From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sat Sep 20 2003 - 19:13:04 BST
Andy, Patrick, Matt and all:
dmb says:
In terms of Pragmatism, Pirsig compares his ideas with James. He makes a
distinction between the two because practicality and social satisfaction
itself has no way to avoid the moral nightmares of the 20th century. And
this is true because there had been no way to make a distinction between
social and intellectual values. This distinction might be seen by the Rortys
of the world as some kind of unreliable abstraction, but I think that is
exactly where they go wrong. Its not abstract. The clash between these two
worlds is real enough that millions have died because of it. This is where
Pirsig's kind of pragmatism excells, I think. It is a very useful and
practical distinction and sorting out the two is very much at the heart of
his brand of pragmatism. It corresponds not to some eternal Truth (with a
capital "T"), but merely corresponds with history and experience, which is
all we have according the MOQ. We don't go so far as to say what it is
exactly that holds together in a glass so that we might satisfy our thirst,
but experience shows over and over again that glasses hold water. And so it
is with ideas. They hold water or they don't. Pirsig's pragmatism is
practical and situational without being amoral, without allowing evil to
flourish. Rorty's brand of pragmatism seems unable to do this in any
coherent way. Quite the opposite. "Cash value" doesn't cut it because evil
is so often very profitable. Rorty seems bent on destroying the distinctions
that would make possible a principled oppostion to nightmares like war and
genocide. Pirsig's levels have a way of sorting out these things. And I
think this is the sense in which he is a pragmatist. I think it has very
little to do with theories of literary criticism or linguistic practices, as
Matt seems to think. (If there is a place for literary criticism here,
surely it would be in criticizing the literary half of Pirsig's books, in an
analysis of the themes and characters contained in the fictional aspects of
his books. That seems the most obvious way to apply literary criticism here,
but I've never seen such a thing. And that's really unfortunate because I
think we are only discusssing half of Pirsig's work, only dealing with every
other chapter. I've tried to get such conversations going more than a few
times, but they are never any takers. Anyway, those kinds of things happen
at a level of abstraction that has very little to do with why people kill
each other. There is no blood dripping from our Ivory towers, but it surely
flows in the streets of Baghdad. Deconstructionism never killed anybody. If
the current gang had any genuine respect for human rights and democracy,
things would be different. The only search for knowledge I see in this crowd
is the search to discover how OUR oil came to be under THEIR sand. When
Pirsig's distinction between the social and intellectual levels is applied
to the current situation in the world, it becomes pretty darn clear that the
current administration is a step backward and represents a real danger to
real people. Or so it seems to me.
In chapter 24 of Lila, Pirsig wrote:
"What passed for morality within this crowd was a kind of vague, amorphous
soup of sentiments known as "human rights". You were also supposed to be
"reasonable". What these terms really meant was never spelled out in any way
that Phaedrus had ever heard. You were just supposed to cheer for them. He
knew now that the reason nobody ever spelled them out was nobody ever could.
In a subject-object understanding of the world these terms have no meaning.
There is no such thing as "human rights". There is no such thing as moral
reasonableness. There are subjects and objects and nothing else. This soup
of sentiments about logically non-existent entities can be straightened out
by the MOQ. ...According to the MOQ these "human rights" have not just a
sentimental basis, but a rational, metaphysical basis. They are essential to
the evolution of a higher level of life. They are for real."
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