Bo,
Your reversal of narrative was very timely. A perfect example of the shift
into a "MoQ perspective".
Bo: "He says (in [my] words) "...we must tempt the rising generation with
our words". Right. Remember Phaedrus of ZAMM who had an affinity for the
Sophists and hated Socrates and Platon? [sic] The former were "persuaders with
words". This put in the perspective of the MOQ (where the intellectual level
is SOM) makes it crystal clear ....
"... Socrates and Plato were the spear-heads of a new value level, that of
INTELLECT (an objective truth above the subjectivity of the sophists) which
is now seen as the representatives of SOCIAL value. Phaedrus' sympathy is
because any level's tendency to join forces with the one below its "natural
born enemy" (Intellect and Biology's common cause against Society). This
proves my eternal claim that the Quality Idea is an intellectual pattern which
is not at home with its parents and thus sees Society its ally.
"So Rorty is merely repeating the dangerous "social" stand-point that it's all
persuasion and that "man is the measure of all things", and thus speaking
from a point of view below Pirsig."
What I find most interesting about the narrative is that it reflects the
description I gave of self-justifying narratives, except that your
narrative commits the same "no, no" I spoke a warning against: (from
earlier) "The two positions cannot do anything but find recourse in their
own methods. If either one were to alternate to another method to enshrine
the original method, then that undermines the entire effort by showing that
there is another method at work behind the original. Both methods are
necessarily self-justifying."
You use the Rortyan "method" of redescription and circumvention to enshrine
the Platonic tradition's method of dialectical, objective, logical
argumentation. We even have Pirsig railing against this move (in a section
I alluded to earlier): "The halo around the heads of Plato and Socrates is
now gone. He sees that they consistently are doing exactly that which they
accuse the Sophists of doing--using emotionally persuasive language for the
ulterior purpose of making the weaker argument, the case for dialectic,
appear the stronger." (ch 29, 388) And by the end of ZMM, Pirsig's heroes
are the Sophists, not Plato or Socrates.
If Rorty is read as debating from Social patterns of value, then I think
this continues to fuzzy the already hard to see line between Social and
Intellectual patterns of value. Pirsig says (and you would affirm) that
dialectic is emergent out of rhetoric. You seem to be reading this as
Intellect emerging out of Society. But, following Pirsig's recapitulation
of Barthes, if logos is believed to be emergent from the mythos, then the
change between the levels is not discrete. As Pirsig says in one of his
annotations, there needs to be a sharp break between Society and Intellect.
The contention that logos is emergent from mythos is the contention that
symbols used in rational argumentation can be broken down and found in the
Society's former mythos. And, as Pirsig says, the logos really just
becomes the new mythos. A continuation, possibly in a different direction,
but still a continuation, not a sharp, discrete break.
So, I find your narrative to be in a little "bad faith". An equivocation
of what is thought to have been done. You seem to make the rhetorical
redescription into a MoQ vocabulary, but then you make a strong rational
argumentation claim of "proving" something ("This proves my eternal claim
that the Quality Idea is an intellectual pattern which is not at home with
its parents and thus sees Society its ally."). You also claim that Rorty
is functioning at a level below Pirsig, when its not at all clear that
Pirsig (the rhetorician of ZMM) shares your conviction.
Your definition of Intellect as "objective truth" is probably what I find
so objectionable. Particularly if, as I understand it, you are equating
SOT with "objective truth". Intellect-as-SOT is not the problem. I think
there is a lot to be said about making subject-object thinking the
Intellectual level. Its when you add "objectivity" into the fray that I
think things begin to fall apart because your narrative essentially, then,
calls for a logical argument. After the redescription, your narrative
defrocks the redescriptioning process. Indeed, when rhetoric is forced
into the Social level, I think many helpful things about Rorty are lossed,
much as Pirsig felt he had missed out on several helpful things from Aristotle.
Finally, I wish to recind on some of my remarks about argumentation. They
may have led to a little overkill. I said earlier that, "Rorty, however,
continues the train of thought and recommends that we forego argumentation
completely, whether with the heretics or with each other." I think I may
have inflated what Rorty recommends. Argumentation may be possible as a
reasonable device for discourse if one is arguing within a given
vocabulary. For instance, it may be possible for argumentation to play a
role between two "priests". There are two problems with this thought, one
theoretical, the other practical. First, it is not entirely clear what the
difference is between "discourse between vocabularies" (inter-vocabulary
discourse) and "discourse within a vocabulary" (intra-vocabulary
discourse). The practical problem as of yet, as I see it, is that I don't
think anybody is agreed to what the MoQ vocabulary consists of for
intra-vocabulary discourse to be made viable. There are still major
disagreements and, when moving between vocabularies, rational arguments are
still of little value.
Matt
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