From: Ian Glendinning (ian@psybertron.org)
Date: Fri Feb 11 2005 - 10:32:09 GMT
Matt,
This is a wonderful post. I shall treasure the educational value of the
content itself.
Scott has his own strong convictions and I'm not sure he'll buy your
message.
At one level this supremely reinforces to me that our problems are entirely
lingusitic and matters of linguistic freedom. (When I say "our problems",
I'm not of course talking about disagreements on MoQ-Discuss, I mean every
explanation or understanding in life, of the kind "how does that work ?".)
FWIW I don't buy your three definitions, but you are honest enough to
introduce them as your working definitions for the purpose of debate. I like
to think I think the same way. (BTW I'd love to hear your equivalent
definitions of "natural science" and common or garden "physics" in similar
terms, distinct from philosophy / meta / etc. but that is an aside.)
Bringing it back to MoQ (from all the -isms), I think the key aspect is the
rules it provides about "freedom" from strictures whilst still providing
those static latches culturally accepted by generations of evolution. The
constraints are only "by agreement for the purposes of argument".
Let the argument continue.
Ian.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt Kundert" <pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2005 7:40 PM
Subject: Re: MD Pure experience and the Kantian problematic
> 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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