[Ian] One reason I latched onto the Johnson quote you brought up (or was it Arlo) is because Lakoff & Johnson's "Metaphors We Live By" and "Fire, Women and Dangerous Things" made a big impression on me.
[Arlo] Just adding the following to support our position. Mark Johnson, in his introduction to his edited volume "Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor", describes something I think should resonate (perhaps uncoincidentally) strongly with those familiar with Pirsig's expostion on the sophists. "Early on, metaphor flourished in myth and poetry. It was natural for the pre-Socratic philosophers to feel at home with the mythic modes of their predecessors and to utilize figurative language to express their insights. Indeed, their philosophic fragments constitute one vast network of interrelated metaphors - and to make sense of their thought is, above all, to unpack these metaphors. It is one of the ironies of history that Plato (428/27-348/47 B.C.), the master of metaphor, having left no explicit treatment of his primary art, should have been taken as providing that basis for the traditional suspicion of metaphor. That alleged bias is his discussion of the "old quarrel between philosophy and poetry" (Republic, X, 607b). Plato defends the banishment of philosophically uneducated imitive poets on two grounds: (1) These poets have no genuine knowledge of that which they imitate - they produce imitations of imitations of the real and are thus "three removes from the king and the truth as are all other imitators" (Republic, X, 597e). (2) Poetry "feeds and waters the passions, instead of drying them up; she let's them rule instead of ruling them as they ought to be ruled, with a view to the happiness and virtue of mankind" (Republic, X, 606d). Plato's expulsion of the imitative poets must not, of course, be read as a condemnation of figurative language per se. But it does show his awareness of the power of metaphor and myth to influence conviction, and it reveals his fear of their potential for misuse. This vulnerability to abuse seems to be the reason for his claim that the poet, "knowing nothing but how to imitate, lays on with words and phrases the colors of the several arts in such fashion that other equally ignorant men, who see things only through words, will deem his words most excellent..." (Republic, X, 601a). It is on similar grounds that he criticizes sophists who care nothing for the truth and who "make trifles seem important and important points trifles by the force of their language" (Phaedrus, 267a-b). Plato's attack is directed against the poet of sophist whose misuse of language leads others away from truth. The irony here, to repeat, is that his criticique of imitative poetry has often been read as applying to metaphor generally, despite his supreme use of metaphor to convey his most important philosophical convictions." (Johnson, 1981). This mirrors the discussion held in ZMM. Importantly, I would draw your attention to this passage. "Phædrus reads further and further into pre-Socratic Greek thought to find out, and eventually comes to the view that Plato's hatred of the rhetoricians was part of a much larger struggle in which the reality of the Good, represented by the Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented by the dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle for the future mind of man. Truth won, the Good lost, and that is why today we have so little difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so much difficulty accepting the reality of Quality, even though there is no more agreement in one area than in the other." Jumping ahead slightly, Pirsig writes, "They were teachers, but what they sought to teach was not principles, but beliefs of men. Their object was not any single absolute truth, but the improvement of men. All principles, all truths, are relative, they said. "Man is the measure of all things." These were the famous teachers of "wisdom," the Sophists of ancient Greece." How does this insight, advancing the "metaphoricity" of all things, relate to Quality? "And yet, Phædrus understands, what he is saying about Quality is somehow opposed to all this. It seems to agree much more closely with the Sophists. "Man is the measure of all things." Yes, that's what he is saying about Quality. 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. The measure of all things...it fits." Pirsig has two passages that relate to the fallout from this shift from "metaphoricity" to "Absolute Truth". The first comes shortly after Phaedrus realizes the "encapsulation" of the sophists "metaphoricity" into a system of "Absolute". Pirsig writes, "And the bones of the Sophists long ago turned to dust and what they said turned to dust with them and the dust was buried under the rubble of declining Athens through its fall and Macedonia through its decline and fall. Through the decline and death of ancient Rome and Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire and the modern states...buried so deep and with such ceremoniousness and such unction and such evil that only a madman centuries later could discover the clues needed to uncover them, and see with horror what had been done...." The modern fallout of this, Pirsig describes as such. "And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth...but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it." "Metaphoricity" and an understanding that "relative" does NOT imply subjectivity nor objectivity but an active, participatory role in the emergence of Quality. Mark Johnson, also in his introduction mentioned above, describes a similar stance taken by adherents of metaphor. "In general, [irreducibility theorists] must hold that we encounter our world, not passively, but by means of projective acts influenced by our interests, purposes, values, beliefs, and language. Because our world is an imaginative, value-laden construction, metaphors that alter our conceptual structure (themselves carried by older metaphors) will also alter the way we experience things." In this last Johnson post, I think one can clearly overlay Pirsig's description of the mythos and, even more directly, the "figure sorting sand" passage. This "active, participatory role" of wo/man in the creation of meaning (and its subsequent adherence to metaphoricity) is also addressed by David Granger in his book on Pirsig and Dewey. "In light of the above, we will henceforth adhere to Dewey's regular practice of speaking of knowledge in terms of "knowledge relations" or the process of "coming-to-know." This will remind us that knowledge, for Dewey and Pirsig, exists neither in a static state nor as an individualistic possession of some sort. For the Cartesian thinker, to the contrary, the move to such an active, situation-based conception of knowledge flies in the face of the quest for certainty: It deprives us of the so-called Archimedean point, the absolute perspective from which to behold the world and its contents. All the same, this quest holds no place on Dewey's and Pirsig's philosophical agendas. As they see it, uncertainty must be accepted at the end of the day as an indelible part of the human condition in a world such as ours. "Absolute certainty in knowledge of things and absolute security in the ordering of life" are to them no more than chimeras, and, to the extent that their pursuit pulls us away from the dynamic everyday world of people and things, potentially destructive (LW 1: 373; see also ZMM264). If Experience and Nature left us with any doubt as to Dewey's position here, a succeeding volume, his now-classic The Quest for Certainty (1929), made it emphatically clear. Aided by the work of twentieth-century physicist Warner Heisenberg, whose ground-breaking research had appeared only two years earlier, Dewey tried once and for all to close the book on spectator theories of knowledge." (Granger, pp. 60-61) "Or as Heisenberg puts it, "what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our questioning."19 This means that there is no way for an inquirer to remain a detached spectator. The knower is continuuous with what is finally known, an active participant in the ongoing drama of an unfinished world (LW 4: 163)." (Granger, p.62) Granger as well refers to this passage from Pirsig, quoted below from LILA, which I'll end with. "Unlike subject-object metaphysics the Metaphysics of Quality does not insist on a single exclusive truth. If subjects and objects are held to be the ultimate reality then we're permitted only one construction of things - that which corresponds to the "objective" world-and all other constructions are unreal. But if Quality or excellence is seen as the ultimate reality then it becomes possible for more than one set of truths to exist. Then one doesn't seek the absolute "Truth." One seeks instead the highest quality intellectual explanation of things with the knowledge that if the past is any guide to the future this explanation must be taken provisionally; as useful until something better comes along. One can then examine intellectual realities the same way he examines paintings in an art gallery, not with an effort to find out which one is the "real" painting, but simply to enjoy and keep those that are of value. There are many sets of intellectual reality in existence and we can perceive some to have more quality than others, but that we do so is, in part, the result of our history and current patterns of values." 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.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
