Arlo said to John: Just to clarify, what I was linking wasn't about "post-modernism" but "POST-post-modernism". And, not making any claims, just pointing out the fun with this way of labeling.
dmb says: A book on the topic and worth mentioning is Larry Hickman's Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism. Hickman's thesis says that classical pragmatists, especially Dewey but also James and Pierce, were already post-postmodern a century ago. (He is a Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.) I think Hickman's analysis could be applied to the MOQ without much trouble. You can get a peek of it here: http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=tze4E_paNoYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=%22Pragmatism+as+post-postmodernism%22&ots=6syrxql_Ui&sig=ij1-5Va74Y4ma0K67GeF522JedY#v=onepage&q=%22Pragmatism%20as%20post-postmodernism%22&f=false Arlo asked Dan: ...to "consider this paragraph" from Alfredi Ruiz's article (Theoretical Bases of the Post-Rationalist Approach). Because "It certainly seems like Pirsig's MOQ would be described as 'post-rationalist' ": "According to Guidano, the most important problem which has been posed to this epistemologic approach has been the radical change which has taken place in the conception of the relation between observer and observed. In the empirist approach the observer faces a reality, objective in itself, which exists independently. The observer in this case is considered impartial and objective. The observation of the observer corresponds to reality. Now, with the changes produced in the notion of the relations between observer and observed, the observer no longer stands as neutral. On the contrary, with his observation he introduces an order in what he observes and what he observes is much more dependent on his perceptual apparatus than on the structure itself of something objective external to him. What is now happening is that we are beginning to attain greater conscience that the reality in which we live is codependent of our way of ordering and goes together with our perception. The world of regularities we live in is a world which is co-constructed by the observer." dmb says: Yes, I think the MOQ agrees with this. They both reject the idea of an independent objective reality (SOM) and its correspondence theory of truth and they both endorse the idea of reality being co-constructed by us. "What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later. The modern mind sometimes tends to balk at the thought of these dichotomies being inventions and says, "Well, the divisions were there for the Greeks to discover," and you have to say, "Where were they? Point to them!" And the modern mind gets a little confused and wonders what this is all about anyway, and still believes the divisions were there.But they weren't, as Phædrus said. They are just ghosts, immortal gods of the modern mythos which appear to us to be real because we are in that mythos. But in reality they are just as much an artistic creation as the anthropomorphic Gods they replaced." ZAMM Ch.29 "Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things." ZAMM Ch. 29 Arlo also said to Dan: ...Consider too that Ruiz writes, "The first dimension is immediate experience. Like what occurs in other animals, the experience of living, of feeling alive, is something with simply occurs to us, something we can not decide. The other dimension is explanation." Sounds very Dynamic/static, doesn't it? dmb says: Yes, it reminds of the line Pirsig takes from James; "There must always be a discrepancy between concepts (Ruiz's dimension of explanation) and reality (Ruiz's dimension of immediate experience), because the former is static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing." Lila Ch 29 Arlo concluded: But this seems different from the post-postmodernism Kirby describes. How would Ruiz's "post-rational" compare to Wood's "post-intellectual" (I have no idea)? Do either reflect, even partially, the MOQ's "spirirationality" (if I'm remember the term Ant's friend used)? We are awash in a sea of "post-X"s, though, that's for sure. dmb says: Yea, not to mention post-structuralism, the death of the author, the death of God and the end of history. Everything is in motion and up for grabs these days - and various kinds of reactionaries are freaking out about it. I've also heard Pirsig described as an "anti-philosopher". That label fits pretty well but so do many others; philosophical mystic, American Buddhist, classical pragmatist, instrumentalist, radical empiricist, monist, dualist, pluralist, novelist, sailor, motorcyclist, liberal intellectual, hyper-intellectual and, in a philosophical sense, even anti-intellectual. This last label means an opposition to Rationalist philosophers like Plato and Hegel, opposition to what James called "vicious intellectualism", and the prioritization of immediate experience over conceptualization. That's where the spirituality comes in, the radically empirical priority of direct experience. Rationality is expanded at its roots by this same centrality of DQ. 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
