From: Ron Winchester (phaedruswolff@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Jan 30 2005 - 23:35:43 GMT
Matt;
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.
Hi Matt and all,
James Pragmatism and Radical Empiricism (what works) based on S/O lack the
moral framework of the MOQ as S/O goes from inorganic to intellectual, and
bypasses biological and social.
"The Holocaust produced a satisfaction among Nazis. That was quality for
them."
By splitting SOM into the inorganic/chaotic, biological/inorganic,
social/biological and intellectual/social, you have a framework for morals
that does not give way to 'What works' as James pragmatism and radical
empiricism did. The Nazis couldn't say "This was the highest intellectual
Quality decision to advance society," but in an SOM pragmatism and
empiricism, it is 'What works' for them.
It is the subject and object scientific empiricism that "SOM uses to exclude
art, morality, and mysticism."
Ron
>From: "Matt Kundert" <pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com>
>Reply-To: moq_discuss@moq.org
>To: moq_discuss@moq.org
>Subject: RE: MD Pure experience and the Kantian problematic
>Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 15:22:28 -0600
>
>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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