From: Scott R (jse885@spinn.net)
Date: Thu Oct 17 2002 - 20:54:04 BST
Matt,
Matt the Enraged Endorphin wrote:
> In partictular, the quote you pulled out from Pirsig in Ch 8 is very
> revealing. Most of that paragraph sounds like Pirsig is discarding a
> correspondence theory of truth. He sounds like an antiessentialist when he
> says, "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." However, two lines before, he sounds like a confused
> metaphysician: "But if Quality or excellence is seen as the ultimate
> reality then it becomes possible for more than one set of truths to exist."
> This, I take, to be Pirsig's hubris. He believed he could succeed where
> Plato failed. He believed he could encapsulate the Good.
Well, no, since Pirsig insists on the undefinability of Quality. To
encapsulate is to define.
Pirsig thinks he
> can have an ultimate reality and not expect people to want to correspond to
> it. He says, one line before that, "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." Well, my question is, what good is an ultimate
> reality if you can't correspond to it?
One can have faith in it (my thought, not necessarily Pirsig's).
If Quality becomes the ultimate
> reality then it tempts people to come along and say, "Hey, the MoQ is
> universal and ahistorical."
No. Quality is undefinable and universal and ahistorical. The MOQ is
contingent. Remember my propsoal for an ironic metaphysics?
But then, in the same breath, Pirsig trys to
> say that "No, it isn't." By retaining metaphysics, he's retaining SOM.
To some extent I agree that he has retained some SOM-ish habits, but it
does not follow from retaining metaphysics. You (and Rorty) are too
dismissive of metaphysics. Buddhists, for example, will say of something
like Quality that "one can't say it exists, one can't say it doesn't
exist, one can't say it both exists and doesn't exist, and one can't say
it neither exists nor doesn't exist", but there is a Buddhist
metaphysics of sorts. Metaphysics becomes wrong when it says positive
things in an absolutist way, but there is an ironic level of discourse
that is not without value.
> Pirsig says it, we say it, Rorty says it. The point is that Pirsig doesn't
> have to retain metaphysics or SOM, Nietzsche and the pragmatists show him a
> way out. They show him a way in which he can retain the first and third
> quote without the need for the second. In fact, to be more precise, the
> third quote should read: "If we retain an ultimate reality then we're
> permitted only one construction of thing."
(Was that to read "...of anything"? I'll assume so). Why should that be?
In my metaphysics, all form is contingent -- it is only the formless
that is absolute (and contingency applies to this sentence, since in
another galaxy the word "form" may be meaningless). "All form" includes
thoughts about form, etc. Ultimate reality is formless.
- Scott
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