From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 13 2003 - 04:52:00 BST
David,
David said:
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 conce
pts 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.
Matt:
I can't think of one reason why a pragmatist wouldn't agree with everything you just wrote here.
David said:
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.
Matt:
Good lord, who said anything about agreeing with the Nazi? I was talking about the limits of argumentation. You say "bang over the head" and I think that's about right when dealing with convinced Nazis. There are only so many tear-jerking tactics we can try before we should feel quite alright about muscling them. The point of clarification I want to make is that, after you beg the question over me, your parenthetical says "that you can choose between vocabularies". Is that supposed to be a pragmatist assumption? Well, if it is, its not quite right. Most of the time, making the change on the truth-value of your assumptions doesn't really feel like a choice. Its just, suddenly, your assumption looks stupid, so you get rid of it. It all depends on your experiences. The issue of converting a Nazi rather than answering him, for instance. Converting a Nazi isn't about explaining to him his options, that he can either play with a Nazi vocabulary or an American vocabulary
. Its about moving him in a way that forces him, compels him, to change the truth-value of his assumptions. What's the difference between what I said just now and what I argued that Pirsig was saying with DQ? I'm not saying that the Nazi's perception of reality is distorted, that he has a mis-handle on reality. I'm arguing that Pirsig seems to want to say this, that DQ is unmediated experience, that it gets at the way reality _really_ is and that, because of this, the Nazi is always wrong, and always has been wrong, based on our correct understanding of reality. We've seen the Truth, all he's got is distortion. What I just said is that converting the Nazi is not about getting him to take off his glasses, but about changing from his glasses to ours.
Matt
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