From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Nov 13 2005 - 22:06:38 GMT
DMB,
I'm not surprised by your reaction, but I just don't think you understand
what I'm saying. Which is fine, my fault, I just don't know how else to
catch you up to speed.
The main point I have about vocabularies and neurology and mysticism and
"pre-intellectual experience" is that in the vocabulary I'm offering via
pragmatism, no experiences are being cut out. No experiences are
unaccounted for. You've consistently gone back to this point about "what
good is a any philosophy if it can't account for a whole class of
experience," but it really just shows that you don't understand the point
I'm making. The point I'm making is that a vocabulary like neurology or
mysticism explains everything it has to to make it a complete vocabulary.
And given enough ingenuity, it can make itself complete. The problem you
have yet to face is that once it makes itself complete, you can't complain
that the vocabulary in question "leaves something out." It doesn't. It
explains it, but it does it in its own terms. You may not like those terms.
Perfectly fair. Those terms may not allow you to do something you'd like
to do. Again, perfectly fair. But you can't say it doesn't account for
them because the only way to say that was if you could compare vocabularies
to how things, experience or reality or whatever, were in and of themselves.
Only if you had a standpoint outside of any particular vocabulary to which
you could use to determine each particular vocabulary's adequacy to
experience or reality. Otherwise, you're simply insisting on your
particular vocabulary to describe a given thing, that the other vocabulary
"doesn't get it." That's fine, too. A neurological vocabulary will never
help with Eastern enlightenment. Fine. The only way to "get" Eastern
enlightenment is to use something like a mystic's vocabulary. That makes
perfect sense to me. But that doesn't mean that the neurological vocabulary
is inadequate. It just means it won't help you for that purpose.
DMB said:
First of all. I think your definition is knowledge is extremely debatable.
Matt:
Didn't say it wasn't. It was a proposal, just as whatever definition you're
implicitly using is.
DMB said:
Its easy to say there is no such thing as non-linguistic knowledge if
knowledge is defined as linguistic, but that begs the question and I'm not
even talking about knowledge as such anyway.
Matt:
You're starting to get it a little bit. It does beg the question, as does
your implicit definitions. I was trying to explain a little bit of the
consequences I see in your definitions and how mine are built to try and
avoid some of them.
My main question, of course, is if you aren't talking about "knowledge," why
are you talking about "knowing"? How do those unhinge from each other?
Obviously I put the two together, but you must be pulling them apart. That
might've been a cogent place to start commenting so I might get a better
understanding of how you see this all hanging together.
DMB said:
Surely anyone can see the difference between an unknowable realm that can
never be experienced directly and an experience that can't be captured in
words? The first can never be known directly while the second can only be
known directly.
Matt:
See, this is the type of thing I'm trying to avoid. I'm not avoiding the
experience, though I am trying to avoid the theoretical imputation that it
_can't_ be captured in words. Afterall, how do you know that? Wouldn't
that be running together your carefully distinguished inexpressibility with
noumenal ineffability?
I'm trying to avoid the idea that _words_ are in the business of
_capturing_. I think that's a remenant of the representationalism that you
say Pirsig eschews fully. I don't know yet. You, me, and Paul all think
that thinking of language as trying to represent or capture experience or
reality is a bad idea, but I'm not sure if Pirsig fully got himself out from
under that rock. He helped us in a lot of ways of getting out from under
the rock by showing us different ways of thinking about things, but I think
he might still have gotten caught. Part of the reason I have trouble
deciding whether Pirsig got out from under it is because I see so many
people like yourself draw out implications from Pirsig, implications that
don't look wrong, stuff that has textual support, and these implications
move in the direction of my worst philosophical fears, that of essentiatlism
and representationalism, rather than towards my highest philosophical hopes,
pragmatism.
So the idea behind my avoidance plan for representationalism is that we not
disjoin knowing from knowledge, knowing from linguistic use, but that we
also stop thinking of language as trying to capture anything. It was only
when we thought of language as trying to capture adequately bits of reality
or experience (the Kantian Thing-in-Itself, experience or reality as it is
aside from our descriptions of it) and these bits as being more or less
capturable (rocks more so, mystical experiences less so) that we catch
ourselves in problems.
For instance, the inability to tell me what is "known directly." You didn't
try to do that. You didn't try to prove me wrong there. You did, however,
add to my knowledge base of how you see the mystical vocabulary hanging
together. How do I "know directly"? How do you help me? Actually, you
said (perhaps somewhat facetiously) that I already am enlightened, in effect
that I do "know directly," but that I just don't realize it. Well, if I get
along just fine with my descriptions of things, but I just don't describe
things the way you do, how do I "wake up"? How do I "know directly" if
there's no way to tell me whether what I just "knew directly" is actual or
fake "knowing directly"? If there were a way of telling me, it would be
linguistic and that would make whatever it was under discussion _not_
actually "known directly," but simply thrown into the linguistic pile.
This is a conversational problem. It either ends with the mystical
dogmatist (because only dogmatists insist that something is unknowable, or
in this case inexpressible, and that every attempt to know or express it is
ruled, a priori of any actual attempt, to have failed) shrugging his
shoulders, smiling, and saying, "Well, you'll know it when you see it," at
which point there's nothing else to say because the conversant is hopeless
(not that conversation supplied any hope in the first place because
conversation itself is hopeless) or with the pragmatist shaking his head and
saying, "Well, maybe we should just try not to talk about that stuff, or
really, in that way. Afterall, talk won't help. Maybe we should just
concentrate on the linguistic pile when it comes to conversation." This has
the effect of changing the subject. But why should this be a problem for a
mystic? Afterall, what's the point of talking about something that is
inexpressible? Whatever "knowing directly" is, it can't be shared with
other people. The pragmatist reaction is just that maybe we should fix up
the rules of the conversation so that we don't get stuck in those kinds of
cul-de-sacs.
And to clear something up, you mentioned my "theory of knowledge" a couple
of times, but I have no such theory. I just have some suggestions about how
to have a fruitful conversation about knowing and knowledge. For instance,
I wouldn't run together "knowing" and "having" which is what you said here:
"we can 'know' this experience in the sense that we can 'have' such
experiences." I'm not conflating those two things. We can _have_ all sorts
of stuff without _knowing_ about it. Running them together was a mistake
the empiricists (like Locke) first engendered by putting "knowing" together
too closely with "sensing."
Matt said:
I think Pirsig's mistake ... [was in] draining the romantic of its
_every_dayness and vaulting it up into the mystic's eternal Other, something
rare and mysterious. ...I suspect the first line of reply from you, DMB,
will be to protest that Pirsig's point is that DQ just _is_ this
everydayness, that mysticism isn't as esoteric as all that. I think that's
the proper move, but I think that's a strike against the tone being used, as
pathos slides off the end towards bathos.
DMB said:
You're already enlightened, but don't yet realize it. Then there is the 180
degree enlightenment versus the 360 degree enlightenment. The heroic model
also depicts the journey out of the ordinary world and into a special world
where much is learned and he then returns to transform that ordinary home
with a little bit of what he learned.
Matt:
I'm skipping over the Platonic nonsense of "Heaven is this world, rightly
seen" (afterall, isn't "rightly seen" the wrong phrasing for someone who
can't imagine anyone thinking absolute certainty is even possible? Only if
you could cash in on if it was "right" or not would you use the phrase, and
the only way to cash in is if you had criteria to determine rightness, but
we don't have any criteria because such criteria was the pipe dream you
boggled at anybody in their right mind dreaming of) to focus on your quick
about-face on the everydayness of DQ. I suggested that Pirsig would have a
problem if he made DQ into an "eternal Other, something rare and mysterious"
and that you would first respond by saying that it _isn't_ rare and
mysterious. The mystic just _is_ talking about the everyday. You say,
"Yes, exactly, you get it but you don't" and then go to explain it to me by
saying, "journey out of the ordinary world and into a special world." If
I'm reading you right, you're saying that there are two kinds of DQ, the
everyday ordinariness and the mystic's inexpressible "rare moment." But
that means to me that you are still writing with the pathos of distance in
mind. I don't think that's good.
DMB said:
You seem to offer only two choices. The MOQ has to be saying something
about exotic and unreachable heights or it has to be talking about
trivialities and ordinariness. Says who? I think you're takiing advantage
of the paradoxical and ineffable nature of mystical sayings here too.
Matt:
I am _absolutely_ taking advantage of paradox. This is something Scott and
I disagree about, too. I say that in conversation, when you meet a
contradiction, a paradox, you make a distinction (I think it was Aquinas who
first said that). That dissolves the contradiction so you can continue the
conversation. (If you say not all conversations are stopped by paradoxes,
I'd say you're right, instancing poetry, but then I've already said how I
think mysticism is analogous to poetry.) I don't think you get to have your
cake and eat it, too, which is what you seem to be trying to convince me of.
Its not either triviality or exoticness, Matt, its both of them. If you
leave unresolved paradoxes, then I think you've left the playing field I'm
working in, the philosophical vineyards.
Generally in philosophy, you don't get to leave acknowledged paradoxes lying
around without taking a hit for it. This is obviously a point of contention
with some philosophers. Why can't we leave them around? Well, comes the
responding question, why would you want to? The answer at some point has to
be, "Because they're unresolvable." But all that means is that you've
changed yourself into a dogmatist, baptizing whatever problem or paradox
you're facing. You've made it into a feature of reality. But if there is
no way that reality is in itself, as all post-Kantian philosophers have to
agree (as you want to agree), then all features of reality are features
we've played a part in putting there. Reality can't tell us when something
is unresolvable. The answer we don't get to have after Kant when asked,
"Why would you leave a paradox?", is "Because its an unresolvable feature of
reality that we have to deal with." After getting past Kant, we realize
that the way we deal with paradoxes is by making distinctions and as many
linguistic innovations until the paradoxical air is cleaned up.
If you leave a paradox, you don't get to baptize it. You don't get to say
that that's just the way things are. You might say that leaving the paradox
makes things more flavorful, like in poetry, but then you're not playing the
game of philosophy anymore. Philosophers don't leave the playing field with
unresolved paradoxes. That means they've failed in why they took to the
field in the first place, to see how things hang together. (One should note
that in the above I've _defined_ philosophy in a certain way, which I've
before suggested one shoudn't do. What I don't think we should do is
hypostatize any definition. We should, though, define it for particular
purposes, like seeing whether two people are playing two different games,
talking past each other. Another way of putting my above implicit
definitions is to say that paradox-mongering is okay in the game of
philosophy-as-poetry, but not okay in philosophy-as-explanation.)
DMB said:
I mean, the orginal idea is that reality is undivided and beyond definition,
but that metaphysics requires definitions and divisions. And even after the
static/Dynamic split, the MOQ asserts that our experience is always a
mixture of the two, that you can't have one without the other and that we
know both of them through experience.
...
I think Pirsig is only saying that DQ is something we experience, that this
class of experience has been excluded for metaphysical reasons and that we
should stop excluding it.
Matt:
I wanted to put these two passages, one that happens at the beginning of a
paragraph and the other at the end, to punch up how they don't go together.
How do you exclude something that "is always a mixture of the two"? If you
say "you can't have one without the other," then how could you possibly
exclude it? It must already be there whether you like it or not.
The "exclusion" must be in a dissatisfaction with how it (whatever "it"
happens to be) is described. And that's fine. But it wasn't excluded. And
if you have moved to a different set of descriptions to become more
satisfied, then you're also not talking about the same thing as the other
description. And if you realize that, though (as you keep trying to bang me
over the head with it), you have to realize that you can't _criticize_ the
other vocabulary for excluding something that wasn't there before. It
doesn't _have_ to be there in some sense analogous to the universe having to
be here for this post to be written. If it _did_ "have" to be there in that
sense, then you'd be talking representationalist nonsense. But we've
dropped that. Whatever is "here" is here because we, in some sense, want it
to be. We put it there for some reason.
There are differences between the mystical vocabulary and the neurological
vocabulary. But there's no way to compare the two to see who's excluding
what. One could say that different things exist in the different
vocabularies. You use one when you want to talk about the set of things
that exist in _it_, and the other when talking about the things that exist
in the other. Vocabularies don't rise and fall because they are adequate or
inadequate to experience or reality. They rise and fall because they are
either useful or not for our purposes.
DMB said misleadingly:
As to the confession that you see no need to recover anything....
I had said:
For my own self, I don't think there is a lost tradition that we desperately
need to recover. I don't think we need anything philosophical desperately.
And then:
Is there lost wisdom in the ancients? Sure. Would we be better off if we
regained it? Probably. But being unable to tell an upbeat story about the
route of the West ignores much that the West has done to improve the world.
Matt:
I think its evident that I wasn't "confessing" that there's "no need to
recover anything," but that my emphasis was on _desperately_ recovering
something. I think desperate is the wrong word and it is only by thinking
that we need to recover something _desperately_ that causes people to ignore
really important things the West has done, like lessen the immiseration of
countless people, like blacks and women.
So again, is there lost wisdom in the ancients? Yeah. Would we be better
if we regained it? Likely. But are we going to capture that wisdom by
turning back the clock to ancient times? No. We're going to use their
wisdom for us, for our times.
DMB said:
It seems to me that interpreting the MOQ through this Rortian filter is
quite unworkable and it would be much better and easier to simply admit that
the MOQ is not for you.
Matt:
Actually, I think it much easier to say that _your_ philosophy isn't for me,
and vice versa. I think Pirsig is great. When interpreting Pirsig, it is
only when those interpretations butt heads does there become a problem with
Pirsig, either with my version or with yours. It is when we interpret
Pirsig that we try and establish what is "really central" from what isn't.
Pirsig's fine, Pirsig's just the source material.
And how is my version unworkable? You _certainly_ haven't shown that. The
only thing you might have shown, with my help, is that our versions are
unworkable together.
Matt
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