Hi Paul, I think we've reached rapprochement on all points in play, because when you say, "If I'd said the observer-external world distinction is valuable, would you have challenged me on it?" I'd have to say, "No. I wouldn't have." The meaning behind my initial query was to know precisely what was being valued--if there was something philosophically contentious being attributed historical efficacy--and to express my unhappiness with that particular Pirsigian habit. Since the subject/object distinction is such a useful pedagogical and conversational tool (by which I mean, with other philosophers), however, I doubt we can part with it just yet, but if Pirsig's optimism about his redescriptions is right, it should mean we can leave it behind us while replacing it with a series of other ones (in order to weed out the pernicious philosophical theses and conundrums).
I still find it an interesting historical question, as to whether something irredeemably bad (like as we treat the A/R distinction in philosophical discourse), played a _necessary_ historical role in the creation of our current epoch. Not just sufficient, but some argument to the effect that there is no other way we could be our Good Selves now if we hadn't passed through the fire of that Evil. But it doesn't seem that you're willing to make precisely that argument (yet, maybe). Paul said: I don't think it's as obvious as you suggest that other animals and Hagar make/made external world-observer distinctions but I don't have the capacity to substantiate my Capricious Gods Worldview, although I have a few comments to make, for your consideration One is that the mythos Hagar lived in may have been one where his thoughts were not his own as our mythos would have it but were the gods telling him what to do. I'm thinking of something like Julian Jaynes's thesis as a reference. The other is that we tend to think that people inside a different mythos experience the same things as us but just think differently about them but if you follow something like Owen Barfield's idea of original participation you will find a very different way of looking at the history of human experience. I think Pirsig's understanding of the mythos shares some of the conclusions reached by these theories. Matt: This is a good point to make. When I wrote the passage you're responding to here I had the idealism of Pirsig's discourse on Western ghosts (in ZMM, Ch. 3) in the back of my mind. What I've come to think is that that idealism, as it is stated, needs serious modulation. That, essentially, we do not want to be that paradoxical, and that it curbs nothing of our philosophical radicalness to say that, sure, gravity existed before Newton. What is necessary for my argument that Hagar and animals made external-world/observer distinctions in their behavior in the world is an implicit/explicit distinction and a doing/saying distinction. (I've been taught these maneuvers by Brandom.) What this allows us to do is say that though Hagar would _say_ that his thoughts are not his own but the Gods whispering in his ear as Jaynes suggests, what he is _doing_ is behaving as if there is a world that is causally independent of his wishes and desires that he observes and acts causally upon with his body. If he wasn't _doing_ the latter, we would probably say his lifeform wouldn't have survived, since we wish and desire for all kinds of things that, if we behaved as if they were true, we'd have snuffed ourselves out. This might seem like a really convenient argument to make, and it is in a sense. But it's part of a larger, radical shift in philosophical thinking, of which the idealism that is coordinate, say, with Benjamin Whorf, Owen Barfield, and Thomas Kuhn's (later regretted) talk of "living in different worlds" to describe the experience of paradigm shifts--that these idealisms all played important roles in moving the philosophical plate tectonics, but that they ultimately need modification. The main thing I want to deny as a parallel to the Hagar argument is that I want (or need) to hold the culturally imperialistic thesis that "people inside a different mythos experience the same things as us but just think differently about them." The key term here is _experience_: I want to radically affirm that every spatialtemporal node experiences the world differently from every other node. (Call these nodes, "centers of pattern gravity.") However, while that disposes of what we might call experiential arrogance, I would also like to say that the _world_ every node is experiencing is the same. Since this seems to reintroduce the arrogance, let me suggest that "world" is pretty close to a non-thing (as I said of "reality" before), and that while we may all experience the same world, the _things_ we find in it are relative to the lifeways our mythos has taught us. And it is that last bit that I think is the truth in idealism. For language-using creatures, one of the most important ways in which we diversify our experience of the world is in slicing it up differently. (Barfield's original participation, though, strikes me as too much like Platonic anamnesis. But it's been a while since I've read Saving the Appearances.) If you were to work further in this area of thought, and wanted to take the above line of thought seriously (to rebut or whathaveyou), the following items were important to me in rethinking my opinion about the idea of living in a mythos and living in different worlds. 1) Donald Davidson's "On the Very Idea of Conceptual Schemes" - this is the major argument against the very idea of living in different worlds 2) Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato - an important piece of early scholarship on method (of how to ascertain what concepts a worldview is using when all you have is their written documents) and the first great argument about the relevance of the orality/literacy distinction to the creation of theoretical philosophy 3) Bernard Williams' Shame and Necessity - a fascinating tour de force on a number of philosophical themes, recuperating the Greeks and their distance and proximity. Most important on this issue is Williams' methodological remarks about how to understand the past. His comments about Bruno Snell should be applied to Havelock to see what finally shakes out. (He also mentions Jaynes as an extension of the Snell tradition.) 4) Daniel Dennett's "Julian Jaynes' Software Archeology" - contains some interesting methodological remarks from the preeminent Darwinian philosopher and anti-Cartesian philosopher of mind Matt p.s. You said, "is the appearance-reality distinction strictly a Platonic thing to you? I see it more that he took the Parmenidean appearance-reality distinction and put Forms firmly into the reality category." Yes, I've gotten into the historically sloppy habit of calling the Enemy Philosophical A/R Distinction "Platonic," though in my defense I think Plato is more important generally as the creator of the Western Philosophical Mythos. There's a reason Whitehead didn't say we're all footnotes to Parmenides. As some slight justification for this reapportionment of responsibility, in our conversation both you and I identified the need for a _method_ as a necessary (or inevitable) adjunct to the deployment of a pernicious A/R distinction. And in Plato's dialectic, which he hoped would take him to the land beyond hypotheses, that's precisely what we find. I don't think Parmenides talked much at all about having a method. 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/md/archives.html
