Steve gave us "A Narrative of Moral Progress" and said:
With regard to my metanarrative (where I paint a view of moral progress as
better taking into account the needs of more and more beings through the
expansion of the moral imagination through stories that help us see the other
as also your self and their needs as also your own), I invite critics of this
view who ask "but is it true?" to offer an alternative narrative or improvement
upon the one I offered. (I'm sure it can easily be improved upon by others.) In
doing so, I will be be trying to move the conversation back from "but which one
is true?" to "which story is the better story?" because that shift in
conversation away from grounding in philosophical foundations toward new and
better narratives is what my metanarrative is really about.
dmb says:
This is a different narrative than the one Pirsig tells. Again, you're
presenting Rortyism with the implication that his pragmatism is in agreement
with the MOQ. In the MOQ, the metanarrative of moral progress is quite epic by
comparison. How does it go? The physical order of the universe is also the
moral order of the universe, I think. Pirsig traces the history of the term
"Quality" back into the proto-Indo-European language and discovers that he is
not proposing a new idea. It's the oldest idea known to man, he says. So in
this picture, moral evolution and the evolution of the universe are the same
thing. You remember, even a chair is composed of little moral orders, even
subatomic particles express a preference for the better. The evolution of human
morality is understood in a much broader context, a much broader sense of the
word "morality".
I'd also point out that Pirsig spends more than a few pages on the moral
hierarchy of the MOQ and while this is not quite a foundation, Pirsig does
think we can use it to make universal moral claims, like we should ALWAYS
choose the human patient over the microorganisms that threaten her life. He
also uses the levels to recommend the moral shape of society. It's not that
anyone is opposed to telling good stories, but the cultivation of moral
imagination doesn't quite have the same teeth. It's just part of the story, if
you'll forgive the pun.
More specifically, Pirsig's story is about progress being achieved at a great
cost. He tells the tale of rationality and its need to suppress the heart, if
you will. Like civilization itself, this story goes, evolutionary progress
depended upon the taming of the passions and instincts, particularly the
tendency to sex and violence. But this suppression should not be seen as a
necessary and permanent restraint on our savage nature because this suppression
has changed our nature. That's what evolution means, of course. Instead, it was
a necessary phase in a longer story. Now that the "savage beast" has been tamed
it is time to re-claim its vitality and wisdom. Now that the brain has grown,
we want to add the heart back into it again and thereby achieve a wholeness
that eludes modern, Western man.
"In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping,
rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It's been
necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the
emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's
order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of
nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled
from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness,
are a part of nature's order too. The central part. ...We have artists with no
scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no
spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is
ghastly. The time for real reunification of art and technology is really long
overdue. (ZAMM 294)
"He felt that the solution started with a new philosophy, or he was it as even
broader than that - a new spiritual rationality - in which the ugliness and the
loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic technological reason would
become illogical. Reason was no longer to be 'value free.' Reason was to be
subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he would find the cause of
its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our
culture with the tendency to do what is 'reasonable' even when it isn't any
good. That was the root of the whole thing. Right there. I said a long time ago
that he was in pursuit of the ghost of reason. This is what I meant. Reason and
Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other and Quality had
been forced under and reason made supreme somewhere back then." (ZAMM 358)
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