From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Jan 25 2005 - 21:50:16 GMT
Paul,
I would like to first focus on your last statement in your reply to my
foolish questions:
I asked:
Okay, so I ask myself, "Am I on a Quality path? Is my cross-examination of
Pirsig's philosophy going in the right direction? Am I really detecting an
appearance/reality distinction unbeknownst to Pirsig or his mainline
interpreters?"
Answer: "Oh yeah, absolutely."
How does one respond to that?
Paul said:
Well, what you are saying is that you associate quality with the idea that
there is "an appearance/reality distinction unbeknownst to Pirsig or his
mainline interpreters." Therefore, one says, "Great, then you are already
certain about what Quality is."
Matt:
This is my point. Dynamic Quality, and the absolute certainty conferred
upon its apprehension, plays no actual part in the determination of what is
high Quality. I say, “I’m certain what I’m doing is high Quality.” Paul
replies, “Yep. I bet you are certain. And you are also wrong. Not in the
certainty. No. You are certain. But you are wrong in the high Quality
path. Just as the Nazis were.”
All of your answers to the skeptic’s questions are brush offs. They always
have been. And you’ve always known they were. The part you don’t seem to
get is that I think a brush off good if you have the proper conceptual
equipment. You comment at one point, “I could almost just sit back and
allow you to complete this dialogue yourself.” Of course you could. I’ve
completed the dialogue many times to myself. What I can’t convince you of
is 1) the conceptual tools you are using (e.g. “direct experience”) is
snagging you on modern, Cartesian, SOMist problems or 2) the parts of the
answers that you rely on to do the work are pragmatist answers and can be
shed of the conceptual baggage (e.g. “direct experience”) without losing
anything.
The reason I get frustrated is because you are answering the questions like
a good Pirsigian, just how Pirsig would answer them. But I know how a good
Pirsigian would answer most questions. I was one once. What I’m trying to
convince people of is that being a good Pirsigian commits you to a dual
identity as a Platonic/Cartesian/Kantian/SOMist and a pragmatist. I’m
trying to convince you that the tools you are employing to brush off the
skeptic are _pragmatist_ tools and that these same tools, like a good acid,
eat away at some of the other tools you use in other places (like “direct
acquaintance” or “pure experience”).
But, I don’t know how to do that anymore.
I’ll try a couple more times:
Matt said:
Can we look at a philosophical proposition and instantaneously know whether
it is good or not?
Paul said:
You can instantly know whether you like it or not. This may change on
reflection and upon analysis but the MOQ predicts that you can have an
absolutely certain immediate response to it. However, it says that one's
overall value judgment is mostly a combination of Dynamic Quality and
accumulated static patterns i.e., the direct experience of value itself
combined with the reflection of that value within the conceptualised scale
of fixed values created from previous experience.
Matt:
I have never denied that you wouldn’t “instantly know whether you like it or
not.” But who cares about that? It would only matter if some kind of
weight were attached to that instance--like “direct apprehension of pure
experience/Quality/reality.” What I want to know is how you know your
“immediate response,” your “direct experience of value itself” (sidebar: and
how does “value itself” _not_ remind you of Kant’s noumena?) isn’t actually
conditioned by your static patterns? How do you tell the difference between
DQ and static patterns? By virtue of DQ being immediate? But that answers
nothing, because you want to _divorce_ DQ from static patterns and I’m
trying to figure out how you would know if you’d done it. If DQ is
immediate _and_ better, then there has to be a way of knowing that your
liking is a DQ response and not a static one. If _all_ immediate responses
are DQ, then that means all immediate responses are _better_ responses. But
that doesn’t seem right. We often go better directions when we think about
things. Being impulsive doesn’t make you right.
Matt said:
How do we know this immediate flash of insight is leading us aright and not
afoul? As Wittgenstein said, "If intuition is an inner voice-how do I know
how I am to obey it? And how do I know that it doesn't mislead me? For if
it can guide me right, it can also guide me wrong." (Philosophical
Investigations, No. 213) How do we know our immediate flash of insight is
better and not degenerate?
Paul said:
The experience of liking or disliking one's insight, before you can say why,
is completely certain. If it turns out that within the context of your
static patterns, which you are then unwilling to give up, the insight causes
more problems than it solves then one may conclude that you were "mislead."
Matt:
Spoken like a true pragmatist. My question is then, what does that
certainty do for you? Isn’t everything sifted through the context of your
static patterns, whether you like it or not? I’ll concede that a person can
be completely certain about having an immediate insight. But who isn’t,
say, certain that they are thinking, that they are having a reaction to a
stimulus? That’s unimportant. The important part is what comes afterwords:
the determination of what we keep and what we throw away.
In fact, you say, “pure experience of value is that which is absolutely
certain, not testimony. The MOQ is stating that liking or disliking, prior
to abstraction, association, or analysis, is absolutely certain.”
My point is, “Who cares? The important stuff comes later with the
abstraction, association, and analysis.” DQ is only important in this
regard if it _is_ testimony.
And we might as well ask this question: what is doing the liking or
disliking? As far as I can tell, the Pirsigian response is that the atomic
self is dissolved into a set of static patterns. That means that a set of
static patterns, pragmatically considered “an individual,” responds to DQ.
That means that your _static patterns_ are what is doing the liking or
disliking. I would say that this means that the very _act_, the very
_event_ of liking or disliking is the sifting through static patterns. DQ
startles us with new beliefs, but it does nothing in the way of
justification, just as you suggest in the passage above.
Which is why I keep asking, “What is the point of differentiating between
two types of experience?” It seems to me that there is one type of
experience: static patterns interacting with DQ.
Anyways, most of your post are riffs off of the above, for the same reason
that most of everything in my posts are riffs off the above. I think our
dialogue has gone just about as far as it can go.
Matt
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