Just so I'm not just harshing on the religious right, this seemed an opportune time to post a video I ran across during my search for consciousness/mind-related videos a few months back:
One of the major interpretations of mystical experience is that in it, we shake off the individual ego and somehow are able to merge with a larger unity. This idea has some appeal to me, in that it would be cool if it were the case, and you can give it some respectability as far as Western philosophical history goes if you want by picking bits out of Hegel and maybe Schopenhauer, and certainly Spinoza invites this interpretation, in that according to him we are all "modes" of God and can become more aware of our unity with God through rational investigation of nature (i.e. God), including ourselves. Beyond this, there may be something to be said for, e.g. a philosopher like Gregory Bateson, who explicitly discussed the possibility that larger systems, like nature itself, could be considered "minds" in some meaningful sense. If you readers have experience with particular philosophers or works in this vein that you think we should look at, I'd be glad to hear your recommendations.
That said, I find it hard to give much credence to New Agey talk like you see here. "By honoring that connection [to the world] through our hearts, we literally have the power to influence the fields of this planet to sustain life... and it's all about the magnetic fields of the earth." So apparently, according to Gregg Braden here, during 9/11, the earth's magnetic fields spiked (and I see via a quick web search that someone posted a graph).
So apparently, if we all all emote together, we can affect the human immune response, weather patterns, cycles of war and peace, and our own cognitive abilities. And around 5:20 he brings in the chestnut that this is nothing new, that science is finally documenting what "the ancients" have been teaching us all along. Amazing, then, that my web search does not actually find any even mildly scientific-looking sources supporting this claim! Groovy conspiracy to keep us from the truth, man! I'm no physicist, but even the little reading we did for our philosophy of physics episode tells me that his description at the end of our emotions creating electromagnetic fields through our hearts to influence the "quantum soup" to cause the "universe to congeal around that template" of compassion or whatever is, well, not a display of the highest caliber of scientific literacy. Pass the shrooms!
-Mark
I have been dissed on blogs with a religious leaning for bringing up Whitehead (and Pirsig), and I fear I will meet the same fate here. Whitehead covered so much territory on the philosophic plain that he overwhelms people on either side of either side of a point of argument.
I love your podcasts, and you guys are the bomb for showing how real philosophy is done. I am an amateur with avid interest, but you make it seem like I am in a grad seminar with you discussing this or that text (does Wes really know Greek – that amazed me)
I offer the following link as an incentive for you to perhaps find an expert on ANW and focus on one of his less formidable texts like SMW, AI, or MT. Please do not dismiss his work for the same reasons that academia has – you guys are better than that.
You will be rewarded with a synthesis of the Jewel Net of Indra and many other timely connections with nearly every one of your podcast episodes in this rich synopsis of Whitehead. No New-Agey shit here.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/rlubbock/ANW.html
OK, Burl, message received. ANW is on the list. (Which doesn’t necessarily mean soon, though…) I will check ‘im out. I did just get Zen and the Art of Moto from the library, as far as Pirsig goes.
-ML
Appreciate the consideration. Enjoy Pirsig (will relate to your upcoming Buddhism cast).
If interested in a neuroscientist’s interest in Spinoza as the philosopher of choice in dealing with embodied emotion, check out Damasio http://www.amazon.com/Looking-Spinoza-Sorrow-Feeling-Brain/dp/0151005575 It was very good, and more philosophy than I expected…there are vidios of him speaking. You can see him in a few Charlie Rose Brain Series shows http://www.charlierose.com/view/collection/10702
Thanks Burl — I know less Ancient Greek than I should for the number of years I studied it. I think I mentioned Damasio in our Spinoza podcast, as part of the revival of interest in him predicated on his monism — I also like “The Feeling of What Happens.”
It’s interesting that Pirsig’s name would up in the context of mystical experience. His central term is a mystic term. The basic idea is very close to your opening description, Mark, except that Pirsig construes the whole deal in a way that’s more compatible non-theistic, philosophical forms of mysticism. Instead of saying the individual merges with a larger unity, we’d say mystical experience is awareness in which the distinction between knower and known is absent. In other words, there is an experience of unity and the feeling of separateness that goes with ego consciousness is absent but it is understood in terms of the absence of conceptual distinctions. It’s an epistemological idea, one that help to explain the basic experience underlying the claims of mystics, religious or otherwise.
As I mentioned recently in a different thread, Pirsig’s “Quality” is equivalent to William James’s “pure experience”. In either case, they’re both basically saying that reality is what you know before you have a chance to think about it. The cutting edge of experience, they say, is pre-intellectual or pre-conceputal. Again, this is just awareness in the absence of reflective thought or intellectual distinctions and since the distinction between knower and known, between subject and object is such an intellectual distinction, this primary empirical reality is not so much unified as it is undivided. It is not divided in the sense that intellectual distinctions have not yet been introduced.
It’s cool. Their radical empiricism let’s you have mysticism and pragmatism all at the same time. It makes sense of religion and spirituality, for lack of better words, and offers a kind of mysticism that’s empirically based, as opposed to one based on supernaturalism, theism or any kind of faith-based beliefs.
Damasio’s work get at this same idea, I think. That initial emotional response that allows all subsequent rational judgement is another way to talk about the pre-conceptual experience. One of the reason’s Pirsig calls it Quality is because this pre-intelletual experience always has a sort of aesthetic charge to it, a feel to it, which can be negative or positive. As a matter of fact, Pirsig’s main influence, Northrop, called it the ‘undifferentiated aesthetic continuum”.
I sincerely hope this little explanation serves as a key to help you enjoy Zen and the Art. (I keep mentioning parallels to James because you’re already familiar with his work.) Hope it serves as a ‘shroom broom, not that I’m above that sort of thing.
David B, that was a beautifully succinct description of Pirsig’s appropriation of zen using a more western way of thinking. You left out one of his own oft-repeated terms for Quality: pre-intellectual awareness, which gets at all you described.
The opening lines of the “Whitehead for the Muddleheaded” paper I linked in a previous post is a paraphrase of ANW from _ Modes of Thought _: http://books.google.com/books?id=n8BeCvuJ734C&pg=PA116&lpg=PA116&dq=have+a+care,+this+is+something+of+worth+%2B+whitehead&source=bl&ots=AFYlZXkViD&sig=Y_0yrsRhYulRUqkmUH4BsBB6X4c&hl=en&ei=JK1-TNTxD4OClAfxv9nsAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=true). The Quality event – the occasion of experience – that precedes any thoughts or perceptions, as upon first awakening for ANW, or when Pirsig lets the mind wander while carefully attending a stuck screw on your motorbike, these get at the same thing. The Quality event is prior to sensation of subject/oberct and mind/body distinction, and is Zen non-duality, ANW’s ‘withness of the body,’ or Damasio’s embodied emotion.
A nice paper ‘I=awareness’ from the mind-body discussion at JCS will help with pre-intellectual reality: http://www.imprint.co.uk/online/Deikman.html
P.S. David mentions James’, whom Pirsig did acknowledged as being a philosopher of influence as well as Northrop. As is usual, ANW is left out, but ANW was greatly influenced by James’ emphasis on experience, and ANW was Northrop’s professor.
Sorry, David, I see you did bring up pre-intellectual awareness. On which other thread were you discussing Pirsig?