hello all
thanks for your reply, elephant. You have put quite a lot of ideas on the plate, and
raised some very interesting issues, on Wittgenstein in particular. I will try to
reply to at least some, to clarify what I consider basic points. I think my post
might seem a bit redundant, but it's because we are talking of something beyond
language, and I have to guard against misinterpretations as much as I can.
I'll have to admit that I did not seriously read Sartre (although I have a general
idea of his positions) and I miss Iris Murdoch completely (will fill this hole).
Moreover, I should also point out that I did not receive a regular education in
philosophy, so my interpretation of various philosophers' thought might be somewhat
non conventional, or downright wrong, and anyhow it will, no doubt, include some of
my own vision. Nevertheless, if I am allowed a brief aside consideration (but not so
much aside after all), I think one good thing about Logical Positivism is that it
"has shown" that this is actually the case for any metaphysical discussion: you
can't be absolutely objective, simply because most of the words you use are at least
under-defined. Unless you use language for stating "scientific facts" (restricting
yourself to some positivist domain of language), each sentence has infinitely many
meanings, and a different one for each listener/reader (the positivists would say it
really has no meaning for anyone, but they would be talking about positivistic
meaning, while I am talking of something else). I think this opinion is worth making
clear if I am to engage into a discussion with anyone. I see a discussion on
metaphysical subjects as a "dance", so to speak, much more than a logical,
semantically-sound exchange. I also think this is why, for example, Pirsig choose to
write *art* instead of a tractatus, and why eastern philosophies dropped logical
reasoning from the start - not that logics were *harmful* for their goals, it was
simply not necessary.
The mystic does not state that logics is bad in itself, but that it won't get to the
Truth (and maybe hide it). After that, and given that *no* language can actually get
to the Truth, it is perfectly coherent to decide to use logical language all the
same to speak of the Truth *to the extent possible, with all the limitations this
entails*. Zen masters don't use logics, MOQers do, but after all, we do so because
that fits better with our culture, because it is easier, not because in logics and
metaphysics we trust as legitimate means to get to the "Truth" (like, Pirsig
compared metaphysics to smoking cigarettes or rushing to the refrigerator in the
middle of the night).
Given these premises...
ANDREA WROTE:
> Also, I think that any means that help us leave language behind to see "what
> is Good", here and now, for Me, should be widely taught, because unhappiness
> is never caused by the world around you, only by your opinion about the world
> itself.
ELELPHANT:
>The world of the unhappy is not the world of the happy. But the change that
>is required is not simply a matter of deciding to take a different attitude
>on objects out there. The objects inhabit our attitudes: value comes first.
>And realising your freedom cannot take some purely intellectual form: there
>has to some connection with action. Perhaps the realisation of your freedom
>in that situation, and your decision to abandon decision X and leave that
>situation, are one and the same thing. Just as in Sartre's example, for the
>woman at the resturaunt table who lets her admirers hand rest in hers
>without acknowledging it, the inaction is all one with her refusal to
>recognise her freedom and power to decide in this situation.
Of course, I agree that there's no "me vs the world out there" (otherwise I would
not post here). In fact, I was using SOM language as it came from my fingertips,
without translating it in a more proper MOQish form. I agree to the specific point,
and especially with the concept that "freedom cannot take some purely intellectual
form". This may help clarify what I had in mind. My point is that when you let
yourself flow with your basic, daily, built-in SOM vision (the same mistake I did
when choosing the words above), you try to judge on what is Good based on two maps
you have in your mind: the map of the world out there, and the map of yourself. To
decide if choice X is good, you actually evaluate whether this is good for the guy
"me" you have in your mind, in the context of the "world" you have in your mind.
None of the maps, of course, are the actual territory. This can lead you to a stall,
as in my example. In a worst case, it may lead you to take the wrong decision, and
hence to unhappiness. Note that I do not mean unhappiness that stems from any
practical consequences of the mistake (for example, you choose the wrong job, and
then suffer because this job doesn't fit you), rather I am talking of the
instantly-perceived unhappiness that your soul feels as soon as you are committed to
something that is not Good for you. (There is a suspiciously strong analogy, here,
with freudian psychopathologies). So I agree that freedom is a matter of action;
actually, in a non-SOM approach, it becomes evident (or at least more clear) that
you *are* what you do (another taoist statement), and a very common source of
suffering is that you have rationally decided to do something that your intuition
perceives as bad. It seems to be possible only as long as the perception of "true"
Good reaches your conscious thought: there's no consciously seeing what is Good
w/out committing to it (we should really have a single word expressing both things).
And most of the happy/unhappy balance lies in your *behavior* (that is what I really
meant with "attitude").
More to this point, to explain the "world out there" reference, let's assume
you-think-you-feel-unhappy because you don't *own* something (eg, a big sum of
money). *This* unhappiness is of course but a delusion. I say that unhappiness is
not something due to the "world outside" meaning exactly that the very idea of the
world outside is misleading. It is based on the idea of self, on a rational
projection, and it simply has *nothing* to do with You, which is, and will always
be, *You here and now*, or should I say, "Me here and now", or you "seen from
within", you that is not "part" of the world (SOM), but that *is* the world, and
that is a pattern of values if you will. Options for this me are not "to have" or
"have not", but rather to "be" or "be not", or even more precisely to "act" and "act
not". My concern here was that as I look around myself, I can't but think this would
be a most valuable and useful idea for most of the people out there, and am sorry
that it has been so powerfully concealed by our philosophy and language.
ELEPHANT:
>I'd like to offer my own example of the discrete/continuous issue at work in
>everyday life, to counteract the impression that this freedom we have is
>some rapturous enjoyment of control. It can just as often be experienced as
>tragic, comic, worrying, or just plain annoying. I want to play up the role
>of what Satre calls facticity (and we might call fortune), and to give this
>as unromantic and unglamourous an angle as possible.
>It's mid-winter and you head for the bus-stop where the timetable says there
>will be a bus into town at 10. By your watch, you arrive at three minutes
>before 10. Excellent, you think, not long to wait. At 10 minutes past 10
>you begin to get a bit restless. You wonder if your watch is wrong and the
>bus left just before you got there. You inspect the timetable, and it turns
>out that there's a bus about every half hour. It's a cold wind from the
>east, so you think about walking the five minutes or so home, sitting down
>for five minutes with a cup of coffee, and then walking back to the stop in
>time for the next bus. But what if all the busses are running a few minutes
>late? And how much? If at 10:15 you decide to head home to unfreeze your
>fingers and grab an extra layer of clothing that might be just the moment
>that the 10 o'clock bus chooses to head through, and then you'll have to
>start waiting in the cold all over again, maybe for another half an hour,
>with the only difference being that you are now going to be late for your
>appointment - an hour late maybe. So here is a situationn in which you have
>complete freedom about how to turn the continuous progression of time into
>discrete phases of actions, and it's completely up to you to decide. But
>the way we might experience this freedom and meta-certainty is that we can't
>take our eyes off the road in case the bus does come, but are driven to head
>home by the intense wind, and at that precise moment at which we have walked
>away from the road with the bus stop on it, with anxious glances in case the
>bus does come, well at that precise moment the bus does come! We turn and
>run to catch it, but are too late. The way we might experience out complete
>freedom to decide on our strategy at discrete points in this continous and
>freezing experience of waiting for the bus might be very well expressed in
>this un-word: "AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!"
While the (emotional) context of your example is quite different, I may give you my
interpretation of it. You are waiting for the bus, and can do one of two things:
first, use your image of yourself and your little mind-contained world to choose
what is good. You will probably call statistics and other logical tools at your
support. Ultimately, the best you can get from this is that a certain choice is
better because it is less likely to lead to the unhappy ending. And of course, there
is still a chance that the unhappy ending actually comes, and then you are left with
frustration and your "unword".
Otherwise, you can be the chinese sage (admittedly, it is overkill to be a chinese
sage to decide about behavior at a bus stop, but let's play the game). The chinese
sage does not make calculations, or possibly he makes them, but ultimately tries to
get in intuitive, non-rational, non-linguistic contact with his true "self" (forgive
this: with the World if you prefer) and "see" what he Wants to do. And seeing it and
doing it is one. His subsequent peace of mind comes from the fact that he took the
decision he Wanted to take, and it has nothing to do with what happens next. (Think
of martyrs here - possibly feeling the pain, but surely not unhappy). The chinese
sage looks at the bus coming, immediately feels that he won't run to catch it, and
smiles. *This* freedom - freedom from misleading, "extraneous" pre-judgements based
on the puppet "self" in your world map - is not an enjoyment of control - neither it
is, "AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH".
ELEPHANT:
>Wittgenstein thinks that value is the limit of language in the sense that it
>is something we cannot talk about. Not a Pirsigian or a Platonic point of
>view.
>Wittgenstein can look like a mystic in a certain light, but even in the later work
I think he's a
>logical positivist in drag, if you get my meaning. It sound's like good
>moral advice to say: don't talk about the good all the time. But in fact
>the instruction: 'don't talk about the good at all' is really the end of
>morality. In a similar way Wittgenstein can sometimes look like a
>pragmatist, but ultimately I think no two philosophical concepts could be
>further apart than the Wittgensteinian idea of a 'criterion' of meaning and
>the Jamesian concept of the difference it makes. For the Wittgensteinian
>concept is about public objects (facts such as 'use'), and the Jamesian
>concept is about the stream of consciousness. Murdoch argues that
>Wittgenstein is "embarrased" by the whole idea of our dynamic continuous
>experience of the Good, and that he makes the mistake of thinking that
>because synthetic language does not relate to the continuous world as a
>report, that individual experience of continuous reality plays no part in
>the meanings of my words. We cannot *report* sensations in the sense of a
>one-to-one correspondance between the words and the experience, because
>there isn't any discrete 'one' on the experience side until language comes
>along. Agreed. But that is not to say that we cannot *describe*
>experience, where this description is the rich deployment of metaphor and
>similie derived from that experience. Immediate experience is *like* a
>river. True enjoyment is *like* the unexpected rose. Thinking is *like*
>looking into clouds and trying to make out the shapes (I quess this would
>apply particularly to any attempt to rationalise the intuitive decision X
>you speak of).
Here I would like to elaborate on "talk about" (possibly repeating myself? forgive
me then). One thing is to say that value is something that cannot be defined - one
of Pirsig's foundations. Another thing is to say that this implies that it is
useless to speak about value. That was my "approximation" point. Anything you say
about value is a non-sentence in positivistic terms. What then? It is more like art.
Art "suggests", does not define nor povistically "say", but we need it. Pirsig's
approach is that of speaking about it using metaphysics. After all, we already had
mystics using poetry or music or other more or less artistic means to speak about
value, so it's pretty interesting see how close we can get from the metaphysics
platform. But nevertheless, this metaphysics is a dance, a game, and not formal
logics (of course), for what concerns its ultimate goal, if this is "speaking about
value". It is perfectly valid, and possibly "formal logics", if it aims at something
less, such as, revealing falsehoods. Or...
ELEPHANT:
>itself. We have to think through what it is that we cannot say about
>Dynamic Quality until we have an intelligiable and coherent account of what
>we can say, and the name for this thinking-through is 'metaphysics'.
Call me a positivist, maybe, but again, I think your opinion somehow alludes to the
fact that the MOQ, once completely formulated, maybe something that (completely)
describes some things, and not others, while my opinion is that it will never
completely/exactly describe *anything* (and also, on the other hand, that it will
never come to an end). I am not stating that language cannot capture reality because
a part of it will escape. I am stating that language can only capture positivistic
reality (the "syntax" of reality, physics), and will never be able to "capture"
(refer exactly to) anything beyond that. That does not preclude its use for
"alluding" to something beyond words.
In afterthought, I agree that Wittgenstein's "that whereof we cannot speak, thereof
we must remain silent" literally states that any discussion on value is useless (or
bad). ("We must remain silent" is what makes it different from Tao Te Ching's
incipit). Nevertheless, as I mentioned, I have read another sentence (I'll try to
remember which book) where he claimed that value (to use our word) is the "limit" of
language, not in the sense of a boundary, but in the mathematical analysis sense,
something that is infinitely approached and never reached (sorry but I lack the
correct english words here). This latter concept is quite different from the "that
whereof..." in that it at least concedes that discussion about value may "progress",
and I think this is basically what Pirsig's work builds on (I see no stronger
assumption anywhere in Pirsig, and much evidence that neverending progress is the
*best* we can achieve in metaphysics).
> ELEPHANT:
> Where Wittgenstein and Pirsig agree, and Plato too, is in saying that
> ordinary language is not a *report* of objects (particular or universal) in
> the flux. Wittgenstein says red is not a report. Plato talks about the
> impossibility of ascribing whiteness to the flux. Pirsig rightly notes that
> objects are a category of being that are added after the primary reality of
> dynamic value.
Sorry, I miss the term "flux" in context, and possibly "report". Can you
elaborate/explain?
> It sound's like good
> moral advice to say: don't talk about the good all the time. But in fact
> the instruction: 'don't talk about the good at all' is really the end of
> morality. In a similar way Wittgenstein can sometimes look like a
> pragmatist, but ultimately I think no two philosophical concepts could be
> further apart than the Wittgensteinian idea of a 'criterion' of meaning and
> the Jamesian concept of the difference it makes.
As I said, I may be heretic in my interpretation of philosophers (nor do I care for
their actual thoughts, except than for purposes of communication with others). I
think Wittgenstein used "meaning" in a positivistic sense because he was working
within the positivistic language. Meaning as you and I and James understand it is
something(s) different, so it is unfair, in my humble uneducated opinion, to compare
their opinions based on this omonimity.
> Murdoch argues that Wittgenstein is "embarrased" by the whole idea of our dynamic
> continuous
> experience of the Good, and that he makes the mistake of thinking that
> because synthetic language does not relate to the continuous world as a
> report, that individual experience of continuous reality plays no part in
> the meanings of my words. We cannot *report* sensations in the sense of a
> one-to-one correspondance between the words and the experience, because
> there isn't any discrete 'one' on the experience side until language comes
> along. Agreed. But that is not to say that we cannot *describe*
> experience, where this description is the rich deployment of metaphor and
> similie derived from that experience. Immediate experience is *like* a
> river. True enjoyment is *like* the unexpected rose. Thinking is *like*
> looking into clouds and trying to make out the shapes (I quess this would
> apply particularly to any attempt to rationalise the intuitive decision X
> you speak of).
In this last point you may seem to agree with me above. Metaphor. Dance. Alluding
to. Agreed. I'm not sure Wittgenstein would disagree, either (if you don't stick to
the "that whereof" motto).
> I think that the way you make room
> for the truth is to destroy falsehoods. And in this case we are not
> thinking of a scientific truth, Peirce's long-run end of enquiry. A
> metaphysical statement cannot approximate to the truth in the way that a
> count of heads can be more or less accurate. A metaphysical statement is
> simply false, or true: that's the way it looks to me.
To me, as I said, a metaphysical statement looks as something that is not true nor
false, but has some value. More specifically, as it relates to the intellectual
level, and this is where the "individual" comes into scene, it has some value to me
now and to you now. With that, I paradoxically (?) agree with both the positivist
and the mystic.
Have a good time all
Andrea
-- Andrea Sosio mailto: Andrea.Sosio@italtel.itMOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/ MD Queries - horse@wasted.demon.nl
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