Hi SA, SA said: Do you mean "IMO" or trying to offer something good, good in the sense, that the person offering this goodness is what they perceive as good, is an effort in softening up somebody to their way, but with full knowing that they have already been convinced to their own opinion and their opinion, their "IMO", is established? Thus, by saying "in my opinion of course" and such is a way to bait a conversation, a seeming dialogue, but of course, it is their opinion and they will not change it no matter what one says? I've seen some us "IMO" in this way.
Matt: I had trouble following your line of thought, but I'm sure people use the phrase "in my opinion" in all sorts of ways. I was not attempting a catalogue. I was looking at a pattern, that may have had any number of sources, but produced cases in which some were wont to say, "Hey, its just my opinion, no need to take it seriously since we are own sources of goodness, just as Socrates said to Phaedrus." In the fullness of the paper, I was collecting a number of disparate strands of rhetorical occurrences in the MD, and my account of "in my opinion" only makes sense from within that context, and in no way was I ever implying that people didn't ever use the phrase in any other way. Matt said: Well, I also happen to think there's a philosophical point lying underneath this particular pet peeve. I tried elaborating on it. If you didn't like it, why didn't _you_ just ignore it? SA said: No, it's not that I didn't like it. It was a wonder on my part as to why you took a suggestion as a "pet peeve". Matt: Well, if you looked at the original suggestion, it wasn't framed _as_ a suggestion: "[Matt], I hope you have a daily meditation practice. I'd hate to think that you, with your mind, are missing the really goods stuff." That has all sorts of rhetorical things going on in it, and I picked out one having to do with philosophy. And actually, I'm really quite tired of talking about what Marsha said two weeks ago, because I quite like Marsha, and me continually having to retread it makes it appear as if I have a problem with her. I was just pursuing an old, philosophical hobby-horse of mine. Matt said: But to recapitulate my pet peeve which links to the philosophical direct/indirect distinction: If someone suggests that I should meditate because it's good to see reality directly and it's something that can really only be understood by doing it, then they are: 1) using the philosophical direct/indirect distinction to lend credence to why I should try it out. After all, according to their view, indirect experience is second-rate. SA interpolated: I see where your coming from on this issue. I guess the authority on any experience can be more intuitively understood if one experiences the experience versus reading about the experience. Yet, my reading about what is happening in Tibet is better than my experience, right here, right now as to what is happening in Tibet. Thus, my experience of reading about Tibet is a better picture than my everyday experiences I'm having here as to what's happening in Tibet. I don't even hear the word Tibet in my everyday experience. So, I guess it depends on how the context is shape and what we're trying to explore. Matt continued: 2) using the common sense direct/indirect distinction to suggest that reading about meditating doesn't quite give one a good idea about whether or not meditating is a good activity. I have no problem with people using the latter to give weight to their suggestion. That makes sense. But the former doesn't scan because I have philosophical problems with it. Marsha wasn't, I don't think, deploying the distinction self-consciously. But, whereas one can always construe a person non-philosophically, in a philosophical discussion group I often trend to the latter construal pattern. SA said: I recognize what your saying, I think, but let me know otherwise if it seems I'm off-point on anything. Matt: I'm not sure you got my distinction between the _philosophical_ direct/indirect distinction and the _commonsensical_ direct/indirect distinction. As far as I can tell, when commenting on the philosophical one, you adverted to the common sense distinction which I have no trouble with. This is the unconscious move that I keep wanting to halt by making the distinction between the philosophical and commonsensical in the first place. What you said was agreeable, but not to the point. What you said about "the authority on any experience" was a good description of a context in which the common sense praise of direct experience proves moot, effectively "What if you can't afford a ticket to Tibet?" That, however, is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a distinction in which experience itself, experience qua experience, is divided into two. _Not_ individual experiences, which are sorted out on a case by case basis--an abstract distinction between reality that is experienced directly and reality that is experienced indirectly. Thus, on the view of Pirsig that jives with Dewey, where we are always directly connected to reality, reading a book and going to Tibet are both direct experiences of "reading a book" and "going to Tibet," respectively. This leaves only the common sense distinction between direct/indirect available because, philosophically speaking, we are always and everywhere connected directly with reality. However, in the mystic's philosophical distinction that occurs at the beginning of Lila, where Pirsig talks about words taking you farther away from reality, in ZMM where Pirsig raises his hand in Benares and asks derisively whether the professor really meant by maya that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an illusion--these are examples of the philosophical distinction at work. Language qua language is a barrier between us and reality. When words are anywhere in the vicinity of your experience of reality, you are far from it, which is why you meditate, why you try to still your mind. And there are more variations in the history of philosophy of this distinction, which is a distinction of distance, besides one between direct and indirect experience. Many boggle at being asked to think of a distinction between a philosophical and a commonsensical use of words or ideas, phrases, images, whatnot, sometimes because they've never been asked to, sometimes because denying the distinction is important to them. But to aid understanding, let me try and explain one way of thinking about it--think of the distinction between a philosophical view and a commonsensical view as the difference between a top-down approach and a bottom-up approach. The top-down approach begins in the abstract sky with very simple distinctions between concepts, like experience/reality, Dynamic/static, direct/indirect, words/ideas. Top-downers bring these distinguished concepts to bare on the particulars of our experience in the world only later, to sort out these experiences into different areas. The top-downer sees contradictions and paradoxes in distinctions and concepts, they see problems in their use, because they are able to abstract them and see the concepts in their relation to each other. The bottom-up approach begins on the ground with the brute happenings of everyday life, like rocks, trees, tigers, books, computers, assholes, mothers. Bottom-uppers bring their experience of these happenings up into the abstract air only later, to see how they compare to each other. The bottom-upper sees concepts and distinctions that are boring or not useful, they see no point in their use, because they force the concepts to work in their life, they demand that they pay immediate dividends with the ordering of some particular experiences. A top-downer will approach experience by thinking about experience as a whole, as a concept, experience qua experience. They will wonder if there are different kinds of experience _generally_. A top-downer will wield the analytic knife with skill, and note that the knife cuts into twos easiest. A bottom-upper will approach experience by thinking about particular experiences they've had, particularly experiences that have given them pause, made them think, for some reason, about experience in general. A bottom-upper is skilled at shaving off the top of particular experiences a reflection of more general interest than the particular experience itself. A top-downer picks up the direct/indirect distinction and will attempt to explicate it by using other general concepts, like "ideas" or "words" or "maya," _before_ using it to organize particular experiences. They will try to explain the distinction by telling us _what_ gets in the way of a direct experience, what _specifically but generally_ causes an experience to be indirect. A bottom-upper picks up the direct/indirect distinction and will attempt to explicate it with immediate recourse to an example--whatever the distinction is, this is an example of it. They will try to explain the distinction by giving us a list of direct experiences and indirect experiences. Some general comments on the two approaches: 1) There are no pure cases. On the surface, it'll look like I'm talking about people who deal exclusively first with concepts on the one hand and people who deal exclusively with experiences on the other. The notion that such a thing is possible is an extrapolation of the concept/experience distinction that Kant bequeathed us (another variation of the direct/indirect). But the two are never purely estranged, as might appear possible if you stay too long at the top without going down. And vice versa: it might look like you don't need to talk about concepts at all, that there's an experience and that's just what it is, if you stay too long at the bottom without going up. My notion of "approaches" is that both are legitimate and useful in their places, though different. A top-downer "begins" with abstract concepts, but experiences from their life are what bump a person up into the air to start thinking about them. Likewise, a bottom-upper "begins" with everyday experience s, but concepts are the tools we already use instinctively in negotiating our lives. 2) The two approaches look like the Coleridgean distinction between Platonists and Aristotelians, which is also the difference between Phaedrus and the narrator in ZMM. As well they should, since they are modeled on them, but the inflection I've given them has shifted a bit--another set of labels one might add are "theoretical" and "pragmatic." In the language I would use to berate Platonism, however, my distinction is not between Platonism-as-a-philosophical-position and pragmatism-as-a-philosophical-position. I see Pirsig as going back and forth quite well between the bottom-up and top-down, and we can see how philosophical positions fall out of the practice of the two approaches, but Pirsig's position is that none should--both are practical approaches to life, are _philosophy_, not philosophical positions themselves (so goes my reading of Pirsig). 3) Two paradigmatic cases of the top-down and bottom-up approach might be me and Dan. The approach with which I've explicated top-down/bottom-up has been from the top-down. Dan, on the other hand, might have given descriptions of the practice of various writers, beginning with the example of, say, my practice as a writer. This, I think, might be a good way of reading his post beginning the "What is 'Plains-spoken' to you?" thread, as explicating in his bottom-up way something like my distinction between top-down/bottom-up. He was talking bottom-up about my top-down approach. 4) My distinction between the "philosophical" and the "commonsensical" isn't _simply_ the difference between these two approaches. (Remember, this was just my way of trying to help people begin to think about it.) The way I often frame the "philosophical" and the "commonsensical" is as two different contexts in which we use concepts and think about particular experiences. The former roughly stands in for "the history of philosophy," the latter for "the workaday life I live." The reason I would take the _history_ of philosophy as the context for, roughly, abstract thought is that the history of philosophy is, roughly, the history of abstract thinking. This isn't strictly true--it is more like "the history of philosophy is _a_ history of abstract thinking," but the idea is that the line of thinkers from Parmenides and Plato to Pirsig and Rorty is a line of people thinking abstractly, a line of top-downers, and them arguing with each other over what the problems are with v arious abstract thoughts--it is a history of examples of possible tips and pratfalls for other people, be they top-downers or bottom-uppers. When I say things like "Well, philosophically speaking," I am saying roughly two things at once: both "well, from the context of the history of philosophy" _and_ "well, from the rarefied air of abstract concept manipulation." This might be a conflation that confuses and confutes the things I say, more than it helps with anything, but as I was saying to Krimel in a related fashion, without the context part, abstract concept tinkering can go round and round (which I wouldn't denigrate out of hand, it's just not something I prefer). Matt _________________________________________________________________ Use video conversation to talk face-to-face with Windows Live Messenger. http://www.windowslive.com/messenger/connect_your_way.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_Refresh_messenger_video_042008 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
