From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Feb 09 2005 - 19:40:23 GMT
Hey Scott,
First some things about metaphilosophy, philosophy, and metaphysics.
Throughout our posts we’ve been weaving back and forth between a number of
implicit definitions of these three things. To try and help put our fingers
on our differences, I’m going to propose three different definitions of
them, in the form of questions. Here’s how I would put these three
different areas:
1) Metaphilosophy: What way of life are we going to follow?
2) Philosophy: How do things, in the broadest sense of the term, hang
together, in the broadest sense of the term?
3) Metaphysics: How do things _really_ hang together?
The first is taken from your use of Pierre Hadot (whose book I’ve just
started reading), which is a use the rhymes very well with Wittgenstein.
Each form of life uses certain vocabularies with which they make sense of
the world. So while doing philosophy (stolen from Wilfrid Sellars), we try
and develop a vocabulary with which we try and get the rest of our
vocabularies (scientific, moral, religious, literary, political, etc.) to
hang together. Doing metaphilosophy involves a conversation about which
form of life is better, which kind of philosophical vocabulary we should be
using to get our other vocabularies to hang together. One way of describing
metaphysics, then, is as a particular kind of philosophical vocabulary, a
kind of philosophy that tries to have metaphilosophical consequences. By
bit by bit hammering down how things really hang together, the choice of
what form of life we are going to be is taken away from us, determined
instead by something other than us (i.e. Reality).
In the sense of these terms, most propounded philosophies by philosophers
are a tangle of meta- and philosophical theses, though most philosophers in
the past (and present for that matter) take their meta- theses for granted
and disentangling them is a bit of a chore. What Rorty shunts under the
name “pragmatism” is mostly just metaphilosophical theses, though from time
to time he’ll be inconsistent (in the sense that pragmatism is _only_ the
name for a metaphilosophical stance, which historically it hasn’t only been)
and attribute a philosophical thesis to pragmatism. (I think this may be
what’s happening with materialism.) But with the above distinctions in
hand, it is fairly easy to distinguish Rorty’s meta- from philosophical
theses (with the realization, then, that he spends most of his time doing
metaphilosophy).
So: I see your philosophy as retaining a mix of that bad, bad metaphysics,
as when you say, “the One, True religion … is something that should be a
goal to work out publicly, as a matter of intellectual responsibility.”
This makes it seem as though the One, True Religion is out there waiting for
us to discover it. That propositions that make up this Religion will force
themselves on us—deciding for us what form of life we are going to be. The
reason I think your philosophy is only slightly tainted with this
metaphysical impulse is because, for the most part, you refrain from
metaphysical addendums to philosophical theses (after sorting out the theses
into the appropriate piles; sometimes you say “metaphysics” where I would
replace it with “philosophy.” For instance, “metaphysics … has to learn to
stop thinking of itself as answering "what is X" type questions, and replace
them with "what is a more useful vocabulary for dealing with 'things in
general.'" I would take this to be urging us to stop metaphysics and stick
to philosophy.). And the crack in those addendums, the spill of pragmatist
acid (as I see it), is in the above claim I quoted from you. The part that
the ellipsis is muffling is “whatever it turns out to be.” The One, True
Religion is whatever it turns out to be. In my last post I commented on the
Peircian quality of this claim. What pragmatists like Rorty can’t
understand is how positing the existence of the language Peircish, that
perfect language we will all be speaking at the end of inquiry, or the
OneTrueReligion religion, which we will all be participating and believing
in at the end of inquiry, makes any difference at all to our inquiries into
better languages and better religion. As long as we have the Miltonian
claim that truth will win out in “free and open encounters” and Peirce’s
strictures against blocking the road of inquiry, we need no such posits.
The reason “truth will win out” doesn’t look like a Peircian posit is
because people like Rorty and I can’t ever imagine inquiry or philosophy or
cultural evolution ever stoping. This is why Rorty has started calling
pragmatism “antiauthoritarianism.” The only thing that can stop the
conversation is other people, not some non-human authority like Reality or
Truth or God. And without political fiat, how are we ever going to get
people to stop bickering and disagreeing? And why would we want to? Some
of the most interesting things come out of disagreement.
Just keep the conversation going.
Okay, a few other particular comments:
Scott said:
My different take is that the bullcrap arises because of the Cartesian
separation of nature from mind. So as I see it, the Dennett's of the world
accepted that separation, saw the problems that creates with respect to mind
(and therefore consciousness), and decided to do away with mind. Berkeley
took the opposite tack. My response is to go back to the thought before the
separation took place and reformulate it in a modern vocabulary.
Matt:
I think this is a mistake. I don’t think we should take Dennett as
proposing that we do away with mind (whatever Dennett thinks of himself;
even if he has rid himself of reductionism (which I think he has), he still
does have a residual taint of scientism). Dennett, Davidson, and Rorty are
concerned with eliminating the separation between nature and mind, same as
you. You are right, Berkeley took one direction and the materialists took
another. But part of the see-saw the pragmatists are trying to hop off of
is just this choice: materialist or idealist? When we eliminate this
separation between nature and mind, though, we have some loose ends to wrap
up, some new vocabularies to create to make things hang together. One thing
the separation between mind and nature allowed was the easy claim that
science was about nature, but not about minds (or God), thus making room for
our moral discourse and free will. So one thing pragmatists have to account
for, after destroying the separation between nature and mind, is what
science does, how the scientific vocabulary hangs together with our other
vocabularies (like psychological and religious). One way Dennett does this
is by distinguishing between different levels of looking at things:
physical, design, or intentional. These different levels each have there
own vocabulary, vocabularies that are inappropriate at the other levels.
Scott said:
As I said in the other post, I think Rorty is arguing as a materialist and
not a pragmatist when he says one should just stop having such intuitions.
Matt:
With the above distinctions between meta-, philosophy, and metaphysics in
mind, I think
I can say that Rorty is arguing from a metaphilosophical standpoint because
he is saying that we shouldn’t be the form of life that thinks there is
something more to physical pain than brain-states (or at the very least, we
should repress the idea that pain tells us something about how the world
really is). When you start talking about which intutions we should save and
which ones we should repress, I think that means you are at the
metaphilosophical level because our intutions are what make us a particular
form of life.
Scott said:
I think that Sam is right that until recently mysticism gains
intelligibility only within a tradition, but that now things are, or are
becoming different. In the first place, one can make cross-tradition
comparisons and find commonalities. In the second place, since we now live
in a pluralist society, it is possible that something like "generic
mysticism" could become a reality. In fact, I have sometimes dreamed of
creating a new monasticism completely independent of all religious
traditions (though adequately stocked with libraries from those traditions),
one which is based on questioning language games as a "skillful means". So
is that just another language game or an aufhebung? I don't know. I like to
think of it as a language game of permanent self-critique ("self" being the
language game, but which in turn critiques the self of the language-user).
As to validating in the absence of a tradition, I would say one is left with
reason to do the validating.
Matt:
The first comment I want to make is that I’m not sure that Sam is claiming
that _until recently_ mysticism only gained intelligibility within a
tradition. If I understand Sam correctly, he is saying that mysticism
_only_ gains intelligibility within a tradition, but this is only because
tradition is not opposed to reason, as the Enlightenment taught us to do.
In the above, you use such an opposition to enunciate the changes that have
undertook religious mysticism, but I think you need to look for a new
distinction to formulate the changes because what Wittgenstein, Gadamer, and
Rorty (and almost every other post-modernist) have taught us is that
_everything_ is embedded in a tradition, a social practice, a language game,
which is something I think you follow in by saying all experience is
semiotic. Reason isn’t a faculty that swings free of a tradition.
Reasonableness arises within a tradition of discourse when certain criteria
have been met, criteria determined by each particular language game.
And second, your “generic mysticism” (“language game of permanent
self-critique”) looks an awful lot like Rorty’s ironist. Is there a
difference?
Matt
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