Hi Matt That's great but only up to a point, because its emphasis is too weak and the implications of this change more significant I'd suggest.
Charles Taylor hints at the problem, and Nick Maxwell takes it on explicitly. Problem is to really address what this tells us about the relationship between values and knowledge. The enlightment suggests that we can tackle human problems by adopting the approach to knowledge demonstrated by science and its success. This was an approach developed to kick the church out of knowledge. This approach threw values, in theory, out of the development of knowledge as if theories could be created in a value free realm of reason and logic, and without any questionable assumptions. Of course Kuhn has shown us how these paradigms operate. Foucault how power is involved in knowledge production. And Taylor that values are always present even if denied. Nick Maxwell has looked at this denial of values in science. He suggests that we need a revolution in education and science to transform this false self-conception of science and knowledge. He suggets that we need an aim-orietated conception of knowledge that self consciously sees it's purpose as the realisation (in both senses) of what is of value. And that determining what is of value needs to be open to democratic debate. As we stand academics are cut off from real social needs and problems that need to be addressed. And they are also able to determine orhave determined for them by polticians and other powerful interests what values they are pursuing unarticulated. This is good stuff and fits not only with my own sense of the experiental reduction caused by the enlightenment (as pointed out by the romantics) and its democratic failure that so many of us currently recognise. See, for some of Maxwell's (he's a philosopher of science) stuff: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002449/ Thanks David M ----- Original Message ----- From: "Matt Kundert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2007 6:02 AM Subject: Re: [MD] subject/object: pragmatism Hey, DMB said: Gravity is usually understood as one of those pre-existing facts of the universe, a law of reality that has always operated regardless of whether of not anyone was aware of the fact. And so we naturally (SOM) think that it was discovered by Newton. No so, says Pirsig. Instead, he says, Newton invented gravity. I forget the source, probably Lila's Child, but there is an account of somebody trying to wrap their heads around the idea and asking him something like, "You mean before Issac Newton came along apples didn't obey the law of gravity". Pirsig replied, "No, they didn't. Apples just fell." ... The world is built of analogies upon analogies going back too far back to see but always growing out of lived experience. Matt: I believe you're thinking of what I like to call Pirsig's "discourse on Western ghosts," which is pages 32-36 (Ch. 3) of ZMM. This passage always sounds like pure idealism, but there is definitely a straight line between this at the beginning of ZMM and the other passage you're alluding to, which occurs towards the end of the book, in the mythos-over-logos argument passage: "The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues." (360, Ch. 28) I think this line is fundamental to how Pirsig shunts Plato and to why we should see Pirsig as embedded in the tradition of American pragmatism. To riff off of what DMB said, I would draw a line that begins with the discourse on Western ghosts and continues to these: "The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself." (148, Ch. 13) "We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues to our previous experiences. If we didn't we'd be unable to act. We build up our language in terms of these analogues. We build up our whole culture in terms of these analogues." (253, Ch. 20) "Of course it's an analogy. Everything is an analogy. But the dialecticians don't know that." (399, Ch. 30) Normally I'd digress about the Hegelian and Nietzschean patterns in this, but the only thing I want to focus on is the connection between "the continuing body of reason" and "our whole culture [is built] in terms of these analogues." What I want to suggest is the reason Pirsig escapes subjectivism and solipsism is because for Pirsig ideas are not tiny little things hanging around our mind (the S) that have to be matched up to reality (the O). For Pirsig, ideas are more like tools, public items that we all use to make our way through the stream of experience. The better an idea works, like gravity and matter, the more we use it and the more likely we pass it on to our children (through a process Pirsig grinningly calls in the discourse on Western ghosts, "Mass hypnosis. In a very orthodox form known as 'education.'" (36, Ch. 3) The link I see is that we are educated to a certain set of tools/ideas, but this isn't an arbitrary practice, as if we do things the way we happen to do them _just_ because they relate to our "previous experiences." Rather, culture is something like a massive experiment, where each person embedded in a stream of experience picks up and uses, or rejects and fashions new, tools for particular reasons--basically all fitting the mold, "this works better than that." Pirsig's trope of Analogy is used to counter Plato's trope of Reason, "Dialectic--the usurper." (380, Ch. 29) For once we make the rhetorical turn, of course Plato's use of dialectic and reason is just one more trope. The difference between the rhetorician and the dialectician is that the dialectician cannot admit that he is using tropes, analogies, the rhetorical art. (Indeed, this is why Socrates, and even Plato, was far savvier than the Western tradition stemming from them has been able to admit.) I see in Pirsig's simple trope a sophisticated staging point for the amelioration of all the traditional, Platonic dangers, for all the particular attacks on Platonism that are represented by American pragmatism. When DMB says that our analogues grow out of "lived experience," he's emphasizing that an analogue lives and dies at the hands of its value in a particular experience. For the most part, most of our tools, most of our culture, is a stabilized body of experience that we all dip into and participate in with no problem (what we call "common sense"). What Pirsig and the pragmatists are calling for is not a tearing down of our culture or tools, but a sea change in _attitude towards_ the stable body of reason that has proven itself useful in the course of historical experience, e.g. science. So when we come to the idea of idealism and "do ideas actually come before matter?", the first thing to realize is that idealism and scientific realism/materialism are only options for those still living under the dichotomous poles of Subject and Object. Which is what everybody says. But what does that mean? I think it means is that 1) it is difficult to stop sounding like you're swinging between the two poles, but 2) it's a paradigm shift in thinking where you just stop seeing the problem of swinging back and forth. One way is to ask yourself what the practical consequences of a pure idealism are given successful communication between people. What are they, are there any rammifications towards how we live our lives if you think that its all in our minds? No. The theatrical effects of The Matrix are attained only by positing that there _is_ a reality that exists beyond that which our mind conceives. But a pure idealism doesn't do that--it just says that the only thing we can be sure of is not an independent realty, but that stuffs going on in our head. But if that's the case, then one of the ways stuff functions in our head is that you can't move rocks or tigers with your mind. The pure idealism of a Berkeley has no bearing on our practical lives, it is only a thought experiment. And the same goes for scientific realism. Even if you are a hard-core, Ayerian logical positivist who thinks that ought-statements are neither true nor false and are simply emotive assertions, that still doesn't sidestep the huge public fight for the triumph of your assertions in the court of public opinion. Emotivism doesn't make us feel more or less attached to our feelings about abortion, poor people, affirmative action, God, the Pope, Iraq, Blake, Yeats, Hollander, Pirsig, Rorty or DMB. It is an idle philosophical theses. The pragmatism of Pirsig desires a retiring of idle philosophical theses in the hopes of relaxing our minds of idle anxieties that mean quite little to problems that matter. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Can you find the hidden words? 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