From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Jan 30 2005 - 21:22:28 GMT
Sam, Scott, etc.,
I just wanted to point out that DMB just quoted the exact passage that shows
Pirsig's ambiguity over the status of "Quality" (and many other pieces of
his philosophy). Pirsig sometimes characterizes it as an empirical
discovery and Scott took issue. DMB quoted this well-known passage from
Pirsig in Lila:
"The Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to what is called empiricism. It
claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by
thinking what the senses provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any
knowledge gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely
theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion,
and metaphysics as unverifiable. The Metaphysics of Quality varies from this
by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism
are verifiable and that in the past have been excluded for metaphysical
reasons, not empirical reasons. They have been excluded because of the
metaphysical assumption that all the universe is composed of subjects and
objects and anything that can't be classified as a subject or an object
isn't real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It is
just an assumption."
Here's the most important part:
"[Art, morality, and mysticism] have been excluded because of the
metaphysical assumption that all the universe is composed of subjects and
objects and anything that can't be classified as a subject or an object
isn't real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It
is just an assumption."
In ZMM, Pirsig describes his burgeoning philosophy as a "Copernican
revolution" of older, SOMic philosophy. He reverses the order, just as
Copernicus and Kant had done: Quality comes first, then subjects and
objects. None of our "empirical evidence" changes: just the way we look at
it. In ZMM, Pirsig seems to have understood (at least at that point) that
he was rearranging our conceptual equipment and not discovering something
that others had not. In Lila, it is much less clear how Pirsig views what
he is doing. After first giving kudos to empiricism and empirical validity,
Pirsig trashes traditional empiricism for being too strict, as hamstringing
valid knowledge with "just" a metaphysical assumption, rather than with
empirical evidence.
This gives the impression that the MoQ is more empirically valid than SOM.
As if the MoQ only hampers itself with empirical evidence, and not
metaphysical assumptions.
But this, of course, is silly because the MoQ just is such a set of
metaphysical assumptions. And if Pirsig recognizes in ZMM and within this
passage from Lila a difference betwen metaphysical assumptions and empirical
evidence, one should wonder how Pirsig views the triumph of his MoQ, by what
criteria he concludes that the MoQ is better than SOM. Pirsig describes it
as empirically better some of the time, but Pirsig himself destroys such
criteria. This is why I've on occasion asserted that Pirsig misrepresents
the problem with SOM: it isn't that SOM can't describe "art, morality, and
mysticism" worth a damn and that the MoQ can. Its that SOM doesn't describe
them in a way that Pirsig likes and the MoQ does. The only criteria in the
area that could be of service to Pirsig are pragmatic criteria: his MoQ
(dis)solves more philosophical problems than SOM does. Its consequences are
better than SOM's.
But if I'm right in this, than I think that very turn to pragmatism in his
hour of need destroys some of the other conceptual equipment he uses along
the way. For instance, take the above passage from Lila. Pirsig
ubiquitizes experience to include everything. Everything is an experience
and in this way everything is empirically verifiable, including art,
morality, and mysticism, which SOM had excluded because of its restricted
sense of experience. But if Pirsig's move is taken to be a "discovery,"
then that means that everything worked like that before, despite the fact
that we didn't know it then. This means that everything was empirically
verifiable before, which means that Pirsig's contrast between metaphysical
assumptions and empirical evidence never could work to contrast SOM with the
MoQ because everything always was empirically verifiable. Whatever this
assumption/evidence distinction is that SOM uses to exclude art, morality,
and mysticism, it must work _within_ and at a different level than the
higher level claim that everything is an experience and therefore
empirically verifiable.
The Onion the other week, in its What Do You Think? section, asked its
one-liner-heads about Georgia's evolution stickers ("Last week, a U.S.
district judge ordered a Georgia school district to remove stickers reading,
'Evolution is a theory, not a fact' from its textbooks. What do you
think?"). One of the heads responded, "If you don't believe in creationism,
then how do you explain the fact that I do, smart guy?" Which could have
just as easily have read, "If creationism isn't empirically verifiable, then
how do you verify the fact that I believe in it?" There are two different
levels or senses of "empiricial validity" at work here.
Matt
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