Matt said: I absolutely believe that Pirsig's motivation in developing a systematic metaphysics was intended to rebut charges of relativism. I think the motivation was misguided, because I don't think you need a system to rebut relativism. On the other hand, the system itself doesn't mean a devolution into absolutism, as in the past I've often seemed to intimate. I still think it's _suspicious_, but I think Pirsig's better angels were looking in a much different direction than Plato's.
dmb says: Well I'm glad to learn that your Platonic suspicions about Pirsig have mellowed. I recently read some Rorty for my philosophy of religion course and was tickled to see him voice the same Platonic suspicions against Heidegger. This tickled me because there is no doubt that Heidegger fully intended to overturn the whole metaphysical tradition of the West and loved the pre-Socratic philosophers just like Pirsig, expresses a Western form of Taoism just like Pirsig, thought art would save us from the scientific world view just like Pirsig, attacked Descartes and SOM just like Pirsig. I mean, its pretty clear where you got your suspicions. It would be relatively easy to transfer Rorty's criticisms to the MOQ. But even there, I thought he was misreading Heidegger. And I think it is related to a confession he made about his attitude toward religion. Called himself "unmusical". Said he just didn't get it and hoped it would be relegated to a private matter and then hopefully, in time, it would all be forgotten. If it weren't for philosophical mysticism and such, I'd tend to agree with him about religion. But I'm thinking that when it comes to mysticism he is not just unmusical. He's downright tone-deaf. This is why he tend to view guys like Pirsig and Heidegger as Platonists. Apparently, he didn't know what else to make of it. Which brings us to... Matt continued: The real disagreement is on the importance of what James called radical empiricism. As I understand the issue now, you, Pirsig, late James, and middle Dewey think it is an important piece, without which damage is done. Myself, Rorty, early James, and late Dewey think it isn't so important, more of an add-on. Because if we construe "radical empiricism" as a non-Platonic description of our relation to the world, then there would seem to have to be a placeholder for that in neopragmatists (as I think there is) because a "description of our relation to the world" is just too general a notion for anybody to not have one, let alone a philosopher. That still leaves the question of how they match up. As I see it generally, James didn't like empiricism because it denied the reality of the relations between particulars. So he made it more radical by suggesting that relations are real, too, but I think in doing so he took out everything that made empiricism an interesting philosophical thesis. dmb says: Hmmm. What is the neopragmatist's view of "our relation to the world"? I'd sincerely like to know what that is. Basically, what I find in Dewey, James and Pirsig is a version of Heidegger's being-in-the-world. Instead of being a subjective mind encountering an external objective reality, we are always already situated in a pre-reflective world. We see a version of this in James's description of pure experience as pre-reflective. Dewey used a wide variety of descriptions for this already-always-situated. His insistence that the initial experience was no less real than the cognitions that follows, his naturalistic description of the organism AND the environment as a whole system and even his ideas about art and the aesthetic experience, the commentators insist, can't be properly understood except in terms of radical empiricism. The move James made, to insist that the relations between things be accounted for, is an interesting way to get the job done. Notice how the relations act as a glue. They provide a continuity to experience or rather including the relations is a way to recognize the continuity in experience. In his deceptively folksy example he walks to a building he has in mind. He's trying to show how so-called subjective ideas and objective realities are NOT set over against each other with some epistemic gap between them. They are joined in a series of experiences, a continuous flow. Sure, there is a difference. Imaginary water won't douse a real fire and real water won't necessarily douse an imaginary fire, but these are phenomenological or qualitative distinctions, not metaphysical categories. Heidegger's complaint about Western metaphysics was that Being has always been understood in terms of beings. If I understand it, he's saying that existence has always been understood in terms of things or entities, what Pirsig would call the metaphysics of substance. It seems "Being", for Heidegger, was not just raw existence but more like a particular mode of being, a way of taking the world. This would be like a grandiose version of Pirsig's SOM glasses. He says something like, "being is that on the basis of which all things are intelligible, the basis on which things are always already known to us. In that sense, our being is our way of seeing the world, our way of seeing everything that makes up our world. In Heidegger's terms this is our basic familiarity with the world, the way we know how to use thing like rooms and hammers and language. It is this sense in which Pirsig's Quality is direct everyday experience. Like Pirsig, he thought there was more than one way to cut reality up and that in fact our way of being changed from time to time. The earth supports many worlds, but not all at the same time. Anyway, his complaint about our own time was ruled by a technological mode of being, which turns everything into an object for a subject. It was a way to criticize everything from consumerism to scientific materialism and everyone from Plato to Husserl. He thought our world was Descartes world come to life and suggested that art might be the only way out. It provides a clearing of this conceptual framework in the way it disrupts and defies our expectations. He thought we had to think in a whole new way, a poetic way, in a "clearing", an openness to being. Following a hunch, I discovered that, yes, this "clearing" can be fruitfully compared to meditation and all that Zennish no-mind stuff. John Caputo does an interesting comparison of Heidegger and Meister Eckhart but the comparisons to Eastern thought work better because of their non-theistic tendencies. Maybe that's too much info. The point is simply that they all share a notion that there is an important non-conceptual mode of experience that has been dismissed and ignored for various reasons and that recognizing is important, also for various reasons. But they're all more or less convinced that its a cure for a kind of cultural illness. Yes, the notion of being always already in the world is going to effect epistemological issues but I think they're all concern with the state of our civilization and the quality of our lives. Rorty is no less concerned, I'm sure. But I think he's tone deaf in this area. It just sounds like Platonism to him. Or religion, if there's a difference. Matt said: Concurrently (but later), in analytic philosophy you have a series of philosophers attacking empiricism for having certain dogmas that are unsustainable. I think the two series dovetail, which is why I think if you are looking for a metaphysical description of our relation to the world that fits where James' radical empiricism does, one needs to look at Sellars' "psychological nominalism." I don't think the "linguistic turn" was any big deal at all--I don't think it was great like the logical positivists did, nor do I think it was the devil like recalcitrant metaphysicians (of which there is a rising tide of in contemporary philosophy). It was just a shift in terminology, and in that sense both sides were wrong. dmb says: Okay, maybe I'll go look up "psychological nominalism", but I'm extremely skeptical of the analytic approach. Tastes like math to me. These are among the tone-deafest philosophers when it comes to the sort of stuff I was just explaining. Some of those guys made a career out of mocking Heidegger. Maybe its just a matter of temperament but I think this amounts to a logical analysis of poetry, an autistic critique of art. I don't understand language to be a logical thing and think its fundamentally wrong to expect it to conform to formal logic. I can see how that approach might develop some important tools, but language much bigger and deeper more mysterious than any such tools. But, I have to admit that my distaste for the analytic philosophers has left me in the dark about them. Foolishly perhaps, I've decided its not worth the time or effort to find out. _________________________________________________________________ Give to a good cause with every e-mail. Join the i’m Initiative from Microsoft. http://im.live.com/Messenger/IM/Join/Default.aspx?souce=EML_WL_ GoodCause 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/
