From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Wed Jan 01 2003 - 17:10:35 GMT
Members of the MD,
As you might be able to tell from the title, I am, with heavy heart,
relinquishing my place in the sanctuary. I'm not sure who first compared
the MoQ to religion and, though I'm sure it was meant despairingly, I find
the analogy fitting and use it as an apt description, rather than an
off-hand denunciation. Though certainly not as shocking as, say, Bo or
Platt leaving the fold, it is a tad shocking for myself, having been there
for all the thoughts and essays and misfired essays I've had over the past
two years. Though not as vocal in the MD forum as the two aforementioned
priests, I was a staunch advocate and was in the process of carving out my
own little place in the Forum. In fact, my silence for the past year is
part of why I'm writing now.
The last several posts I had written were about two things I've been
thinking about a lot lately: Rorty and argumentation. As I had commented a
while ago during a pragmatism thread, I've been reading a lot of Rorty
lately and I've finally come to a realization: Pirsig was doing to me what
Plato did to Pirsig. For Pirsig, Plato created the Western philosophical
nightmare called "Professional Philosophy," amongst other things. But
through Rorty's eyes I'm finding that Pirsig is attempting the same thing,
rather than really fundamentally changing anything. To turn Pirsig's
eloquent phrase back on him, the halo is gone from Pirsig's head. This is
not to say that I'm still not an avid Pirsig supporter. But I'm finding
that the better parts of Pirsig are to be found in ZMM, not Lila. What
Rorty has given me is the tools necessary to see and to enunciate what I've
disliked about Pirsig, without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
And though Rorty gave Pirsig the short shrift, I implore you not to do the
same to Rorty. Rorty has a lot to offer Pirsig and vice versa.
The main topic I wanted to cover in this little introduction to the new
movement of my thought is the issue of argumentation, something we know all
too well here. A lot of arguing goes on here, some of it edifying, much of
it belligerent and uninteresting (so goes my opinion). When I first signed
onto the MD I lurked for a while and then was pulled by the force of God to
respond to someone's "stupidity." "They are making a mistake and I must
set them straight!" or so went my megalomania. After a while the arguments
became tedious. My point didn't seem to be coming across, or rather, since
the point of argumentation is conversion, nobody was budging. This had
happened before in other forums, so I just took a step back. But as I've
watched over the past year, I've seen a lot of intense bickering with no
ground being given or gained in one direction or the other. I'm not the
first to see this or say something about it, but people seem to drive their
arguments at the others and then defiantly defend their own position
without much give or leeway for new perspective. This is why antagonists
in the MD have despairingly called the MoQ a "dogma" and a "religion."
Defenders of the faith have then, rightly, come back and called the
antagonists own positions dogma and religion. Obviously, there is an
impasse. What is this argumentation if it does not align our thoughts into
a single thread? That's what argumentation is for, after all, right?
Reading Rorty, however, put this uneasiness I felt with argumentation into
focus. Rorty suggests that we picture "the self" as Quine did: a
centerless web of beliefs and desires. This web includes "a set of words
which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives.
These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and
contempt of our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts
and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes
prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. I
shall call these words a persons 'final vocabulary.'" (from Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity) Rorty feels that the centerless web of beliefs and
desires that we label "the self" is changed, not by something called
Reason, but causally. This means that arguments are of little practical
use because a person's final vocabulary is self-justifying. It's the end of
the road and, for all practical purposes, final. Arguments proceed by
common ground, but if common ground is not had, then logical argumentation
is superfluous. Our final vocabularies are not judged by some Kantian
tribunal of Reason. If an argument does "work," it is not because it was
"rational" or "logical," but because it was persuasive. At root, people
have a fundamental incorrigibility of their final vocabulary, so, in
Rorty's words, we "must tempt the rising generation with our words."
My uneasiness with argumentation stems from two things: 1) the feeling that
people need to reach their own conclusions, work through their own
problems, think it through themselves, etc. This "philosophical
individualism" finds voice in the incorrigibility of a person's final
vocabulary. If a person cannot be forced by Reason into a new belief, then
they must be persuaded to think it through themselves. 2) The results of
most dialectical arguments are as so: two people each defend a separate
position, they argue, one person forces the other into a position of
weakness through a series of dialectical gambits, the "loser" invokes her
incorrigibility ("Well, I'm still right" or "I'm still not convinced" or
"You're a big doo-doo head"), and the "winner", having already supposedly
won the encounter, resorts to rhetorical measures of labeling which have no
logical, dialectical bearing ("Well, you're not being rational" or "Your'e
being dogmatic" or "You're an insane freak"). Either way, the rational,
logical, undistorted dialectical match is ended rhetorically. Hence, the
primacy of tempting people with your words, rather than with argumentation.
This is essentially what I see being played out on a daily basis in the MD
forum. Two or more positions come together, clash, and eventually, through
finding that arguing with a brick wall is tiresome, end the debate. The
debate is found to be exasperating rather than elucidating. The debates
that rage over the supremacy of the MoQ over some other usurper (SOM,
Wilber, etc.) or vice versa play out this type of clash, but they also
illustrate the self-justification of alternate paradigms. Two recent
examples come to mind: the Beasley/McWatt clash (and its subsequent
backlash on the MD) and a relatively minor skirmish between Platt Holden
and Glenn Bradford.
The Beasley/McWatt battle took place over John Beasley's essay
"Understanding Quality." Anthony McWatt claimed that Beasley is
"discussing the MOQ from an SOM perspective. He's not yet made that
perceptual shift to the MOQ…." McWatt then offered a MoQian critique of
the essay which, McWatt would claim, shifted the ground of the debate onto
MoQian terms and showed that Beasley, by not following this shift, had not
even begun to understand the MoQ and, ergo, cannot begin to yet critique
it. The backlash that occurred was led by Struan Hellier who (as per his
pattern) attacked the credibility of McWatt, amongst other apparent holes
in McWatt's argument. What this incident illustrates is how McWatt accused
Beasley of not engaging Pirsig's MoQ (by not shifting into a MoQ paradigm),
but then himself did not engage Beasley's essay (by staying in the MoQ
paradigm). Hellier solidified the incommensurability and, ultimately,
self-justifying nature of these alternate paradigms (as he has done on so
many occasions) with rhetorical attacks in the way of ad hominem arguments,
rather than logical argumentation which is what is supposedly desired.
The recent skirmish between Holden and Bradford only receives notice
because of its timeliness, commonality to other skirmishes (this as only a
single exemplar), and its explicitness. On July 18, 2002, Holden (posted
under Re: MD Understanding Intellect) said:
"It all hangs together and, as you [Bodvar Skutvik] say, 'the MOQ makes
much more sense than the SOM.' When all is said and done, SOM's dogma of
'chance.' [sic] is every bit as rigid and unprovable as what creationists
believe. The faith of science in chance knows no bounds."
Bradford took issue and wrote:
"You've written a number of similar criticisms of 'chance' over the years
yet you've never fleshed out the issue, opting instead for the rhetorical
pot-shot.
...
"Would you mind expanding on your criticism of the SOM notion of 'chance'
and, as an exercise in intellectual honesty, give the best defense of
'chance' that you can find, *before* positing the MOQ position?" (July 20,
2002, MD MOQ on chance)
This is a further illustration of the common shifting of perspective.
Bradford, taking issue with it, redesribes such a shift as intellectual
dishonesty. Holden, in defending himself, notes the same thing as I have:
"Asking me to defend 'chance' before positing the MOQ position is like
asking you to defend creationism before positing the scientific position.
I fail to see the connection to 'intellectual honesty,' but I'm open to
enlightenment on the subject." (July 20, 2002, Re: MD MOQ on chance)
As a further illustration of the circular, self-justifying nature of
alternative modes of thought, I would illustrate two more positions: the
Platonic dialectical-foundation position and the Rortyan
recontextualization position. These two positions are on the nature of
intellectual engagement and so receive special notice. The Platonic
tradition argues that for intellectual discourse to occur, we must agree on
terms and then argue various positions and platforms according to these
terms. At the end of an engagement some sort of consensus will have
occurred given the singular use of terms and the rigorousness and
thoroughness of argumentation. If consensus has not occurred, it is only
because of equivocation in terminology, sloppy reasoning, or plain old
stubborness. The Platonic dialectic is the basis for this logical
argumentation. The Rortyan position holds that beliefs are changed
causally, not through "rational" argumentation. The proper "method" for
intellectual engagement is recontextualization. The private position of a
person is recontextualized within a narrative of history by which the
private position is shown to have an inadequate understanding of the
patterns of the past and the needs of the present. Positions aren't so
much engaged as they are circumvented by shifting the grounds of debate
into one's own private vocabulary. Consensus is reached if you can
persuade the other person that their understanding isn't as useful as yours.
The "engagement" of these two positions is, obviously, quite problematical.
The Platonic tradition demands agreement of terms and dialectical
argumentation, while the Rortyan position demands circumvention of opposing
terms and persuasiveness of narrative. So how do these two positions
engage? If you're a Platonist, they engage like normal: logical dialectic.
If you're a Rortyan, they don't like normal: the arguments are
circumvented and then recontextualized. The Platonist would dialectically
engage the Rortyan by showing that dialectical reason is supreme and/or
needed for rational discourse to take place. The Rortyan would shift the
terms and show that dialectical reason has given us the entire misconceived
tradition of Western metaphysics. 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.
Now that I've laid out some of the Rortyan tools and terminology, we can
see how they can help resolve the recent debates on the MD I pulled out
earlier. We can see how the Rortyan suggestion that much of our final
vocabularies are incorrigible and the circumvention of alternate
vocabularies works its magic on the outstanding differences between MoQ
priests and MoQ heretics. The heretics demand some rational, neutral
foundation for debate, while the priests continue to shift the terms of
debate onto the MoQ (this isn't to say that some priests don't call for
rational foundations and some heretics don't shift the terms). Rorty helps
us realize that this is precisely what should be done. McWatt was correct
in shifting the playing field to MoQ terms (whatever the particularities of
his critique) and so was Holden. Rorty, however, continues the train of
thought and recommends that we forego an argument model of persuasion. But
while we should forego the argumentation model, this does not mean we
should abandon discourse or dialogue.
This isn't to say that argumentation isn't possible. 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 I see it is that,
as of yet, 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. When all the key words are still up
for grabs, we can do little more then suggest different ways of picturing
and accounting for things.
Finally, I wish to elaborate briefly on why I find the MoQ-religion analogy
a pleasing description. As I've said, all people have recourse to their own
final vocabulary. The most famous source for final vocabularies in the West
is the Judeo-Christian tradition. With the indentification of religions as
supplying final vocabularies we have the ability to compare secular
vocabularies to traditionally religious vocabularies. However,
consequently, the divide between the secular and the religious has been
blurred. Many Religious Studies academics are constructing definitions of
religion that include, for instance, Marxism and Capitalism. This has had
the effect of making the secular/religious distinction, not only blurred,
but even ubiquitous and therefore as having outlived its usefulness. Not
only that, it has also had the effect of turning the heinous charge of
being religious (as necessarily being dogmatic) into a gentle, descriptive
analogy.
Before I sign off, I wish to simply allude to the fact that there is much
that has been left out of Rorty's philosophy so far (notably Bloomian
strong misreadings, Rorty's use of irony, systematic vs. edifying
philosophy, post-Philosophical culture, and metaphors vs. literal words,
amongst much else). I hope to submit this posting to a kind of peer review
before I commit it to essay. As such, any forthcoming engagements with
this post will almost certainly elicit the other strands of Rortys thought.
I don't wish to spring them on anyone in some sort of ambush; I only wish
to get a feel for when they would best be introduced. If you feel like
youre being ambushed, remember that this post is meant only as an
introduction to the intersections of Rorty and Pirsig and my own use of
them. As should already be apparent, I don't wish convince anyone using
Platonic, dialectical strong-arm tactics; I only wish to tempt you with the
gentle purring of Rorty's edifying discourse.
Matt
[p.s. As some may be aware, I've since recinded on the notion that the
distinction between the secular and religious should be dissolved, but part
of that notion is that we should secularize Marxism so you don't have to
reference Marx's philosophy of history to suggest that the poor are being
taken advantage of and that we should secularize Christianity so you don't
have to reference the Cosmic Christ to suggest the same thing. The most
important thing we need to do is compare vocabularies, including secular
with religious. I still find the comparison of the MoQ to religion
satisfying, but it has more to do with Rorty's notion of Redemptive Truth,
that Sam brought up a while ago.]
------- End of forwarded message -------
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 01 2003 - 21:36:28 GMT