From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Thu Jun 16 2005 - 15:22:37 BST
Matt,
Scott said:
So while it doesn't make sense to call the self a container of the set of
static patterns, it also doesn't make sense to say the self *is* the set of
static patterns. [skip]
What you four (and Pirsig) are doing is taking one pole of a polarity as
true,
making the other pole "just an appearance", and that fails.
Matt said:
Nah, I don't think there's any real disagreement here. You say you'd think
Rorty would want to toss the me-setting, but I don't think that's what he's
saying at all. He does want to redescribe this me-setting into something
less problematic, but the fact that we have a sense of individuality
differentiating me from other mes seems pretty basic to who we are and how
we function and I see no reason to toss it out.
Scott:
He wants to toss out making metaphysical hay out of that sense, while I
don't, and that is the real disagreement. Moreover, my interest is to make
the whole business more problematic, not less. That is the (or a) function
of the logic of contradictory identity: to keep the problematicity (if
that's a word) of the self, of consciousness, of intellect, of language
firmly in the forefront of philosophical inquiry.
Matt continued:
I can't even imagine
trying. What you describe as the necessary contradictory identity of
(perhaps) the me-setting with the we-setting, I'm quite content to describe
as two sides of the same coin, two different descriptions of ourselves that
we use depending on the purpose involved. I see both ways of putting it as
functioning the same way. I certainly don't think pragmatists are swinging
to the opposite side of a polarity. Sometimes we need to describe how we
become educated, how ideas disseminate, how we communicate, and then it
becomes helpful to describe people in terms of little bottle-like atoms that
interact. But sometimes we need to describe large shifts in beliefs and why
there isn't a substance opposed to matter called the "mind." Then we can
describe people in terms of a large web of beliefs, a gigantic intellectual
static pattern in which an individual "self"-atom dissolves.
Scott:
You say "I certainly don't think pragmatists are swinging to the opposite
side of a polarity", but it is not as a pragmatist that I accuse you and
Rorty of doing this, but as Darwinists, secularists, and nominalists. To say
that the self "just is" a set of static patterns is forced on one to remove
the vestiges of anything spooky in the human makeup. My argument is that
awareness of patterns cannot be accounted for within this worldview
(requiring, as it does, a transcendence of time). Mark Heyman has been
signing off his posts with the quote from Vonnegut: "Man got to tell himself
he understand", and this is almost invariably done through falling off the
Middle Way: with Ham it is in substantiating the subject[2], with Darwinists
by ignoring the problematics of the subject[2]. Keeping the contradictory
identity in the forefront prevents either error.
Matt continued:
I think the difference between you and I is summed up in your use of
"contradictory identity" and my "different descriptions for different
purposes." For the most part, the effect is the same for both of us. But I
think your penchant for your description is part of your desire to hold
things in a single vision, all at once, which I see as too reminscent of
Platonism. You see a contradiction between these various "poles" of
descriptions, but I see no contradiction. Wherever there appears a
contradiction, I think descriptive ingenuity and creativity can dissolve it.
There is nothing that would demand that we live with a contradiction.
Sometimes it means rejecting the duality (mind/matter). Sometimes it means
describing what's involved in a manner that leaves them non-conflicting
(religion/science), so that the purposes of one (with the attendent
descriptions) don't conflict with the purposes of the other. In other
words, we don't have to hold them in a single, steady vision. We can be
bifocal, or really, multifocal.
Scott:
Yes that it the difference, but the effect is the same only in our
non-philosophical and non-religious moments. As I see it, the difference is
what makes me religious, and you not. I've got no problem with being
Platonist in this sense, though it is not so much a matter of desiring to
hold things in a single vision (the point of contradictory identity is that
one can't, after all -- that the vision keeps sliding into its opposite),
rather it is remind oneself of one's Original Insanity, so to speak -- that
we are fallen beings, the symptom of which is to "tell ourselves we
understand" by grasping at erroneous solutions: like nominalism :)
And I deny that "descriptive ingenuity and creativity can dissolve it". The
problem of awareness of change, for example, has no spatio-temporal
solution. One must appeal to the non-temporal, which is to say, the eternal,
which is not understandable.
- Scott
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