From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue May 06 2003 - 19:31:08 BST
Phyllis,
Sorry its taken me so long to get back to you. There have been...problems.
Phyllis said:
By any chance is there a summary essay somehwere? I'm a bit short on
reading time, but I am interested in looking into it. Thanks for the
recommendation. I would hesitate to accept the inclusion of Habermas in
this, as he usually sits on the opposite side of the table from Rorty.
Matt:
If you are looking for a summary of Bernstein, I can't really help you. If
you are looking for a summary of the idea of post-modernism as a relief
from Cartesian Anxiety, I can recommend my essay, "Confessions of a Fallen
Priest," posted on the MoQ website. I don't make a lot of reference to
Bernstein, but the essay is a good (I think) introduction to Rorty and
provides the first fruits of my colligation of Rorty and Pirsig (though it
is a little long). Some people think the fruit is rotten, but there you go.
Most of the time I would agree about sitting Habermas and Rorty together,
but they do have large strains of agreement, which make their disagreements
all the more fascinating. Its particularly Habermas' work on communicative
reason, as opposed to subject-centered reason, that earns him a label of
post-Cartesian Anxiety. However, and this is where I would also be
reticent to sit them side by side, by Rorty's lights Habermas still falls
into the Anxiety when he posits Universals as the natural outcome of
undistorted communication, the Peircian pot of gold at the end of the
communicative rainbow.
Phyllis said:
I am particularly interested (in mid project now) about your views on the
MoQ's place in this axiological debate. As I said in response to Platt,
the dynamic could be considered the stage where absolutes are contained
independent of human apprehension, the modernist/objectivist view, or the
dynamic is chaos out of which static patterns are chosen (radical
postmodernism - my term) or the event which initially is responded to by
emotion/intuition and then examined and assimilated by the intellect to new
patterns (conservative postmodernism with a dash of neo-feminism).
Matt:
To be honest, I haven't really been following the debate. As DMB would be
quick to point out, I don't write a lot of posts about things other than
post-modernism, pragmatism, or Rorty. It's mainly because the
conversations don't relate very well to what I want to do with Pirsig,
which is fine by me, but not for others. As I don't have time to dig
around in the archives to get to the heart of the debate I'll only add
these thoughts:
1. I don't think Johnny's claims about wanting to save morality are
useful. As I see it, he's providing a service by noting that static
patterns are where morality finds its concreteness, but adding that we need
to, essentially, "save static patterns" is, in my view, a superfluous and
modernist thing to say.
and
2. I view Dynamic Quality as a compliment made to certain events
(construed widely) after the static patterns that have formed around them
prove to be more useful than the ones they seek to replace.
Phyllis said:
Johnny's initial comments on this actually sounded very pragmatic, like
Venturi on architecture - is this a hallmark of the self-identity you claim?
Matt:
If you are asking whether or not I identify as a pragmatist, then yes,
specifically following in the footsteps of Rorty.
Phyllis said:
How does the "beyond foundations" position avoid the performative
contradiction that so many relativists fall into?
Matt:
This is a charge people have been trying to hang on me for a long time now
and I've given a lot of different answers, all of which I view as
successful and my interlocuters view as not. The issue of whether
post-moderns fall into a performative contradiction or self-referential
paradox is a metaphilosophical issue. Like all good metaphilosophical
debates, its about competing intuitions about the subject. As such,
metaphilosophical debates can't really be resolved by argumentation. The
interlocuters each hold too few of the key beliefs in common for an
argument. What's at issue is the intuitions upon which they build their
arguments. What somebody like Rorty points out is that both sides beg the
question over the other when they argue. The only thing we can do is
discuss the issue, spell out reasons, write up narratives, compare and
contrast vocabularies and the like. This is at the heart of Kuhn's
suggestion that paradigm's are incommensurable. The movement past modern
philosophy is a paradigm shift and as such, can never be shown conclusively
to be the best thing to do. We can only provide what we think are good
reasons.
All this is a preface to my answer. I don't think there is contradiction
in holding that "All statements are relative to other statements, up to and
including this one" or "All statements are contingent, up to and including
this one" or "There are no Universals, up to and including this one"
because of the coherence provided by an entirely different web of
beliefs. Pragmatists don't think there are Universal statements because
they don't think that anything can exist outside of history, outside the
flow of time. This isn't much of an answer, but I can suggest my last
prolonged answer on the subject: "Pirsig the postmodernist?" from 3/14/03
in combination with Platt's reply and my reply to Platt. My reply to Platt
may be of particular interest because it expands briefly on my view of
Dynamic Quality. (If anybody else happens to know off hand of a post where
I describe my views of DQ, could they let me know? I know I wrote one
fairly recently, I just don't know where I put it.)
Oh, and don't worry about offending anybody. If you are polite, then the
only thing you could possibly offend (unless the offendee is a nut, in
which case don't pay attention to them) is someone's philosophical
sensibilities, which is the point of philosophical dialogue. There are a
few offensive people around here, and I suggest ignoring them, but as long
as you don't fall in with them you'll have nothing to worry about.
Matt
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