tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post2088916172884360147..comments2023-07-04T03:53:40.171-07:00Comments on Matt Kundert's Friday Experiment: Notes on Mysticism: Madness, Directness, Tears, and ContingencyMatt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-20530687360077780342022-06-05T11:07:18.115-07:002022-06-05T11:07:18.115-07:00Thank you for shariingThank you for shariingTara Ehttps://www.taraeaton.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-61863376183985193882011-01-15T11:47:27.096-07:002011-01-15T11:47:27.096-07:00Yeah, most of the work is done by "consciousl...Yeah, most of the work is done by "consciously" in your formula, and then I'm not sure we should really pin the strong poet down to whether she does anything consciously or unconsciously. For example, all unreflective people are "moving out of their own nature." Once one becomes Hegelian in how one conceives of what is "in" one's own nature (i.e. through a process of socialization), then to do something unreflectively is to move out of your nature, as opposed to thinking about what your nature is and moving out of an opposition to what you find there.<br /><br />Rorty wanted to wonder explicitly about the Romantic conception of an inner nature that one is "authentic" to, in the way that "moving out of her own nature" seems too to conceive. If one assimilates it to Nietzsche's more dynamic formula of "become who you are," which thinking of your formula as itself a "holy grail" does, there are less problems.Matt Khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-31161652336451588172011-01-14T06:19:44.890-07:002011-01-14T06:19:44.890-07:00I don't see the strong poet as consciously loo...I don't see the strong poet as consciously looking for tears per se, as much as she is simply moving out of her own nature. <br /><br />That, "moving out of one's own nature" is the holy grail of mysticism I think. <br /><br />I'm bumping into more thoughts about this then I can cram into these post boxes.Andrew Louishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18204999524677028033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-55865365180694865102011-01-13T13:26:23.182-07:002011-01-13T13:26:23.182-07:00Maybe one reason to prefer tearing to looking is t...Maybe one reason to prefer tearing to looking is that tearing gives one a sense of activity on the part of the agent, as opposed to passively opening your eyes. Asking how you "make a tear" I think is a perfectly good question. Following the Socratic notions I threw out above, you can think of it as finding the inconsistencies in your web of beliefs (to recur to Quine's metaphor suddenly). So on the map metaphor, inquiry is like folding the map in new ways to get new sections of the map placed next to each other, and then seeing if it still reads, or whether it looks impossible. <br /><br />Rorty's exposition of liberalism using the public/private distinction is a suggestion that certain kinds of tensions (those "looks impossible") are not actually a big deal, and should be ignored (I've tried to explicating something like this with Brandom's vocabulary in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/07/spatial-model-of-belief-change.html" rel="nofollow">"A Spatial Model of Belief Change"</a>). Rorty says in <i>CIS</i> that the strong poet faces up to her contingency better than others. Why is that? That is a huge, gaping question that Rorty had a hard time getting to because he too nearly equivocated between a number of terms in the writing (in this near case, "contingency" and "nominalism": regular people can, apparently, be nominalists, so why is it they don't "face" their contingency as well as the abnormally strong poet?). What I've come to see is that the strong poet does so because they are hunting for those tears, for those tears are their tropes, their poetry. To write strong poetry is to feel the holes in our maps and draw a circle around them. You can be a nominalist and historicist and understand that you are thrown (in Heidegger's sense) into the world. Knowing this, however, helps you not a <i>whit</i> in deciding what to keep repeating and what not. The strong poet is good at finding the invisible space between repetitions, how to complicate the beat, at it were. <br /><br />Understanding that we are conventional, as you quote the Buddha in an earlier comment, is at best only the first step to breaking convention. And I have doubts about that. For you don't have to be conscious of a convention to break it. Becoming conscious of conventionality must be part of a different process (a Hegelian process is what Brandom will ultimately say).Matt Khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-34931817921048145092011-01-13T13:22:44.082-07:002011-01-13T13:22:44.082-07:00How to put Rorty together with mysticism has taken...How to put Rorty together with mysticism has taken me a long time, partly because I'm tone deaf to the siren call of the mystic tradition.<br /><br />The trick in working through Rorty was to finally take seriously what he says in the intro to <i>Consequences of Pragmatism</i>: "read the history of philosophy and draw a moral." When I first started trying to understand anti-Platonism, I couldn't do it any other way than by taking certain turns of phrase and thinking they were <i>always</i> Platonic. I think if one were to look back at my writing from 1999 to 2006, you'd see me mouthing the words, but still treating heavy-handedly every traditional metaphor, distinction, and phrasing as bad <i>because</i> it was traditional. I didn't know any better because I was still learning what the tradition was and seeing how it worked in different contexts.<br /><br />In the last few years, I've finally been trying to implement a true understanding of what it means for rhetoric to go all the way down. The process may have started when I read Putnam's distinction between distinctions and dichotomies (in <i>The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays</i>). It may have finally hit home that there's nothing <i>intrisically</i> wrong with <i>any</i> distinction or metaphor that Plato used, only dead-ends in <i>usage</i>. This means that the <i>purposes and ends</i>, for which we deploy particular linguistic means to achieve, need to be looked at closely on a case by case basis. It has only been by exposing myself to more and more ends and means that I've gotten clearer to myself about why we should say <i>this</i> rather than <i>that</i> at <i>these particular kinds of moments</i>, with the judgment extending <i>only</i> to these particular kinds of moments (all other moments needing to be judged for themselves).<br /><br />Because what I've found is that pretty much every metaphor can be pushed to say the thing you don't want to say. "Tear" as much as "beyond," so I now prefer a critical diction of "<i>this</i> is better than <i>that</i> because X is harder to say with <i>this</i>." There's nothing wrong with metaphors of vision, only in how you use them. Iris Murdoch deploys the metaphor of vision beautifully in her discussion of ethics in <i>The Sovereignty of Good</i> to develop a notion of "contexts of attention" that I find terribly useful in explicating a pragmatist ethos. Or my use of the terribly unWittgensteinian "total private meaning" in my last paragraph. It's nearly intended to provoke misunderstanding, but Stanley Cavell's helping me to understand the phenomenology of words better, and so relieve some of the pressures of being a Rortyan.Matt Khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-24932927779671710012011-01-13T06:45:07.967-07:002011-01-13T06:45:07.967-07:00You state here:
“These are conventional indication...You state here:<br />“These are conventional indications of how the experience of nature can evacuate your sense of how to respond, overflow or tear what Dewey called the “crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness.”<br /><br />In this case I think it’s being highlighted that there’s more to it then “looking beyond” (or rather, there is no “looking beyond” per se), as if it were an actual thing we could do. I think the Platonic assumptions arise out of the idea that in fact we can do this, we can consciously (through reason perhaps) make a tear, or look beyond, etc.. But I don’t think it works that way. Overnight I pondered for the sake of it, “Okay, how do you make a tear?”, and/or, “How do find these tears?” But I don’t think it’s a matter of looking and finding [again]. As Pirsig stated somewhere in ZMM, “Truth can stare you right in the face and you say, ‘go away, I’m looking for truth’, so it goes away.”<br /><br />Anyway, I really enjoyed this. It’s always been my goal at some point to make connections between mysticism and Rorty’s pragmatism in CIS, but I’ve been a busy man lately. What you have here just hit me like a ton of bricks – much of what I’ve been thinking, but of course written much better. You bastard.Andrew Louishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18204999524677028033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-48978946634111045072011-01-13T06:44:39.581-07:002011-01-13T06:44:39.581-07:00Well… Regarding the “tear” metaphor, you can stret...Well… Regarding the “tear” metaphor, you can stretch that out into Platonic assumptions in the same way you can with the language of “beyond”, and “transcends”. Certainly one can imagine that if you can tear the map, you can also rip it completely apart to reveal everything behind it. Same with the poking a hole; if you can poke a hole, why not dig out a large chasm. <br /><br />But okay, I suppose in one sense I do agree that the tear rhetoric is better in the sense that it has a newness to it. “Looking beyond”, or “transcending” has become so overused (and used within Platonic reasoning) that it’s hardly recognizable for what it is. I’m reminded of my defense of Campbell with his phrase, “Truth transcends language”. Again, I don’t see that tool as serving a purpose different than a tear in the map, nevertheless I agree that we should try and scrap those old platitudes.Andrew Louishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18204999524677028033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-49133787016297474382011-01-12T16:04:35.001-07:002011-01-12T16:04:35.001-07:00That "beautiful" bit you quoted in the t...That "beautiful" bit you quoted in the third comment is actually a typo, which I've fixed. I'm not sure if it's beauty is affected, but it's conceptually clearer now.<br /><br />In the first comment, about conventions, the fear of becoming inundated by technology has grown since the industrial revolution, but what the mystics like to remind us is that language is a technology, too. So limiting oneself to the woes of "modern life" doesn't even cut it, mystically speaking. It's such a "radical skepticism," if you will, that leads me to wonder what exactly the pragmatic effects are of a rhetoric that seems Platonic (which is what the above tries working through to some degree).<br /><br />In your second comment, with regards to not swallowing my comments about <i>koans</i>, I'm not sure there's any disagreement. I didn't mean to suggest that what the <i>koan</i> does was unintentional. However, I would insist on them as "breakdowns," but that's because it's part of the general bit of re-understanding linguistic events like "metaphor" and "irony" along Davidsonian lines.<br /><br />In your third comment, I like "finding a tear" better than "looking beyond convention." Our rhetorical conventions in this area have to be carefully thought over to avoid Platonic improprieties, and on the version of the map analogy I deployed, one can't look "beyond" the map unless one has found a tear to look through. The problem I find with "beyond" is I want to avoid as much as possible the sense that one could <i>lower the map</i> entirely, and look beyond it to stare reality in the face. This, as I understand the nature of humanity, is impossible, similar to imagining a person who can fly. Pirsig entertains this impossibility in the glasses analogy, but I want to avoid this. One cannot peak over the edge of conventions-as-a-whole, one can only poke a hole through particular conventions, one at a time.Matt Khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-1275450948934280892011-01-12T11:38:37.694-07:002011-01-12T11:38:37.694-07:00You write:
“As I said, the amount of things we don...You write:<br />“As I said, the amount of things we don’t notice and tie are infinitely greater than that which we don’t, and those unnoticed parts are the overflow of reality over the borders of our conventions.”<br /><br />Just because it’s beautiful. <br /><br />You write:<br />“If we are thrown into the world and socialized, then one way to understand the process of individualizing ourselves to break free of the happenstance education we received is to empty ourselves of that which we’ve learned.”<br /><br />This reminds me of the Buddha and his statement:<br />“Believe nothing on the faith of traditions,even though they have been held in honor for many generations and in diverse places. Do not believe a thing because many people speak of it. Do not believe on the faith of the sages of the past. Do not believe what you yourself have imagined, persuading yourself that a God inspires you. Believe nothing on the sole authority of your masters and priests. After examination, believe what you yourself have tested and found to be reasonable, and conform your conduct thereto.”<br /><br />A call to look beyond convention, to find a tear?Andrew Louishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18204999524677028033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-903766161318595292011-01-12T11:37:30.616-07:002011-01-12T11:37:30.616-07:00You write:
“If regular, conventional, routinized l...You write:<br />“If regular, conventional, routinized linguistic communication is based on the mutual, correct transference of “what I mean” to “I understand what you mean,” then we can understand a breakdown in communication as itself a kind of tear in the map of understanding. On the Eastern side, we might understand this as the purpose of a Zen koan, what the Greeks called an aporia (literally: “with no way out”).”<br /><br />I’m not so sure I swallow this, but I think you wrapped it up differently later. I agree, using your language, that a Koans purpose is to create tears (so to speak), but its essence is not a “breakdown in communication”. I’d suggest it’s intentional on the part of the speaker. A further problem (off topic) seems to be that the ambiguity of a koan quickly turns into platitude when under use by the western consciousness.<br /><br />In any case, you follow up in the end with the following – which I couldn’t agree with more :<br />“The purpose of a mantra in meditation is to help clear your mind, to eliminate it, by saying a phrase over and over until it loses meaning, until what used to be sounds that had meaning become pure sounds, phonemes qua phonemes, not phonemes qua words….”<br /><br /><br />continued...Andrew Louishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18204999524677028033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-33267598755450123832011-01-12T11:36:59.748-07:002011-01-12T11:36:59.748-07:00You write:
Consider the Grand Canyon: the common e...You write:<br />Consider the Grand Canyon: the common experience of it is as a “blowing away,” leaving a person “at a loss for words,” “stunned.” These are conventional indications of how the experience of nature can evacuate your sense of how to respond, overflow or tear what Dewey called the “crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness.”<br /><br />In one sense then, the surrounding of oneself by technology by throwing oneself into modern life; concrete structures, motor vehicles, our stuffy homes, cellphones and TV’s, our systematic jobs, so on, we’re surrounding ourselves with convention. We’re surrounding ourselves with the immateriality of mans own conventional creations. Our lives, to some extent, become much like Pirsig’s analogy of the Cruise ship in “Lila”; we end up living in this pre-packaged / conditioned reality. We’re so packed in by “it all”….<br />Where is the stimulus which generates that feeling of “aw” in all this? Where are the tears to be found in a life not only thought of, but surrounded by our own conventions? Rhetorical questions of course.<br /><br />continued...Andrew Louishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18204999524677028033noreply@blogger.com