From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sun Jan 05 2003 - 02:25:22 GMT
DMB,
Of all the posts I'm going to write tonight, I'm going to do your's first.
I'm not sure why, maybe 'cuz its the last one I read.
With that theme in mind, I'll start with your last paragraph:
DMB said:
>I don't know, Matt. I'm far from an expert on Rorty and I should probably
>just play it safe and defer to you on this, but I think you've misunderstood
>Rorty AND misapplied it to the MOQ.
Yeah, you should probably defer ;-) Because I'm a "true" Rortyan (who
wishes for the conversation to continue), I'm willing to open up this can
of worms again (maybe old questions and quibbles Platt had after our many
dialogues will come up as fresh subjects again).
Some bibliographical information: I've now read 61 of Rorty's essays, all
of Achieving Our Country, the first half of Contingency, Irony, and
Solidarity, bits of the Mirror of Nature, two full-scale commentaries,
parts of another, and several other essays on Rorty. I've listed this all
off for two questions: What does this mean? I've probably gotten the
general drift of his thinking. What does it not mean? Practically
speaking, that I've fully understood him, but theoretically speaking it
also means that I haven't found the real Rorty, nor will I ever find him.
I've been saying the same thing about Pirsig for six months now.
As to the rest of your comments, this general thought first: You've done
what I described as "recontextualization" whether or not you did it
consciously. You did not, as it were, "engage the subject." You shifted
the terms. I applaud the effort in fact.
Specific comments on comments (ad hominem appeals to my inscrutability aside):
>circumventing the position and shifting the ground of debate to one's
>own private vocabulary sounds intellectually dishonest and evasive.
Funny, that's what Glenn said, as I pointed out in the original.
>It strikes me as a pretty good way to put the breaks on a conversation and
as a
>method that is fundamentally hostile to philosophical debate.
Funny, that's the opposite spin I later put on it to Platt. DMB says that
circumvention and recontextualization "put the breaks on a conversation."
I follow Rorty in saying that circumvention and recontextualization
continue the conversation. Here's why: dialectical argumentation (which
you are implicitly favoring) starts from shared premises and aims at
consensus, which, given rigorous argumentation, will always be achieved.
That's the promise of Reason. Okay, so what happens when consensus is
reached? The conversation stops doesn't it. Yes it does. Rorty however
wants to continue the conversation, particularly when shared premises are
not to be had. That's why there are so many strawman littering the
philosophical landscape. Professional Philosophers create other people's
positions so they have someone to argue against. The problem is that, when
they aren't directly lifting passages from other people, nobody ends up
holding these positions. Other Philosophers come along, point it out, but
continue the same trend. Rorty suggests that we shouldn't worry about
shared premises and just worry about saying something edifying, something
interesting that will possibly catch fire, just as supposed dialectially
acheived consensus is supposed to catch fire. This is why you and I have
been able to converse. You completely disagree with me on some very
central ideas. Yet we always seem to have something to say to each other,
but I would say it would be very hard to characterize what either of us is
doing as "argumentation."
>Are sure he's
>not complaining about the antics of true believers or the thought style of a
>third level person?
and later,
>I think the distinction you make between dialectic and recontexualization, is
>really a difference between intellectual and social level thinking.
still later,
>This supports my hunch that this behavior is associated with the third level
>social values and is therefore and inappropriate method for philosophical
>discussions, which, obviously, is supposed to be a fourth level thing.
and finally,
>Religions are social level descriptions of a
>mystic reality and the MOQ is an intellectual level description of that same
>mystic reality. They describe the same thing, but from completely different
>levels.
These are examples of recontextualization. As it happens, they are very
similar to how Bo recontextualized the original posting. He said that
Rorty represents the social level while Pirsig remains at the intellectual.
>Agreement on the MOQ's vocabulary. Yes. I think you've identified one of the
>main problems here. I find this extremely frustrating. I wonder how anyone
>can read Lila and fail to grasp the basic terms. People want to change the
>names of levels, add them, subtract them, ignore the differences between
>them. I think all this stuff is motivated by misunderstanding and reflects
>this undesireable tendency to distort things in order to fit them in with
>what we already believe. Intellectual honesty and self-serving
>rationalizations don't go together. Anyway, enough of that rant. Knowing the
>basic terms and structure of the MOQ are pre-requisites to any fruitful
>conversation, which is why I quote from the books so much. I want us all to
>get away from their won private vocabularies and pet projects and just look
>at what Pirsig says.
Naturally, having read the post and at least keeping in mind the other
things I've written in direct correspondence with you, you're perfectly
cognizant of the fact that I disagree with your rant and promote "private
vocabularies and pet projects." Or, maybe not, things I've written people
run together these days. To be explicit: I follow Rorty in thinking that
there is no True Pirsig to be found in his books. Accuracy can be one
goal, but not necessarily the most useful. My interpretation of Pirsig
(which is the only thing anybody can offer) never claimed for accuracy. In
fact, I am always quite up front about the fact that I'm willfully ignoring
certain parts of Pirsig that are in some kind of inconsistency with either
where I would have wanted him to go or with the direction he did go.
>Ah ha! Religious tradition are indentified with these final vocabularies.
Of course they are. Its a pretty trivial thing to say that one of the
biggest places people get their final vocabularies from are religions. Its
not the only place, naturally. Could be politics, sociology, anthropology,
physics, philosophy, movies, TV, soda can labels, Vonnegut, Derrida, Dewey,
Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Wilber, Shakespeare, Oakeshott, Marx, Steinbeck,
Constant, Berlin, Hegel, Palahniuk, Lovejoy, Sontag, Rorty, Jesus, Ghandi,
Reagan, Bloom ... I could go on I suppose, but I'll end with ... Pirsig.
Gee, I wonder where this website's "priests" get many of the words that
they use in their final vocabularies? Religion only?
I'll end with the last part of your last paragraph (which I omitted the
first time around):
>I think its safe to say that Rorty is
>several light years from mysticism, which is the essence of the MOQ. I think
>you've got to do some serious violence to the square peg and/or the round
>hole to make this thing fit.
"Rorty is several light years from mysticism"
Yes and no. Rorty doesn't talk a lot about mysticism, so on first gloss,
yes. But one of his major commentators who wrote an introduction to him
(Malachowski) compared Rorty's thinking (I think quite successfully) to
Madhyamika Buddhism (correct me Scott, if its not Buddhism) and Nagarjuna.
"mysticism, which is the essence of the MOQ"
I, or course, deny there is an essence, in any True sense, to the MoQ. We
can characterize it as mysticism, but I think we can characterize it as a
bunch of other things, too (which I've been trying to do). Besides, if you
give the MoQ an essence, you're defining it. That would be a definition of
a definition of "something" undefinable. I suppose you could do that, but
as long as you know what you're doing. I myself see Quality's
undefinability as about a clear a sign for antiessentialism as anything.
"I think you've got to do some serious violence to the square peg and/or
the round hole to make this thing fit."
Rorty on Bloomian strong misreadings:
"The critic asks neither the author nor the text about their intentions but
simply beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose. ... He
does this by imposing a vocabulary ... on the text which may have nothing
to do with any vocabulary used in the text or by its authoer, and seeing
what happens. The model here is not the curious collector of clever
gadgets taking them apart to see what makes them work and carefully
ignoring any extrinsic end they may have, but the psychoanalyst blithely
interpreting a dream or a joke as a symptom of homicidal mania."
Though I do have an interest in pulling Pirsig apart before putting him
back together, I'm also interested in radically interpreting him. As it
happens, Pirsig does the same thing to Plato, the Sophists, Aristotle,
Poincare, Boas, the Victorians, Sidis, James, etc. Harold Bloom says, when
done well, its what the genius does to differentiate himself from the
masses. I'm inclined to agree (not that I'm a genius, far from it).
Matt
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