From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 19 2002 - 23:58:14 GMT
Sam,
>Doesn't Pirsig explicitly say that he is continuing the philosophical school
>of pragmatism (ie James, Pierce) so that is the best place to locate him?
Christ, I've been trying to make that argument for, what? 6 months now?
Granted, though, certain aspects of Pirsig may coincide with certain other
aspects of Dewey, James, and Pierce that Rorty (as my representative
pragmatist) may want to gloss over. For instance, Dewey's supposed
metaphysics (which is called a "metaphysics of experience," in case anybody
is interested in looking into the comparisons).
>Also, to Matt: why do you think Pirsig has continuities with Heidegger?
That passage that caught my eye was "Religion isn't invented by man. Men
are invented by religion," (Ch 28) which is very, very much like
Heidegger's (roughly) "Man doesn't use language, language uses man." Not
only do the phrases show strong, eerie similarity, but the message of them
is the same: a person is in many ways the same as the person's culture.
>Are you saying that you cannot have a
>non-linguistic experience, or rather that you simply cannot talk about such
>an experience intelligibly?
There are two slogans, one from the Continental tradition, one from the
Analytic, that cash out to mean the same thing: "Everything is a social
construction" (Foucault) and "All awareness is a linguistic affair"
(Sellars). Here's Rorty:
"Both are ways of saying that we shall never be able to step outside of
language, never be able to grasp reality unmediated by a linguistic
description. So both are ways of saying that we should be suspicious of
the Greek distinction between appearance and reality, and that we should
try to replace it with something like the distinction between 'less useful
description of the world' and 'more useful description of the world'. To
say that everything is a social construction is to say that our linguistic
practices are so bound up with our other social practices that our
descriptions of nature, as well as of ourselves, will always be a function
of our social needs. To say that all awareness is a linguistic affair is
to say that we have no knowledge of the kind which Bertrand Russell ...
called 'knowledge by acquaintance'. All our knowledge is of the sort which
Russell called 'knowledge by description'. If you put the two slogans
together, you get the claim that all our knowledge is under descriptions
suited to our current social purposes."
Now, this is what Heidegger means by "Man doesn't use language, language
uses man" and, as I would interpret it, what Pirsig's gesturing towards
when he said, "Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion."
So, when Platt says that Rorty has an idea that "that a pre-linguistic
reality doesn't exist," (and that I'm defending it) he's not exactly
accurate. A more accurate statement is that we can't have knowledge of a
pre-linguistic reality.
Matt
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