From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sun Oct 12 2003 - 20:11:09 BST
Hey Steve,
Steve said:
Pirsig acknowledges that the MOQ is based on one big assumption (that reality = Quality) and a bunch of smaller ones. The fact the he is not paralyzed by the fact that reasoning must always start with assumptions and goes on to make assumptions anyway does not make him a bad pragmatist. Or does it?
Matt:
No, no, that wasn't my point at all. Part of my point was to show that Pirsig _agrees_ with Rorty about assumptions. The whole idea of a "spiritual rationality," one in which "ugliness," "loneliness," and "spiritual blankness" "become illogical" fits in exactly with what Rorty describes as the differences between vocabularies. Most philosophers these days acknowledge that we have to have assumptions to reason. In fact, I can't think of one that doesn't. So paralysis isn't what we are dealing with. The difference between Rorty and the "bad pragmatist" Pirsig (which is one way to read Pirsig) is that, while it isn't apparent to me that Pirsig thinks _arguing_ can change the truth-values of our assumptions (which is a good sign), Pirsig thinks that something "out there" can compel us, force us, to change the truth-value of our assumptions, force the Nazi to play by MoQian rules. This is the way in which Pirsig is trying to usurp the rhetoric of the hard, natural sciences
. Pragmatists think that our environment, reality, something "out there," does constrain us. While we don't try and correspond to this reality, we do think it causes us to believe certain things, like "rocks fall when they are let go" and "there's a tiger biting Roy's neck". Pragmatists think this is fairly unproblematic when talking about rocks and tigers, when talking about the things the natural sciences talk about. However, we have no idea what it means for something "out there" to constrain our morals in any easily identified way, in any obvious, intuitive way. What constrains an American (the suffering of Jews) does not constrain the Nazi.
Steve said:
Can the Nazi use the MOQ to support his beliefs? You claim that he can by basically adding some MOQ vocabulary to his Nazi talk. My impulse is to say that what the Nazi was applying is not the true MOQ, to which you would no doubt respond that there is no ahistorical MOQ out there to be corresponded with. Yeah, but still the examples you gave about the Nazi applying the MOQ are not about the true MOQ. I mean, do you think a Nazi who says that Jews are mere animals and that fascism is the best government is making correct applications of the MOQ? (Note: assume I accept your definition of "correct.") If not, then we agree that the Nazi can't correctly use the MOQ to support his cause.
Matt:
I'm willing to say that there is a true MoQ if we limit that to mean "the MoQ as conceived of in Pirsig's books". Of course, as I quoted Rorty as saying at the end of the last post, "the works of anybody whose mind was complex enough to make his or her books worth reading will not have an 'essence,' that those books will admit of a fruitful diversity of interpretations, that the quest for 'an authentic reading' is pointless." So, I'm not sure that any MoQ we pull out of Pirsig's books will be impervious to evidence-to-the-contrary that we can find in Pirsig's books (or even if we just limit it to Lila). However, for the sake of argument, I'm willing to say there is a true MoQ. Given this, what I'm saying is that if we limit the MoQ to its abstract parts, its moral hierarchy and some other abstract metaphysical and epistemological parts, then yes, its easily cooptable. What makes the MoQian vocabulary "impervious" to cooptation is Pirsig's explication by historical examp
le of things like "freedom". Its only when he concretizes the MoQ that it becomes clear why the MoQ wouldn't be cooptable by the evil people of the world. But that's defining all the key terms in your favor, which is why it then begs the question over the Nazi, just as Rosenberg begs the question over the rest of the liberal world when he defines the highest form of blood as Aryan (ironic given his Jewish ancestry). So, yes, the MoQ that the Nazi would deploy is not the same as the true MoQ, the MoQ found in Pirsig's books.
You can see why I'd agree to a "true MoQ" for the sake of argument; even if we tripled the amount of tension in Pirsig's books, there is no way we could call Pirsig a Nazi. The reason for this is that what keeps Pirsig from being a Nazi are the concrete sections of history he does, not the abstract philosophizing, and the abstract philosophizing is where all the tensions appear (so far as I've seen). If Pirsig had _simply_ written a moral hierarchy and dressed it up with a few metaphysical and epistemological arguments, then I don't think there would have been anyway for us to say that the Nazi couldn't use it because there would have been no evidence to say that Pirsig meant it one way and not another. This is what makes Pirsig vocabulary heroic, as opposed to argumentative. Pirsig's recontextualizations, redescriptions, and his semi-autobiographical and fictional narratives are what show us into what Pirsig thinks. This is why I think Pirsig's criticism of James to be
out of point and a little telling about the way he pictures himself.
Steve said:
I don't think Pirsig is saying that armed with the MOQ we can argue with the Nazi and convince him that we are right and he is wrong, just that he can't make a reasonable argument that he is right based on our MOQ premises.
Matt:
Absolutely, that's the argument I'm attempting to make in the second part. However, when I go on to part three, I'm attempting to show that Pirsig does show signs that he thinks the Nazi should be _compelled_ to play the MoQ game and this would show the Nazi and his moral intuitions to be unreasonable, illogical given the MoQ's "new spiritual rationality".
Steve said:
I guess since Nazis are in such short supply these days, it would be unfair for me to ask you to produce this Nazi lover of Pirsig's books, but I really don't think he exists. Isn't he just the sort of scary hypothetical monster that pragmatists aren't supposed to concern themselves with?
Matt:
Well, though Heidegger isn't alive anymore, I think David would attest that Heidegger probably would've thought very highly of the abstract parts of Pirsig's philosophy. And Heidegger was a Nazi with some unpopular political views.
The reason pragmatists (along with every other philosopher) play with hypothetical monsters like the convinced, sophisticated Nazi is to make _philosophical_ points, not points about the concrete, like political points. Philosophers wax abstract by saying "Well, couldn't somebody do this with your proposal, or say this about it?" They do this because they typically conceived of themselves as creating something transcendental, something beyond argument. Philosophers have been in the business for the past 2500 years of creating a system that cannot be coopted by people they disagree with, something that is airtight. Hume was one of the first to start to let the air out of this bag by saying that anything that is deductive and airtight will have nothing to do with the real, experienced world. Of course, Kant took Hume very seriously and tried to reconstitute the whole enterprise for moderns. Pragmatists think Hume was only partially right. We think Hume was still caught
by the picture of thinking that our deductive, airtight arguments _had_ to correspond to the real, experienced world, and if they didn't, good-bye philosophy and reason. Pragmatists don't think this, but they take Hume as being one of the first to point out the limits of argumentative reasoning. I take Rorty as attempting to put the final nail in the coffin of transcendental philosophy. Rorty creates the convinced, sophisticated Nazi to clear out the final remenants of Kantian conceptual debris. His first philosophical point is that there is no way to create a philosophy that is beyond argument because philosophies are framed in vocabularies and to be in a vocabulary is to be in the domain of argumentation. His second point is that you cannot force the morally despisable to play your game unless you "go Kantian", which is what we've just tried to clear away. And this is where I criticize Pirsig, because in his seperation between mediated and unmediated experience, I see
him "going Kantian".
Like I say, this is a philosophical point. Your criticism is in point if I had been making a political point, if I had been arguing on the Senate floor about campaign financing. Hypothetical monsters can sometimes be useful there, but typically the concrete has more rhetorical force because we are trying to convince real people and help real people, not create something transcendental and ahistorical. If politicians think of themselves as trying to match the picture of the Greatest Government, then they will be more likely to be revolutionary and go hypothetical. If, on the other hand, politicians view themselves as simply trying to create a better government, then they will be more likely to be reformist and concrete.
Matt
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