From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 19 2003 - 23:13:10 GMT
Paul,
I think we've gone about as far into mutual understanding as we are going to go. As happens many times when discussing the differences between Pirsig and pragmatism, because I see them as so close, it turns into a shouting match of "You're the Kantian." "No, you're the Kantian." "No, you are!" "NO, YOU are!" "No, you are!" "NO, you are!" So, let's see if I can't straighten out some of this mess from my point of view.
Matt said:
I would suggest that when reading the popular Pirsig quote, we read him as agreeing with pragmatism that "common sense" is bred out of society.
Paul said:
Yes, but not in the usual way of understanding it. In Lila, Pirsig makes the point that the MOQ allows one to say that the levels are dependent but not continuous. Common sense is primarily a set of ideas (intellectual patterns) which are dependent on society (social patterns of shared meanings, learning, institutions and authority) as social patterns are dependent on biology and biology on carbon. However, just as carbon does not possess or guide biology and biology does not possess or guide society, society
does not possess or guide intellect. In the MOQ, value guides intellect, which is what he means when he says - "What will decide which belief prevails is, of course, its quality."
Matt:
The only difference I see, being that pragmatists also feel value is the common denominator of intellect and society, is one that Sam and I agree on: Pirsig makes a sharp distinction between society and language when we aren't so sure there should be one. I see Pirsig's distinction being the attempt to say that there is a sharp divide between theory (intellectual patterns) and practice (social patterns). This past century's most prominent worldwide philosophers on both the continent and in the anglophone world
have harped against this distinction: Habermas, Foucault, Derrida, Rorty, Quine, Davidson, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Dewey, James, Peirce.
Matt said:
I don't see the point in saying "value precedes culture".
Paul said:
Because it gives us a new way to look at our history, our pre-history, our present situation and a possible future. Because it may be better than trying to reduce language and culture to biological survival now that tigers aren't a threat to us anymore. Because it is a new metaphor for evolution which is compelling enough for a few people to want to see where it goes. Because it redefines "the point" that you don't see.
Matt:
Granted Pirsig spends two books combing out the consequences of the redescription, but I still can't see any good reason not to insist that Pirsig's redescription is at root the same as the pragmatist redescription, barring Pirsig's couching in metaphysics. I'm attempting to show that we can get the same thing as Pirsig without the metaphysics, though the option of doing metaphysics is then still up to whoever. Pragmatism and Pirsig do give "us a new way to look at our history, pre-history, and present
situation and a possible future." However, pragmatists do not "reduce language and culture to biological survival". The sense in which intellect has spun out of society's and biology's determinations is the sense that we've have created for ourselves the idea of "self-creation". This has no relation to homo sapiens surviving and it has no relation to societies surviving: it is what relatively leisured people do with their aloneness, what Whitehead called religion. But, t
hough I do make this distinction between intellect and society, I do not think its what Pirsig was getting at with his.
Matt said:
How do you know if the only thing that tells you that value precedes culture is your culture?
Paul said:
We are not born with cultural beliefs or common sense; we *are* born liking and disliking, my baby daughter proves this to me every day.
Matt:
Hmm, I deleted something I thought I had left in in my initial couching of the question. I figured you'd answer that way, and my deleted chouching was supposed to be, "And you can't answer historically to separate yourself from the pragmatist, because that makes the notion fairly trivial and not philosophically interesting." Pragmatists have no disagreement with the proof your daughter gives you, but we also don't think it philosophically interesting.
The other way to look at this is to say, "How do you know you aren't projecting your own cultural habits and expectations on the poor kid?" Kinda' like Aristotle's description of the way the natural world works. To make the claim philosophically interesting, i.e. a metaphysical claim, you have to answer that question. And I have no idea how you'd do it, since nobody has been able to yet.
What I see is that when you say, "value is the primary empirical reality," you are emphasizing "empirical" and not "reality". You are saying that value must have come first historically because neanderthals must have _valued_ the creation of society to have created it. There's nothing wrong, or philosophically interesting, about that claim and pragmatists think its great. Its just that the locution "primary empirical reality" is typically used in big logocentric enterprises, where some term is central and
everything else is peripheral. Pragmatists just don't see the use in making that ontological claim.
Matt said:
I don't see a different loop from the same loop that Pirsig has. If Quality is Reality, what's the problem with saying this bit of Quality over here (let's call it a "tree") causes us to have this belief and this other bit of Quality over here (let's call it a "tiger") causes us to have this other belief.
Paul said:
It's different because it redescribes reality as a process, as something with no pre-existing properties such as "this bit of Quality is a tree." For example, primitive tribes have been reported to pay relatively little attention to the difference we would make between animate and inanimate objects or make no distinction between the sun and a white cockatoo but distinguish sharply between both the sun and white cockatoos and black cockatoos. Different values, different reality. Pirsig is saying that a sense of
value creates the distinction between a tree and its surroundings and "carves out" a tree from the rest of our environment. The idea of a pre-existing physical tiger is a high quality idea that comes after the evaluation.
Matt:
Still don't see a difference because the pragmatist isn't saying that there are pre-existing properties, he's with you in saying that Quality is a process, an event. The distinction between the tiger bit of reality and the rest is the same pragmatic distinction you and Pirsig have to make to deal with tigers.
Paul said:
What causes you to believe in the existence of cruelty?
Matt:
That's a lot more complicated than a tiger. Probably an amalgamation of my society's patterns being handed to my parents, who handed them to me, who taught me how to discern cruelty, and then seeing it with my own eyes and reading about it.
Paul said:
By "environment" Pirsig does not mean something already laid out in physical space and time, which seems to be what pragmatists are saying.
Matt:
Pragmatists only say it with common sense, which is what Pirsig is saying.
Matt said:
The pragmatist, though, sees all the questions the metaphysician asks as part of SOM.
Paul said:
And this is where he goes wrong. The appearance/reality distinction is dissolved when everything is real. Debate about reality then becomes a debate about high and low quality.
Matt:
If everything is real, then the metaphysical question "What is real?" (one of those questions I listed long ago as Wim remembered) is reduced, not to absurdity, but to triviality. Debate about reality, pragmatists say, then ceases to be metaphysical and become other things, like politics and literary criticism (which, as you say, are debates about high and low quality). This, of course, is all part of my disagreement with the attempt to rehabilitate metaphysics post-appearance/reality distinction, which I
commented upon formerly. The pragmatist isn't wrong so much as he's using a different definition of "metaphysician". Its why the metaphysical debate becomes something entirely different when you answer "everything." It becomes so different, that pragmatists wonder why we should continue calling it metaphysics.
Paul said:
Absurdity is often the beginning of a progression which ends in a platitude.
Matt:
Absolutely. Pragmatists think that the progression usually ends with the rejection of the questions that produced the absurd answer.
Matt said:
Pragmatists like myself go, "Primary to what?"
Paul said:
Words, concepts, beliefs.
Matt said:
Eww, gross. Quine and his student Davidson helps us think that the distinction between language and nature, scheme and content is untenable.
Paul said:
Where did scheme and content come into what I said?
Matt:
Usually when there is a sharp division between a primary reality of <blank> and a secondary reality of concepts, it means that concepts are the scheme with which we interpret the content of the rest of world. Pragmatists don't think this sharp division is tenable.
Paul said:
Also, are you suggesting, like Kant, that we are born with innate concepts about the world? All I'm saying is that I agree with Pirsig that evaluation happens without words, concepts or beliefs and is the cause of words, concepts and beliefs. You are also saying that beliefs are caused by something other than beliefs, so you are making a distinction even if it is "a pragmatic one." My distinction is between static and Dynamic Quality.
Matt:
No, I'm not with Kant. Kant made a very sharp distinction between scheme and content. The pragmatist is suggesting that there's not point in trying to separate our words from the causes of our words because the only way to know the causes is by using words.
And your "my distinction is between static and Dynamic Quality" I see as a rhetorical ploy typically used all the time by Platt and Squonk to try and suggest that a person is obviously being unPirsigian. Half the time, though, I can't make out how it relates at all to what was being said. You say it, but all the other words you use suggest a different distinction, that's what critics like myself are trying to point out. I am making a distinction between reasons and causes, between the world and ourselves.
But I don't see how the distinction between static and Dynamic Quality illuminates the deficiency of those pragmatic distinctions.
Paul said:
(Regarding Quine, I've only read his "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and I have to say I think it is a terribly written, condescending, unconvincing example of the worst kind of philosophy. A couple of good points buried in an avalanche of jargon and italicised latin :-))
Matt:
Sounds like Quine, but I don't see why that makes him an example of "the worst kind of philosophy". I have a friend who couldn't make it through ZMM because she thought the narrator a condescending, pontificating prick.
Matt said:
Clearly people place it ["immediately apprehended aesthetic reality"] at the heart, though I'm not so sure about "successfully". Pragmatism in this century has, to my mind, successfully shown that Northrop's "things which can be known only by being experienced" hasn't yet panned out to mean anything philosophically, and that we should probably just give up on it.
Paul said:
I find that a hugely disappointing attitude for anyone to take. Most of what I value in my life can be known only by being experienced. I am reminded of the epigraph in ZMM - "And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good - need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"
Matt:
Oh, c'mon Paul. Isn't Pirsig taking the exact same attitude to the heart of Western culture? And who would disagree with "most of what I value in my life can be known only by being experienced," except people who are being careful and say "_everything_ in my life can _only_ be known by being experienced because all there is is experience." No disagreement here.
Matt
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