Ron,I'd like to comment on this, and the other thread you started, austerely
titled, "SOM".Ron said:Hmm, I would agree that MoQ is taking the next step
toward de-anthropomorphizing our explanations but I have a problem with the
replace term, I think append is a better word for it. And a more practical
explanation of it's function.Matt:I'm currently writing a short, potted
description of the origins of SOM for another project, and I've been struggling
over calling what the Greeks did "de-anthopomorphizing". It seems easy to say
that when describing what they did to Homeric religion, but it becomes
difficult to sustain when you sweep it forward as an impetus for intellectual
progress in the West. It becomes most obvious when you look at Pirsig: who
would call the notion of calling rocks "static patterns of value" _less_
anthropomorphic? It leads me to think that there's something wrong with the
terms in which we are writing the history, just as I think saying that
"rationality" is what suddenly hit Greece around the time of Thales. Cornford,
Grube, and Snell (even contemporaries like Julia Annas and the brilliantly
original Pierre Hadot) contain that kind of talk, but it doesn't sound right
for the kind of volte-face I would think pragmatists would like to make.One
thing I'm more convinced about is that "replace," or some variation of, is the
better way to go then a variation of "append." The way I conceive of SOM is as
a finite thing, not nearly as pervasive as some think it (or at least, the
problems it creates are not as insidious to the common person as some think
it). It is all the bad things we need to cut from the branches. I don't go in
at all with Bo's idea that SOM is a permanent stage in our evolution, like our
cells. SOM is simply a constellation of metaphors and distinctions that we can
shunt out of philosophical discussion and replace with better metaphors and
distinctions.Ron said (in "SOM"):Plato's Idea, the value of what is, is an
attempt to establish a basic understanding of certainty Through the axiom of
excluded middles by working with assumed absolutes as a matter Of convenience.
This immediately gives rise to the process event trap that things are fixed And
do not change. It also gives rise to another form of anthropomorphism the
theory of forms. I say it has become cultural because it influences how we
perceive, describe and understand the reality We experience every day. Although
I think rather highly of the MoQ I find it rather un realistic to expect it to
REPLACE Thousands of years of the cultural formation of religion,
mathematics,and scientific discovery that we utilize And which have become such
an integral part of our modern lives.Matt:Not only do I disagree with Bo in
thinking of SOM as synonymous with thinking, and therefore unavoidable, but I
also disagree that SOMic problems follow, say, our use of math. Pirsig uses
SOM as his cover-all bad guy term, but I think in the long run it would be more
profitable to think of individual problems, metaphors, distinctions, and the
like, and stop thinking of shunting aside something awesomely huge. Pirsig's
philosophy isn't meant to replace religion or math or science. It is an
atmospheric change, a shift in how we perceive other cultural formations. For
instance, certainty. Nobody now thinks of certainty as Plato did: except for
philosophers. Nobody thinks there is a kind of certainty that gains its
credence from the necessity of existence itself. Nobody pays much mind to what
certainty is except philosophers because most people know what certainty is
when they have it--a probabilistic kind that came to existence in the 17th
century. Philosophers are the only ones who still pay any attention to the
notion of certainty as it is in itself, and I think most of the manna has
fallen from that conversation.
The changes I'm talking about are in the short-run negligible because they
would mainly be changes for philosophers. By high-end, atmospheric talk does
trickle down and I think there would be a good long-run cultural change. But I
think it has nothing to do with accepting particular philosophical planks, and
everything to do with what most people raised in a certain culture think are
good questions and bad questions, open roads of inquiry and lines of reasoning
beyond the pale. For instance, most people have a homely notion of truth that
follow along with realism/Platonism. However, many of these same people are
also secularists. In the short run, it matters less to me whether one defends
one's secularism using realistic noises or pragmatist noises, just so long as
one _is_ a secularist. In the long run, on the other hand, I think the more
secularist we become, the more congenial pragmatism will look, which will make
pragmatism more likely to help us become more secularist, which will eventually
help us replace realism with pragmatism (playing out something like Dewey's
means/ends contiuum, playing back and forth between means and ends).
But in no way do I think a systematic philosophy does anything more than
articulate a coherent vision, which we then pick through for wisdom to apply to
the pressing problems of our time. What it should not do is make us think that
the letter is more important than the spirit. I think the most important shift
we should make when thinking about philosophy is from thinking that philosophy
comes before cultural politics to thinking that philosophy is an extension of
cultural politics. This is the shift from thinking that doing philosophy
(i.e., talking about Plato or the general nature of experience) has a direct
effect on culture to thinking that philosophy is just one more cultural sphere
that must be won over to one's vision of life. That we often call "philosophy"
what one is doing _when_ one articulates one's vision of life is just one of
the tastier apparent-paradoxes stemming from the reduction of everything to the
play of values.
Matt
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