From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Thu Oct 16 2003 - 16:54:00 BST
Matt,
> 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.
This strikes me as one sense of intuition rather than two, i.e.,
Pirsig's empirical "sense of value."
> 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 moment, 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.
Pirsig says a lot more than this--the whole hierarchy of morality with
the intellectual level at the top. To ignore that part of Pirsig's
"argument" is intellectually lazy.
> 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.
Questionable interpretation. Static patterns are just as much "reality"
in the MOQ as Dynamic Quality. The reason DQ is capitalized is because
it's transcendent, like God.
> 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.
Partly true. We also have "intuitions" beyond our culture, like the
brujo. Otherwise, cultures would never change.
>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.
This is a description of "mystic" reality. Pirsig doesn't make the
split in the MOQ. He simply acknowledges the split may be possible, as
mystics say. Take some peyote and maybe you too will experience "true
reality." But the MOQ doesn't advocate this.
> 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)
What's with the word "priveleging?" Is that just a fancy way of saying
"favors?" Sure Pirsig favors DQ--the life force. Who wouldn't, except
Communists, Nazis and Mideast terrorists? But he is adamant that DQ is
worthless without static patterns:
"But without wild, disreputable outcasts like the brujo, ready to seize
on any new outside idea and bring it into the community, Zuni would
have been too inflexible to survive. A tension between these two forces
is needed to continue the evolution of life." (Lila, chp. 9)
> 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.
The mystic theme of the MOQ is grossly overstated. The the moral
hierarchy of static patterns is much more significant because it's
original. The business about mystic reality is old hat, going at least
as far back as Plotinus.
> 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.
The Nazi is immoral because he is anti-intellectual. You are really
stretching to make an argument. Anyway, we didn't "play games" with
Nazis. We killed them, as is justified with anyone who threatens
individual liberty.
> 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 notice you circling until I get dizzy. I mean, what's your point?
> 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.
That's good because I don't get it. You're simply repeating what
idealists have said for a hundred years or so.
> 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.
What "fruits" for goodness sake? How does this change one iota of the
MOQ? All I see here is an academic exercise of little "pragmatic"
value. Will there be a test on "A pragmatist's view of the MOQ?" Why
should we care about this any more than "A Kantian view of the MOQ" or
"A Clintonian view of the MOQ?" Why not just tell us in plain English
what you think is right and wrong, good and bad about the MOQ? Why all
this beating around in arcane philosophical bushes?
I know. Your pragmatic answer is "Platt's full of crap."
Platt
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