From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Feb 21 2005 - 21:29:04 GMT
Scott, Sam, Erin, and Ian,
This post is a further progression of Scott and my discussion, but I wanted
to first say something to the four of you: I very much appreciate your
voices. I used to get hammered hard about not being "clear," despite the
fact that some people found me crystal. But I've come to a realization.
I'm currently writing an essay for the forum and I've been trying to get my
finger solidly on a piece of Pirsig's conceptual machinery, how it works.
Not only is it fairly unclear and ambiguous (as I've been arguing for some
time), but it is also pretty complex and esoteric. Not as simple as Pirsig
says it is. I mean, I think the gist of how his philosophy works is fairly
easy to learn, but the nitty-gritty, which you need to get into when doing
deep reading, isn't. I think this is the problem we are having with the
MoQ. We go to criticize it, as any good philosophy needs to be, but its
very difficult to get a clean handle on, despite the fact that so many
people say they understand it. And most of them aren't very good at
clarifying it either. That doesn't help. They're explanations slip through
your fingers. They also usually just say things like, "You're biased,"
"You're SOM," "You're blind," "I don't know anything," "You're confused."
Damn straight we're confused. Pirsig's wedged himself in a complex
theoretical structure and says its as easy as apple pie. Its not about
shedding our "preconceptions" (which is a sword that they somehow don't
realize cuts both ways), its more about trying to keep 16 balls in the air,
rather than just 3 or 4 as Pirsig and every other mainline interpreter tries
to tell us. But I did it: I think I finally figured out how it works.
And I'm not going to tell you. (That's the punchline, you can laugh now.)
No, I'm saving it for the Forum piece its written for because I want to be
miles away from the MD when it gets posted. The MD just isn't very helpful
anymore, at least not for me. I've always had problems with certain
interlocuters, but I think its gotten worse. The thing is, for people like
us, I think the only thing for it is to raise the level of debate: move to
the essay where you have the time and space to lay out and develop your
arguments, which forces your interlocuters to do the same. The interruptury
style of most MDers does not allow for a lot of sustained argument and in
the end it hinders the type of complex understanding that's needed to get
our heads around in the "high country of the mind." If you move to the
moq.org Forum, dialogue will be slower (as it should be with a higher level
of demand), but I promise you, it will be a lot more interesting and
elucidating.
Alright, enough of that. Back to Scott:
Scott said:
I think that Rorty and Dennett still have these problems [of metaphysical
dogmatism], 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:
I’ve mixed and matched the posts into one about consciousness and one about
metaphysics. I guess what I don’t understand is how you escape the problem
and how I get caught in it. I see it as either we both do, or neither of us
do. You say that everything is language, but I would then think that you’d
need a distinction between the language a rock uses and the language humans
use and an explanation as to how humans came to be. As Paul commented,
“Human spoken and written languages, to Scott, seem to be special cases of
something ubiquitous.” I see this distinction as the same distinction
pragmatists use. We don’t see a hard-line distinction between language and
reality, mainly because we don’t see language as something special. We see
it as a tool for coping with reality, like cilia or an arm. The only
explanation we need for the creation of language is an anthropological one
(not cognitive science, as you suggested elsewhere). You say language
requires consciousness, but as far as pragmatists like Dennett and Rorty are
concerned, consciousness is internal to (or coextensive with) language,
which was the general thrust of Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. Granted
that philosophers like Nagel and Searle replied that Dennett wasn’t so much
explaining consciousness as he was explaining it away, but pragmatists
aren’t sure why we can’t do that.
Rorty says that “it seems reasonable for Dennett to reply that explaining
something away—explaining why we do not have to make a place for _it_ in our
picture, but only for the belief in it—is often a good thing to do. The
road of inquiry would have been disastrously blocked if we had forbidden
this move to the Copernicans or to those other seventeenth-century thinkers
who attacked traditional beliefs about witches. On Dennett’s account, we
believe that there is phenomenology, and we believe in qualia, because we
adopted a certain set of metaphors for talking about people, just as
Aristotelians believed in solar motion, and witch-hunters in witches,
because a certain picture of the cosmos held them captive. … But if we can
explain people’s linguistic and other behavior with the help of other
metaphors … then we are relieved of the obligation to explain qualia.”
(“Daniel Dennett on Intrinsicality,” in Truth and Progress)
As far as I can tell, you haven’t explained consciousness either. You’ve
noted the futility of explaining it, put a black box around it saying it
will always remain mysterious and unexplained, and then made it ubiquitous
so that we can still have it without explaining it. But the question
remains: there must be a difference between rocks and humans, so what is it?
As far as I can tell, your answer will have the same status as the
pragmatist answer. We both note the futility of explaining consciousness,
neither of us attempt to explain it, and then we both erect pragmatic
distinctions to sort out the differences between stuff like rocks, books,
and people.
This is what I see at the bottom of Pirsig, too. You’ve commented elsewhere
that Pirsig’s problem will be that we need to have consciousness to have
value. I completely agree with this point. However, I’ve thought for a
long time that one of the consequences of Pirsig’s redescription of reality
in terms of Quality is that the locus of consciousness (amongst a number of
other troublesome philosophical concepts, like intention and free will) is
now ubiquitized, much the same as you’ve done. Any particular thing that we
bundle together and name, like a rock or a person, is a locus of
consciousness. This is the same move Dennett makes in saying that people
are “centers of narrative gravity.” Pragmatists follow Quine in thinking
that a “self” is simply a web of beliefs and desires and that the only
distinctions we have in that web and between webs are pragmatic ones. Rorty
generalizes Dennett’s point and says that we should think of _all_ objects
as centers of descriptive gravity. So, again, I think the only distinctions
you can deploy at this point to distinguish common sense things like the
difference between humans and rocks are the same distinctions that Pirsig
and pragmatists like Dennett and Rorty can deploy.
To change gears:
Scott said:
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:
I agree, the ability to stop a conversation isn’t inherent in religion as
opposed to anything else, it happens whenever two conversants can’t agree on
the terms of debate. The only reason religion is singled out is the same
reason you would single it out: because of its history. But remember, Rorty
also follows Rawls in generalizing the point about the separation of church
and state to a point about the separation of philosophy and state, which
means the state shouldn’t be making choices about what form of life we will
be _outside of a democratic form of life_. We can’t be so liberal
democratic as to produce, willy-nilly, anti-liberals. That’s when you
become so wet, so anti-ethnocentric, that your brain falls out.
Scott said:
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 :-)
Matt:
I don’t see that Rorty, for one, has ignored them. It is always a good idea
to have people with a wide range of reading and engagement and to urge more
of that, but so far as I can see the people I rely on do. Rorty taught a
class on the philosophy of religion once and couldn’t see the difference
between the Dewey of A Common Faith and the liberal theologian (both as
social democrat and proponent of liberal theology) Paul Tillich’s Dynamics
of Faith. Rorty has been in conversation with Alasdair MacIntyre (a modern
day Thomist) for years, let alone West and Stout. (I see Stout as a leader
in bridging the divide. He’s been working for years on the interconnections
between Rorty, MacIntyre, and the theologian Stanley Hauerwas.) And
recently Rorty has written several things concerning Gianni Vattimo, a
Catholic philosopher who takes religion very seriously. They have a book
that just came out (The Future of Religion) with essays by the two of them
and a conversation between them.
Matt
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