From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Fri Jan 10 2003 - 23:48:21 GMT
Platt, Scott,
Platt said:
Binaries are required if we are to think at all. As Plato said,
"You can't have many without the one." Wilber emphasizes this in "The
Spectrum of Consciousness." Language is dualistic. Thanks for bringing
this up as I suspected there was flaw in Matt's "privileging" of DQ but
couldn't put my finger on it.
Matt:
Actually, I kinda' thought I was trying to pinpoint what Pirsig was saying,
rather then agreeing with or deviating from his presentation of Dynamic
Quality and static quality. As Scott says, "One indication of the
privileging of Dynamic Quality over static quality is
that the former is capitalized and the latter not," which echoes Pirsig's
reply on why DQ is capitalized and static not.
On Scott's interpretation, I think it could've been predicted that I would
agree on all points but one: the turn back to metaphysics. I thought of
something the other day on Scott and mine's convergence and divergence, so
I thought I'd take the opportunity to add this.
Scott's interpretation of Pirsig is as an "ironic metaphysics." Scott
forwarded this name a while ago and I think it represents his position very
well. It also highlights the difference between Scott and I: metaphysics.
We agree on irony, the linguistic turn, and several other places, but Scott
wants to "raise this observation to a metaphysical prime," and I still
don't see that we have to. Like Rorty's criticism's of Derrida's and de
Man's turn, after destroying all metanarratives, _back_ towards
metanarratives, I don't see that we have to elevate our narratives back up
to the meta- level. If we don't do this, we won't have an "ironic
metaphysics" (which retains a Reality behind appearances all the while
affirming that we would never know if we were accurately representing it),
but nominalism.
Scott's criticized Rorty's nominalism before as being "self-contradictory
on his part. To be a nominalist is to assume that there is a non-verbal
reality, something for one's words to be about, and so one starts on the
slippery slope back to a correspondence theory of truth -- and so SOM."
("Confessions" 8/6/02) I would agree, it would fall back into a
representational theory of truth, if this were the case with Rorty's
nominalism. But its not. Rorty's nominalism is avowedly
antirepresentationalist, that being the whole point of his first book and
much of his later writings. Scott elaborated in a private correspondence
to me (which I asked for, and I hope I'm not overstepping my bounds by
including it), "What is wrong with it (IMO) is that it allows one to ignore
certain mysteries. ... What Rorty ignores (as does Dennett and most
everybody) is that the smallest act of consciousness, like reading a word,
involves the mystery of the Many and the One (e.g. why do we see things and
not photons)." One of the mystery's Scott is after is the mystery of how
we abstract, how we detect similarities amoung particulars. However, I
don't see how this is a problem. We have causal pressures (i.e.
experience) and we begin to notice similarities in our experience. We
begin making distinctions between some of our experience, like
differentiating between tables and lions. I don't understand why we have
to treat this as mysterious, particularly if we take the Darwinian turn,
which is simply that our cognitive abilities have evolved. I believe
Nietzsche (and probably others) argued that if an animal didn't
differentiate between tables and lions, it wouldn't have survived and
that's the extent of an explanation we need on why we have the cognitive
abilities that we do. It wasn't God or a telos, it was evolution. It
weeded out all the humans who didn't make differentiations in the
experience (with help from the lions).
I think Scott's main criticism of irony without metaphysics is that it
leads to nihilism. I haven't, though, quite figured out why. As I see it,
nihilism, along with relativism, is a position that nobody holds. Its not
that nominalists think that no values or no truths exist. We make values
and truths out of our present context, we think of them in relational and
contextual terms, not in an ahistorical or transcendent way. Scott has
said that the only way to believe in this transcendent Reality is on faith,
that we will eventually reach Reality, even though we can't really know
what that would be like. Scott's said that an ironic metaphysics is about
self-transformation, and it is this exact point I agree with. Rorty's
moral philosophy is about self-perfection, self-transformation. But the
point of irony is that there isn't a "true vocabulary" out there that is
the perfection that we should be transforming into. As I understand it,
Scott's agrees with the point of irony, but still has faith in us one day
transforming our vocabulary into this perfect, true vocabulary
I don't see any problem with the faith. That's part of Scott's route
towards self-perfection. But I don't see how my route (which is nearly
identical in form to Scott's) falls into nihilism because I _don't_ have
faith in ever accidentally transforming my vocabulary into a perfect
vocabulary.
Matt
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