppose to pretend a word, a phrase, a concept isn't real so that you win the debate before it can begin.
Matt:
By denying the distinction I do not deny the existence of the "object" of discussion because I rehabilitate the "object" of discussion. Saying that deny DQ's existence is like saying that Pirsig deny's matter's existence. He doesn't, he just rehabilitates it.
But, I do beg the question in interpreting DQ. I'm glad you're getting the hang of this. However, in no sense do I win a debate before it can begin. The purpose of pointing out to someone that they are begging the question (of which we both do to each other) is that if a debate were to ensue, they would inevitably win because the terms of debate lead to their conclusion. To say, then, "You, sir, have begged the question" is to say that we can't have a debate at the level that was originally intended.
DMB said:
Didn't I JUST tell you that an unmediated experience is a mystical experience? Didn't I? And now here you are two seconds later pretending like it was never mentioned.
Matt:
Nah, no pretending. You did tell me that unmediated experience is a mystical experience. And that formulation doesn't allow me to say what I want to say about mysticism. It begs the question. So I rehabilitated it. Remember what I said about people who disagree violently about their assumptions? All they can do is explicate.
DMB said:
In any case, "a compliment we pay after the fact" isn't even in the same ballpark with DQ. There is no freakin' way. The mystical reality, the void, eternity, the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum, the primary reality, the pre-intellectual reality, the father of all, the womb of creation, the ground of being. It can be called many things. But "compliment" ain't one of them.
Matt:
Sure it is. But let's get a couple more set ups from you.
DMB said:
we are suppose to pretend a word, a phrase, a concept isn't real
and
You just assert that it has to do with the distance between words and experience. Don't let the ineffability of the mystical experience lead you astray. This is not a linguistic problem. We're talking about a religous experience, about a shift in consciousness, not coining new terms.
Matt:
Here's what my rehabilitation of DQ and mysticism has to do with: ineffability. The question I ask about unmediated experience as mystical experience is what the consequences of it are? The main consequence that we can all agree on, as far as I can tell, is that we can't talk about it and as soon as you do you start to "move away" from it (again, I don't wish to use spatial metaphors, but that's the way most people phrase it). So, somebody has a mystical experience, a religious experience, a shift in consciousness, an experience of Dynamic Quality. What do they do? If they try to explain the insight they gained from it, the words they use will not quite convey what they experienced.
I stay away from spatial metaphors generally because I do not want to say there is distance between words and experience. Words are tools that we use to deal with experience. A pragmatic interpretation of mysticism says that words are sometimes incapabable of dealing with the experiences we have. So what do we do? We make up new words, we start fudging the meaings of old words, we use _metaphors_ for that which cannot be conveyed literally. All of the words you can use to describe, point at, convey the meaning of mysticism ("mystical reality, the void, eternity, the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum, the primary reality, the pre intellectual reality, the father of all, the womb of creation, the ground of being") all ultimately fail at being literal, at conveying a meaning that is assimilable into an established language game. That's what it means for DQ and Quality to be undefined. They are metaphors, and also new terms.
The terms "DQ" and "Quality" themselves, like all terms, ultimately fail. Simply saying the words are an attempt to literalize the unliteralizable. So, when I say that DQ is a compliment we pay after the fact, I'm saying that Dynamic Quality is a static pattern that we use to try and make sense of an experience that does not make sense within any established pattern. When we say something was Dynamic as a term of endorsement, it is a compliment because there is no way, at that point, to explain why we value that experience. If we could explain it, that would mean it was assimilable into a language game and so not really Dynamic. As we become able to explain it, it loses its Dynamic status and becomes static, and so referencing a now static pattern as Dynamic references the past origin of that pattern. Saying a new static pattern was Dynamic is paying it a compliment, saying that its good that it originated.
So when you say "we are suppose[d] to pretend a word, a phrase, a concept isn't real" I think you yourself are missing the point of mysticism. I know you don't think that a word, phrase, or concept gets at mysticism in any infallible way because if you did, mystics would jump all over you. I'm not pretending a word or concept is unreal. I'm not even pretending an experience is unreal. I'm shifting the meaning of the words, phrases, and concepts we use to try and cope with mystical experiences so that certain purely philosophical problems do not arise. And I think my interpretation loses nothing of mysticism's significance.
Matt
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