From: david buchanan (dmbuchanan@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Nov 20 2005 - 23:32:25 GMT
Matt and all MOQers:
Matt said:
What I would like to suggest is that Pirsig sometimes uses an outdated image
of language's relation to reality. DMB, I think accurately reflecting
Pirsig's language, said in our dialogue (on Nov 13): "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?" I can't
remember if Pirsig uses the particular image of language "capturing"
experience. But the sentiment is there in several places...
dmb replies:
Cheap trick. Here you're trying to spin a set of metaphysical assumptions on
the basis of one word. Besides that, you're complaints about the relation
between language and reality that is supposedly expressed by that one word
hardly make sense since in that sentence it is "experience" being captured
by words. (Or not) But the substance of that statement is the same thing I
keep pointing out; you are treating my statements about direct experience as
if they refered to Kant's things-in-themsleves. No you're just doing it
again. Instead of responding to the point I was actually trying to make,
you've seized upon a single word and effectively changed the subject, which
is annoying to say the least. Plus you're workiing off of images and
sentiments rather than any actual quotes from Pirsig's books. I guess that
makes it weak as well as cheap.
Matt continued:
...The place I would like to focus on is in the beginning of Lila when
Pirsig describes mysticism and logical positivism. Roughly, Pirsig says
that the logical positivists think that (some) language can capture reality
perfectly well, we just have to iron out when and where (yes with rocks, no
with values), and that the mystics think that language can't capture at all.
Language takes you further away from reality, not closer. I said earlier
(on Nov 11) that both the idea that language can span the gap between us and
reality and the idea that it _can't_ take part in the pathos of distance.
Both have as a common presupposition the idea that there is a _gap_ between
us and reality and both have suggestions about how to span that gap (through
language on the one hand and direct
mystical experience on the other).
dmb says:
Pathos of distance, eh? Where'd you pick that slogan up? I'm going to keep
making this point until you address it properly; Again, my assertions about
direct experience do NOT claim to bridge a gap between us and reality. As I
understand the matter, the MOQ says there are no things-in-themselves and so
there is no gap between us and reality. There is no reality beyond
experience. That's all we get. The "gap" between direct experience and
language is a "gap" between two categories of experience. Language is
intellectually knowable and direct experience is apprehended through
non-rational means. See? It seems that language is the whole thing, that
language is all we get. I think this might be part of why you keep hanging
onto your Rortian critque, part of why you continue to subliminably
misunderestimate Pirsig's strategery with respect to DQ, myticism and such.
Think about this. Pirsig corrects Descrates, pointing out that he can think
only because French culture exists. The idea here being that language comes
before philosophy, before intellect. Along side this we have Pirsig's
description about pre-historic man and the evolution of myth, ritual and
cosmology stories (all language centered) and how the first intellectual
truths could have been derived from these social level forms. See, Pirsig
acknowledges the sorter and the handful of conscious reality that he is
sorting. (As well as the landscape of awareness from which that handful is
drawn.) That sorter is suspended in language, is suspended in the conceptual
categories of that evolutionary inheritance. But that's not the whole
tamale. Again, its about categories of experience, levels of experience. It
epistemological pluralism, baby. Here is Pirsig in the SODV paper:
"In the block diagram of the Metaphysics of Quality we see that each higher
level of evolution rests on and is supported by the next lower level of
evolution and cannot do without it. There is no intellect that can
independently reach and make contact with inorganic patterns. It must go
through both society and biology to reach them. In the past science has
insisted on the necessity of biological proofs, that is, proofs in terms of
sense data, and it has tried to discard social patterns as a source of
scientific knowledge. When Bohr says we are suspended in language I think he
means you cannot get rid of the social contexts either."
dmb resumes:
Saying you can't get rid of the social contexts is not quite the same as
saying such contexts are all we get. Pirsig is talking about the
relationship different ways of knowing; sensory data, social contexts and
then intellect. Each provides a different kind of data, if you will. As I
understand it, this is what the philosophy of language is all about, the
recognition that sensory data does not register on the mind like a mirror,
but is filtered through the conceptual categories furnished by language.
(Concepts like subjects and objects, for example.) In any case, I think the
distinction between DQ and sq and the distinctions between static levels is
the only place you'll find anything like a "gap".
See, so ineffability has to be understood not as a gap between us and
reality, but as a distinction between two kind of experience, static and
dynamic. So the inability of words to "capture" this experience is simply
based on the difference between fixed definitions and an ever changing
reality. Its just a matter of using the wrong tool. You may recall that this
is what distinguishes Quality from Plato's Good and what attracted him to
the sophists.
"The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving
Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an idea at all. The Good was
not a FORM of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately
unknowable in any kind of fixed rigid way." (ZAMM page 342)
Matt continued:
Language neither does nor does not capture experience. Language isn't in
the capturing business. Language is a tool that we use to deal with
reality, with our experience. If we make this turn fully
from language-as-a-mirror (or pirate) to language-as-a-tool, if we fully get
rid of representationalism, I think we will want to get rid of the idea of a
"pre-intellectual experience." What we will have instead are
_non_-intellectual experiences, like kicking a rock, seeing a sunset, being
eaten by a tiger, dropping some acid.
dmb says:
Huh? This makes no sense to me at all. I don't see how language-as-a-toolism
will make us want to replace the "preintellectual experience" with rock
kicking or anything else. But also wonder if the reality language "deals"
with as a "tool". I've also heard language described as a kind of coping
mechanism. This raise the question; is that reality something like a realm
beyond experience. Do you imagine a reality of things-in-themselves which
which language is dealing? Is it a tool to handle something unknown and
other than itself?
Matt continued:
Its not that our language _fails_ in capturing our experience of smoking
peyote, its that language sometimes finds it _difficult_ to deal with it.
The experience of having a tough time of putting something into words isn't
a measure of language's failure or success, its simply a measure of
difficulty, of the struggle to find an analogue that makes sense in the
analogues upon analogues upon analogues that make up civilization's
knowledge.
dmb says:
Is saying its "difficult to capture in words" really any different from
saying that "language finds it difficult to deal with"? No, not unless
you're desperately looking for something to pounch on as an excuse to change
the subject to that tired old critique once again. But speaking of the
struggle to find the right analogues, something I know all too well as a
poster in this forum, the difficulty of putting the mystical experience into
static intellectual terms is like the difficulty of putting the Pythagorian
theorm into gestures. Even the best mime would have some trouble. Gestures
can't capture mathematical principles in the same way that intellect can't
capture the mystical experience. See? There is no reality gap, just
distinctions between levels or categories of experience.
Finally, Matt said:
...Once you make experience coextensive with reality _everything_ is a
direct relation to reality. Smoking peyote will not get you closer to
reality if only because there is no distant reality to get closer
to--reality is always and everywhere around us. What we can say after we
split the difference is that mystics do produce knowledge, just as the
physicists do, but its just a different kind of knowledge, not aimed at
prediction and control, but at something else, like spiritual balance. The
fruits of the mystics' knowledge tree, the one where the Dao de jing grows,
shouldn't be judged by the standards of other trees, like science, because
the purpose of growing the tree is different.
dmb says:
Hey, you're almost admiting something like epistiemological pluralism here.
I'd also say that mysticism and science produce different kinds of
knowledge, but not just because they have different purposes so much as deal
with different levels, different areas of experience. I would also object to
the idea that "everything is a direct relation to reality". This seems
symptomatic of your general wish to get rid of DQ. If I get the gist, you'll
allow such things as mysticism insofar as its construed as a purpose-driven
context bound activity just like everything else including science and the
other intellectual activities. See, I think you're trying way too hard to
convert DQ into sq so as to effect the disappearance of DQ.
See, I think this move virtually undoes the whole thing, discards the main
thing. And I think this move is especially bogus because, as I've tried to
show, its based on a misunderstanding of what it is you're trying to undo.
(It never even occured to me that DQ or the "pre-intellectual experience"
would be related to anything like a realm of thing-in-themselves until you
and Sam brought it up nor had I ever imagined "direct experience" in terms
of reaching that realm.) You gotta figure that altering or removing the
central terms would do serious damage to any such system. Or at best, going
after the central terms would produce a different system of it own. In
either case, its not really accurate to call that an interpretation insofar
as the original is unrecognizable afterward.
But maybe I should keep saying that your project is drastically at odds with
the MOQ. Maybe it would be better to say that your project would take a
different shape. I mean, even I have to admit there is some overlap, some
areas in common, which I have tried to show. Maybe Rortism can be altered,
without injury, instead. Maybe there is a way to get Rorty and Pirsig
together in a way that doesn't alter or erase any of the central terms of
the MOQ. Maybe Rorty's thinking only helps to clarify a portion of what
Pirsig is saying. I think that last one is very likely.
In any case, I hope we can move past the representational theory of truth
and start talking about those rhetoricians or something more relevant to the
MOQ.
Thanks.
dmb
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