From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon May 02 2005 - 20:16:20 BST
Hi Mark,
I want to start with a middle bit from your reply to set up the rest of my
response, which is the meat of our discussion.
Mark said:
When you mentioned above that people gradually came to realize their own
self-worth and right to be free, it is the application of reason that made
the realization possible.
Matt:
Yeah, but my point is still that it's idolatrous to think that Mill was
using reason when he decided that liberty was the highest value and Aquinas
was using something else when he decided love for God the highest. I have
no idea what Mill and Aquinas were doing differently. As far as I can see,
they were both "using reason." They just did different things with it.
I think this'll become more pointed in a bit. The meat is the notion of the
social/intellectual distinction. You said the distinction "seems quite
vivid" to you, so you were wishing for a little expansion on why I think the
distinction blurry. I haven't been following the "Nuremburg" thread, but
you described your angle as being that an "intellectual analysis of social
actions reveals a highly suspect inconsistency of social-level thought."
What I want to concentrate on is "intellectual analysis of social actions"
and "social-level thought." I don't know what "social-level thought" is
supposed to be. As I understand it, I thought Pirsig thought the social
level is represented by something like "the presidency" or "the university"
and other social institutions. As soon as you allow for "social-level
thought" you're allowing for thought _at_ the social level. I don't think
Pirsig would want this, being as institutions don't think, only humans do.
But say we allow it. There's social level thinking and intellectual level
thinking. How do we tell the two apart? This seems to me to be a complete
impasse because both leftist and conservative are going to argue that the
other side is only employing social level thinking whereas their side is at
the intellectual level. How do you resolve that? When you talk politics
you're both talking about institutions, about the supposed social level. So
how does either of you reach for the "moral high ground" (as Pirsig's
created it). The only way to shore up your claim to the "intellectual
level" would be to start draining away reference to the institutions, to
politics. But the more you do that, the less relevant what you're talking
about seems to politics. As politically neutral as symbolic logic and
calculus seems, they also seem to be politically pointless. So, just
because an argument is abstract or drained of detail or however else we can
distinguish the social from the intellectual, I don't see how that makes the
argument morally higher.
To my mind, there are two directions that Pirsig's metaphysical category
"the social level" comes under suspicion. The first is from behind, from
the biological level, from the long noted idea at the MD that animals
display sociability, that animals are social creatures. (I imagine
Aristotle said man was a rational animal, not a social one, because other
animals appeared social.) I'm not sure who the first one was to suggest
this line, but its been around for a while, long enough for Pirsig to
comment about it (I think unsatisfactorily). The other direction is from
the intellectual level. It was long supposed that the intellectual level is
where language was invented, that language was to the intellectual level as
DNA is to the biological level. Its the currency one deals in. But then we
get ideas like "social level thinking." It sounds right, but if we extend
language down into the social level, we'll get endless disagreements about
how to distinguish social level thinking from intellectual level thinking.
These levels were supposed to be clear cut, but I just don't see it as they
are arranged most of the time.
So, suppose the levels are like this:
inorganic -- rocks
biological -- plants, animals
social -- social customs
intellectual -- independentally manipulable symbols
The notion that our intellect plays with symbols that are indepent of
anything else is a relic from Descartes, the crunch coming from Wittgenstein
who suggested that our language doesn't come in independent bits or atoms
(as Bertrand Russell thought), but only have meaning in a whole language
game or form of life. Particularly with the second formulation, we begin to
see that our symbols, our language, is dependent on our customs, language
simply being an extension of social customs.
Now, say we accept all this. Isn't there a big difference between saying
"Gunsundheit!" and doing calculus? Sure, but I don't think that its that
one is a social custom and the other is more "independent" from custom.
Rather, I think both are built into customs, namely the customs of polite
society for the one and the customs of mathematicians for the other. The
reason, I think, math seems independent is because we view "independence
from society" as relating to "independence from everyday life." The more a
subject seems to get away from the functioning of life that we deal with on
a day to day basis, the more "independent" it seems. And so math and logic
and grammar seem very independent. But at the same time, as I noted above,
they also seem very remote from the concerns of politics, which is what
people try to turn the distinction between the social and intellectual
levels towards. Even if one doesn't become a full-fledged pragmatist (by,
say, trying to firm up the custom/non-custom distinction), I still can't
imagine how one would use the distinction in a political discussion. Start
from abstract principles like "freedom" and "human rights" and you'll get
agreement from everybody, but as soon as you start talking about policy,
which is when you start bringing things that are seemingly "independent" or
"remote" from everyday life back into the everyday by fleshing out such thin
concepts like freedom and rights with details---that's when you get the
fight.
This is all to say that I think in Pirsig's formulation of the levels,
particularly with a distinction between social and intellectual, there are
remenants of Reason Idolatry. One of Pirsig's aims in his books is to take
down this idol, but in his Lila (and later) formulations of the static
levels, I think there may be a few heaps of refuse that still need to be
cleared away.
If we want to reformulate the levels, I think something like this might be
needed:
inorganic -- rocks
biological -- animals
"social" -- language
eudaimonia -- politics
(Sometimes I've formulated the levels into five, with "bio = cells" and
"social = animals" and "intellectual = language" and "eudaimonia =
politics," but it doesn't matter all that much at the moment.)
As you point out, to suggest that "politics derives from philosophy" is
pretty silly, but that's not what I'm suggesting. Philosophy should be
regarded as a "social" level phenomena, just as biology and math and
"Gesundheit" are. We use these as tools in our political discussions, but
politics didn't arise out of them (at least, not in any straightforward
manner). The way I see it, the utility of "levels" is to mark certain
evolutionary changes that seem to take evolution to, well, a whole new
level. So, we have inanimate stuff suddenly reproducing. Big change. Now
we have animals with symbolic patterns of behavior that allows them to do
all sorts of new kinds of complicated behavior (like math). Big change.
Now we have the notion that animals (read: people) behaving in all kinds of
idiosyncratic manners should be able to behave as they want to as long as
they don't infringe on other people's behavior. That's the advent of
politics which only arose when complicated social structures grew (read:
governments) to manage all the people. And real politics only started to
occur with the advent of democracy and individual human dignity. So,
really, Pirsig wasn't temporally off at all when he located his top level
originating with the Greeks. I simply think he mixed up which revolutionary
occurence was more important (more than likely because, as has happened
throughout history with philosophers noting philosophy's importance, because
he was a philosopher).
But after all this, we still aren't given a distinction that is useful to
political discussion, except one that says, "Hey, if you're doing philosophy
(or sociology or anthropology or political science or whatever), that
doesn't give you some kind of intrinsic superiority to the rest of us."
Those subjects can be useful tools in our political discussions, but they
don't trump anything. And sometimes they can be distracting and used as red
herrings, such as the conservative wailings over "post-modern nihilism."
Allan Bloom may have known a bit more about philosophy than the common
conservative, but he was also wrong about it. And by introducing it, he
gave the right a new stick to beat liberals with, despite the fact that the
stick was made out of nothing but fear. If a stick is made out of nothing
but fear, that's a good sign that the tool being used is a red herring.
If there's a distinction in the area that might be of use, people might
first reach for the prudence/principle distinction. Lower level people act
out of their own prudent self-interest, but higher level people act out of
universal principles. But this distinction should look a lot like the
social/intellectual distinction, and we should stay away from it. There is
something to be said about the range between solipsistic self-interest and
wide-reaching rules of thumb, and its a good distinction to use some of the
time, but it doesn't always work because the right has gotten quite good at
dressing up self-interest in principles (look at Ayn Rand). I think a
better distinction that we should focus on using may be a temporal one:
between short-term and long-term thinking. This would be particularly
useful in discussions about the environment. Instead of talking about the
respect we should be giving to all living things (which may be true), we
should talk about the eventual destruction of our way of life if we continue
to rape our planet for our own immediate needs.
So, all in all, its not that some of these distinctions don't work. The
prudence/principle distinction, which is often how the social/intellectual
distinction is used, can be useful, but not always (and I don't think much
of the time in high-energy confrontations). In particular, I don't think
the social/intellectual distinction is useful because it is easily usurped
by anybody who is creative enough to formulate their policy suggestions in
terms of principles. Even more, often it is used to try and establish a
moral high ground, with the object that the first person to reach it wins.
I don't think any of these political conversations are as easy as that and
that's why I stay out of political discussions here. It seems like many
people are looking for that trump card (the "intellectual level") that we'll
just shut the other guy up. But I don't think there's any trump card in the
vicinity (at least, for most political conversations; I have no idea what
people could possibly be arguing about with Nuremburg, but I imagine
everyone's disjointed over an issue which, with lower-energy involved, most
people would agree, but the topic is being used to push issues that are
peripheral to Nuremburg; then again, I have no idea, its possible somebody
is being a complete idiot in the conversation). We should stop looking for
the trump card, and instead look harder for new ways to formulate the issues
when conversation is stopped by bedrock ideas we won't have much chance in
moving. Politics is best when it keeps moving, not when its in a rut.
But again, these are suggestions from my position in the high, abstract
level of philosophy. Being in the trenches can be another story, and I
don't have many concrete suggestions (at least not for discussions occuring
at this list).
Matt
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