I first gained whatever meager measure of notoriety in the MD from a post many years ago in which I short-sightedly used a religious piety metaphor to develop and layer some views I'd come to hold about Pirsig, philosophical discourse, and practical conversation. People, however, took the metaphor a lot more seriously than I did and some of what I was saying got lost in translation. But the issue I was trying to highlight, and that I continue to come back to frequently, is the interconnection between our philosophies and our conduct, specifically our conduct in engaging other philosophers, and in particular our conduct on the MD.
Then, as now, my attention shifts in this direction when I see hang-ups in present conversations, particularly ones I see as needless. We can draw great patterns in the back-and-forth between major contributors, those whose voice is heard frequently and loudly, and I have done so on many different occasions. I would presently like to focus on a controversy that has floated around Platt for as long as I have been here. Everybody, by now, knows the pattern of Platt's argument: if you deny Absolute Truth, Platt will ask if that truth you just stated is absolute. After watching Platt in conversation for years, it is unclear to me his motivation for asking it. Motivation is very important in handling a conversation because if you don't know why an interlocutor is asking a question, you may perceive the substance of their question wrongly and so offer an answer that is off the point they wished to make. Some participants at the MD make it their business to obscure their motivations, which is their prerogative, but it sometimes makes tedious conversation. What I've seen in the pattern of Platt's conversation--which has the virtue of consistency, making it easier to identify Platt's position--is a certain improvisational quality in relation to his opponent over the question of relativism that has made it difficult, on this question, to see why he's saying anything at all. This has produced frustrations over the years. I came to terms with Platt's position some years ago when I finally saw its overall pattern. Platt's position on truth stems from a specific attitude about the nature of discourse, and specifically of assertion. This position sees an assertion as something that, by its very nature of being an assertion, requires what is asserted to have the status of something that is true for everybody, everywhere, at all times. This position does not require us to believe in a mythical being called "Absolute Truth" that hangs in the sky at right angles to our vision. All it requires is the understanding of assertion that says that "to assert" is to forward a competitor in the marketplace of ideas, and the only non-sophistical reason for asserting one idea over another is because you believe it to be the best idea, i.e. you are betting that this idea will, in the fullness of time, defeat all comers. This view of truth has distant roots in Plato, but its more modern relation is in Kant, which is extended by Peirce, and come back full force in Germany with Jurgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel. In this view, to assert that truth is not absolute in some sense is to assert a position on _assertion_ that denies your very act of asserting it. This is what Habermas called a "performative contradiction": your performance contradicts what you are saying in the performance. Finally understanding the roots of Platt's position, or anyone's for that matter, allows us to engage with it fruitfully. Instead of going back forth about "absolute truth," which is an ambiguous moniker that has a long history of varied philosophical freight being attached to it, a conversation that goes around in circles because everyone gets to just revert to their own understanding of the constellation of terms and ideas that get associated with it, instead of that conversation--which can be fun, but after you've had it a few times you get bored--you can have a conversation that leads to mutual understanding. Dialectical victory over a real, living philosophical opponent is a rare thing. Far more often is it the case that all that can, and should, be hoped for is a mutually shared understanding of the other person's position. Habermas and Richard Rorty fruitfully disagreed over the nature of assertion for years, but they did it fruitfully because they tried desperately to find the core issue at which they were disagreeing and talk about it in a manner that hoped to elicit further enunciation and sophisticated articulation of their own position in relation to this fundamental disagreement. A core philosophical disagreement will extend out in waves over a philosophy until at the limits, it just seems on the surface that the other guy said something wrong or stupid. This is rarely the case, and the principle of charity, a principle of intellectual discourse that begs all sides to construe another's ideas in as favorable light as possible before finally judging them, requires it to never be the case. Platt isn't always the best at articulating his position, but as someone that also has problems in communication, I feel acutely the pain of being inarticulate and assuming a degree of responsibility over misunderstanding. I'm as good a living example of the problems of conversation as they come: I've used metaphors inadvisably; I've made arguments with missing premises--and conclusions; I've written narratives that meander and bird-walk without a point; I still write prosaically enough that it seems like you should be able to understand it, but the content of which is fairly unintelligible for all kinds of reasons, often having to do with the fact that you haven't read enough of the same books as I have. And is that a good reason? "To Read Matt's Posts, You Must Have Done the Following Required Reading: 1) Rorty's Philosophy and the ...." We all have different motivations for coming here, different things we are looking for, and we all have different styles, different voices, different modes of engagement. Some are innocent soul-searchers, some hide in a sea of irony. Some write autobiographically, weaving in examples from their life, some stick to a play of abstract concepts. Some lack good grammar or a spellchecker, some look like they just finished Freshman English. Some look like they hit "Enter" randomly as they write. I don't think there is any right way to communicate, I don't think there is any right way to write. I don't think there is any single thing called "plain spoken" and I don't think we should be quick to judge a certain style as lacking insight or wisdom. Every style is able to convey wisdom, it is just a matter of finding out what. In my tenure at the MD, I've employed just about every rhetorical format, genre, strategy, tactic, technique, gesture and gambit. I've been condescending, sarcastic, conciliatory, polite. I've obfuscated intention, innocently questioned, suggestively probed, quickly damned and disregarded. I've told good jokes, bad jokes, conceptual jokes, joke jokes. I've used commas, colons, semicolons, parentheticals, ellipses, litotes. I've used metaphor, analogy, allegory, alliteration, allusion, sleight of hand, stuff from Aristotle's Rhetoric that I didn't even know I was doing. I've used arguments, made comparisons, told stories, dropped names, created long lists (a practice not done much anymore, since the time of Emerson, when most writings had first been speakings). I've done all these things for different reasons at different times, sometimes self-consciously, sometimes unconsciously and habitually. The only two forms I don't think I have employed (I even recently wrote a poem for Marsha, though it was a sonnet and not the free verse most people write around here) are the dialogue and stream-of-consciousness proem, the former because it requires too much creativity on my part and the latter because I lack the artful ability to mimic the lack of artful ability (some do it so naturally, but it just seems so forced when I do it). I think the main post-it we should tag alongside our computer monitors for when we read MD contributions is "aim for mutual understanding." Good philosophical positions are intractable, which is itself a philosophical position, so let me say to the more practical point--almost all living, breathing philosophers are intractable in their core beliefs. Sometimes we just don't know which beliefs we are holding are core, and philosophy helps elicit that as our understanding of what we take to be important in philosophy, and life, ebbs and flows. But we all know that most of the time, in these conversations, with these conversational partners, there are a lot of feet stuck in the mud, a lot of dug-in trenches. Whenever you encounter one, whenever you think to yourself, "God, that person is just being stubborn about X!", just remember that if someone else is being stubborn about X, that means you are being stubborn, too. The question then is: what do you do now? How do you move forward? Much of the philosophy that occurs here, and with good reason, is what the Greeks called eristic, virtuoso displays of dialectical agility that focus polemically on the current opponent. I think good philosophy should focus on the current person you are talking to, but if it is to have lasting value, it needs to say something to a wider audience than that. If we apply charity to each other's writings, we will make this process easier, as we rise above possible mistakes or indefensible wrong turns to the core matters that, well, matter. We need to ruminate on the best possible version of what a person says, as we are sometimes inarticulate and still searching for what that best possible version is. It is only by really caring, not only in what the other person is going to say, but in what they _want to say_--in more than a dialectical game of "Gotcha!"--that we are going to have quality conversations. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Change the world with e-mail. Join the i’m Initiative from Microsoft. http://im.live.com/Messenger/IM/Join/Default.aspx?source=EML_WL_ChangeWorld 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/
