DMB said: Dewey, James, Pirsig, and Heidegger ...they're all concerned 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 replied: This is, I think, the true, but minor, difference. Rorty, and I, get less excited about the notion of philosophy changing the world. "Cultural illness" is language we both would have a distaste for, but the notion of it being a cultural problem--a cultural _battle_--is right. His view is, basically, that politics is the best route (though certainly not the only) to effect change in this regard. At the end of his life, he liked to refer to philosophy as a kind of cultural politics. It's a temperamental difference, probably. Rorty and I both think that many of the problems in the world stem from economic issues and that cleaning that up is the main precursor to paradise. ... But, you are no doubt right: I'm tone-deaf to mysticism. Not as much as some, but I don't get a whole lot out of the approach or the tradition, though I've gotten pretty good at talking about it without talking about it. Is that license to ignore some of the things I say about Pirsig? Maybe. It is all cost-benefit analysis. Or as the Greeks would say: phronesis. dmb says: I get the impression that we aren't even talking about the same thing here. I mean, its not like economic and political solutions would compete with the solutions offered by mysticism. They don't really address the same problems. Apparently, the tone-deafness extends to the problem for Rorty. He is one of the contributors to an anthology titled "Religion After Metaphysics". This is where he paints the demise of religion as a matter of losing a political battle and makes a case that religious people can't rightly participate in the formation of public agreements, the public dialogue. He says in a footnote, "we anti-clericalists who are also leftists in politics have a further reason for hoping that institutional religion will eventually disappear. We think other-worldliness dangerous, as John Dewey put it, 'Men have never fully used the powers they posses to advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the work t hey are responsible for doing'." I agree with this in almost every way. Pirsig paints the conflict between science and religion as a political battle too. His anti-theistic streak made him suspicious of William James at first and it led him to attack Bradley's idealism for the same reason. But Pirsig also openly adopts James's radical empiricism. Dewey is not only a radical empiricist as a philosophical position but he also personally had a mystical experience - in Oil City Pennsylvania, of all places. See, the thing is, the attitude that recoils at other-worldliness, that embraces progressive politics and takes a dim view of religion is perfectly consistent radical empiricism and the sort of mysticism I'm talking about here. In fact, James's emphasis on counting the relations between things as real as the things themselves wasn't just aimed at closing the gap between subjects and objects. He said that ignoring the conjunctive relations would open a hole through which all sorts of metaphysical fictions will pour. James thought he was closing off the possibility of other-worldliness. Thus he excluded anything that can't be known in actual experience, to make a difference in actual experience. (With the flipside being that all experience must count as real.) There is quite a lot of agreement here, even between Rorty and me. But it seems he never saw a place for or the possibility of a natural spirituality or of a religion based on experience. This wouldn't bother me if it only amounted to a lack of interest and a failure to comment. But my conversations with you in general and more particularly this essay from the anthology and a paper he wrote attacking Heidegger as a Romantic and a Platonist have all led me to the conclusion that this blindspot causes certain distortions and misinterpretations. I'm trying to think of a way to characterize the problem but its just so big. As Heidegger paints it, we have forgotten ourselves and our way of being in the world is such that everything is just an object for a subject. He thought the modern technological world was a Cartesian nightmare come true. Pirsig is not so grandiose but we hear lots of echos of this in his attack on the fake bunny chase, the terrible isolation and alienation, the divorce from nature that comes from gaining power and control over it, etc.. Unlike Heidegger, he finds the Buddha in the gears of a motorcycle. The problems are many, but basically we're talking about the cultural and practical effects of SOM. We're talking about the downside of something nobody wants to give up and we're talking about the kind of problem that can only be solve by a whole new way of seeing things. I mean, if the problem is metaphysical then the solution but be also. I was surprized to learn that Dewey and Heidegger basicall y agree with Pirsig on the solution, on what Pirsig calls the code of art. Or as Heidegger would say: phronesis. _________________________________________________________________ Keep your kids safer online with Windows Live Family Safety. http://www.windowslive.com/family_safety/overview.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_Refresh_family_safety_052008 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/
