From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Sep 30 2005 - 20:56:01 BST
Ham,
I know you're sincere and honest in your efforts. What I'm trying to
suggest is that you just need to try a different tact with some people, like
me. You need to be having a different kind of conversation with them. You
sum up exactly our differences by saying incredulously, "Surely there is
something to be said for the concept considered apart from the semantics."
No, no there isn't in a Wittgensteinian view of philosophy, which both Sam
and I explicitly hold, and I think is at the least implicit in Pirsig and
part of why any self-described Pirsigian has trouble taking much of what you
say about Essentialism seriously. We are on two very different pages here.
The extent that I appear close-minded and thrust you into a historical
cubby-hole is the same extent that you appear close-minded by thrusting me
into a conceptual cubby-hole. I think you're a Cartesian relic and you
think I'm a frivolous nihilist. That's not the problem. That's inevitable.
If we assume we've both explored the general outlines of each other's view
of philosophy (in some form or other, if not literally the other person's),
then its understandable that we won't really have many nice things to say
about each other's view. That's why I generally don't say anything in the
conversations you have. I stay out of the way so you can have the kind of
conversation you want to have, which would be different if I said anything.
But we can still try and have a conversation about the choice between these
differing views, about how we view what we are doing.
And that's the conversation I don't know how to have with you because I've
been _trying_ to have that conversation with you whenever we do end up
conversing. Every time I try, you disarm me with your philosophical
convictions. I mostly consider it a matter of style that I lace my writings
with a certain level of historical understanding, but its a style that is
me. I'm not sure how not to be me. However, you take all the little bits
that make me up, using whatever terms come to hand (like "redescription"),
name-dropping, historical allusions, and say that they are obscuring the
real me. No--this is it. I haven't been doing a fancy dance all this time,
trying to avoid divulging what my real convictions and values are--I've been
trying to enunciate what its like to be me. I've been telling you my
convictions and values.
You think everybody's closed you out without hearing you out, but what do
you expect? Does everybody have time to listen to everybody's proposal for
such-and-such? No, you make choices about your time and energy. Again, its
inevitable, but not only that, its required. What's alive and what's dead
in philosophy is largely what makes up a worldview. Not everything can be
alive at the same time. If it were, you wouldn't be able to do anything.
So, for my own part, I don't read your proposals about Essentialism because
your entire project gets off on the wrong foot from my perspective. The
only way to pursue any line of inquiry is to close the other ones off. For
instance, you don't doubt "that conscious awareness, unlike anything else in
the experienced world, is proprietary to the individual." In fact, that is
self-evident to you. Eliminating that as a candidate for doubt allows you
to develop the rest of your philosophy. More fundamentally, it is your
conviction, your lack of doubt in the difference between concepts and words
that allows you to get your whole project off the ground. You don't doubt
that there is distinction between concepts and words and I don't doubt that
there isn't. Our philosophical activity go off in different directions.
However, if that is something like a basic difference, we can have a
conversation about that difference. That conversation would basically be
the two of us trying to _cast_ doubt on the other person's conviction in the
converse, philosophically enabling belief.
Matt
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