From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Sun Oct 12 2003 - 18:52:36 BST
Hi Matt
I think I can see where you are at, and I can assure you that
there is another place to be. You are giving us the
US/Rorty/pragmatist -style
of post-modernism, but there are other ways of considering morality in a
post-
Heiderggerian, post-Derrida context. I think one of these for example is
Levinas,
another is Charles Taylor, another is Jean-Luc Marion. Sure argumentation,
static
patterns of analysis, vocabularies are pretty essential to the way we can
talk about
and value aspects of our experience. For you pragmatists you want to leave
it there,
there is simply a choice between vocabularies, but how do you choose between
them?
For me, there are various sources of value that appeal to aspects of our
experience that
do not sit easily in any of the vocabularies we currently have. They make us
uncomfortable,
they saturate our experience, they are a kind of holy terror, where we
intuit that our
concepts are failing us, where we intuit that we lack understanding, or that
our concepts lack
something, that they do not grasp the phenomenon. The concept of DQ is
substantially
a negative concept, in the way that god is in negative theology. This is
because DQ is Pirsig's
way of pointing to the transcendent, what is beyond the horizon of our
conceptual grasp.
In fact our conceptual tools are very limited. Because of SOM they are only
really happy handling
objects, yet our experience is full of things that are not objects: other
people, love, time, death, etc.
All there things are linked to DQ and this link makes them hard to deal with
using forms of analysis
that are almost entirely designed to handle SQ patterns or objects. DQ for
me is an aspect of our
human authenticity, as individuals we face a unique set of possibilities,
and we are unable to either
turn away from the given set we possess (I never did have a chance of being
a space man) or from
the anxiety of having to choose (eat the cake or not), or from other people
(my wife wants to eat the last
cake too!). In the end a question of freedom. Such are we human beings. The
Nazi can deny it, but in
his or your very denial you confirm what I believe about human freedom. This
is my vocabulary and
I think it matches with our human experience better than a pragmatists: I
have an ontological position, the
pragmatists has unstated ontological assumptions (that you can choose
between vocabularies) and this
gives me something firmer to bang the Nazi over the head with, to encourage
him to believe me when I
say I do not have to agree, and even under threat of death we can make our
Byronic stand.
regards
David M
----- Original Message -----
From: "MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: "MoQ" <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2003 9:29 PM
Subject: MD Begging the Question, Moral Intuitions, and Answering the Nazi,
Part III
> Return of the pragmatist,
>
>
> Moral Intuition(s)
> --------------------------
>
> There are two senses of intuition that we should distinguish. The first
are ideas that we feel without argument. The second is a way of accessing
something nonrational, something beyond argument. The two are obviously
related, but the first sense is the sense of "intuition" as ideas that we
feel are fairly obvious. The second sense is the sense of "intuition" as a
faculty that gives us access to ideas that should be fairly obvious.
>
> By "moral intuitions" I mean certain ideas about what is good. For
instance, we Americans have intuitions that democracy is the best form of
government yet realized, that freedom is the best route to happiness, and
that Nazis are despisable. We feel these things without argument and we
agree to them without argument. They are in our blood, so to speak. By
"moral intuition" I mean an ability to access ideas about what is good,
ideas that we accept without argument.
>
> What I will argue is that Pirsig holds to both senses of intuition and
that pragmatists hold to only the first sense.
>
> The reason people want to answer the Nazi, want to be able to
argumentatively and dialectically wrestle the Nazi down, is that they fear
"that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent,
there is nothing to be said to them of the form 'There is something within
you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a
totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond
those practices which condemns you.'" (Rorty, p. xlii, CP) Rorty says that
our moral intuitions are temporary resting places, that there is nothing
ahistorical or universal about them. They are simply the best that we have
come up with so far. They are what make us _us_, or as Wittgenstein would
put it, they are a form of life, the best form of life we have yet seen.
When Sartre says, "Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to
establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let
them get away with it. At that mom
> ent, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us"
("Existentialism is a Humanism") the "us" Sartre is referring to is not some
universal image of mankind, but _us_ Westerners, we who have lived through
the Enlightenment and WW II, who have seen the terrible things that fascism
and totalitarianism can do.
>
> Pirsig however does refer to something that is beyond our practices,
something that will condemn us even if there is nobody else around but us.
He calls it Quality and Dynamic Quality. Quality is reality for Pirsig.
This is consistent between ZMM and Lila. In Lila, however, Pirsig develops
two ways in which we access Quality: through static patterns of quality and
through Dynamic Quality. Pirsig calls Dynamic Quality the "pre-intellectual
cutting edge of reality." (p. 133, Ch. 9, Lila) For Pirsig, "Static quality
... emerges in the wake of Dynamic Quality." (ibid.) One way we can
interpret this is that Dynamic Quality represents our intuition, our access
to the nonrational, our access to Quality. It gives us our moral
intuitions, which take the form of static quality patterns. Static quality
patterns are what is left over and these are arguable. These represent our
patterns of argument over the years that have accumulated, arguments for
democracy and freedom. But
> unlike Rorty who says that we can never reach outside of the cicle of
these static patterns, Pirsig says that the argument begins and ends with
Dynamic Quality.
>
> To help see this interpretation, I think we should first stop and look at
the way Pirsig literally writes these two things: static patterns of small
"q" quality and Dynamic big "q" Quality. Quality as reality, for Pirsig, is
always capitalized, just like Dynamic Quality. Static patterns, on the
other hand, are never capitalized, the "Quality" that comes with them is
never capitalized. I don't think this is just some German pretension. I
suggest that we take this as a sign that Pirsig is suggesting that static
patterns are not quite "Quality," not quite reality, but that Dynamic
Quality does give us access to reality, to Quality.
>
> My main analysis starts with, Pirsig's glasses analogy at the beginning of
chapter eight in Lila. "The culture in which we live hands us a set of
intellectual glasses to interpret experience with, and the concept of the
primacy of subjects and objects is built right into these glasses. If
someone sees things through a somewhat different set of glasses or, God help
him, takes his glasses off, the natural tendency of those who still have
their glasses on is to regard his statements as somewhat weird, if not
actually crazy." (p. 112-3, Ch. 8, Lila) The "intellectual glasses" that we
are given by our culture is our static patterns, they are our intuitions.
The shift to another set of glasses represents the shift to another set of
intuitions, another vocabulary. Pragmatists would agree to all of this.
However, Pirsig continues and says that we can _take our glasses off_. This
is Pirsig's split between mediated and unmediated experience, his idea that
static patterns are a
> veil and a distortion of our experience, of the true reality.
>
> What Pirsig does is privelege unmediated experience. Pirsig says, "The
purpose of mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from experience but to
bring one's self closer to it by eliminating stale, confusing, static,
intellectual attachments of the past." (p. 134, Ch.9, Lila) We must
"eliminate" our static patterns so that we can become closer to unmediate
experience. Our static patterns are "stale" and "confusing". Further,
Pirsig says that "All life is a migration of static patterns of quality
toward Dynamic Quality." (p. 160, Ch. 11, Lila) Life is a movement towards
unmediated experience. The priveleging is solidified with "In general,
given a choice of two courses to follow and all other things being equal,
that choice which is more Dynamic, that is, at a higher level of evolution,
is more moral." (p. 183, Ch. 13, Lila)
>
> This isn't a minor interpretation of Pirsig that is hard to get a handle
on. It is pervasive. Pirsig says, "Mystics will tell you that once you've
opened the door to metaphysics you can say good-bye to any genuine
understanding of reality. Thought is not a path to reality. It sets
obstacles in that path because when you try to use thought to approach
something that is prior to thought your thinking does not carry you toward
that something. It carries you away from it. To define something is to
subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do
that you destroy real understanding." (p. 73, Ch. 5, Lila) Static patterns,
thought itself, will never lead to a "genuine understanding of reality," "it
carries you away from it", it "destory[s] real understanding." To think
about something is to "subordinate" it, it is to make static patterns higher
than Dynamic Quality and, all other things being equal, this is immoral.
>
> Not only is this theme pervasive in Lila, the later, more metaphysical
Pirsig, it has precedent in ZMM. Linking together Pirsig's cooptation of
the rhetoric of science and Dynamic Quality as an intuition, a capacity for
that which is beyond rational means, he says, "What guarantees the
objectivity of the world in which we live is that this world is common to us
with other thinking beings. Through the communications that we have with
other men we receive from them ready-made harmonious reasonings. We know
that these reasonings do not come from us and at the same time we recognize
in them, because of their harmony, the work of reasonable beings like
ourselves. And as these reasonings appear to fit the world of our
sensations, we think we may infer that these reasonable beings have seen the
same thing as we; thus it is that we know we haven't been dreaming. It is
this harmony, this quality if you will, that is the sole basis for the only
reality we can ever know." (p.273, Ch.
> 22, ZMM)
>
> This, in itself, seems to simply refer to a redescription of objectivity
into intersubjectivity, which every pragmatist can rejoice in. However,
Pirsig says that there is a "guarantee". Pirsig is saying that
intersubjectivity, alone, is not enough, we need a guarantee for this
intersubjectivity to be objectivity. Pirsig spins his words to make it look
like intersubjectivity guarantees objectvity, but a close reading shows that
this is not the case. Preceding this passage, we find that the guarantee is
"... the sense of harmony of the cosmos, which makes us choose the facts
most fitting to contribute to this harmony. It is not the facts but the
relation of things that results in the universal harmony that is the sole
objective reality." (p.273, Ch. 22, ZMM) [thanks to Paul for calling my
attention to these passages] "The sense of harmony of the cosmos" is
Dynamic Quality, intuition, and this sense "makes us choose the facts most
fitting to contribute to this harmony." I
> t _makes_ us, it _forces_ us, it _compels_ us. This is what forces the
Nazi to play our game, a game in which the Nazi has no chance of winning.
The force is our intuition of Dynamic Quality, a capacity that every person
has, that every person has a moral obligation to follow. If the Nazi denies
it, then we should feel righteous in saying that he is subordinating Dynamic
Quality to immoral static patterns. The Nazi is immoral because he denies
Dynamic Quality.
>
> Pirsig's force comes from Dynamic Quality as bringing in something outside
of static patterns; this in effect reconstitutes Kant's analytic/synthetic
dichotomy and Mill's real/verbal dichotomy, the ones that Quine gets rid of.
Rather than following the pragmatists and saying that our language never
brings in or refers to something that is outside of itself, Pirsig becomes a
Kantian by suggesting that some static patterns, like "All bachelors are
single", are analytic, wholly internal to themselves, and that some static
patterns, like "Nazis are immoral", are synthetic, they refer and are forced
by something outside of the pattern. This allows, in argumentation, for
Pirsig to not simply make verbal inferences, but real inferences, like the
kind that would be made when answering the Nazi, when engaging in an
argument where you can triumphantly and dialectically declare "You are
immoral!"
>
> But the pragmatist gets rid of this distinction. He dissolves our ability
to distinguish in any absolutely certain way the difference between analytic
truths and synthetic truths, verbal inferences and real inferences. By
doing this, the pragmatist is saying that our moral intuitions are inside of
a vocabulary, too. That the distinction between Dynamic Quality and static
quality, between unmediated and mediated experience, is inside of a
vocabulary. Pirsig wants to say that our vocabulary is only our static
patterns of quality (specifically our intellectual static patterns of
quality) and that Dynamic Quality exists outside of our vocabularies.
Dynamic Quality then becomes our trump card, that which forces people to use
certain vocabularies rather than others. But the pragmatist simply becomes
metaphilosophical and says that you are begging the question. By saying
that something exists outside of a vocabulary, you are begging the question
over the pragmatist who says
> that nothing can, that nothing can force us to play a vocabulary. The
pragmatist instead says that some vocabularies are better than others, but
the choice in vocabularies is always a question begging experience.
>
> People should notice that I've conveniently walked around in a circle for
everybody: I've ended with Quine's dissolution of the analytic/synthetic
dogma, which was one of my original premises. I didn't actually conclude
with Quine's dissolution, but I could try by pointing out that "Dynamic
Quality" exists as a static pattern, that we can't seperate any of those
words from a vocabulary, from the Quality vocabulary. That any effort to
point or refer or demonstrate the existence of something unmediated is
doomed to mediation. But that's not my main point. My point isn't to argue
for the pragmatist position, for Quine's dissolution of one of the dogma's
of empiricism. The point is that Rorty is showing us the consequences of
pragmatism. My effort is to show that Pirsig fails as a pragmatist part of
the time, and succeeds some of the time. I am not arguing for pragmatism.
I am showing the fruits of its labors. Its up to each individual
interlocuter to decide whether or
> not they will follow in my footsteps, in my interpretation, in my
pragmatist vocabulary.
>
> I've continually tried to point out Pirsig's ambivalence concerning these
subjects, what I've called his pragmatist impulse and his Kantian or
Platonic impulse. People have taken this to mean that I am debasing
Pirsig's genius. But this isn't so, not in the least. I believe the grey
space in Pirsig's writings is enormous, compounded by the fact that the
volume of Pirsig's writing is very small. Rorty writes that "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. One will assume that the author was as mixed up as the rest of
us, and that our job is to pull out, from the tangle we find on the pages,
some lines of thought that might turn out to be useful for our own
purposes." ("Taking Philosophy Serious" quoted in Hall, 166) I think that,
given in particular the kinds of books P
> irsig wrote, books about a man who went "insane" and then came back to
tell the tale, this is as true of Pirsig as it was for Heidegger.
>
> Matt
>
>
>
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