Quite a converstation. Many points of agreement. Some genuine exploration.
The possibility of learning. But we start with a disagreement:
ANDREA WROTE:
> Couldn't that be that the idea that there *is* something out there (or in
> there, in our "heart" so to speak) and that we cannot make a good report of
> it, is really a false idea?
ELEPHANT:
No, not really, or there wouldn't be any point trying to speak our hearts.
Words are tools, not the weilders of tools. Something needful comes first,
before language, even if not a discrete fact: something (with a waive of the
hand).
It is one thing to say that our descriptive use of language isn't a report
(doesn't describe a pre-existing discreteness), and quite another to say
that nothing at all anti-dates the linguistic. There is something which
discrete language tries and fails to report: the continuous experience of
value. The word 'vague' I am worried about, as I suspect that only the
discrete can be properly vague (which vague impression? - *this* one). But
one can, indeed must, talk of 'a cloudy beyond'. Something is indicated by
such metaphors, by our inexhaustible need of them. Indeed, by our need of
metaphor per se. A reality 'shown' not 'expressed'? - I might agree there,
except that I doubt the hard edges of any such distinction: to show and to
express amount to the same one purpose which language serves as a tool: to
convey.
As to your remarks on playing different language games, I make my veiws
known in another post (I think we've managed to split up the thread with two
different headings - 'language and reality' and the 'sparse (trivial?) - I
don't think so' one).
You will have to defend your conception of Games in the furnace of the
Rule-following argument, I fear - for otherwise I will ("pretend to"?)
refuse to understand why we have to talk of language simply as a family of
hetrogeneous games, rather than as having some essential nature. I am
familiar with L.W.'s argument - but I don't want to jump the starting
pistol, and will presently continue beleiving that there is this one
essential thing which language does (create discrete objects) and an
essential way of doing it (synthetic judgements deploying transcendent
realities such as The Good, often using metaphor to extend this synthetic
world of objects to previously unreached areas of the continuous flux) .
ANDREA:
> I agree that science is a dance (to mention the positivists one last time, I
> don't think their "system" works in any useful way - not even that it can
> really be applied to science as it actually is). But I think I disagree that
> is logical (not that I mean it is *less than...*, just *not exactly*, or *not
> only*).
ELEPHANT:
By 'logical' I only meant 'obeys logic', not 'derived from' or 'wholly
coextensive with' logic (of course not!). (Gravity is logical in that it is
not a contradiction in terms, not in that it is derived from the law of
non-contradiction!)
ELEPHANT HAD WRITTEN:
>> And the idea that all eastern Philosophies dropped logical reasoning *from
>> the start*sounds to me like a bit of a myth. ... (think of Wittgenstein's
>> metaphor of the ladder discarded on reaching the height). True logic is
>> useful, then, in showing us some limits to some supposedly logical *pictures*
>> of the world, and the abandonment of such approaches is not the abandonment
>> of *logic*. But I think you may be saying this when you say that logic is
>> not harmful to reaching our goals, just not necessary. I would merely add
>> that it only becomes superfluous when it has really done it's job properly in
>> discarding false pictures - and we need to remain vigilant about such a task.
ANDREA:
> Agreed.
ELEPHANT:
Good.
ELEPHANT:
>> [...] although in an important sense a 'delusion', in practical terms our
>> attachment to such pictures of the self and the unhappinesses they bring in
>> their wake is very strong. We do not break such bonds by declaring them
>> broken, and we do not escape such illusions by declaring them illusory. The
>> problem here is not merely a concealment effected by language, although, yes,
>> that is a big part of the problem - the bit where Philosophy can help. But
>> the other, bigger, part of the problem is not merely seeing and expressing
>> the truth, but living it. To experience revelation of divine love is not to
>> experience beatitude. The former is like a momentary insight, a beautiful
>> calm moment of truth, but just a moment. The challenge then is to make that
>> moment of truth into a life of truth. Anyone with a momentary insight can
>> write a book of philosophy, but the goal of a true mystic isn't to express
>> the truth (which cannot, anyway, be expressed in full) but to live the truth.
ANDREA:
> Exactly. Especially, "living the truth" and "seeing it" (as a mystical
> experience) are not related by the equation "living the truth" = "seeing the
> truth in each and every moment of your life". To me, the latter is simply not
> possible, even if you are a full-time Yogi. I think that sparse moments of
> "seeing the truth", which is an exhilarating, intense experience, provide the
> fuel that you need to live a moral, satisfactory, valuable life, without being
> in the immediate, consciously-felt presence of God all of your time.
ELEPHANT:
>> But the worry, if there is one, remains with the comic-book question: 'why
>> did the sage want to catch the bus?' Because we have to rid the answer to
>> such a question of all reference to a puppet self in any world map, we have
>> to say: 'There wasn't anything in particular that "the sage" wanted at all -
>> it just seemed right in the world to stand there and turn away just before
>> the bus came, smiling'. Now at first glance that doesn't seem a convincing
>> answer. Why not? ... But someone might also say that after all waiting for a
>> bus is a telelogical activity, and that if the Sage was standing at the bus
>> stop like that, then he must have had a world map in which his self, and his
>> ideas about bus timetables, both figured. ... The point then becomes one
>> about our *attachment* to such pictures, and not about the existence or
>> non-existence of those pictures. Freedom here is something harder to attest
>> to: what constitutes attachment to >> a picture, if standing at the bus-stop
>> doesn't? It seems that the little smile you mention, while he turns away
>> from what otherwise seems a minor disaster, looks like our best, and only,
>> proof of the sage's sageness.
>>
ANDREA:
> Yes. If we have to deal with maps, and of course we have, I think sageness
> amounts to something that Fritjof Capra (The Turning Point) calls "a playful
> relationship with the self" (I am translating back from italian to english, so
> the words may not be completely correct). I use my maps but I'm always at
> least "preconsciously" aware that they are just that - maps. I am ready to
> smile if something goes wrong, I am ready to accept what breaks my
> certainties, because I knew they were conventional from the start. I hold
> "living the truth" as my one and only certainty. I think this is the peace of
> mind that the sages point to, and that it can be reached by everyone.
ELEPHANT:
I like that, and now I think we are perhaps exchanging notes about what
metaphors happen to work best for us. I would only want to add, on the
'play' metaphor, that in Buddhism and Platonism the lack of seriousness with
which it is possible to treat the self is the flip-side of a very serious
(by which I don't mean 'humourless', exactly, but might well mean 'earnest'
or 'whole-hearted') attention to enlightenment or 'the truth'. It is
because the pictures of the self are *false* that we must be careful of
them. Supposing that that they are merely *play* doesn't seem to do justice
to this idea, as it seems to allow for the idea that one might also have a
'playful' relationship with enlightenment, which won't do, I think. Or,
maybe you want to say, 'playfulness is for maps - enlightenment isn't a
map'? Perhaps this can be another point of agreement. Sometimes what looks
like a philosophical point can turn out to be a point of character
difference. But Plato is all for making philosophy into moral philosophy in
just this direction: that the truth doesn't need playful admirers, but
committed lovers (think about the tests that the Guardians must undergo in
The Republic).
>>>> ELEPHANT: Where Wittgenstein and Pirsig agree, and Plato too, is in saying
>>>> that ordinary language is not a *report* of objects (particular or
>>>> universal) in the flux. Wittgenstein says red is not a report. Plato
>>>> talks about the impossibility of ascribing whiteness to the flux. Pirsig
>>>> rightly notes that objects are a category of being that are added after the
>>>> primary reality of dynamic value.
>>>>
>> ANDREA: Sorry, I miss the term "flux" in context, and possibly "report". Can
>> you elaborate/explain?
>>
>> ELEPHANT: 'Flux' is the Heractitean and Platonic (metaphorical: using the
>> metaphor of the river) way of describing the continuity that we have been
>> talking about. A "report" is a statement that describes a reality which
>> pre-exists the statement. A newspaper article is thus a report, we hope.
>>
>ANDREA: Ok, then I agree. (Not a positivistic position from Wittgenstein,
after all).
>
> ANDREA: To me, as I said, a metaphysical statement looks as something that is
> not true nor false, but has some value...
>
> ELEPHANT: [...] It's just that I happen to believe that in this context the
> good has an absolutely universal face: the form of the good. So what I would
> argue is that a metaphysical statement is one that either has value or does
> not.
>
> ANDREA: ...More specifically, as it relates to the intellectual level, and
> this is where the "individual" comes into scene, it has some value to me now
> and to you now. [...]
>
> ELEPHANT:
>> Well yes, absolutely, it has to come back to individuals: it has to have
>> value for me. But it happens that I think the reason why a really good
>> metaphysics (such as might lie in the common ground between Tao and Pirsig)
>> would be good for me, and for others, is that it appeals to an entirely
>> universal notion of the Good which transcends and pre-exists those illusory
>> puppets of the self we were talking about, and so can't be relative to them
>> in any way. It's a theory. Actually it's Plato's theory of forms.
>>
ANDREA:
> But, any metaphysical truth is static quality.
ELEPHANT:
You mean 'has static quality?' Well, that's not addressing your point, but
I do see where you are going. You mean that having only static quality, it
could never be a final answer (that there is no final answer)? Yes, I see
the point. This connects with some passages I like to emphasise in Lila
about the impossibility of perfect chess. A perfect all embracing picture
of the world is impossible, because peoples needs change, their starting
positions change, the sorts of things it is most useful to tell them change,
and so on. All that is true. But supposing that we are not talking about
an all-embracing picture of the world, and supposing we are not talking
about a route-map from here to there: supposing we are just talking about
'there': and that in some way that discussion isn't even a 'map'? What
then? Shown, not said? Well a lot of the things that can be shown to be
true about the form of the good don't amount to 'saying' very much: they
look more like denials of wrong maps than a mapping exercise as such. This
connects with the thought that analysis is 'dry' and 'cold'. Synthesis goes
from the simple to the complex, and analysis goes in the opposite direction.
This isn't a logic with which you create pictures, it's a logic with which
we un-create them.
I'm enjoying the dialogue but should probably just sit quiet for a while.
Good wishes to all,
Elephant
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