From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sun Dec 22 2002 - 17:45:12 GMT
DMB, Sam,
Sam said:
That triumphant Modernism was built upon the re-incorporation of the
Platonic path within Western Christianity itself, from which came the evils
of the Inquisition, Scholasticism, the Crusades, the Wars of Religion and,
ultimately, the Holocaust.
DMB responded:
No, Modernism was built upon the Aristotelan path. "This duality of form and
substance and the scientific method of arriving at facts about substances
wre central to Aristotle's philosophy. Thus the dethronement dialectic from
what Socrates and Plato held it to be..." (ZAMM P330) It is Aristotle's
emphasis on "substance" that led to amoral scientific objectivity. SOM is a
metaphysics of substance. That's what killed God and put a dark mark on
modernity. Further, both the modern scientific worldview and social level
religions are extremely hostile to the Platonic/Socratic quest for the One.
They equate mysticism with insanity and heresy. (Scholasitism very much
involved the effort to join Aristotle's physics with Christian theology.) I
think it is profoundly incorrect to blame this mystical tradition for
everything from the Inquisition to the Holocaust. As Pirsig says, war,
genocide and human exploitation are best understood as antics of the giant.
No. Sorry friend, but the suggestion that mystics and philosophers are
responsible for that kind of bloodshed strikes me as preposterous. That is
to say, it is backwards. Quite the opposite is true.
Matt:
I agree with Sam, to a certain extent. I'm not about to toss the blame of
the Inquisition, the Crusades, the Wars of Religion and the Holocaust
solely on any philosophical enterprise, though I doubt that was Sam's
intention. However, when he says Platonism leads to modernism, I can
agree, insofar as Aristotellianism (usually contrasted to Platonism) is
engulfed by Platonism, subsumed under its heading. Aristotle and Plato had
many differences, but they also had several continuities, namely the
overall project of them both: the search for Truth. Socrates started this
tradition and Plato immortalized it. While Plato said that dialectic was
the only path towards the Truth, Aristotle wasn't so sure, though he still
bought into the project of searching for the Truth. As Pirsig says right
before the section you quoted:
"Aristotle attacked this belief [that "dialectic was the sole method by
which the truth as arrived at."], saying that the dialectic was only
suitable for some purposes--to enquire into men's beliefs, to arrive at
truths about eternal forms of things, known as Ideas, which were fixed and
unchanging and constituited reality for Plato. Aristotle said there is
also the method of science, or 'physical' method, which observes physical
facts and arrives at truths about substances, which undergo change." (Ch. 29)
Aristotle was making room for science. The distinction between form and
substance is a distinction that Aristotle took from Plato: the Realm of the
Forms and the Realm of Shadows, respectively. The distinction that informs
both Plato's emphasis on the Forms and the Enlightenment's emphasis on
Science is that between appearance and reality. Plato claimed that the
Forms were reality and that Shadows were mere appearance. The
Enlightenment project of science inverted this schematic, making the
Shadows (now, material existence) reality and the Forms (now, concepts)
mere appearance. This reading of the history of ideas, I think, shows us
the real culprit: the search for Truth, started by our friends Socrates and
Plato. This is why we can refer to a Platonic tradition that includes
everybody from Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas and Descartes to Habermas and
Searle.
Now, quite plainly, you, DMB, are going to want to deny this reading of
philosophy. You want to save the search for Truth while damning the
Aristotellian tradition for creating "amoral scientific objectivity" and a
"metaphysics of substance." Well, if we damn metaphysics of substance,
what do we do with Spinoza? Spinoza created a metaphysics of substance
where the only substance was God. If we damn him, then why not Descartes,
who argued for "clear and distinct ideas," one of which was the Perfection
and Ultimate Goodness of God? If we damn Descartes, then why not Plato and
Aristotle who all three thought that the Truth was "out there" waiting to
be discovered, which is what objectivity is all about. Objectivity is
about making the relation between humans and Truth be the relation between
human and nonhuman. A non-Platonic relation between humans and truth is
the relation between humans and other humans i.e. solidarity.
The mystic relation to Truth is still that of human to nonhuman, even if
this relation is an extremely private act. But mysticism is based on
revelation, be it Siddhartha Guatama's revelation or Saul of Tarsus'
revelation. And to think that the Eastern half of the world hasn't had its
religious conflicts, pace Pirsig, is to not read enough Eastern history.
There are records of so-called "Fighting Monks" who fought amongst
themselves because of different interpretations of the Buddha.
This isn't to say that a human to nonhuman relation breeds violence while a
humans to humans relation does not. Violence can be bred by both sides.
This observation is what leads me to repudiate the idea, pace Pirsig, that
our ideas lead invariably towards certain world events. This type of
Fukuyamian idea that the motor of history are ideas, that to find what's
really driving history we need to do intellectual history, I think is
overstated. Ideas can cause us to do certain things, but I think ideas are
parasitic upon life's circumstances, not the other way around. I don't
think SOM (be it a "metaphysics of substance" in DMB's interpretation or
the appearance/reality distinction in my interpretation) is what has caused
societies ills. I think there are many more factors involved, one being
the lack of money. If everybody had enough money and had time enough to be
lazy and reflective and loving, then I think a lot of the world's problems
would dissolve.
Matt
p.s. DMB, I was hoping that when you quote Pirsig you could put the chapter
number. There are many different editions of his books out, all being
numbered differently, and it makes it hard to find the sections you're
quoting with only page numbers.
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