dmb said to Matt: ...I think these guys are emphasizing the non-cognitive, pre-reflective mode of experience not because they think it is more real but because it has traditionally been ignored and excluded by philosophy. Pirsig traces it back to the Platonic demand for intelligibility, the one that tried to turn truth into a fixed, rigid thing. So I see Pirsig's distinction between static and dynamic as a move against Platonism and a rehabilitation of the non-conceptual "knowledge" he denigrated at every opportunity.
DM replied: That seems OK to me. But Rorty and Matt are right to question whether experience is a form of knowledge, as it is not linguistic or propositional. But DMB and David Hildebrand are right to say that Rorty (in opposition to bad Dewey, Rorty also has a good Dewey) underplays experience. Experience and experiment are key to life and wisdom and practical undertakings and science. Experience does not give us certain knowledge but it is the subject matter of knowledge, it is what our knowledge is about. ... dmb now says: Well, that's just it. As I understand Pirsig's diagnosis, Rorty's emphasis on language and inter-subjective agreement has the effect of continuing one of the most objectionable features of Platonism. Plato's demand for intelligibility is the move that subordinates quality to intellectual truth, to propositional truth. That's one of the main reasons I take Matt's kind of anti-Platonism as a kind of Platonism. Apparently, Rorty was not concerned with that particular move but for Pirsig this is the main problem with Platonism. You know, intellect as the usurper. Pirsig doesn't exclude cognitive knowledge, of course, but he makes it subordinate the aesthetic, to the dynamic, to direct experience. The relationship between mysticism and metaphysics, as Pirsig explains in addressing the objections of mystics, shows the nature of this anti-Platonic move as well as anything. In other words, there is nothing new about the questioning whether experience counts. You gotta remember that Plato was an aristocrat who thought working with his hands was beneath him, who thought artists were dangerous and should be banned from his utopia. Dewey and Pirsig, by contrast, celebrate the skillful mechanic as an artist and point out that our intellectuals are always derived from direct, everyday experience. For classical pragmatists, truth is a species of the good. Truth is valuable to the extent that it successfully guides future action. That action CAN include making propositional statements and the search for philosophical agreement but painting a canvas and getting out of bed in the morning is action too. _________________________________________________________________ E-mail for the greater good. Join the i’m Initiative from Microsoft. http://im.live.com/Messenger/IM/Join/Default.aspx?source=EML_WL_ GreaterGood 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/
