From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu May 12 2005 - 21:35:25 BST
Hey Mark, Sam,
Sam caught my invisible high sign to him and jumped in on the conversation
at the place I was hoping he would. I’m going to reconvene the conversation
back at Mill and Aquinas, which I was using with MacIntyre in the back of my
head (and I hoped Sam would jump in because he talks much more smartly about
MacIntyre than I), because the part of the conversation that I’m interested
in (which Sam has partly geared away from in the “Ideology of Capitalism”
thread) is at work at that point.
Matt said (May 2nd):
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.
Mark replied (May 3rd):
The difference, I think, is in the universal accessibility of the objects of
their thought. The concept of liberty, personal freedom, is immediately
accessible to everyone. No one needs to be told that freedom is better than
being buried alive. That the concept of God is not immediately accessible
to everyone is obvious in that not everyone believes in God. Pirsig's
Quality, like Mill's Liberty, is immediately accessible to everyone. This,
I suggest, is why belief in God is idolatrous and belief in Quality or
Freedom or Liberty or Equality is not.
Sam jumped in on cue (May 3rd):
I think this is a very revealing exchange. … But more importantly there are
indeed societies where the concept of personal freedom is incomprehensible.
I quote from Alasdair MacIntyre's 'After Virtue' - he's a
philosopher/theologian I greatly admire.
…
What really strikes me as odd is that, for someone so lucidly critical of
modern ideologies in the political and economic spheres, you seem remarkably
at home with the very same ideology in the philosophical sphere - which is
ironic, in that it is precisely the ideology which you are here defending
which provides the main justification for the practices which you so
cogently condemn elsewhere.
Matt:
I think Sam’s right that Mark still holds to modern, Enlightenment
philosophy for philosophical justification and, with Sam and MacIntyre, that
this is bad. However, I think Sam and MacIntyre are wrong that
Enlightenment philosophy provides the “main justification” for liberal
practices. To my mind, the reason why Enlightenment philosophy is wrong is
because it was looking for philosophical justification in the first place.
And I think Sam and MacIntyre are subsequently wrong to think that the
failure of Enlightenment philosophy means the failure of Enlightenment
politics.
If I’m right, there are basically two stages to your argument. First,
things like personal liberty are “immediately accessible.” When this is
shown to be suspect, by digging into history and showing how our moral
conceptual heritage has changed, which is what Sam was pointing out, your
second stage is to argue that a “fully realized human being” would find
personal liberty immediately accessible. My first softening up move will be
to point out that not everybody believes in Quality, as you say they do. To
say that they do is to make the same move the theist does when they say that
God exists whether particular people believe in Him or not. The only way to
“believe in Quality” is to first have read Pirsig’s books (which not
everyone has) and then to have been persuaded by them (which even fewer
people have been). To say otherwise is to make the same kind of
appearance/reality distinguishing move that Plato gave us, where
Quality/God/whatever is there whether we like it or not.
To begin again, the first step of “immediately accessible ideas” is suspect
when we look into intellectual history. When Isaiah Berlin wrote about two
concepts of liberty, negative liberty (which is Millian personal liberty)
and positive liberty (which at the time referred to something like Marxist
liberty), he was playing off of a point made by a French writer from the
Enlightenment, Benjamin Constant. Constant referred to negative, personal
liberty as Modern liberty and positive liberty as Ancient. The reason he
formulated it so was because of the debate surrounding the Enlightenment
thinkers on the status of the Ancient Greeks. Rousseau was prominent for
thinking that the Ancients knew what real liberty was, and that liberty was
the freedom found in a community, by being part of a community and acting
for the community. Thinkers like Hume and Adam Smith were prominent for
thinking that that wasn’t true liberty at all, and that liberty was instead
what was gained when the community stayed out of your way to let you do what
you wanted. Constant wrote that we stood at an Epochal changing point. The
Ancients indeed had a notion of liberty, but it was different than ours and
for very good reasons. Likewise, the Moderns had their notion of liberty
which we held for good reasons. The differences lay in the changing face of
our culture.
This is where the second step in your argument comes into play. The
Ancients, and other cultures and ethical modes of thinking, may have had
their various understandings of liberty and other ethical virtues, but they
were wrong about them, they didn’t see the moral preeminence of our way of
thinking because they weren’t yet “fully realized human beings.” I should
like to argue, though, that the introduction of the notion of a “fully
realized human being” as a rebuttal in an argument begs all the important
questions, just as supposing that some ideas are “immediately accessible”
whereas others are not. We can fill in the blank behind “a fully realized
human being would _________” with whatever we want, say, “be a penguin,” and
whatever denial or argument your opponent comes up with, you can always
reply “Well, they aren’t fully realized human beings,” which for all your
opponent (or, as importantly, you, for that matter) knows, is true. We
could all just be stages towards some hitherto unknown moral level. We
won’t know until we get there, so placing our current moral understanding at
this endpoint level begs the question over your opponent who thinks that
their moral understanding is the better one that will last. They can reply
the same way you do, thus creating an impasse.
To bring this back around to the social/intellectual distinction, the
distinction has almost always been used around here to describe the
difference between immoral, evolutionary retardant thinking to moral,
evolutionary expedient thinking, i.e. the difference between static and
Dynamic. Mark put it most plainly. People often say that this part of
Pirsig made everything so clear, it was a breath of fresh air, never having
been done before. This always surprises the hell out of me, at least the
last part, particularly from people who’ve read a lot of philosophy. The
way the distinction is used, to basically denote bad thinking from good
thinking, to my mind that distinction was created the moment Plato admitted
in the Republic that philosophers look like run-of-the-mill rhetoricians and
in the Phaedrus that philosophy is true rhetoric as opposed to false
rhetoric. This distinction has been handed down to us in the form of the
Enlightenment’s call to make our social institutions “more rational,” the
19th century’s call to make our institutions “more scientific,” and to the
20th century’s very idea of a “social science.” The social/intellectual
distinction looks just like the Marxist distinction between ideology and
science. And this is why Rand looks like a mirror image of Marx: she simply
reverses the attributes to the higher and lower level. The problem is the
distinction, not Marx or Rand’s attributions (at least at this point in the
argument). The problem is thinking that you’re doing anything that your
moral philosophical opponent cannot, like making morals “more rational,” or
“more intellectual.”
As MacIntyre points out in the passage Sam quoted, the problem is thinking
that there is a Sartrean pour soi, an atom of freely choosing, freely acting
consciousness that swings completely free of its facticity, which MacIntyre
calls the “emotivist self of modernity.” The gist of MacIntyre’s (and
others’) critique is that the modern notion of the true self says that it
can choose between competing traditions of moral discourse, while itself
being rooted in none. The “post-modern” critique is that this notion of a
“blank self” makes no sense, and that it’s only within a tradition that any
choices can be made. For the post-modern, socialization goes all the way
down. I mentioned Rousseau’s famous maxim in an early post, “we are born
free, but everywhere in chains,” and much of modernity’s problem can be
attributed to Rousseau’s notion that we are socialized into who we are, but
there is a true self underneath of it all that we can fully realize through
the exercise of reason. This idea was transmitted to Kant, and so to all
contemporary moral philosophy still hanging in his sway (which is most;
though, I hope, lessening).
For the social/intellectual distinction, this becomes a problem of
recognizing that we are socially bound creatures, and that the “intellect”
comes out of the social, but that it also somehow swings free. Just as Marx
used the word “ideology” to mark the dirt out of which we all grow, Pirsig
uses “social.” And Marx used “science” to mark the method by which we could
pull ourselves out of the mud, just as Pirsig uses “intellectual.” But
Marx, like every other Enlightenment rooted philosopher, never could
adequately describe what we were grabbing onto to pull ourselves out of the
mud, never could find what Daniel Dennet called a “skyhook.” And so Marx’s
“ideology” never really amounted to more than a reference to “the bad guys.”
And likewise I think for Pirsig’s distinction. And if that’s so, the
distinction does very little in the argumentation that occurs between the
good guys and the bad guys.
Since I’ve already written part of my criticisms of Sam’s continuance of the
MacIntyrean argument (in an “ideology of capitalism” post), I'll just add a
little bit more here to make it a bit clearer. I claimed before and in this
post that Sam and MacIntyre are conflating Enlightenment philosophy and
Enlightenment politics. In Sam's array of points in the "ideology of
capitalism" post, the point I most disagree with is point E. Sam's been
savy enough to stay away from philosophical critique of liberalism, but I
think it might be hidden in points B and C. But if it isn't, his point
about the anthropology presupposed by liberalism is that the kinds of people
that are formed by liberalism are undesirable. MacIntyre puts the point by
saying that the cultural archetypes of modernity/liberalism are the Rich
Aesthete, the Therapist, and the Manager. And that this is bad. The
problem with this critique is that I can't see that it suffices to
counteract our modern belief that freedom might be one of the most important
moral goods we can have, and that if we have freedom, everything else will
work itself out (eventually). So, maybe the Aesthete, Therapist, and
Manager are bad archetypes to have. But those can be changed. I don't
think they are demanded by liberalism. One of the ways they can be changed
is by critiques like MacIntyre's, which are basically moral pronouncements,
much like most of literary criticism is built of moral pronouncements ("this
stuff over here (be it Harry Potter or cultural archetypes), that's bad").
But what I can't imagine changing is the basic structure of liberal
democracy. These critiques will all take place within the basic structure,
because if they don't, they had better show in great detail a better
socio-political system alternative to liberal democracy, which is not what
MacIntyre, for one, has done.
I’ll end by saying something more about the notion of a “fully realized
human being.” While I don’t think such a notion helps in an argument with
an opponent who already disagrees with you on the end result, the notion,
like the notion of a “fully realized polity,” does play a part in our moral
thinking. For “post-moderns,” it is important to sketch the utopias we’d
like to see realized because it helps us think up concrete suggestions for
realizing them. It gives us a direction to go. It also helps us begin the
channels of communication between alternative utopias described by others.
The existence of plurality and diversity poses a significant challenge to a
community. The first step is communication, spelling out the various
traditions and cultures people are coming from, their different ends, goals,
and desires, and then trying to figure what we are going to do about it.
The gist of my criticism of the social/intellectual distinction is that,
while it may serve a function in describing the tradition you’re in (though,
as I’ve said, I think the MacIntyrean line is effective in making that
particular way of describing it suspect), it won’t serve much of a function
in deliberating about what we are going to do about disagreement, it won’t
play much of a role in the argumentative dialogue that unfolds after
understanding (well, actually it usually unfolds during the process of
understanding, but that’s another matter).
Matt
p.s. Mark commented last time that my little array of levels (“inorganic –
rocks; biological – plants, animals; social – social customs; intellectual
– independently manipulable symbols”) was “a terrible over-simplification of
[Pirsig’s] metaphysical hierarchy.” That may be true, but it wasn’t mine.
It was more or less Pirsig’s in his “Letter to Paul Turner,” which is still
accessible on the moq.org main page.
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