Hi Ron, Matt said: My feeling about deep issues in Pirsig interpretation and philosophy is that at some point, the level of articulation needed moves beyond what the MD is capable of handling. In other words, I'm suggesting that the discussion group format is too small to handle the deep fight/arguments that would be needed to move the conversation forward. I take that to be the serious issue involved.
Ron said: Not sure how you mean too small. I think if we can be clear on a Particular paradigm of a discussion as you stated then it would decrease The gumption traps. I question if the format is too small but rather The participants capacity of willingness to establish a criteria And paradigm before getting so involved. That way when one participant wants to take the conversation to A different paradigm, it will not conflict in meaning and cause a gumption Trap in the conversation. Matt: I actually meant "small" in a kind of literal way. You're right, Ron, about criteria, but I might be the most egregious dodger of criteria. The reason I am is because, for the most part, I'm usually arguing on the wrong ground, other people's ground that I don't want to be on and I see as slipping down towards places I don't want to go, and so most of my arguments at first engage with the terms of the other person, and eventually I start arguing that the terms the arguments are stated in need to be changed. Those are two different conversations: "X using Y terms/criteria" and "should we use Y to discuss X?" I receive a lot of flak for hi-jacking conversations (which I never really have in mind, just interjections that people choose to follow along on), but I think philosophy can only function with a balance of both. But with the post format, you usually don't have a lot of space for a good balancing act. So, I do want to balance the virtues of both criteria-following and criteria-dodging. Some no doubt find it nastily ironic that the language of criteria-following flowed out of my mouth, considering my dodgey past. I simply find it ironic. After all, I was technically just talking about the importance of criteria-enunciating. I've always thought we need both, we need articulations of goals and purviews as a first step, we need people to follow purviews along, we need people to wander in the other direction. At its root, it is a distinction between action and contemplation, between opening your mouth and thinking twice about what you are about to say. We _need_ both. I'm just pretty handy with the dodging, let's-defer-the-conversation-a-little-further-down-the-line-until-we-get-better-terms half (which is my ad nauseum anti-Platonism) and it is easier to do in the small space we are allowed. When I say "small," I partly mean that we don't have the literal space, because there is a cap on how big a post you can send into the MD-bounce address. But there are other impingements on the size of what we send--the speed of response of conversations here means that if you don't respond in a timely fashion, the conversation will have move passed you. You can always trail back, but sometimes what a person writes is very tuned to the rhetorical conditions it is responding to: if they change, sometimes your point loses all of its color, or becomes different and bad. (Have you ever read something you wrote when you were angry later when you weren't? Have you ever seen video/audio of Howard Dean's 2004 campaign cheer? Rhetorical conditions can change _everything_.) If you have a deadline for writing, then you also have a deadline for thinking things through, for honing an argument, for reflecting on a position or yourself to see what you position is or what you believe. In this case, "small" means a cap on how much energy you pack into something. (It is a joke that I'm really long-winded, but I'm partly so long-winded because I only have so much time to craft: a process that includes _weeding out_.) Speed is bad for Socratic soul-searching, though it is good for Socratic debate (which is why Socrates gets made fun of in Plato's Gorgias--because the rules of the game _he_ wants to play are designed so that he can attain victory, not because those are the only rules to the game). We need Socratic debate _and_ Socratic examination. What I've been suggesting for years is that people flex the opportunities created by the existence of the MoQ.org Essay Forum a bit more often than they do. Writing an essay is a much different experience than writing a post. I think we need both kinds of experience to hone our ideas to the best that they can be. The trouble with conversation, the trouble with dialectical debate as we have here and as we get in the Platonic dialogues, is that sometimes, you really do need the other person to shut up so that you can think, you really do need to have an extended monologue without interruption to explore yourself the position you're developing (which in some cases are synonymous with deeply held beliefs). Socrates--the character--gets hit in the Gorgias because the elenchus, or dialectic, was his debating style. This is his famous kind of cross-examination way of talking. He gets you to state a definition of a term, and then asks you questions about it, and then collages your answers together into a contradiction. The Sophist characters that he is tearing to shreds in the Gorgias call him out on it--he smiles and says, go ahead, make your pretty speeches. I think Plato included that bit because Socrates--the person--was ripped on by others for his methods because cross-examination was the only thing he did in real life (unlike in Plato's dialogues, where he does much else), and he's casting a wink to them. Socrates denigrates the speech-form--and good scholarship has it that his speech to defend himself in court (ya' know, before he drank the hemlock) sucked a lot of ass--but _Plato is amazing at it_. In this rendering of the Platonic/Sophist antithesis, which is often the Platonist/anti-Platonist antithesis, Pirsig being an arch-antiPlatonist, I'm suggesting--just as Plato _knew_ but could not acknowledge--that we need both rhetoric and dialectic. Or, to use Pirsig's revaluation of the dialectic/rhetoric antithesis (whereby _everything_ is birthed from rhetoric), we need both long speeches and cross-examinations. When I say that I wish people took the time to write their thoughts into essays more often, when I suggest that the essay form is an indispensable tool for us amateur philosophers, us Pirsig-enthusiasts, I'm saying that the ability to give a long speech is a needed skill to be taken seriously on the open market of ideas. We should not be like Socrates and suck at it--life may not be in the balance for us, but our ideas are, be they Pirsig's, or your's, or someone else's. And for God sake--don't be like Socrates and turn the suck into a virtue: Socrates going down in a blaze of glory _on principle_, the principle of long-speeches being bullshit and cross-examination being the fountainhead. The irony of Plato is the irony of a disciple refusing to acknowledge that his master was wrong, and using the tools of wrongness to establish its wrongness. That is why "sophist" means "spinner of lies" rather than "teacher of wisdom." Plato's blindness has proved all of ours. The point is--writing a good post is (maybe: _can be_) much different than writing a good essay. If a person thinks otherwise--I wonder if we perhaps have different processes for writing. Because in a post, you are responding to a person in real time (for the most part). In an essay, there is no conversation partner--you have to, pretty much, do all of the talking. In the MD, you get to take a pause, bounce off of other's, catch your breath, _breathe_. In an essay, you gotta' deliver it all--on this analogy--in one breath, by yourself: so you better know what you're saying ahead of time. And saying everything at once changes everything. Matt p.s. Ya' know, I didn't plan on that--sometimes it amazes me how everything I start turns into a thing about Plato. _________________________________________________________________ Now you can invite friends from Facebook and other groups to join you on Windows Live™ Messenger. Add now. https://www.invite2messenger.net/im/?source=TXT_EML_WLH_AddNow_Now 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/
