From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Apr 25 2005 - 20:32:16 BST
Ian,
Ian said:
You were in fact (initially) making a plea for balance, rather than setting
up of philosophy and philosophology as black and white, good and bad
opposites. A message close to my own pragmatic heart as you know.
...
If your aim really was to balance the books pre-loaded against
philosophology then, you may have gone just a bit too far in appearing to
discredit Pirsig's motives, just as Pirsig did himself. (Actually it's that
good old Catch-22 again - arguing a balanced case never wins an argument -
the best defense is offense, and the most offensive weapon is logical
analysis.)
Matt:
You think (and many others would agree) that I'm trying to balance
philosophy and philosophology. This isn't what I view myself as doing.
What I think of myself as attempting to do was undermine what I view to be a
bad, artificial distinction between philosophy and philosophology. My
analysis at the beginning of the paper was intended to show how the only way
to hold the distinction as Pirsig lays it out was to be a Platonist, which
no Pirsigian in their right minds wants to be. Because many don't see the
Platonist in Pirsig, the middle part, the one dealing with motives, was
intended to supply a context with which Pirsig's Platonist tendencies make
sense. Anybody catching the general thrust of my writings (let alone what I
said at the beginning of that section) would realize that I think the
"Cartesian Anxiety" is a bad trap to get into. I didn't say a lot in the
"Antiestablishmentarianism" section about what I thought of it, though, but
mainly because I hadn't thought it all through. Since then, I have a bit
more, which is what "Pirsig Institutionalized" was all about. The third
section was intended to balance the two views of what Pirsig thinks
philosophy should be, with the structure of the presentation soliciting
affirmation for one and scowls for the other.
You say that "logical analysis" is the best weapon, but I don't think it is,
at least not categorically. Sometimes it is, but I think its better as a
softening up move. Depends on how far you diverge from your opponent. The
problem with logical analysis is that it reaches back and stops at
assumptions. Once you've reached those, the only thing to do then is to
suggest why those assumptions are bad ones to have. One way is to show the
motivation for those assumptions, which is what I did and what Wittgenstein
did in the Philosophical Investigations, the unasked question in the
background being, "Do we really want to think this way?"
For instance, this "Catch-22" you keep piloting around. I think it's a bad
way to characterize pragmatist tendencies. On my reading, pragmatists don't
really think there are philosophical Catch-22s. Reaching one just means you
haven't thought of a way of characterizing the presuppositions of _both_
positions, with the attendent idea that you are willing to toss the
presupposition, get rid of the problem, and redescribe the surrounding area
of dispute. The history of philosophy is littered with them, some of the
more recent ones being idealism/realism and antirealism/realism. I think
thinking that Catch-22s are around commits you to a bit of Platonism because
the only thing that could stop an imagination from getting around a
dichotomy in the rarified air of philosophy is someting like a brute fact,
which is a Platonic myth.
I think your touting of Catch-22s gets you into some trouble, like thinking
I'm trying to balance philosophy and philosophology when I have no idea what
is left for the term philosophology to refer to after I've gotten done with
it. (Maybe "philosophy that refers to the history of philosophy" and
"philosophy that doesn't," but I think that's a pretty artificial
distinction, too. Besides, the word "philosophology," as Pirsig says when
he first uses it, has degradation built right into it.) Or thinking that
rhetoric and logical analysis are opposed, which you've suggested a couple
of times recently in various posts. Good Pirsigians and pragmatists don't
think that. _Everything_ is rhetoric, which _doesn't_ mean that
argumentation is a wasted effort as some alarmists think (and as I may have
once foolishly intimated), but rather that there are a number of tools at a
person's disposal when conversing, various ones being appropriate to various
purposes of conversation (persuasion not being the only purpose). Logical
argumentation is a tool that is only appropriate under certain circumstances
(just as all tools are only appropriate under certain circumstances). I
think one way of putting what these circumstances might be is that for two
people to have a logical argument, they must hold certain premises or
assumptions in common. If they don't, the arguments will eventually whittle
down to the assumption that they don't hold in common, displaying it for all
to see, and then the arguments will be forced to stop. It is at that point
that other tools become much more useful for continuing the conversation,
such as hunting down motivations for assumptions.
So, in relation to my paper, the question I wonder about is what you think
philosophy and philosophology are (though I am, of course, curious as to
what you think I thought they were)? What's left for philosophology to be
and why should we hold on to that curiously denigrating word to keep some
people on the left and others on the right?
Matt
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