From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Sat Feb 12 2005 - 05:59:42 GMT
Matt,
[Much skipped, since overall, my responses would presuppose the response to
the gist, below. But a couple of points:]
Matt said:
Materialism can't
win and neither can idealism, at least not as long as the philosophical
tradition continues, because there is no criteria to determine the victor.
Scott:
I think this is overlooking the anecdotal evidence for the immaterial, that
a Rorty or a Dennett is just not likely to consider, which is to say they
have already in place a criterion for excluding evidence for the immaterial.
There is no absolute criterion (short of personal experience), but how
likely is someone like Rorty to read of others' personal experiences,
Merrell-Wolff's, say?
Matt said:
The idea is that you can be an immaterialist in Rorty's world _as long as
you don't propound metaphysical theses_. You see to want to, but only in
the sense, it would seem, that nobody can help but to. Two things, though:
If metaphysics is that ubiquitous, we have a question-begging problem
because the pragmatist doesn't think she has to propound metaphysical
theses, she thinks they are optional. (I'll talk more about the relation
between metaphilosophy, philosophy, and metaphysics in my next response to
your other post.)
Scott:
I agree that propounding metaphysical theses is optional, since one can
simply not do so. But as I see it, Rorty does propound metaphysical theses,
by propounding Darwinism and nominalism. A Darwinian and a nominalist thinks
that language came into being at some point in time. I see this as
impossible. I see these as two different metaphysical theses, even according
to your definitions of metaphysics as given in the companion post. The
reason is that depending on which choice one makes will have an effect on
one's choice of form of life. It changed me from a secularist to a
religionist.
Matt said:
And two: Why don't you think metaphysical theses lead to
epistemology? This ties to my claim at the beginning of my latest series of
interloctions: "To deny the need to do epistemology, and maintain an
appearance/reality distinction, is to regress to a pre-Cartesian
'metaphysical dogmatism' where we simply assert our correct interpretations
of the True Reality without any criteria for success." How is this not bad?
Scott:
I give a longer answer in the companion post, bringing in Barfield, but
basically, I think that Rorty and Dennett still have these problems, and I
don't, because I have totalized language (a metaphysical move). The reason
Dennett still has one is that he has tried to explain away qualia, while I
see qualia as words in a language which we call physical reality. There is
nothing that is not semiotic, so there is no appearance/reality distinction,
since there is no language/reality distinction, while as nominalists and
Darwinians, Dennett and Rorty still have such a distinction, because they
believe in a reality in which there was no language (the world prior to
humanity). So the epistemological problem resurfaces as the problem of how
did language (which requires consciousness) come about.
Matt said:
I guess the gist of what I don't get is what we get from an immaterialist
account. How does it supersede, and on what counts, physicalism?
Presumably you think physics works for some things, so on those counts you'd
be a physicalist. Where does it end? I'm guessing "at the point of
consciousness," but why can't we have a Darwinian account of consciousness?
You invert the cycle ("time [and presumably creation in general] is a
product of consciousness"), but where does that really leave us?
Scott:
It means the Darwinian account of consciousness is false. Surely that leaves
us in a very different conceptual place, doesn't it? It means that all that
materialists, including non-reductionist ones, have been ignoring, namely
religion and the paranormal and the mystical, is reopened for consideration,
that the metaphysical dogmatism of the pre-Cartesians may have had something
not so dogmatic behind it. (It also provides us with an interesting
interpretation of quantum physics: perception turns the unmeasured, aka the
non-spatio-temporal, into the measured, aka, the spatio-temporal.)
Matt said:
We've
learned from many different philosophers that we can call reality "God" or
"Good" or "Quality" or "Spirit" or "Being" or "Idea," but the thing we keep
learning is that often it doesn't take us any place different, at least any
place we can get to without epistemology. Spinoza's God and Berkeley's Idea
didn't leave us any place different and neither does Pirsig's Quality. They
were creative redescriptions for very distinct purposes (make room for God
in a mechanistic universe, show how bound up our minds are with the world,
show how bound up the act of valuing is with our encounter with the world).
So what is your purpose? If we can accept physicalism on certain counts,
what counts does it fail and what alternative are you proposing?
Scott:
My purpose, which came about as a consequence of realizing that
consciousness produces time, is removing obstacles to Awakening, and
attempting to convince the rest of the intellectual community to help out,
in that it can be done without a reversion to a pre-modern religious
consciousness, does not require faith, etc.
Matt said:
Rorty doesn't want anything more than the practical level most times. Rorty
works on two levels, too. The most important level is the practical level,
which is the point of his claiming the "priority of democracy to
philosophy." On the philosophical level, Rorty would more often than not
stigmatize a lot of religious beliefs (ala Nietzsche) as "metaphysical
comfort." But that doesn't mean there aren't more purposes than that. One
purpose that Rorty has had a hard time coming to terms with is the idea of
religion being a social movement, ala MLK's movement and the Christian
Coalition. Martin Luther King was undoubtedly good and religion played a
strong (if not primary) role in the American Civil Rights movement. (Look
at Ghandi, too.) But on the other hand, the Christian Coalition is a bunch
of thuggish, cultural reactionaries trying to use politics to make everyone
more like them. (Look at the Taliban, too.) So what are we supposed to do?
Scott:
I don't think you were around during the "On Faith" debate. This involved,
in part, my trying to convince others that it is in the interest of the
secular liberal to ally with the significant portion of religionists that
are just as much against the cultural reactionaries as secular liberals are,
and that an intolerance on the part of secular liberals for all religionists
was a danger to their overall goals.
Matt said:
Rorty's not entirely sure. In PSH you have a copy of "Religion as a
Conversation-Stopper," which I still see as essentially right. Recently
though, Rorty has rescinded on some of his views in that short paper (can't
remember what it was called, but I think its on the internet someplace),
mostly through conversations, I have a feeling, with his past Princeton
colleagues Cornel West (who's trying to revive a liberal tradition rooted in
Christianity) and Jeffery Stout (who recently published a greatly received
book, Democracy and Tradition).
Scott:
Don't know why it has to be revived. It's been there pretty constantly since
the MLK days: the Berrigan brothers, the sanctuary movement in the 80's,
etc. I hadn't heard of the Stout book, but will keep an eye out.
Religion can certainly stop a conversation, but so can Rorty, at least the
Rorty of PMN, and so can Pirsig ("faith is a willingness to believe in
falsehoods"), so I'm not sure why religion is singled out.
Matt said:
But I guess the real question is, if you agree with our current situation
even as you disagree both in predicting and hoping for the future, what
would you have us do on a political level? For if cultural progress is as
Rorty models it, as a conversation, it is entirely possible that the
conversation, in the full extent of time, will swing to your favor. We may
end up all religious in a sense you are predicting and hoping for. But this
type of Peircian/Habermasian thesis that the True will be reached at the end
of Conversation plays no part in the actual conversation working out better
and better descriptions. We just keep having the conversation, and
intellectually evolving, until it stops. Our intellectual responsibility is
Miltonian: if we keep "free and open encounters" and keep the conversation
going by not letting it stop by, say, political fiat, then truth will work
itself out.
Scott:
As I see it, the secular pragmatists need to open up their conversation to
include theologians like David Tracy and Peter Berger, and they might find
that they have more in common than they thought. Certainly, they are on the
same side politically. I would say that Rorty and Tracy have more in common
than Rorty and Searle, for instance. The first sentence of Tracy's
*Plurality and Ambiguity* is "The theme of this small book is conversation".
And, of course, they should be reading the books I keep recommending
(Barfield, Merrell-Wolff, Magliola, etc.) but that's probably too much to
hope for :-)
- Scott
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Feb 12 2005 - 06:03:49 GMT