Redsky235,
I think you have a haywire interpretive principle when you're reading Pirsig
because some of your responses to people, including myself, seem weird. I'm
not sure you're grasping Pirsig by the right handle.
Matt said:
Pirsig's just trying to point out how commonsensical the existence of what
he's talking about is. It's a beginning point. His more controversial points
require different arguments. That argument is a softening up move before the
more interesting stuff about Plato.
Redsky235:
Ok, so he's just saying that humans have the capacity to differentiate between
items? You can't really assume that in all cases. Carrying that idea to its
extreme; I present you with two glasses of water that look equally full, but
one is actually very slightly lighter. You might say that there's no real
difference, while someone equipped with a scale might say otherwise.
Matt:
And?
Pirsig is saying many things, but your counter-example doesn't show much
because if you present two glasses of water they are still _two_ glasses, at
the least spatially differentiated. And even at your extreme, the first person
can only distinguish spatially and the second person, aided by the scale, can
cut another difference, is only better at distinguishing. Who said aids were
out of line?
Matt said:
I have a lot of difficulty also with Pirsig's assertion that we already know
what Quality is, but I'm not sure if he isn't saying that we already know how
to identify Quality, we already know how to distinguish higher from lower
value because doing so is _the_ basic feature of living life.
Redsky235 said:
Assuming that humans can indeed accurately distinguish between items (doing so
without bias?), there's still no real justification for thinking that there is
even a "higher" value and a "lower" value. We might assign higher priority to
action "A," but maybe that's only the result of our society's influences on us.
Matt:
And?
You're right to be skeptical about distinguishing being without bias because I
think Pirsig is exactly saying that bias is what makes reality reality. The
bias of the rock to fall down, instead of up, for instance. This is an
important point of Pirsig's, because the outcome causes us to rethink what the
distinction between "descriptive" and "evaluative."
And in my opinion, though perhaps not others, there's no point in saying "only
the result of our society's influences on us" because I take Pirsig's point in
saying that rationality is the result of "analogues upon analogues upon
analogues" is that our responses in life are intimately bound up with our
education.
Matt said:
If you are looking for definitive answers to _any_ question, let alone
traditional aesthetic questions, you are looking in the wrong place if you are
looking some place other than what you yourself think. That's Pirsig's point.
It is a philosophical individualism that begins with each person. Granted,
it doesn't end there, which I don't think Pirsig emphasizes enough in ZMM, but
it has to begin there.
Redsky235 said:
"Trust yourself?" I'm a great believer in the power of instinct or intuition
(whatever you wish to call it, whatever scientific hangups one might have
about it), but I'm not sure I can trust what I think. Anyone's thoughts are
going to be impacted by the effect his culture has on him. No one is truly
"individual."
Matt:
Well, I didn't say trust yourself. I said it begins with each person's own
self. But what you say is essentially right, no person is so unique that they
don't overlap 99% with other people. I think conversation with others, all
other things being equal, is very important to good decisions. In fact, I
think the Humean moral philosopher Annette Baier was right when she said that
thinking is a dialogue with yourself, that we learn how to think by
internalizing our interactions with others. But none of this is against, I
think, Pirsig's philosophy. What I call Pirsig's "philosophical
individualism," while having something to do with Emerson (i.e.,
nonconformity), shouldn't be taken as having anything to do with Descartes
(i.e., we know the contents of our own minds better than anything else).
Pirsig is intent on debunking the abstract universalism that goes from Plato to
Descartes to Kant. It was Plato's focus on the Forms that Pirsig thinks
distracts us from ourselves.
Matt said:
But I also think you're going at it in the wrong direction, which is in
looking for a proof.
Redsky235 said:
First of all, it doesn't make sense that Pirsig can present his theory and
then claim that, because of the nature of his theory, no proof is required.
It's similar to "You cannot question the Bible, because it is the word of God."
Matt:
Sure it does. It only doesn't if what you think "theory" is is something that
requires something like geometrical proof. Your analogy is only sound if
Pirsig was saying that there are no grounds for thinking that his orientation
towards life is better than others (in fact, no savvy Christian would rest with
your pithy formulation, but continue on to incommensurable paradigms). But
Pirsig does think there are grounds: the cultural malaise of the 60s, the
impact of the Plato-Kant canon. It is against those backgrounds that Pirsig
thinks he can do better.
But from the way it sounds, it appears that part of what Pirsig is challenging
is the background philosophical assumptions that both you and Matt seem to have
in play. My sense is that both of you have a similar understanding of what
philosophy is, which in Pirsig's terms would be a Platonic understanding.
Pirsig's opposition of rhetoric to dialectic was meant to undermine the strong
sense of "proof" that you seem to be using here.
But I can't be too sure without explicit discussion of some of these
background, enabling suppositions.
Matt said:
Right, the objective criteria set down by the literary world, which is what a
community of individuals agree to.
Redsky235 said:
But even there you get into some discrepancies. The "objective criteria" of
the literary world is always in flux (witness the constantly changing MLA
guidelines, and lest we forget, "Moby Dick" was panned when it was first
published).
Matt:
Right, my statement was ironic because by the Platonic tradition's lights, what
I said about the literary world doesn't count as "objective" at all. But part
of Pirsig's philosophy is aimed at replacing the strict dichotomy of
subjective/objective.
Matt said:
Pirsig is eliminating the pernicious subjective/objective distinction in order
to undermine the notion of "these (arbitrary) literary criteria" so that we
can instead see any sort of criteria that might be set forth by a community as
set forth by individuals, though none the worse for it because _anything_ set
forth is set forth by _somebody_, every view the product of the far end of the
movement of an individual's brandishment of the "analytic knife."
Redsky235 said:
Ok, but again, wouldn't that individual's use of the knife still be affected
by his cultural bias? His actions would still reflect at least some part of
the literary world's judgment.
Matt:
Absolutely. An individual's own peculiar bias, their own unique viewpoint of
the world, develops out of their culture. The analogy of DNA is very much in
point here: we are all unique snowflakes, but only if you look really close.
Matt said:
Pirsig would certainly object to the notion that a critic's opinion is more
"valid," but that does not destory the notion of authority derived by communal
attention, for instance the authority granted to specialists, like physicists.
Redsky235 said:
But if there is indeed an absolute Quality, then a well educated (or
experienced) critic would have more knowledge when approaching a text and,
theoretically, should be able to discern its elements that ultimately reveal
Quality. If there is an absolute Quality, and an absolute way to reveal that
Quality, then there is a definitive way of constructing and reading a text.
Matt:
Absolute Quality? I'm not sure where you're getting such an idea, but I doubt
it was Pirsig.
But, say there was: there's an absolute conception of Quality. Why would more
education or experience denote better ability at discerning Quality? What if
stipping yourself of everything you've learned is the gate to Quality? What if
your experience is only of appearances and we have to ignore those to get at
Quality.
The arguments about how to find absolute conceptions, in addition to their
content, have lasted 2500 years without anybody knowing how we'd even know if
we knew we knew the absolute conception when we knew it. The arguments just
keep going. But do get on just fine reading texts and predicting the movements
of particles. Pirsig's suggesting that we don't need a notion of "absolute
conception" hiding attached to all of our assertions of truth: the court of
argumentative interplay will determine what what works or not.
Matt said:
But doing so will be one more view set forth by an individual. For instance,
Harold Bloom has done so on occasion to enunciate why he doesn't enjoy one
particular poet but isn't about deny the poet's place in the Western canon.
All we have to do to get a distinction like that is to distinguish liking a
text for highly idiosyncratic reasons and placing it in high esteem because of
its originality.
Redsky235 said:
Well, then you could ask, why value originality itself? Isn't that a
"Quality" judgment?
Matt:
Absolutely. Why would that be a problem?
Matt said:
But what kind of argument is that? It's not, but we should instead wonder why
Pirsig would make it. The pernicious view that he is trying to surmount is
that there are objective criteria or things or whatever that exist outside of
what anybody thinks of them, which then sets as pejorative anything that
_does_ have to rest on what people think of them--things like aesthetic
judgments. Pirsig's trying to help us reconceive our view by showing how
judgments sit at the very bottom of things.
Redsky235 said:
So he's employing a flawed argument simply to spark discourse and thought? Or
is he using the argument just to spark a certain theory, which one then has to
take on faith?
Matt:
Is it a flawed argument if it is successful in what it wants to accomplish?
In isolation, the argument seems to exhibit some flaws. As part of the book
Pirsig was writing, I'm not so sure. Pirsig was writing a different kind of
philosophical treatise than say Bertrand Russell or Immanuel Kant. What Pirsig
wrote has more in common with Plato. Afterall, try reading the Phaedrus
without paying attention to the structure and arc of the dialogue.
Matt
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