From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 06 2003 - 15:57:47 GMT
Platt, Kevin, Matt,
Kevin said:
Pomos *DON'T* think everything is equal or that we can't know Better from
Worse. In fact, we could say that *ALL* we ever *CAN* know is Better from
Worse because Truth (the ahistorical absolute kind) will ultimately escape
us. We can but choose to conintue on a course of Betterness to make of
things what we will without concerning ourselves with finding the Terminus
of that Quest. It's the Journey, not the destination.
Platt asked:
I'd like to see if the two Matts agree with your foundational principle
that "all we can ever know is better from worse" and that it's ultimately
true that "truth will ultimately escape us."
Matt S said:
I agree. I'd perhaps say that rather than knowing better or worse, we
*perceive* it, as at the end of the day these concepts (better and worse)
are human inventions that Pirsig, amongst others, uses to bring meaning and
coherence to the world. But apart from that slight alteration I agree
indeed. And yes it's true that truth ultimately escapes us: the former
'truth' situated in man and his thought, the latter 'truth' sensed by man
as external to man, and so unknowable.
Matt:
I think Kevin's formulation is fair enough for something phrased in a
modern vocabulary (which, I assume, he did on purpose). I don't find
anything wrong with it because I already interpret it the way Kevin would
want me to. Matt's substitution of "perceive" for "knowing" I would shy
away from simply because I think perception sounds too much like
pre-linguistic turn empiricism. But apart from that, Matt's right: "at the
end of the day these concepts (better and worse) are human inventions that
Pirsig, amongst others, uses to bring meaning and coherence to the world."
And even more importantly: "yes it's true that truth ultimately escapes us:
the former 'truth' situated in man and his thought, the latter 'truth'
sensed by man as external to man, and so unknowable."
This last point I would expand on because it sums up the post-modern
condition and why Matt, Kevin, and I will continue to shrug at our
shoulders at Platt's continuing attempts to catch us in self-referential
paradoxes (as the last one, "your foundational principle that "all we can
ever know is better from worse" and that it's ultimately true that "truth
will ultimately escape us."). It is true that "Truth ultimately escapes
us." The "true" attached to that sentence is a property of it. The only
reason it is true is because it coheres with other sentences in our web of
beliefs and desires. The "Truth" in the sentence is an object, a goal, as
Kevin says, a "Terminus of that Quest" for Truth. For post-moderns, Truth
is not a Quest, it is a property of sentences. To say that something is
"true" is not to say that we have added one more piece to the Jigsaw Puzzle
of Truth, but rather that that something hangs together with other
sentences that we call true. When Matt calls the Truth that we eschew
"external," he's pointing up the fact that we would like to get rid of our
ocular metaphors, that we are not trying to "see" the Truth which is "out
there," as Kant thought of it. The post-moderns say that we've been
chasing this "Truth" for a long time. It's about time we got on to things
that are more important.
Matt
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