From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Sun Oct 12 2003 - 19:28:48 BST
Matt says:To bring this question through one last twist, one last spin of
the hermeneutical wheel, I will offer the most compelling reason I've found
to believe that Pirsig thinks that the Nazi should be compelled to play our
game. It hinges on the acquisition of our moral intuitions and hence, as
everyone might guess, on Dynamic Quality.
Yes it does, because having a morality assumes DQ/freedom and so if a
morality using SOM ignores this
it is inconsistent and poorly thought-out/reasoned. The big problem with SOM
is what it does to
morality, and how we lose sight of the vast aspects of our experience that
is not to do with
what can be taken as objects. And we start to treat people as
functions/objects. And the world
also becomes just another piece of equipment. But there are always aporias
in our vocabularies that
demonstarte their lack, that experience is not fully grasped by them, and
hence we (if we seek truth)
can always find a way of moving on to another vocabulary, and hopefully one
that has less aporias.
regards
David M
----- Original Message -----
From: "MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: "MoQ" <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2003 9:28 PM
Subject: MD Begging the Question, Moral Intuitions, and Answering the Nazi,
Part II
> The empire strikes back,
>
>
> Answering the Nazi
> --------------------------
>
> What I would like to bring out of Pirsig's texts is how Pirsig seems to
want to usurp the rhetoric of the "hard" sciences as paradigms of
argumentation, that Pirsig seems to want to make morals arguable. Whether,
in the end, Pirsig does want to make the Nazi answerable, I think, is still
left open.
>
> To do this, I would like to use the example of the Nazi as the paradigm
case of a morally corrupted individual. For our purposes, the case of the
Nazi is only interesting if he is a _convinced_ Nazi, as convinced of the
morality of Nazism as we are convinced of its immorality, and a
_sophisticated_ philosopher, as sophisticated in the art of argumentation
and rhetoric as we are. What many individuals want is a knock-down, logical
argument, the force of which would, if the Nazi were to remain a sane,
logical interlocuter, demand that the Nazi recant his erroneous ways.
>
> Rorty's reply to such a request is that "there is no neutral, common
ground to which an experienced Nazi philosopher and I can repair in order to
argue out our differences. That Nazi and I will always strike one another
as begging all the crucial questions, arguing in circles." (p. 15, PSH)
Rorty says that we cannot answer the Nazi because we do not hold enough of
the relevant premises in common to have an argument in which our arguments
and his arguments are engageable, answerable in terms we both would
recognize as good, sufficient, and relevant.
>
> It has been pointed out on many occasions that Pirsig has this to say
about morality and pragmatism: "James would probably have been horrified to
find that Nazis could use his pragmatism just as freely as anyone else, but
Phaedrus didn't see anything that would prevent it. But he thought that the
Metaphysics of Quality's classification of static patterns of good prevents
this kind of debasement." People have tried to say that this makes the MoQ
impossible for the Nazi to use, that, in effect, you can answer the Nazi by
using the MoQ.
>
> There are several problems with Pirsig's analysis of pragmatism and the
Nazis. For one, the reason why pragmatism appears to be cooptable is
because pragmatism only makes a negative point about the state of
philosophy, it makes no positive contributions to our discourse about
literature, morality, or politics. James would not have been horrified at
the cooptation of his _philosophy_ because James held too much in common
with Nietzsche. What protected James from the Nazi was his American
_politics_, not his philosophy. It was his Whitmanian faith in democracy
and plurality that confronted the Nazi. This, however, isn't the problem I
want to focus on, so I will not attend to the various arguments and
counters.
>
> The second problem is that I see no reason to think that a sophisticated
Nazi philosopher could not co-opt the MoQ just as easily as an American
rhetoric teacher. Just as a sophisticated rhetoric teacher can redescribe
the history of philosophy in terms of Quality, so can a sophisticated Nazi
redescribe a metaphysical system and tailor it to fit his needs. The
problem with metaphysical systems, with philosophy in general, is that it is
too _general_. When you have a systematic _moral_ hierarchy of Dynamic
Quality, intellectual static patterns, social static patterns, biological
static patterns, and inorganic static patterns, what's to stop the Nazi from
describing Jews as no more than animals, the fascist state as being the most
evolved government, Alfred Rosenberg's "blood, race, and soil"
interpretation of the MoQ as the greatest philosophical achievement, and
Adolf Hitler the great brujo of our generation? As far as I can see, as
long as we stay at generalities, nothi
> ng.
>
> What stops the Nazi is concretizing the MoQ, defining the terms of the MoQ
so that democracy is the greatest government and freedom the greatest
intellectual achievement. However, this creates the third problem of
reading Pirsig as _answering_ the Nazi: if we insist on our definitions of
the MoQ, we beg the question in our favor over the Nazi. In effect, we
don't answer him, we merely exclude him from our conversation. In fact,
when we look closely, it isn't clear that Pirsig is saying that the MoQ
_answers_ the Nazi. He says that the MoQ "prevents this kind of
debasement", meaning that the way the MoQ should be interpreted prevents the
Nazi from arguing for his own morals, in other words, it excludes him from
continuing the conversation in terms he would use. It stops him cold and
causes him to reply, "Well, have it your way. I refuse to enter the arena."
>
> But it certainly seems like Pirsig wants to answer the Nazi. The problem
is that Pirsig seems to want to say that we can argue about morals, that
_reason_ in the Platonic, dialectical sense, is something that should not be
divorced from morals. In ZMM, Pirsig felt that the solution to the
Platonic, SOM mess was "a new philosophy ... a new spiritual rationality--in
which the ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual blankness of
dualistic technological reason would become illogical." (p. 368, Ch. 29)
Pirsig wants to erect a new philosophy, a new rationality, a new _five-step
deductive proof_ in which, with our new assumptions in tow like how Quality
comes before subjects and objects, we can _argue_ with people about morals
and art. "Reason and Quality had become separated and in conflict with each
other" (p. 368) and Pirsig wants to bring them back together.
>
> Pirsig continues his cooptation of an argumentative model of morality in
his rhetoric in Lila by usurping the rhetoric of the sciences. On page p.
183, Ch. 19 he says, "it is absolutely, scientifically moral for a doctor to
prefer a patient. ... We're at last dealing with morals on the basis of
reason. We can now deduce codes based on evolution that analyze moral
arguments with greater precision than before." "[A]bsolutely,
scientifically", "the basis of reason", "deduce codes", "precision". These
are things we find routinely in physics and chemistry, but not so often in
ethics. Two more times: "Is it scientifically moral for a society to kill a
human being?" (p. 184) and "A culture that supports the dominance of social
values over biological values is an absolutely superior culture to one that
does not...." (p. 357, Ch. 24) His use of this rhetoric isn't extensive,
but it is evocative and overbearing. It overshadows all of his moral
pronouncements and his system.
>
> To reformulate everything I've been saying so far, pragmatists are
Humeans, they think reason the slave of the passions. Pragmatists think
this because they think you can be a perfectly logical and reasonable and
intellectual if you are a convinced Nazi, just the same as a convinced
liberal or conservative or religious fundamentalist. The moral engine is
not reason, as if you could argue a Nazi down, but passion, getting people
to feel sorry about the immiseration of other people, jerking their tears at
the sight of Holocaust victims. Rorty's point is that there is no way to
answer the Nazi, there is no way to argue with him. The Nazi has different
moral intuitions. We beg the question over each other when we argue because
we are using different assumptions. However, while we can't answer the
Nazi, Rorty urges that we can convert him. This doesn't occur by
argumentation, it occurs by persuading him with pictures of the atrocities
he has done, accounts of how the Jewis
> h family acts and behaves and loves just like the Nazi family, that the
Nazi shouldn't exclude the Jew from his we-consciousness. Clear thinking
and reason and rationality are great. But Hume's point is that our clear
thinking will always be in the service of our passional natures. In other
words, clear thinking occurs on the model of a 5-step proof and that will
always be in the service of a final vocabulary.
>
> Pirsig's big enemy is the lack of value in science and reason, but what is
he really doing, what is going on? Pirsig was right, there was nothing to
stop the Nazi from coopting James' pragmatism, but Pirsig was sorely wrong
to think that his MoQ was somehow safe from cooptation if it is simply based
on his new hierarchy for reality. If you abstract away from the concrete,
away from moral intuitions, you are either easily cooptable (like pragmatism
and the morally abstract MoQ), or begging the question (like when you fill
in the abstract with the concrete).
>
> So we are led back to our question: does Pirsig want to answer the Nazi?
I think the answer is still inconclusive. I think given the language he
uses, it still appears that Pirsig wants to be able to wrestle the Nazi
down. But can he, can Pirsig, given the tools laid out presently, wrestle
the Nazi down? No, he cannot. Even if Pirsig wants to create a new
spiritual rationality, a logical game where the Nazi couldn't possibly win,
it isn't clear yet that Pirsig is implying that the Nazi is _forced_ to play
this game, is _compelled_ to play by our logical rules, in our terms. The
question is still open.
>
> To bring this question through one last twist, one last spin of the
hermeneutical wheel, I will offer the most compelling reason I've found to
believe that Pirsig thinks that the Nazi should be compelled to play our
game. It hinges on the acquisition of our moral intuitions and hence, as
everyone might guess, on Dynamic Quality.
>
> Matt
>
>
>
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