From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Thu May 15 2003 - 03:59:47 BST
Steve,
Now, I don't want to say you're begging the question to end a conversation. At times you are, after all, just asking questions. I'm just a little confused because I thought you caught some of the conversations I'd been having with some of the others around here on these issues, so I presumed a little background knowledge.
I can't go on at length, so I'll do what I can. If there are any other pragmatists out there who've grasped some of the arguments I've been making that want to pick up my slack or point us towards something I or somebody else wrote on these subjects, that would be great 'cuz I'm losing steam.
Steve asked:
What is a psychic unity?
Matt:
Descartes (and many others) supposed that humankind had special spark that made us different from the animals. For Descrates, this special spark was reason, the mind. If you're more interested, I talk briefly about it at the end of my (now inadequate and outdated) essay, "Mechanistic Philosophy and the Yellow B
rick Road of Science."
Matt said:
So, no post-structuralists don't have to reject hierarchies. A good example is Rorty, who quite plainly prefers liberals to conservatives.
Steve asked:
But this is just his subjective opinion?
Matt:
Ewww, gross! What a very odd thing to say. I wouldn't think that anybody who takes Pirsig seriously, from either of his two books, would say something like that. So, I think the question is severly limiting because anything I answer under the current formulation will be wrong according to Pirsig's, Rorty's, and my perspective. Let's just say that Rorty, like Pirsig, get's rid of the distinction between subject and object and he also blurs the distinction between knowledge and opinion, making it a continuum between stuff that's easy to reach a consensus on and stuff that ain't.
Steve said:
So, you don't like ahistorical hierarchies, but you like historical ones.
Can you explain the difference? Give examples?
Matt:
An ahistorical hierarch
y goes like this, "Liberals are ahistorically better than conservatives, now and forever." That means that liberals being better than conservatives is a judgment that exists outside the flow of time. A historical hierarchy goes like this, "Liberals are historically better than conservatives." That's it, no claim about being universal or being outside the flow of time. That's the only difference between the two, otherwise they are hierarchies, which look more or less the same. The difference is the claims made about the hierarchies.
Matt said:
As far as I can see, the only way to call somebody on this fallacy is to already have in mind the "correct" way to differentiate pre- from trans-.
Steve said:
But I do. A higher level includes and transcends a lower level. I higher
level performs all the functions of a lower level and more. If the word
"higher" is offensive, choose a different word. The distinction I'm
(Wilber, really is) making is that transrationality inclu
des rationality
(and thus can forward mathematics) while prerationality (babies) can't.
Matt:
Yah, but my point is that for the interesting examples of pre- v. trans-, like between mystical intuition and mythology, there are going to be long-winded arguments about why mystical intuition doesn't transcend the lower levels. It may seem cut and dry for you, but for someone like me it doesn't. That's because we are both operating under different final vocabularies, different intuitions about the way the world works, different paradigms. If I went off about the continuities and essential sameness of mystical intuitions and mythology and you accused me of a pre/trans fallacy, I would just shrug it off because my metaphilosophical orientation already accounts for how to interpret mystical intutions and mythology. You think I'm getting it all wrong, but then, I think I'm getting it all right. To use your own language, why wouldn't I be able to turn to you and say, "But that's j
ust your subjective opinion." To me, fallacy only applies between people who already share enough of the relevant beliefs, which I don't think we would.
Steve said:
Is there a good reason why I should take the position that there are no
ahistorical hierarchies? Wouldn't such a reason imply that there is one?
Isn't being able to take the perspectives of others (understanding different
contexts) better than only being able to see things from your own? Another
ahistorical hierarchy? Being able to take the perspective of others
includes and transcends your own. No?
Matt:
The good reason is that philosophers have been looking for ahistorical hierarchies for over 2,000 years at least and we don't appear to be any closer than when we started, nor can we even come up with an agreed upon criteria about how we will know when we reach an ahistorical hierarchy. As Rorty would say, you simply have to meditate on the history of philosophy and draw a moral.
The reason I just gave
doesn't imply ahistoricity because it is an ethical-pragmatic claim. It makes no claims about being the way things are, and they way things always will be. It makes a claim about the Greek project of philosophy, says its impoverished, good for parlor games, but bad for helping humanity be more honest or nice to each other, and says that we should just move on to some other, more profitable projects.
On being able to take on other perspectives, that is of course a good thing. But the notion of another ahistorical hierarchy is incoherent. To contradictory hierarchies can't both be True and ahistorical, true for all time. If they can, then we are already talking past each other. I take you to mean simply that its good to take in other people's experiences, their ways of talking, and try and see how it fits in with ours. That's an extremely pragmatic and Rortyan motif. On appropriating and synthesizing other perspectives and having that to mean transcendence, I have no
problem, except that the word transcendence makes me cringe because of what it typically means in philosophy. Like some people's definition of metaphysics here, I have no problem with it theoretically, it just doesn't fit my purposes.
Matt
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