Krimel said to dmb:
Yeah, it was really funny to hear you expounding on Pirsig's leading edge of
the train on the track metaphor while discussing James' essay that explicitly
condemned all such metaphors.
dmb says:
James condemned all train metaphors? That's weird. Why would he do that? Since
James himself uses images of continuous motion or a leading edges, I have to
assume you've badly misread something. Go ahead. Dish it up. Splain yourself.
Krimel said:
... when you claim an idea as original when someone else has stated it 100
years earlier and richer detail that is just sloppy.
dmb says:
You misconstruing the point. To say they arrived at the same ideas
independently is not to say Pirsig's idea was original. In fact, it rules out
that possibility. I'm not saying that James was "original" either. The point is
simply that they are extremely simpatico. This is unremarkable most of the time
because such close philosophical affinities usually involve a thinker and her
followers or the schools of thought that follow from his work. But here we have
a case of two thinkers developing their ideas without any influence from each
other and yet landing on the same spot. It's worth mentioning that,
historically speaking, American Pragmatism was all but dead and buried during
the period when ZAMM was written and published and the current revival began
just around the time Lila was published. Pirsig had his own reasons for
dismissing James too, but the fashions of the time were enough to make a
dismissal understandable, even justifiable. And it turns out that James isn't
qui
te the Victorian defender of theism that Pirsig took him for.
Krimel said:
I have not read Rorty nor have I seen anything to suggest that you have either.
dmb says:
Really? There is a paper called "Clash of the Pragmatists" on Ant's site. Rorty
plays the villain and is quoted extensively. It's been there for over three
years. Rorty was assigned reading at least three times in various courses and
he'll appear quite a bit in my thesis too. There are lots of his writings that
I haven't read, but it just not plausible to say I've read no Rorty. And I've
read a lot of pragmatists who write about Rorty. For some reason, a lot more
fun than reading Rorty himself.
Krimel said:
I am pretty sure he would take offense at your attempt to use his [James] name
to justify ignoring the literature on neuroscience.
dmb says:
What are you talking about? The James fans I mentioned [Antonio Dimasio at
Princeton and Eugene Taylor at Harvard] are both excited about the application
of James's ideas to what happening in neuroscience. Your accusation must be
directed at my evil twin, who goes around saying the very opposite of whatever
I say.
To accuse you of reductionism is not to dismiss neuroscience. It simply doesn't
follow. If you think it follows, then you don't understand what reductionism is
or you don't understand how logic works. I suspect the former because you say
things like this...
Krimel said:
I don't think you can understand much about language or culture without
understanding their function as natural processes. Since they arise from
biological processes those processes are relevant at least as starting points.
James would not agree with your position either he was the chief advocate for
looking at the function behavior and language play in promoting human survival.
He explicitly brought Darwinian agreements into the study of psychology and one
of his lasting contributions to the field is within evolutionary psychology.
dmb says:
My position against reductionism certainly does not include a claim that
biological processes are irrelevant. This is the kind of construction that
makes me believe that you don't understand what "reductionism" means, what the
problem is. To say that culture can't be explained in biological terms is not
to say biology is irrelevant. Obviously!
Also, my hunch about James has been confirmed. Maybe you remember how you'd pit
James's psychology against him radical empiricism? Anyway, there is a very good
reason why James says things in the former that he would not say in the latter
and it is just as I suspected. When James wrote his psychology book, it was
from the point of view of positive science and from within SOM. Doubts crept in
during the long process but he put them aside. The book project raised many
questions for James and we see their resolution taking shape in his last works,
such as the essays in radical empiricism and a pluralistic universe. James the
scientist became James the philosopher. You like to quote the former against my
quotes of the latter as if James himself did not alter his position. That's
another parallel between he and Pirsig. Science raised questions for Pirsig and
that's what led him to philosophy as well.
dmb asked some rhetorical questions:
Are butterflies democratic or are they ruled by monarchs? What god does the
Mantis pray to?
Krimel replied:
Again not especially social nor would have a large brain to house a complex
nervous system serve them very well in their biological niches. They don't do
those things because they don't need them to survive. We do them because we do.
dmb says:
We need prayer and kings to survive? See, this is the problem with
reductionism. Survival is a biological imperative, worship and political
hierarchies are not very well understood if they are seen as tools for
survival. That's what I mean in saying the social level has a different
purpose. When these are confused you get things like social Darwinsim, where
the laws of the jungle are applied to the job market or politics. Just as one
might suspect, these leads to brutality and suffering. It's not just bad in
theory, you know?
Krimel said:
... few in the field take Freud's explanations particularly seriously anymore
and haven't for decades. I think that means you should study him more.
dmb says:
That's a ridiculous claim. Freud was assigned reading in MOST of my classes and
there are still a million Freudian psychoanalysts. Pretty much literally, a
million of 'em. Granted, the field has advanced since Freud himself was
writing, but that's true of Marx, Darwin, Einstein or any other ground breaker.
Where did you get the idea that he's no longer taken seriously?
How many Freudian psychoanalysts does it take to change a lightbulb?
It takes two. One to stab the father (oops), I mean grab the ladder, and one to
screw in the mother (oops), I mean lightbulb.
The existence of Freudian slips seems like a sound scientific doctrine,
especially when you give it a medical name like "parapraxism", but the idea is
just not testicle.
Krimel said:
It may "seem" that way to you but that is largely because you don't understand
it at all, have not attempted to look at what is being said and you seem
genetically incapable of straying outside your comfort zone. But to paint this
"romanticism" as somehow moral or philosophically justifiable is just a form of
self delusion.
dmb says:
Your complaints are too vague for me to know what you're talking about, what it
is you think I don't understand. The other 90% of that was about the same. But
your comments make one thing perfectly clear; you're a dick. I don't think your
snarky bullshit is cute or clever or respectable in any way. You're just a
dick. You're a grandfather, for Christ's sake. What the hell is wrong with you?
Seriously, grow up.
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