From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed May 18 2005 - 03:12:18 BST
Mark,
Matt said:
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,
Mark cut off:
History proves nothing regarding this point, and is in fact an academic
diversion. I doubt if the concept of freedom was immediately accessible to
Neanderthals; this doesn't mean it isn't immediately accessible to post
enlightenment human beings, assuming such humans have escaped the FRH
destroying externalities I've mentioned before.
Matt:
I said "suspect" for very important reasons, namely I don't think history
proves anything, either. Part of the constellation of ideas that my
arguments were meant to move you towards is that our interpretation of
intellectual and moral progress is part and parcel of our arguments for
furtherances of that progress. You have to pick a direction before you can
move further. I thought your arguments beg the question because you're
arguing with people for whom the direction you've picked out is debatable.
You can't just point back at history and say, "This, without a doubt, has
been the progress we've made. So it should be pretty easy figuring out what
will help it progress further." In the above cut off, you think I'm
committing the sin I think _you_ are. In my descriptions of what is
involved in the concepts of "immediately accessible" (IA) and "fully
realized human being" (FRH), I was trying to show how you have to assume an
interpretation of intellectual and moral history to use them. The problem
is not that you have a different interpretation of moral progress. It's
understood that you differ from others, like Sam. But when trying to give
an account of _why_ this interpretation of moral history is _better_ than
Sam's, you use notions like "IA" and "FRH." My argument is that those
notions commit you to an Enlightenment version of intellectual progress,
which I do think is very philosophically bad, which is why in the beginning
I talked about your "strategy." I think the strategy of firming up your
Enlightenment version of moral progress (which I basically agree with) with
an Enlightenment version of intellectual progress (which I think largely
wrong) is bad (which is why with Sam, I would argue that his version of
intellectual progress is largely right, but his version of moral progress is
off).
So I said there were two stages to this firming up: first you refer to IA.
I said this notion is _made suspect_ (not proven wrong) by noting the
vicissitudes of intellectual history. First, you said that intellectual
history is an academic diversion, having nothing really to do with what we
are talking about. Then, you admitted that, yes, IA doesn't work by itself.
A "neanderthal" may not think freedom IA, but a "post-Enlightenment human
being" would, "assuming such humans have escaped the FRH destroying
externalities," which, apparently without any acknowledgement at all, moved
you to what I predicted to be your second stage of the argument: holding IA
up with an idea of what a FRH is. The reason I would be persnickety about
you basically conceding the first line of argument, though not acknowledging
it, is because an interlocuter has to ask themselves, "Why would somebody do
that? Why would they deny the basis on which they concede the first line
(intellectual history), and then not acknowledge any concession, as if I'm
arguing about something else, or against a ghost?" The only reason I can
surmise is because you think there is something very different going on in
my arguments, something that doesn't quite branch up with what you are
talking about. The one very plausible reason for that is because you are
working with some very different background assumptions about, for instance,
how intellectual progress works. For instance, an Enlightenment
interpretation of intellectual progress.
So, after you cut me off and (as I perceive it) conceded my first line, I
finished my first statement with this about FRH:
Matt said:
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.
Mark said:
Uh, no. I think Pirsig makes it pretty clear than everyone makes a hundred
quality decisions a day. This is why belief in Quality is empirical and
belief in God is not.
Matt:
Now, my softening up move was designed to pretty well parallel the problem
with IA: you have to have been brought up in a certain intellectual or moral
tradition to take certain ideas as IA, which I would think would be just
another way of saying that "everybody believes in _______." First it was
"freedom" in the blank, then "Quality," and I think they're both wrong and
resting on bad philosophical assumptions. So, to reply with a brusque "you
are obviously wrong according to Pirsig" remark, when I think Pirsig sides
entirely with me (though, granted, you may not have known this), to me
demands an even higher level of imputing of Enlightenment-style assumptions.
(A suspicion only furthered by your remark that "[Pirsig] and Lao Tzu had
arrived at the same place via different routes. So, a person can believe in
the Dao without having read Lao Tzu, just as a person can believe in
Quality without having read Pirsig," which seems to create a Realm of Ideas,
just sitting out there, with some ideas being exactly the same, just called
by different names by us finite mortals. As per my own version of
intellectual progress, this is wrong.)
...
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