From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sat Jul 26 2003 - 01:42:41 BST
Johnny, Platt,
Joe said:
How can Platt be agreeing with you? I don't understand how you can champion DQ all of a sudden, how you can say there is something outside hitsory. Not only can't we escape from history, but nothing can. DQ change is unexpected, sure, but it still can be explained, it still happens for a reason based in history, even if it is not known to us.
Matt:
As soon as I saw Platt agreeing with me, I figured there would be some misunderstandings. Platt and I still have major disagreements, like how DQ cashes out. For instance, never did I say that DQ is outside of history. In fact, I said, "It only unfolds in history." I think of DQ as being closely allied to imagination. Copernicus was using his imagination, thinking outside the box, as they say, when, going against all the rules of Aristolellian cosmology and mechanics, he suggested that perhaps the sun was at the center of the universe, rather than the Earth. He was still playing with much of the old rules handed down by the Greeks, their static patterns, but he did make at least one crucial break.
Johnny said:
DQ is an illusion, brought on by our own existence as patterns within the whole of morality.
Matt:
As opposed to saying, "DQ is an illusion," I've been forwarding the idea that DQ is a compliment. Its a compliment we pay to crucial breaks with tradition that, from the future, we take to be very important in deciding who we are. For instance, I take the signing of the Declaration of Independence to be very important in who I am because I am an American. I identify with America and I wish it would live up to my hopes for it, or at least live up to its own self-image. So when I narrate the history of the community I belong to, very important to how the ego is constituted, the signing is of great importance, it was a Dynamic event. There are other Dynamic events, much more personal. The writing of ZMM, for instance.
Matt said:
If history were simply a matter of static pattern forming in expected ways, I expect that we could come up with a science of history and predict the ways static patterns will form.
Johnny said:
Why would you expect that? We've never done it before, have we?
Matt:
We've certainly tried. It is what the Hegelian tradition of metaphysical philosophy has trained to do: find immutable laws of History. That's certainly what the post-Hegelian Karl Marx attempted to do. I say that "I expect that we _could_ come up with a science of hsitory" because if _everything_ were a matter of expectation, theoretically we will be able figure out what we should expect and predict it with a very strong measure of success. We should be able to come up with a method that will be able to detect the force of history, working just below conscious level, and predict what will happen.
Attempting to find a method and science of history, as you would readily agree, is doomed to failure. There are simply too many factors that could go into an event, a number that is so close to infinite that it shouldn't even be attempted to count how many. Hegel knew this, which is why he said that "the Owl of Minerva spreads her wings when the dust of civilization settles" (or something like that, I don't have my copy of the Phenomenolgy with me). His point was that we would never have perfect prediction success until everything had already happened. This was his basis for Absolute Mind. But the positing of Absolute Mind does nothing for us in practice, here in the present. We may be able to come up with a causal explanation for everything, after the fact, but I think there is very little reason for us to think that we will ever be able to get good causal prediction success on our day-to-day living, or even with the broad viccistitudes of history. As long as people
keep using their imagination and doing the unexpected, how could we? And if we can't get this science of History, I see very little point in saying that Morality is all expectation.
Matt said:
This is the dead end that Marx led us down, the hypostatization of
History.
Johnny said:
Please explain this some more - what does hypostatizazisninination mean? Why was it a dead end?
Matt:
Pragmatists use "hypostatize" to refer to what Platonic metaphysicians do when they use the appearance/reality distinction. As you pointed out, the dictionary says, "to attribute real identity to." The word only gains force when something else is attributed to being an appearance. What Marx and eventually the structuralists did was to say that their are underlying forces at work in history. If we can find out what these laws of history are, we will be able to realize the end point of history all the faster. For Marx, the end point was a Communist Utopia (his utopia didn't look all bad, it was just infeasible). Christianity has kinda' the same thing with the whole apocalypse thing.
I say its a dead end because pragmatists take Marx and the structuralists to be more of the same kind of Platonic metaphysicians, attempting to find the real essences of things though, as Locke pointed out, we have no way of knowing when we reach the real essence of a thing. Pragmatists read the history of philosophy, from Plato to Kant to analytic philosophers like Dummett and Searle and Continental philosophers like Habermas, as the story of an attempt to get at something Real as opposed to something Apparent. The pragmatists then say, "It's been 2500 years boys, why don't we give it a rest and try some other things out?"
Johnny said:
But the goodness is carrying forward in the expected way, in expanding the point, rather than dispersing it. None of us know everything, so we can't predict anything perfectly, let alone everything. Would you expect us to be able to? But intersubjectively, by sharing our knowledge and immersing ourselves in culture, we build up great patterns of truth and matter and everything that is true and matters, of which we are individually only aware of our subjective portion. But that allows for unexpected things to happen to us.
Matt:
Your point continually is that static patterns are by which we judge morality. They are morality. My point is simply that the static patterns by which we judge were acts of imagination, acts that were unexpected at their time. To call these acts of imagination immoral seems a little silly, though correct to history. But to call these acts moral is a little Whiggish, it is only after their fact that we can call them moral. In other words, like Nietzsche's ubermensch, they created their own morality. I don't think we need to reconcile these two treatments of the past. We simply need to note when we are trying to reconstruct how the past thought of itself and, distinct from this, when we are drawing up a narrative of progress for ourselves or our community.
When we look to the present, I think it becomes even sillier to get upset about static vs DQ. When you think of the labeling of DQ as, at best a prediction of its success, a compliment we pay to something that we predict will be good, it becomes silly to say that you are acting immorally. You are creating your own morality and, if it catches on, other people will start following your moral code. The static vs. DQ cashes out to be a conservative vs. progressive battle. The conservatives are sometimes right. But then so are the progressives. We need both to hold society together. As Pirsig says, we need both static and Dynamic. The reverance of DQ is simply the homage we pay to great acts of imagination, those acts that created who we are today. To say that Morality is _only_ constituted by expectation, by static patterns, I think leaves out the act of imagination that will create its own morality, its own form of life. That, I think, is silly.
I also think it is silly to say that we should, "immerse ourselves in culture," because culture is already ubiquitous. As you've pointed out, we can't escape history. To that same point, we can't escape the culture we were born into, we cannot leap out of our skins. There is a sense in which we can geographically run to another culture, or run away to the mountains, but we don't lose "culture," we simply exchange the culture of an American for that of an Indian Buddhist or Montana hermit. I don't think either choice, staying or going, has a good chance of making us more moral, or of expanding morality. Its too hard to say. When Thoreau left for Walden, he came back with some keen insights. The Buddha too when he left for solitude. It is just too hard to predict. You never know when or where the next kulterbarer will appear.
I also would stop short of your expansion metaphor for morality. I think in some cases, some forms of life (in the Wittgensteinian sense) are best left to die. The Aryan supremacy one, for instance. When you use an expansion metaphor, it leads us to think that we must continually try and save all our intuitions. But after realizing that we are all irrevocably in history, we can never escape our contingent history (what I've been calling the "contingent turn"), we realize that our intuitions are simply the ones we happen to be given by our forefathers, the ones that they, in some cases, created by acts of imagination. When you realize this, you begin to exercize your own imagination and think, "what if some of their intuitions aren't as good as maybe..." and then you come up with a creative alternative. The new intuition sometimes replaces the old one, it isn't necessarily kept. In some cases you can synthesize (like the creation of a practical public/private split whe
n attempts to preserve the Ancient polis-centered political ideals alongside the Modern individual-centered political ideals), but in others, you can't (like Aryan supremacy).
Johnny said:
DQ to me is the force that sums all our expectations (it gave them to us in the first place) and carries the patterns forward in the way that maximizes satisfaction from individual expectations being realized (over the long haul, not at every moment, thus lunatics can't be satisfied by expecting to fly or something strange like that), which results in the most enlarged point, the hugest mass of patterns all expected by consciousness.
Matt:
I've been suggesting that you sound Hegelian, and this is where it comes out most. To say that "individual expectations being realized ... results in the most enlarged point, the huest mass of patterns all expected by consciousness," sounds like Hegel's idea of the Absolute Spirit. And it just sounds like a dead end to me. I don't think it cashes out practically to mean anything. To say that at the end of history we will know everything has no effect on my motivation to know any particular thing. It is particularity that motivates us.
When you say that DQ "is the force that sums all our expectations," I can't help but think that you are making the same mistake that DQ-cheerleaders (a good, incisive critique that I agree with) are making. It begs the skeptical question to be asked, "How do you know when what you've identified as the sum of all our expectations is really the sum of all our expectations?" That's why I refer to DQ as a compliment we place in our narratives of progress.
After all that, I don't know if Platt still agrees with me, but somehow, against all expectations, it seems Platt's beginning to see a little of himself in some of my goings-on. I never really thought we were all that far apart on some things, its just on a few things we are. Well, maybe a lot of things, its still too hard to tell.
Matt
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