From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Oct 18 2005 - 21:24:43 BST
DMB,
DMB said:
I think there's a HUGE difference between "insisting on a particular
description" and objecting to some particular descriptions such as this [the
brain state] one. To describe the mystical experience in terms of brain
states is classic SOM reductionism.
Matt:
A description is only reductionistic if it adds, after the details of the
description, "this is how things really are." This is not how non-reductive
physicalists describe things. They say, "Here's a description of a table in
terms of molecules" or "Here's a description of an experience in terms of
firing neurons." So are you saying that a mystical experience cannot be
described in terms of firing neurons _at all_? If that's the case, how do
you get around my objection that you're insisting on a particular
description?
DMB said:
...one gets the impression that Rorty is a SOMer whose critique of
philosophy consists largely in rejecting the idea that there is an
epistemically accessable reality beyond the appearances. He's rejecting the
correspondence theory because there is no way for the pre-existing subject
to correspond with this pre-existing physical reality. And yet he seems to
be working within the belief that we are psychological creatures in a
physical world. As I understand it, Rorty has decided to simply declare that
philosophy is impossible because of this unbridgable gap.
But Pirsig rejects the correspondence theory, not because the gap is too
wide, but because it is a product of mistaken assumptions, metaphysical
assuptions about subjects in an objective reality.
Matt:
I think you have a slightly mistaken impression about what Rorty is up to.
Rorty's detailed critique of the correspodence theory (or
representationalism or SOM) is parasitic on those terms, of working with
them and saying, "And how are we ever to bridge that gap?," pretty much as
you say (though not exactly because its less about materialism then you
think). But after he gets to that question, he says that we should probably
just ditch the Cartesian, S-O, knower/known problematic, just as you say
Pirsig does. In this sense, they are doing the same thing. The gap is a
product of mistaken assumptions, so we should ditch the assumptions that
create the gap. (You see Pirsig doing the same thing, making parasitic
arguments, in the S/O Dilemma in ZMM. And then he just rejects the whole
problematic after seeing that arguing with it won't work.) That's why the
classical pragmatists were accused of idealism. As the little snipet from
the Oxford thing said, the pragmatist's argumentative strategy is basically
the same as the 19th century idealists. What the idealist didn't do is go,
"Well, we should ditch the problematic," they just went, "Well, that's what
we have to deal with." (This is why I think Pirsig wants to hitch his train
up to idealism at various points and why he shouldn't.)
What I'm criticizing the pre-/post- and pure/impure distinction of is
resurrecting that problematic. You're right, Locke conceived of the
distinction in terms of sensory perception, but its not the sensory
perception that's the problem, its the distinction. If we get rid of the
distinction between passive receptivity and active judging (which is what
Kant was working with and Northrop inherits from him), we won't have a
problem with reducing everything to sensory perception, as traditional
British empiricists wanted to do, or brain states and logical properties, as
the logical postitivists, heirs of the British empiricists, wanted to do
because we won't be _reducing_ anything. We'll just be throwing out various
proposals for descriptions for different purposes.
To focus on what you're saying about the stove example, you accuse me of
"insisting that quality is in the subject, in the valuing." I think it only
looks that way to somebody who makes a distinction between the two, object
valued and subject valuing. I think this is exactly the distinction you are
in danger of making when you gloss the hot stove example by saying, "this
paragraph is CONTRASTING 'pure sensation' or 'immeditate experience' with
the intellectual constructs or 'creative judgements' that quickly follow."
We _shouldn't_ be contrasting the two in this way. This is the contrast
that the British empiricists and the Kantians wanted to make. You're almost
_forced_ to make the invidious distinction between subjects and objects
after making that distinction, and that's why its bad. The S/O distinction
would no longer be optional (dependent on purpose) as Pirsig wants it, it
would be roughly as Bo wants it, the intellectual level or something, a
necessary part of the nature of human knowing. If you make a distinction
between pure value and subsequent valuing, I think you are forced to ask
such silly questions as, "Well, what's doing the valuing? What is it
valuing?" You don't want to do that. I thought Pirsig's insight was to
make it all _valuing_ across the board (which is still parasitic on the old
language and why it looks like reducing everything to one side, the subject,
as the idealist did). Rocks are interplays of valuings, patterns of
valuing. Everything from the touch of a physical object to the hearing of
an idea for the first time are interplays of valuing, not the passive
reception of value and then the active valuing later.
DMB said (in the other post):
The difference between looking at art and talking about art was very far
from my point and I certainly think you're smart enogh to know the
difference without anyone having to point out such a thing. I'm simply using
the examples that Pirsig uses in trying to talk about experiences that are
pre-intellectual, pre-linguistic, ineffable. The hot stove, the new song
heard on the street and the paintings of El Greco are all used as examples
of when Dynamic Quality becomes noticable to Westerners like us. I'm not
trying to reduce DQ to commonsensical "gut reactions" or to the simple act
of shutting your mouth for a while. And by the way, Matt, we very much agree
about "gut reactions". People who live by such impulses are doomed to
hedonism, fascism or some other short-sighted self indulgences. Its a
degenerate road to ruin. I think its downright creepy to equate "gut
reactions" with a "primary empirical experience".
Matt:
Well, alright, I know you're not _reducing_ DQ to gut reactions (and I
totally expected you and everyone else to agree on not wanting to be
hedonists), but your description of this amorphous thing called "primary
empirical experience" is parasitic on such examples. Its what gives it its
shape. You're building, as you say is the only way possible, by analogy.
I'm trying to point out that this analogy doesn't pan out very well. I
think you'd have to be committed to, if not hedonism, at least impulsivity.
You're trying to explain the DQ/SQ distinction by way of analogy, but the
series of analogies set up are not only different from each other (creating
a bewildering array of uses for DQ), they try and get you to accept
seperable, specifically philosophical theses from common sense distinctions,
like "gut reactions" and "further reflections." Taking the hot stove again,
I think Ian played out the description of DQ and SQ fairly right according
to the standard view you're elaborating on. There's your initial reaction
to the stove, and then there's your further reflections about the initial
experience. What I don't see is how this is (should be) tied in with the
other things that go under the heading of DQ, like as ultimate reality. It
seems like a mistake to me.
The one thing I think it facetious to say is that, "Despite my ignorance on
this point [about the overcoming of traditional empiricism], it seems
reasonable to assume that the traditional empiricists were operating within
a SOM framework while Pirsig isn't." It might be reasonable as a leaping
off point into an investigation into the matter, but it isn't a safe
assumption if you don't know anything about the matter. I've been trying to
raise doubt about whether we should take Pirsig's word for it or not about
what he's overcome or hasn't. But to take another example, what about my
trust in Rorty? Don't I take his word for it? Sort of, but not in the same
way. The difference between Rorty and Pirsig is that Rorty's left a large
corpus of writing and Pirsig hasn't. Having woven my way through most of
that corpus, I've seen him excercise his arguments in a number of different
situations and contexts. Whether or not one thinks the arguments successful
or not, if you read them you'll know how to predict what Rorty thinks about
a wide range of matters. With Pirsig, we have a much smaller set of
contexts that we've seen Pirsig write about. So it requires us to
extrapolate from what he does say. In working out those extrapolations,
from his arguments against defined opponents and his connection points with
the history of philosophy, I've come to think that it isn't all neat and
clear.
The only way for me to make my point about this is to rehearse traditional
empiricism, rehearse what Pirsig does, and then rehearse the critiques of
empiricism that mangled _it_ to pieces and see if any of them bear any
relation to Pirsig. I'm not prepared to do all of that at the moment (no
less in a post or series of posts). All I have right now is my, shall we
say, gut reaction. From what I have read and thought about, I'm not so sure
about Pirsig's escape from representationalism. From where I am currently,
I'm not convinced, as David says, that Pirsig is a step beyond Rorty.
One of the things my gut reactions tell me is that we should be wary of
Pirsig's descriptions of SOM. I've mentioned for a while that I think
Pirsig conflates two enemies in an unhelpful matter, representationalism and
materialism. I think we can see that played out in your descriptions of the
problem. You keep pegging me with some kind of reductive materialism, when
the only problem I can see with materialism was that it was reductive. I
suspect that Pirsig conflated the two primarily because they were conflated
through much of history. But we know its not required, if for no other
reason than the early rationalists, like Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza,
and the idealists, like Berkeley and Hegel. I think looking at the
vicissitudes of the history of philosophy gives one a greater appreciation
of the range one's philosophical attitudes can take.
The other reason I would go off on a little spree of what most will consider
"negligible philosophology" is because I think one of the reasons people get
into trouble is they're focused on building a system of philosophy from the
ground up, but without really knowing why they're building it.
Philosophical systems were built to solve certain problems. Richard McKeon
is often blasted as a degenerate taxonomist of philosophical thinkers (which
is one of the things Pirsig was reacting against in his distaste for the
Chairman, though I don't think he makes any explicit mention of it), but the
one thing that McKeon taught is that to understand what a philosopher was
doing when he built such-and-such philosophical edifice is what _problems_
the philosopher was tangling with. What gave the philosopher _impetus_ to
build the system.
You've been quoting Pirsig at me when I ask _why_ you would want
such-and-such distinction, but that's not all I want. I pretty much know
what Pirsig thinks he was doing, what he says in the books. What we need is
some sense of why the problems Pirsig is setting out to dissolve are
problems and what these problems are. And when some of these problems are
traditional philosophical problems (not all of them are), I think the only
way to be able to get a good sense of whether Pirsig's solution is
successful or not is to have a good sense of the history of that problem, of
why Pirsig picks it up as a problem from the history of philosophy.
Everytime you tell me that this or that distinction doesn't fall into this
or that agreed upon bad distinction, I start to wonder _why_, then, do we
need the distinction you're selling? If I can use the gut reaction/further
reflection distinction just as easily as the pre-/post- distinction in that
situation, what other situations is the pre-/post- distinction helping me
in?
At this present moment, my basic criticism of your use of the impure/pure
sensation distinction is that, if Ian reframes it successfully in the terms
he does, it should make us wonder why we need a pre- and post-intellectual
experience distinction when we already have a common sense distinction
between "gut reactions" and "further reflections." Because if that's _all_
the pure/impure sensation distinction amounts to, then it looks superfluous
because there _wasn't_ a problem there to begin with. We already _have_ the
distinction between gut reactions and further reflections. But if I had to
guess, I don't think either you or Pirsig thinks that that's all there is to
the distinction. That being the case, I think using analogies that boil
down to the distinction between reaction/reflection obscures what you think
you're getting out of the pre-/post- distinction that I'm not.
The thing I think you and Pirsig are reacting to heavily in this regard is
Socrates' definition of the "life of knowing" as the highest form of life
(which was, I think, a large part of why Pirsig made the distinction between
classic and romantic in ZMM). I agree in this reaction (and so did people
like Nietzsche). I think there are many more forms of life that are just as
good, there are many more things we do then philosophy that is good,
pleasureable, and needed like politics (which we still agree on despite our
philosophical differences) and sunsets and paintings. But I don't think
this route in displacing Socrates' definition of the philosophical life is
the right one. I think its something like overkill. I think all we need is
the ole' Millian, democratic point that what you do in your free time is up
to you. All we need is the very simple, commonsensical point against
elitism, "different strokes for different folks."
The thing that I think leads Pirsig into some dangerous situations (from my
perspective) is his blending of what we might call practical wisdom with
philosophical wisdom (what Pirsig would probably call philosophological
wisdom). He has some great practical advice and he has some great
philosophical advice. I think things get tangled and bogged down when he
tries to say something systematic about all of it. He tries to link
together the sense that we shouldn't devalue the life of a non-thinker (the
romantic person from ZMM) with the dissolution of the historical
philosophical problems of S/O, free will, substance, etc. I'm not sure that
we should try and deal with all of those problems in the same breath. (And
more to the point, what if we don't? Is there a problem with dealing with
them separately?)
I think the most neutral terms of describing the disagreement we've found
might be something like this: we disagree on the nature of SOM, the impetus
that prompts Pirsig into formulating some alternative to it. The shape and
scope of this enemy is going to shape _our_ response to it, determine what
we take out of Pirsig, which is why you think one part of Pirsig fundamental
and I a different part. If there is a further direction to this
conversation, it'll have to be about what _we_ consider SOM to be (not
_just_ what Pirsig considers it, though obviously it'll travel through there
considerably), what we consider the impetus to philosophize to be, what
problems we consider ourselves to be solving.
Matt
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