Ham said to Horse:
My question concerns the reference by you and others in this forum to the
"metaphysical position" of the subject/object relationship. Specifically, what
is metaphysical about it? I'd still appreciate your slant on why Pirsig chose
to posit objective reality (experienced subjectively) as a metaphysical concept.
dmb says:
Pirsig did not choose to posit SOM as a metaphysical concept. He's talking
about the basic assumptions of all Modern philosophers since Descartes. That's
a big part of the reason it doesn't seem like a metaphysical position. It has
become our common sense understanding. So much so, that most people find it
very difficult to accept or even comprehend any alternative even when it is
carefully explained. There are thousands and thousands of posts in the archives
of this forum that testify to this difficulty. But at least you're actually
starting to ask questions.
Positivism, which is one of the purest forms of traditional empiricism is one
of the most clear cut cases of subject-object dualism. At the beginning of
chapter eight in Lila, Pirsig distinguishes traditional empiricism with his own.
"The MOQ subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all
legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about what the
senses provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge gained
trough imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning.
[because valid empirical evidence is limited to sensory experience] They regard
fields such as art, morality, religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable. The
MOQ varies from this by saying that the values of art and morality and even
religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been
excluded for metaphysical reasons. They have been excluded because of the
METAPHYSICAL ASSUMPTIONS that all the universe is composed of subjects and
objects and anything that can't be classified as a subject or an object isn't
real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It is just an
assumption. ... If subjects and objects are held to be the ultimate reality the
n we're permitted only one construction of things - that which corresponds to
the 'objective' world - and all other constructions are unreal."
There is a similar explanation in chapter 5:
"Positivism is a philosophy that emphasizes science as the only source of
knowledge. It sharply distinguishes between fact and value, and is hostile to
religion and traditional metaphysics. It is an outgrowth of empiricism, the
idea that knowledge must come from experience, and is suspicious of any
thought, even a scientific statement, that is incapable of being reduced to
direct observation. [because of the limits of sensory empiricism again.]
Philosophy, as far as positivism is concerned, is limited to the analysis of
scientific language. ... But even then the assertion that metaphysics is
meaningless sounded false to him [Phaedrus] As long as you're inside a logical,
coherent universe of thought you can't escape metaphysics. Logical positivism's
criteria for 'meaningfulness' were pure metaphysics, he thought."
One thing worth noticing about Pirsig's criticism of the positivists is that
they were hostile to metaphysics for metaphysical reasons. He's talking about a
certain kind of blindness on the part of the positivists with respect to their
own basic assumptions. They were so busy asking questions about how to get our
subjective ideas to correspond with the objective reality, they forgot to ask
questions about those questionable questions. Finally, at the end of chapter
29, Pirsig identifies his own empiricism with James's radical empiricism,
wherein, "subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience.
Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something
more fundamental which he [James] described as 'the immediate flux of life
which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual
categories'. In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective
thought, such as between consciousness and content, subject and objec
t, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure
Experience [DQ] cannot be called either physical or psychical: it logically
precedes this distinction."
This is how subjects and objects are demoted from being the two basic
metaphysical categories that make experience possible to secondary concepts
which derived from a more primary experience.
There are lots of reasons to attack these metaphysical assumptions. Pirsig
talks a lot about the cultural problems that grow out of attitudes of
objectivity and attitudes that denigrate subjectivity. In his essays on radical
empiricism, James explains how SOM has been a source of many fake problems
throughout the history of philosophy. But the basic idea here is that subjects
and object are just abstractions, not the actual shape of the universe. We
believe in them like the ancients believed in the gods. It's practically
unthinkable to question them at first. But then you get used to the idea. And
then you start to see why SOM is such a problem and then you start to see why
it's a good idea to say they're just ideas and demote them to that secondary
rank.
Don't get me wrong. They (subjects and objects) are ideas derived from
experience and function pretty well in experience most of the time. But when
you're asking certain philosophical questions, that is not one of those times.
This is not one of those times.
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