From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Jun 14 2005 - 19:28:00 BST
Ham,
Ham said:
So why are you all wasting so much time and effort trying to place
Intellect, Consciousness, Subjectivity, and Mind into some sort of SQ
scheme? If you could get beyond the "slippery terms" for a moment, and turn
on your imagination, you'll find that you can "conceptualize" what these
terms really represent. After all, Philosophy is more than linguistic
propositions; it's an attempt to conceptualize what we call Reality.
Matt:
Hmm, a representational dichotomy between linguistic propositions and
Reality sounds like a bad idea, but okay, I'll "turn on my imagination" for
a moment.
Ham began:
Consider the fact that everything you know, every idea you have, every
feeling you experience is proprietary to yourself. If there were no one
else "out there", you would still have this awareness. It is the
"essential" You. If that You disappeared, there would be no Reality. Are
you still with me?
Now, you say, that's pure solipsism. Okay, but it's the starting point for
defining Reality. You can't go outside yourself and say, oh, but there's
evidence of a reality beyond myself. What is the evidence?
Matt:
Yeah, okay, that's enough. The above is straight out of Descartes'
Meditations. Trying to find an Archimedean point, turning inward, finding
the ego, working out from there, etc., etc. (By the way, some secondary
philosopher that only intellectual historians know of (I can't even remember
his name) pointed out that by Descartes' principles, we wouldn't _know_ "I
think therefore I am." We wouldn't know there was a "self" that was
thinking, we would only know that there was "thinking.") Paul and I think
that is a _huge_ mistake. It leads, in fact, to the problems Pirsigians
collectively identify as the Subject-Object Metaphysics. Which is why we
really don't let you get your Essentialism off the ground here and have a
hard time understanding these "facts" you take as so self-evident---like the
notion of "self-evident."
Related to the type of thought experiment that you want us to do, I said
this in "Philosophologology":
"One reason why the 'traditional philosophical problems' and the traditional
philosophers still resonate outside of their time and place, despite any
historicizing of their thought, is that the philosophers themselves wrote as
though they were speaking to all eternity. They formed their thoughts in a
way that made it easy to think that they were speaking to all people at all
times. They used thought experiments that could be easily reproduced,
rather than their own personal historical experiences and travails, to
contextualize and 'pump up' the problems they saw. But not only do they
write as though they are speaking to eternity, they _actually thought they
were speaking to eternity_. Their project was the project of speaking to
eternity. This all has the effect of making it seem as though these
problems are perennial problems."
The traditional problem that specifically pops out of your Meditations-esque
line of thinking is the Problem of Other People or the Problem of an
External Reality. But why should these be problems? Do we really have a
problem believing that there are other people out there, acting and thinking
independent of me? Or that there are tigers who want to eat me and rocks
who want to squish me? I don't think we have a problem with this.
Descartes didn't even have a problem with this. We can tell because he
lived long enough to write his books, because if he did actually have these
problems, he probably would have died long before in one of his duels. The
only reason other people and an external reality would look like problems is
if you wanted a Foundation, a pivot point to achieve "absolute certainty,"
something analogous to the kind of thing God has. That would be the only
reason to push doubt far enough to solipsism. Paul and I, however, have
given up Archimedes' desire. We aren't foundationalists and so aren't
cocerned with trying to "prove" the existence of people and rocks. We
follow G. E. Moore in thinking that all the proof we need is in the kicking
of a chair.
This line of reasoning is what leads us around to the entire notion of
thinking of our linguistic propositions as having a representational
relation to Reality. We think that's a bad idea, which is what Paul was
saying when he denied languages' expressive ability. Pragmatists like us do
just fine, in everyday living, with saying that language "expresses" our own
ideas, or that exclaiming, "Holy Christ, there's tiger over there!"
accurately reflects the current situation. But we think that the metaphors
of "reflection" and "expression" become bad if pushed into philosophical
thinking because they breed a sharp disjunction between language and
reality. Pirsig, with his static levels of reality, has taught us that
language, in the form of intellectual static patterns (or whatever), is as
much a part of reality as anything else.
So---that's the challenge to Essentialism. Which is why I don't find it
that surprising that you haven't had much success in finding many takers
here. Pirsig seems pretty antithetical to Essentialism as far as I can
tell, and all the better for it.
Matt
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