KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA60 (Grandpierre)

Commentary 13 (to C11, Wood and Muller)

( EXPERIENCE AND SENSE )
by Peter Mutnick
7 December 2003, posted 14 December 2003

<1>
[Quote from Wood :]

(See your comment to Mutnick who says you cannot say where experience is, and then rather than say it is no-where you imply it is now-here.)

<2>
[Peter Mutnick]

This is a nice word-trick, with possibly profound implications, but don't get too hung up on the question "where" is experience. What I mean to say is simply does this fundamental "experience" really exist, and if so in what way, or how, does it exist? I am raising the existential question in reference to Muller's primordial empiricism, and I don't think he has answered it. What is real, or what really exists? These are the questions physicists are, or should be, concerned with, quantum theory notwithstanding.

<3>
The mere step of pragmaticism is also insufficient, in and of itself. One must ultimately embrace some form of mysticism to anchor primordial empiricism in objective reality. That is my point. Then and only then do you begin to get a transcendental definition of experience, from which standpoint you can define it and talk about its relation to apeiron, peras, etc.

<4>
Muller has rejected this approach, based on my reworking of an outline by William Ernest Hocking, who was a philosophy professor at Harvard contemporaneous with Alfred North Whitehead, but I believe it is the only way to make sense of his premise. In an age of nonsense, few even desire to make sense, and of course what makes sense to one does not often make sense to all, but nonetheless I think it is good to try to make sense of things rather than leave them dangling in an existential void, as Muller seems to do.

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Peter Mutnick

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<5>
REPLY

Some people (not me) say they can completely void their mind of contents, so that for them the "fundamental experience" may "exist". But that, I would say, is not the main question. It is that no mind-and-nature structures would be there without the subjects' activity, whether human or animal.

<6>
What really exists is a decision (automatic or deliberate) of the subjects, individually and/or collectively; it results from investment of trust in created intra-experiential structures. This may but does not have to pre-suppose a mind-independent existence (MIR), which can never be proven in ways which convince everybody, but may be perceived to have auxiliary strength. How do you see your Saint-Peter connection, is he inside of you or outside ? How does fundamentalism (defined as belief in absolute validity of posited structures) work ? Some Islamic clergy have strong opinions on that.

<7>
Mysticism and similar experiences can be of help for overall world-views. Actually something like that is needed for them. This is so because all mental mind-and-nature structures arise within experience, and thus experience always is (or can be) encompassing, as among others Jaspers emphasized in his later work ("Das Umgreifende das wir sind oder sein können"; Von der Wahrheit, 2.Kapitel, p.53). From this follows that mental structures cannot in turn encompass all of experience (i.e., theories of everything are self-contradictory unless they have such a component).

<8>
On the other hand, mysticism cannot take the place of instrumental and analytical thinking; if one tries to do that, everything gets fuzzy and arbitrary. Pragmatism can mean trying out mental structures, with feed-back during use, to see how well they work. It does not require an assumption of nature-MIR ("objective reality") to do that. Whether you feel that there is an existential void without such MIR-input is up to you. The question is, in a nutshell, whether you (individually and/or collectively) want to make sense, or in contrast expect sense to be delivered to you, in pre-fabricated form, from outside.

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Herbert FJ Müller