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.
DM: Spot on, Plato gives us the whole notion of knowledge split off from
practical ends and purposes, people still learn pure maths
and physics as if there is something special about having no reason for
learning, no purpose or end. And overcoming this helps to
overcomethe relativism that Rorty gets caught up with. One form of knowledge
is not incomparable toanother because you can
compare what outcomes, ends, lives, possibilities each approach gives you.
What do we want and what is the best way to achieve it?
Nothing relative about that as soon as you get going,working, doing, active
rather inactive and contemplating.
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