DMB, Matt said: His angle, however, sounds the way it does to combat certain pernicious tendencies in SOMist philosophical formulation, for instance Enlightenment philosophical exaltations of the God known as "Reason," at the expense of the imagination, which is why the Romantics reacted the way they did by exalting the Imagination.
DMB said: I think that's about right and that this neo-romanticism is DM's problem here and elsewhere. And I have to say that this is not entirely unrelated to my criticism of Rorty as a broken-hearted Positivist. Matt: Leaving David aside, I think you're absolutely right to see these two criticisms as related, though I still think you are wrong about Rorty. Accepting the above potted philosophical narrative, I would suggest that Rorty has (much so in response to these types of criticisms) rebuked the Romantics for there exaltation of Imagination--we should exalt nothing (the whole "get rid of God and his doubles" thing). I don't think Rorty "rejects" objectivity, I think he rejects, just like Pirsig, the subjectivity/objectivity problematic. Pragmatism, in his view, is a further offshoot of Romanticism in so far as Kantianism further calcified Platonism and Romanticism's reaction was a rejection of Platonism, just as the Sophists were the counterpoint to Plato. We've gotten better at rejecting Platonism since the Sophists and the Romantics, taking their good ideas at how to batter Platonism and trying to evade reinstating it in something else (like Imagination). This is, however, an exegetical dispute over what Rorty's saying. I could give you a list of the essays I would look at to combate your analysis, but I won't (except to mention that, particularly in Acheiving Our Country, Rorty talks explicitly about the kinds of people that were at Pirsig's cocktail party, calling them the Academic Left) because actual fidelity to Rorty is besides the point when figuring out better philosophy. If the two of us can agree to reject both Enlightenment exaltation and Romantic exaltation, then that's enough agreement about which philosophical theses to agree on. The fact that I think I got such ideas more or less wholesale from Rorty (granted a blend of reinforcement from a host of other writers like Richard Bernstein, Clifford Geertz, Robert Pirsig, Stanley Fish, Jeffrey Stout, Annette Baier, etc.), and would in another context be willing to debate the finer points of Rortyan exegetical analysis, is besides the point--I could, unbeknownst to me, be augmenting Rorty (though I currently don't think I am). Matt said: Now--as far as defending his redescription with phenomenology [and physics and an inner/outer distinction] ... clearly these demand some sort of explanation and, as need be, cuffs around the ears. DMB said: Right. These are pieces of evidence on which I made the accusation above. I want to say more about this because I think its about the validity of all sorts of concepts, its about more than just "the possible". Its about the MOQ's relation to contemporary thought. Does phenomenolgy really bracket out SOM, as David M says, or does it just bracket out objectivity, for example? I'll be learning about that in school in a few weeks so I can't draw any conclusions quite yet. At this point, it looks very SOM to me. It is a method conducted from the first-person point of view and insists that consciousness is intentional, that is to say it always attends to an object. But the physics really gives it away, I think. Matt: I'd be interested to hear how you come to understand the relationship. For my own part, the thing that makes me the most suspicious about phenomenology is its claims about having found a "method" that acheives neutrality, a way in which we can finally settle all these stupid disputes. The first-person point of view is no more neutral than any other point of view. Phenomenology hoped, by what Husserl called "bracketing" (I forget the technical term), to cut the wheat from the chaff, the accidents of our experience (and descriptions) from the essence of our experience (and descriptions)--just as every attempt at methodical neutrality supposedly does. Pragmatism, and I think Pirsig agrees, suggests that such neutrality is no where for the finding and that the accident/essence distinction is just one more in the constellation around Plato, creator (possibly inadvertant) of SOM. As far as the narrative of how we got from the 19th century to the 20th, I'm not going to quibble with it too much. Its nice enough for what it is, though I think it tries to do too much. I don't think there's a huge unified thing going on between the 19th and the 20th century (or any other century for that matter). There may be a lot of surface similarities, but I think the only way to get from mid-19th century philosophy (meaning Hegel) to end of the 20th century philosophy (meaning Derrida, at least as far as Continental is concerned) is by telling a tale more specific to the philosophical dialectic. That isn't to say that there are interconnections and the like, but the trouble is when we get to the 70s and people start talking about something called "post-modernism." The crap that gets thrown on (or under) that bus--for the life of me I can't figure out what the similarities are supposed to be that are substantial and not cosmetic. For instance, the relation between literature and philosophy. Rorty, I think, was the first to call it: what goes by the name of postmodern in philosophy (Foucault, Derrida, whatever) is basically philosophy catching up to literary modernism, what--to take the list of authors I studied in a lit class--Eliot, Woolf, and Faulkner were doing at the Fin-de-siecle. That being said, a warning of "don't lose sight of too many of the details of intellectual history when telling your Geistesgeschichte," while a few of the details didn't sound right with training, it was a fine enough tale. And well written. My sense of discordance probably comes from the fact that I sense you've been reading Peter Gay (and if you haven't, you'd probably find him a good source). My main intellectual history teacher was Laurence Dickey and he once told us that Gay was more or less oudated and outmoded by more recent historical scholarship. But since I'm not qualified to lodge more detailed complaints than that, I'll simiply highlight a few of the parts I think are right and I would focus on if I were you: DMB said: It relied on the assumption that reality was more or less apparent to the eye. This sort of positivism more or less trusted the senses, it is that narrow brand of sensory empiricism which is discussed and rejected in Lila. Matt: Ocular metaphors? Sound familiar, DMB? I think use of ocular metaphors, and the creation of appearance/reality distinctions, in the philosophical landscape is the right trail to tumble down. But of course I think that, that's the tale Rorty tells.... DMB said: This is also when the Radical Empiricism of William James was born, by the way, and he was pen pals with Bergson who was developing similar notions of flowing consciousness. Its interesting to note that both really do tackle SOM as such and both have mostly been ignored for it ever since too. Matt: Maybe my sense is off, but I would hesitate before saying that about James in America these days, but I have no sense about Bergson. I've never heard of really studying him in America, but I don't know about the Continent (they tend to study their history pretty good, unlike anglophone universities). A detail and connection in this regard: 1) One of the things Bergson did was change our assumptions about time--he elongated it, as it were. I think this is interesting because, in a certain sense and under certain interpretations, Pirsig is behind Bergson on this score, given e.g. Pirsig's metaphor of the train. 2) Nietzsche is famous for being a huge fan of Emerson and Emerson was a huge influence on James. (Two different histories, see Cornel West's The American Evasion of Philosophy--which traces pragmatism to Emerson first, before Peirce--and Loius Menand's The Metaphysical Club, which is a heavy-on-the-detail intellectual history story about the group James and Peirce belonged to at Harvard--though I should note that Susan Haack hates Menand's anthology of pragmatist writings, mainly because they not so subtly lead up to Rorty--who usually, when talking about pragmatism's roots lately, mentions James and Nietzsche together.) DMB said: Freud, Nietzsche and Marx rocked realist conceptions too. ... In Pirsigian terms, it looks like one more stage in the classic-romantic dialectic rather than a rejection of SOM. Matt: I can agree with this, but the reason I think so has little to do with materialism. The reason these three got into problems is because they played into an assumption that holds materialism up (I doubt many people would call Nietzsche a materialist)--the appearance/reality distinction. Marx and Freud are the easiest to see because they used scientistic rhetoric, they both thought they had discovered a (surprise, surprise) neutral method to cut past appearances to reality (they both call it "science," though in what regard it's hard to say). Nietzsche's harder to put a finger on in this regard, because it is _really_ hard to say what kind of method he has, but his deployment of the "will to power" was an inversion of Plato, and despite the wisdom we can glean from such an inversion, an inversion still plays by the same rules as what it inverts, using the same material as it were. DMB said: See how the rejection of objective knowledge is different from rejecting the assumptions of SOM, how the rejection of objective knowledge only makes sense from within SOM? Matt: Well, what can I say: I again deny that Rorty rejects "objective knowledge" as opposed to the whole problematic. Sound familiar? And while we're at what sounds familiar, do I really need to smirkinigly remind you who first introduced you to the very idea of the appearance/reality distinction and how it needs to be rejected? Or have you forgotten our first conversations in which you couldn't make out the connection between SOM and the appearance/reality distinction and blasted me for talking about such a thing? Or the fact that, apparently until quite recently, you couldn't imagine _anybody_ who'd _ever_ thought the way you now seem quite content to paint them--ways in which philosophers thought they'd cut to the absolute truth of things, appearance to reality? If you've finally figured out how to use that vocabulary, and how SOM, Pirsig's vocabulary, links to it, why have you continued with the one note tune of Rorty rejecting one half of a dualism that Pirsig rejects the whole of when the primary promulgator of the vocabulary of the appearance/reality distinction--_and how it needs to be rejected_--is Richard Rorty, primarily through Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature which singles out the metaphor of _sight_ as the main lynchpin in the problematic we should be rejecting? Sound familiar? We have you continued where you should perhaps think about revising? By taking on Rorty's vocabulary you've made it even _easier_ for me to rebut the accusations because now, instead of traveling the road of translation from Pirsig's vocab into Rorty's, all I have to do is cite a line in which he explicitly denies what you accuse. Or just repost old stuff. That doesn't mean it isn't true and you aren't right, but I would think it requires a more explicit handling of his arguments. To deny that Rorty rejects the appearance/reality distinction when a _whole_ lot of what he does is explicitly show us ways to reject it and replace it with other things--and especially in the tone you've adopted, where it sounds like Rorty's never even thought rejection was possible or sometimes even _heard_ of the distinctions he should be rejecting--is a very suspicious kind of treatment. You sound scorned. I don't know by what, but it's a very suspicious sound. Matt _________________________________________________________________ The average US Credit Score is 675. 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