ELEPHANT TO STRUAN:
Greetings. A Reply! Stuan Hellier finally picks on someone with an ego
more his size. However, rather than tackle my exemplar exegesis of SOM in
Simon Blackburn and the other substantive points I made in an earlier post,
Struan condescendingly decides to ignore that post as placing too many
demands on his valuable time (he also appears to have some strange email
application which mysteriously contrives to lose any messages that are
deemed too taxing on first reading).
OK Struan, so we will take it that you still find my argument in that post
unanswerable?
Thankfully Struan does have the time, it would appear, to hang himself with
another bit of rope I left lying around... viz: gravity.
STRUAN WROTE:
> Re: Elephant. I would be here all day picking out each and every
> misunderstanding and I don't have the time. One example only, and I choose his
> most recent post as it is in front of me.
STRUAN HAD PREVIOUSLY WRITTEN:
> 1) 'All the universe is composed of subjects and objects and anything that
> can't be classified as a subject or object isn't real' (pg121) - Again, nobody
> has ever believed this. Gravity is seen by almost everybody as real ESPECIALLY
> the 'man in the street'. Likewise time.
> 2)'(SOM) . . insist(s) upon a single exclusive truth' pg122 - Rubbish. It is
> 'true' that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. It is also 'true' that
> water is wet. In another sense, it is 'true' that 2+2=4 and it is also true
> that 3+1=4. That H20 is water is a scientific truth and, while the genesis
> story is not a scientific truth, it is a religious truth.
ELEPHANT HAD WRITTEN:
Struan, in (1) you cite gravity to argue that nobody holds SOM. In (2) you
argue that SOM has identifiable characteristics which Prisig has
misreported. Please explain, because I'm rather puzzled. How can Prisig be
talking 'rubbish' about what SOM involves if nobody beleives SOM? Because
if Prisig has invented SOM, it can legitimately be said to comprise just
exactly what Prisig says it comprises.
STRUAN REPLIES:
> In 2 I argued no such thing. I quoted Pirsig, then gave examples to show that
> he was wrong.
ELEPHANT:
Er, OK. But I'm still puzzling about how Prisig can be wrong (talking
"rubbish") about SOM, if SOM is just his invention.
STRUAN WROTE:
> To claim that I 'argue that SOM has identifiable
> characteristics' is so far removed from what I actually did that the mind
> boggles. Clearly....
ELEPHANT:
'Clearly'?...
STRUAN:
>...Clearly my argument is this:
>
> 'If we accept, for the sake of argument, that SOM exists (and I don't), you
> say that it has these characteristics, but those people to whom you ascribe
> SOM actually think like this'.
ELEPHANT:
Well yes. And the point you are making is? Look Struan, as I pointed out
in my earlier post, it is precisely Prisig's point that it is impossible to
hold to SOM coherrently. Your argument is that Prisig ascribes X to THOSE
PEOPLE, while THOSE PEOPLE often maintain NOT X. Yes? And? Oh, I see, so
we have to start out by assuming that whatever THOSE PEOPLE say, they must
say it wholly, coherently, infalibly, correctly? Is that your argument?
And what makes this group of individuals so perfectly omiscient that they
can never contradict themeselves? Might it be, perchance, the fact that you
happen to agree with them? Struan, your point here is simply a repition of
an earlier claim which I have already exposed as sewage (I'll put the lid
back on just as soon as you recognize this brain-drain for what it is). Let
me quote my earlier post for your enlightenment:
ELEPHANT HAD WRITTEN:
Prisig never says, and indeed no Philosopher ever says, that the
philosophical veiw he is attacking is completely and coherently held by
those who espouse it - quite the reverse! The whole point is that you can't
hold on to SOM completely and coherently - that is of course precisely why
it is wrong as a description of the situation in which we find ourselves.
SOM may be fine in theory, and yet useless in practice: that doesn't mean
that nobody is fool enough to beleive the theory, whatever the actual
practice is. Pointing out that the theory doesn't fit what we actually
beleive is an entirely familiar move made in Philosophical argument made by
philosophers down the ages, and a particular specialism of American
Pragmatism, into which tradition Prisig fits very well. So, if Struan's
argument is that SOM doesn't exist because SOM isn't how people live their
lives, then this really isn't much of an argument.
Struan's supplementary point might be that no-one can be found who calls
themselves a "Subject-Object Metaphysician" in the way that, say, you used
to be able to find people who called themselves "Marxist". Well this
observation is certainly true. It is somewhat besides the point, however.
It is standard fare in the history of philosophy that from time to time
people invent terms that can then describe veiws that predate the invention
of that term. 'Empiricism', 'Rationalism', 'Pragmatism', 'Pragmaticism':
these are all examples of this kind of coinage. And this is exactly what
"subject-object metaphysics" does. In fact it does it rather neatly and
usefully, precisely because it highlights a common heritage and theme in a
large body of superficially diverse and even antithetical varieties of
metaphysics and anti-metaphysics. It might well count as a demonstration of
Prisig's genius that the views of such a large set of thinkers can be
expressed in this way, expressed, that is, more explicitly than those
thinkers expressed it themselves. Nor is Prisig's move without an exact
parrallel in the History of 20th Cent Philosophy. F.H.Bradley made the
exact same kind of distinction, inventing a new terminology to expose
essential similarities in the apparently diverse metaphysical and
anti-metaphysical systems of his day. Bradley's new philosophical
distinction was between subject-predicate metaphysics and his own
'Absolutism', which will, I think, bear substantial comparison with Prisig's
veiws on Mystical Reality, or Dynamic Quality. Indeed, Prisig can (actually
I think he does - just can't find the conveinient quote at present) make
just the same point about predicates that Bradley makes, and Bradley can do
the same for Prisig in return. Just the same objections which Struan and
Strawson now make against Prisig's conception of a Subject-Object
Metaphysics could have been made, and were made, against Bradley's
conception of a Subject-Predicate Metaphysics. But, in both cases, these
objections are facile. They are both easy and superficial, in my veiw,
because they avoid investigating the issue at hand, namely whether or not
current metaphysics is in fact based on an implicit (not explicit)
assumption which it has failed to properly formalise or acknowledge.
So, let us turn to that issue, and look at some current Philosophical
views to see whether or not Prisig's interpretive suggestion holds water.
Struan, if you want proof, 'empirically', that people do beleive in
Subject-Object Metaphysics, then you only have to read Simon Blackburn's
recentish work on Quasi-Realism about 'good' ('spreading the word'). Look
at the extraordinary lengths he is prepared to go to, to establish that
value statements are not statememts of fact. Ask yourself why he would be
bothering. What does Blackburn think is wrong with the idea that 'Good' is
a noun which describes a reality in the world? Why the plausible diversion
into the elaborately formalised philosophy of language, why the merely
quasi-reality? I really don't think it's that hard. Blackburn's
metaphysics (though he might not call it a 'metaphysics') holds that moral
agents are real (subjects), and that non-moral facts are real (objects),
while having this tremendous difficulty about acknowledging that moral
judgements are judgements of fact. What is this if not the exile of value
through a subject-object metaphysics?
Blackburn is not an isolated case, and any half serious inversigation of
the literature will tell you that. There is a general prejudice against the
reality of value, which takes the form, generally, of trying to talk about
value in terms of something else entirely. Exactly the same is true of
universals, before you bring that one up as an objection to my case. There
is assumed to be a "problem of universals", as if particulars where, in so
far as being particular is concerned, entirely unproblematic. If that's not
an objects-only Metaphysics I don't know what is. People go around trying
to explain universals in terms of particulars. Perhaps you want to come
bang-up-to-date and to the hieght of philosophical fashion and discuss
Wittgenstein's late philosophy of language. Think about the bizarre
problems Ludwig has trying to experience the because in "I am going on in
the same way because of the rule". He thinks he can experience the
instances of the rule just fine - it's just the rule that he can't
experience. Why can't I experience a rule? Well , it isn't a subject of
experience, and it isn't an object either.... lord how mysterious it must
be then! Why, we will have to invoke community practice, which after all is
a kind of object, and then everything can be alright again. Look, Struan,
far from there being no such thing as a Subject-Object Metaphysics, I think
Prisig has hit upon just about the most useful analytic tool in 20th Cent.
philosophy. It lay's the whole thing on the slab and cuts it open right
down the middle.
(end of self-quotation)
STRUAN WROTE:
> This reminds me of the infuriatingly similar techniques employed by David
> Buchanan and Elephant's first posting was riddled with similar examples, which
> would take an age to unravel. I have no interest in doing so.
ELEPHANT:
Indeed not. But I'm interested, and I think we all are. Come on, at some
point the enjoyable abuse has to end and you have to come up with the goods.
Come on Struan. Take me on if you think you're big enough.
STRUAN:
> Finally (to Elephant), to say that Iris Murdoch was met with silence is simply
> wrong. She is, in England at least, widely considered to be one of the
> greatest English thinkers of the century, is praised by everybody who is
> anybody in moral philosophy today, is considered indispensable to almost every
> moral philosophy course from AS level to degree level and will undoubtedly go
> down in history as having an important influence upon moral thought. She also
> happens to be my favourite moral philosopher. Having spoken to her on a couple
> of occasions, I consider your parallels between Murdoch and Pirsig to be
> superficial and fruitless.
ELEPHANT:
You are right that Murdoch occupies a very special place, and is indeed
"praised by everybody who is anybody in moral philosophy today". That
doesn't take away from my point about silence one jot. Because while the
Quality of Murdoch's work shines through to the dimest of wits, and she
herself was regarded fondly at all times, I don't think I'm wrong to say
that nobody really has any idea what to make of what she actually argued,
and, ingeneral, the possibility that she might actually be right is not
pursued properly outside of the undergraduate seminars you allude to. In my
experience, every academic Philosopher that I have ever met and who has read
Murdoch feels that there is something interesting that they ought to
investigate here, only they never actually do. The silence I am talking
about resembles the immediate reaction of an audience after a particularly
impressive performance of a newly composed piano concerto. Stunned silence.
They sit there bemused. That anyone could think it proper to retreive Plato
in order to solve a current impasse is thought 'brave'. (damming with faint
praise). I don't think it's going too far too say that the majority
attitude to Murdoch, although 'appreciative' in a sense, is also quite
patronising. In what I think is her most important contribution, Murdoch
argues that Wittgenstein has a false and ontologically loaded theory of
experience. This is just laughed off. 'Oh, I did like some of her essays
on Plato, yes. But I think in that latter work she's making the mistake of
thinking Wittgenstein was a behaviourist, don't you?' - SCR fare around the
nation! (Struan and I are compatriots) 'Interesting' is a word I hear in
conversations about her. 'Challenging' is another one. Strange then, that
nobody actually seems sufficiently interested or challenged to get up off
their linguistic turn and address the reality of the Good.
Nor do I think that the Murdoch-Prisig parrallels can in any way be
described as "superficial". Granted, there are huge differences, and
Murdoch would never have embarked on the project which the 'levels' are
intended to map out. But Prisig and Murdoch have a common heritage of
Classical literature, both Greek and from the Subcontinent, which both have
a similar understanding of, and make similar uses of, that heritage.
I treat Struan's challenges seriously, so I will proceed with proper
academic rigour, and quote at length. Compare Murdoch with Prisig on
mystical reality, and on defending the necessity of Metaphysics:
1. Prisig [RM Prisig, Lila, pp73/74 bantam books pb dec 1992 isbn
0553299611]
"Of the two kinds of hostility to metaphysics he considered the mystics'
hostility the more formidable. Mystics will tell you that once you've
opened the door to metaphysics you can say good-bye to any genuine
understanding of reality. Thought is not a path to reality. It sets
obstacles in that path because once you try to use thought to approach
something that is prior to thought your thinking does not carry you toward
that something. It carries you away from it. To define something is to
subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do
that you destroy any real understanding.
The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had
called "Quality" in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess peice.
Quality doesn't have to be defined. You understand it without definition,
ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independant of and
prior to intellectual abstractions.
Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense
that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these
things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable, and knowable, or there
isn't any metaphysics. Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of
dialectical definition and since Quality is essentially outside definition,
this means that a "Metaphysics of Quality" is essentially a contradiction in
terms, a logical absurdity.
It would be almost like a mathematical definition of randomness.
The more you try to say what randomness is, the less random it becomes. Or
"zero" or "space" for thtat matter. Today these terms are almost nothing to
do with "nothing". "Zero" and "space" are complex relationships of
"somethingness". If he said anything about the scientific nature of mystic
understanding, science might benefit, but the actual mystic understanding
would, if anthing, be injured. If he really wanted to do Quality a favour
he should just leave it alone.
What made all this so formidable to Phaedrus was that he himself
had insisted in his book that Quality cannot be defined. Yet here he was
about to define it. Was this some kind of sell out? His mind went over
this many times.
A part of him said, "Don't do it. You'll get into nothing but
trouble. You're going to start up a thousand dumb arguments about something
that was perfectly clear until you came along. You're going to make ten
thousand opponents and zero friends because the moment you open your mouth
to say one thing about the nature of reality you automatically have a whole
set of enemies who've already said that reality is something else."
The trouble was, this was only one part of him talking. There
was another part that kept saying "Ahh, do it anyway. It's interesting."
This was the intellectual part that didn't like undefined things, and
telling it not to define Quality was like telling a fat man to stay out of
the refrigerator, or an alcoholic to stay out of bars. To the intellect the
process of defining Quality has a compulsive quality of its own. It
produces a certain excitement even though it leaves a hangover afterward,
like too many cigarettes, or a party that lasted too long. Or Lila last
night. It isn't anything of lasting beauty; no joy forever. What would you
call it? Degeneracy, he guessed. Writing a metaphysics is, in the
strictest mystic sense, a degenerate activity.
But the answer to all this, he thought, was that a ruthless,
doctrinaire avoidance of degeneracy is a degeneracy of another sort. That's
the degereacy fanatics are made of. Purity, identified, ceases to be
purity. Objections to pollution are a form of pollution. The only person
who doesn't pollute the mystic reality of the world with fixed metaphysical
meanings is a person who hasn't been born - and to whose birth no though has
been given. The rest of us have to settle for being something less pure.
Getting drunk and picking up bar-ladies and writing metaphysics is a part of
life. That was all he had to say to the mystical objection to a Metaphysics
of Quality. He next turned to those of logical positivism."
In short: any thought is metaphysical thought, and we cannot shirk from
metaphysics. Everything is metaphysical.
Compare Murdoch in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals:
"There must be different concepts of experience. Here Wittgenstein has in
mind the dictum about the inner needing outer criteria. May a doubt be
thrown on this? What about the Œexperience¹ of being guided or influenced,
for instance in copying a figure. While being guided I notice nothing
special. Afterwards if I wonder what happened I feel there must have been
something else. ŒI have the feeling that what is essential about it is ³an
experience of being influenced², of a connection ... but I should not be
willing to call any experienced phenomenon the ³experience of being
influenced²... I should like to say that I experienced the ³because², and
yet I do not want to call any phenomenon ³the experience of the because².¹
([Philosophical Investigations] 176.) This anxiety connects with
Wittgenstein¹s more general problem about inability to continue a series,
Œhow to go on¹, how to trust to memory. We (I) reading Wittgenstein here
feel the compelling presence of Œlogic¹, and also a sense of void.
Wittgenstein cannot find (and really does not want) any Œbecause¹. The
Œexperience¹ of being guided is an illusion. But what is to count as an
experience? Back in ordinary language we may say, all right, often (for
instance, counting, adding) we do not have any Œpalpable¹ experience - but
also, often, we are in situations where the concept of experience is clearly
in place. ŒIs it seeing or is it thought?¹ Well, usually it is both, one
cannot, necessarily, Œlogically¹ prise experiences apart. Experience is
consciousness. (Wittgenstein avoids the latter word.) It is deep and
complex, it has density, thoughts and perceptions and feelings are combined
in the swift movement of our mode of existence. (Swift, as pointed out by
Schopenhauer.) Can we experience an influence? Yes, of course, when (for
instance) we sit wondering whether we have been wrongly persuaded by another
person. Physical feelings as well as mental images attend such anxiety. In
Œsetting his face against the picture of the inner process¹ Wittgenstein
seems to have banished not only (as in the example at 305-7) a naive error
(or grammatical fiction) but the whole multifarious mixed-up business of our
inner reflections, though-being, experience, consciousness." [MGM 278/279]
Here Murdoch is defending something like James' Stream of Consciousness
against Wittgenstein's corrosive desire that everything be cashed out in
terms of Criteria. This is a defence of Mystic reality, but it is also, and
more to the point, a defence of our right to *talk* about that mystic
reality, to let it feature in our metaphysics. Wittgenstein's willfully
limited concept of experience is one form of the "doctrinaire avoidance of
degeneracy" which Prisig speaks of, and which would have us blank out the
most important and lived in area of our lives. Murdoch is here accusing
Wittgenstein of just what Prisig finds in the Mystic objection to
Metaphysics. Prisig says that here "Objections to pollution are a form of
pollution" - this is exactly Murdoch's point about Wittgenstein. For
Murdoch, silence about the inner represents the acheivement of a high level
of spiritual development: a product of meditation. Silence about the inner
then is inner silence. It is not something to be decreed in the stroke of a
Philosopher's pen.
There is more to say. But I think we can agree that there is nothing
superficial or fruitless in these resemblances between Murdoch and Prisig.
As I have remarked, there are deep differences two. But I think something
informative might come out of a preparedness to examine the two with a
similar level of seriousness. In philosophical circles we call this
'interpretive charity'. What is means, in short, is that if you are too
prepared to call someone an idiot the first time to you fail to understand
them, then you never are going to understand them. So, Struan, give Prisig
a second chance, and maybe I'll give you one.
BTW Struan, have you published anything on Murdoch?
Yours Pseudonymously
Elephant
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