From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Sun Oct 19 2003 - 15:51:57 BST
Matt/DMB
I see at least a 75% common ground between
Pirsig and Rorty. One of the main aspects of this
is that understanding has to begin with practical
engagement/value. Pirsig is quite clear about this in terms
of where he located value in his ontology, and so is Rorty in
calling himself a pragmatist. For Rorty this is taken up from
Heidegger's phenomenological analysis of human experience.
To take things in a theoretical and detached way is to reduce
the way our normal day to day experience is constructed.
This is how we get to SOM which is always a theoretical
position. Whe you engaged with activity, you are not separate
from the object, you are engaged with your task. This is what
Heidegger's Being and Time spends most of its time describing, although
in a less than straight forward German way. Rorty's modernised pragmatism
derives a great deal from Heidegger. And as someone who only read Pirsig
last year, after 15 years of trying to understand Heidegger's criticisms of
subject-object metaphysics, and of course he did this a long time before
Pirsig, I find it amazing that Pirsig does not seem to have read Heidegger
because almost all of Pirsig's main ideas are to be found in Heidegger,
I assume this is coincidence, and that Pirsig reached many of the same
places
because he too wanted to try and find a new starting point to discuss
man/language/being/world that does not start going down a SOM dualistic
path.
The big advantage of Pirsig over Heidegger is that Heidegger is a terrible
writer
in many ways, whilst Pirsig explains himself very well with simple examples.
I think if anyone read Pirsig, Rorty and Heidegger they would be very struck
by what is common to them all, as I am. It seems to me very sad that lots of
people
on this site are unwilling to go and read Rorty and yet still complain about
him.
I think some of this may be due to a lack of realisation that since
Heidegger/Dewey/Bergson/
James there has been a lot of thinking in philosophy that has sought to
criticise and escape
SOM dualism and that Rorty represents one particular branch of this. The
real enemy is
the dominance of SOM in popular, social and political culture.
regards
David M
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Buchanan" <DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 19, 2003 2:40 AM
Subject: RE: MD Begging the Question, Moral Intuitions, and Answering the
Nazi, Part III
> Matt said:
> The pragmatist makes a distinction between trying to get at the way the
> world _really_ is through language or other means and simply trying to
cope
> with the world, trying to survive and perhaps some other private things.
If
> you don't make a distinction, if you think everybody has a metaphysics, if
> you think that everybody makes assumptions about the way the world
_really_
> is whether they like it or not, then you can't engage with the pragmatist
in
> an argument because the two of you don't have a crucial assumption in
> common.
>
> dmb summarizes pragmatism's main (negative) point:
> People can't really talk to each other because they sincerely believe
their
> beliefs. And if you don't believe that, then I just can't talk to you.
>
>
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