dmb said to Matt:
...I can show you an example of what I'm complaining about, one that you posted
this month and in this thread. You said to Steve, "I've always had difficulty
seeing how the direct/indirect distinction doesn't reproduce the problems of
the experience/reality distinction. " This is not a direct claim that the DQ/sq
distinction simply is Platonism. It's more cautious and tentative than that,
but it amounts to the same thing.
Matt replied:
...I do not think they at all "amount to the same thing." ...in an earlier
age (when I started writing at the MD) I began by parroting, e.g., the mantras
that mirror imagery will lead inexorably to Platonism, I've come to think that
the "inexorable" is exactly wrong. I've come to see, over the years through my
experience here, and reading other philosophers, and reading more Rorty, that
the importance of the pragmatist slogan that "beliefs are habits of action" is
that metaphors can create fly-bottles, but it is philosophers who fly in them.
Our concepts can create rice-traps, but its philosophers who stick their hands
in. And, in fact, careful handling of rice-traps and fly-bottles can
successfully avoid traps. ...I'd given off the impression that some metaphors
and analogies are _inherently_ bad. Nothing is inherently bad, I've come to
learn (Dewey tells us this).
dmb says:
I understand the difference between an outright accusation and the expression
of "difficulty" or "doubt". But as far as I'm concerned the question is whether
or not you "get" the direct/indirect distinction (DQ/sq. In that respect, the
difference between an outright accusation of Plationism and an expression of
doubt about how it escapes Platonism is only a difference in the level of
commitment on your part. Either way, it would be my task to show you how and
why it is wrong to treat Pirsig or James as if they were trapped in bottle like
Wittgenstein's fly. Either way, it would be my task to show you that the
direct/indirect distinction is itself a form of anti-Platonism.
You're using the anti-Platonism of Wittgenstein (and Rorty) against the
anti-Platonism of our radical empiricists, James and Pirsig. If Goodman is
right, Wittgenstein got his anti-Platonism from James in the first place, at
least in part.
In "WITTGENSTEIN AND WILLIAM JAMES", Russell B. Goodman "argues that James
exerted a distinctive and pervasive positive influence on Wittgenstein's
thought. He shows that both share commitments to anti-foundationalism, to the
description of the concrete details of human experience, and to the priority of
practice over intellect", Amazon says. Simon Critchley says this book,
"establishes categorically the influence of William James on Wittgenstein's
work" and Wesley Cooper says, "this study ..reveals a more complex and rich
relationship than has been supposed."
William James was not the "fly" that Wittgenstein had in mind. He was thinking
of super-Platonists like Frege, the founding father of analytic philosophy. The
flies he had in mind were those who thought mathematics and logic were the
royal roads to Truth. (He also happened to be a right-wing asshole, but that's
beside the point.) Bertrand Russell took Wittgenstein to be inventing something
like a logically pure language with which to philosophically examine the
misleading metaphors contained in ordinary language and of course the Vienna
Circle went round and round thinking they could scrub away all the metaphysical
fictions and get down to the facts in this way. Those were the flies he had in
mind, the various kinds of rationalists. The rationalists, going all the way
back to Plato, were James's targets too. He talked about this kind of
philosophy in terms of "vicious intellectualism" and his radical empiricism was
essentially designed to rule out all metaphysical fictions or
trans-experiential entities. The notion that reality was logical through and
through, James thought, was a kind of religious faith, an otherworldly pretense
that denigrates the reality we actually live. Wittgenstein's fly in a bottle
analogy is aimed at James's enemies, and cannot rightly be used against James
or Pirsig. For one thing, neither one of them is guilty of using unexamined
metaphors and it's not right to treat these artists as if they were simply
"ordinary language" philosophers.
ZAMM tells the tale of a rhetoric teacher who discovers that the Sophists were
teaching Quality and rhetoric was the form they chose to teach it. He'd been
doing it right all along, he realizes. I think it's very important to realize
that Pirsig's use metaphors and analogies and his choice to present the MOQ in
the literary form is directly related to the substance and content of the MOQ.
Thanks to scholars like Charlene Siegfried, James's use of explosive metaphors
and literary style is also designed to defy abstract logic-chopping in favor of
a more human-centered approach. James and Pirsig both studied science as young
men and they could do it well but people used to joke that Henry James's novels
were better psychology than William's textbook and that William's philosophy
was more literary than Henry's books. Everyone around here already knows how
Pirsig mixes philosophy and literature, with plenty of side dishes in
anthropology, history, science and religion. It hardly m
akes sense to treat these guys as if they were anything like the rationalist,
the Platonists or the logical positivists. I think it's important to understand
that the static/dynamic distinction (direct/indirect) is already opposed to all
those flies in their bottles.
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