From: Ron Winchester (phaedruswolff@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Feb 12 2005 - 13:59:45 GMT
Scott:
I like this a lot. I think there is one additional distinction to make,
though, within the category "metaphysics". One might call it "finalizing" or
"asymptotic" metaphysics versus (as Whitehead describes his) "speculative"
metaphysics.
Hi Scott,
I don't like your use of the word metaphysics here. If we look at
metaphysics through all these meanings, does it not tend to confuse?
Ron
>From: "Scott Roberts" <jse885@localnet.com>
>Reply-To: moq_discuss@moq.org
>To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
>Subject: Re: MD Pure experience and the Kantian problematic
>Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 23:00:10 -0700
>
>Matt,
>
>Matt said:
>First some things about metaphilosophy, philosophy, and metaphysics.
> Here's how I would put these three
>different areas:
>
>1) Metaphilosophy: What way of life are we going to follow?
>
>2) Philosophy: How do things, in the broadest sense of the term, hang
>together, in the broadest sense of the term?
>
>3) Metaphysics: How do things _really_ hang together?
>
>The first is taken from your use of Pierre Hadot (whose book I've just
>started reading), which is a use the rhymes very well with Wittgenstein.
>Each form of life uses certain vocabularies with which they make sense of
>the world. So while doing philosophy (stolen from Wilfrid Sellars), we try
>and develop a vocabulary with which we try and get the rest of our
>vocabularies (scientific, moral, religious, literary, political, etc.) to
>hang together. Doing metaphilosophy involves a conversation about which
>form of life is better, which kind of philosophical vocabulary we should be
>using to get our other vocabularies to hang together. One way of
>describing
>metaphysics, then, is as a particular kind of philosophical vocabulary, a
>kind of philosophy that tries to have metaphilosophical consequences. By
>bit by bit hammering down how things really hang together, the choice of
>what form of life we are going to be is taken away from us, determined
>instead by something other than us (i.e. Reality).
>
>Scott:
>I like this a lot. I think there is one additional distinction to make,
>though, within the category "metaphysics". One might call it "finalizing"
>or
>"asymptotic" metaphysics versus (as Whitehead describes his) "speculative"
>metaphysics. Finalizing metaphysics matches your definition, but
>speculative
>metaphysics doesn't quite. In the latter there is an acknowledgment that
>the
>hammering cannot be finally carried through, and that it is only good until
>the next Copernican revolution or whatever. It recognizes that it is
>working
>within some contingent perspective. (Modern, non-fundamentalist theology is
>generally speculative, by the way -- for a theologian, the theology is not
>likely to determine the choice of form of life. What will is grace, so the
>best that theology can do is make one more open to grace, using the
>vocabulary of the present time. So it is metaphysical, in that it it does
>try to have metaphilosophical consequences that are determined by Reality,
>but it acknowledges its limitations.) The MOQ would be speculative, as must
>any that posits an ineffable. Mine -- assuming it is a metaphysics (which I
>think it is -- see below) is more finalizing, but with a twist. (N.b., I do
>not "posit" an ineffable, as that is logocentric. This may be casuistry,
>though.)
>
>Matt said:
>In the sense of these terms, most propounded philosophies by philosophers
>are a tangle of meta- and philosophical theses, though most philosophers in
>the past (and present for that matter) take their meta- theses for granted
>and disentangling them is a bit of a chore. What Rorty shunts under the
>name "pragmatism" is mostly just metaphilosophical theses, though from time
>to time he'll be inconsistent (in the sense that pragmatism is _only_ the
>name for a metaphilosophical stance, which historically it hasn't only
>been)
>and attribute a philosophical thesis to pragmatism. (I think this may be
>what's happening with materialism.) But with the above distinctions in
>hand, it is fairly easy to distinguish Rorty's meta- from philosophical
>theses (with the realization, then, that he spends most of his time doing
>metaphilosophy).
>
>Scott:
>Makes sense.
>
>Matt said:
>So: I see your philosophy as retaining a mix of that bad, bad metaphysics,
>as when you say, "the One, True religion . is something that should be a
>goal to work out publicly, as a matter of intellectual responsibility."
>This makes it seem as though the One, True Religion is out there waiting
>for
>us to discover it. That propositions that make up this Religion will force
>themselves on us-deciding for us what form of life we are going to be.
>
>Scott:
>Mostly correct (i.e., yes, I am doing bad, bad metaphysics, but I will be
>arguing why this is not so bad). However, I think it unlikely that this
>Religion will be made up of propositional truth claims. One might quote
>Nagarjuna: "For those who make a view out of emptiness there is no hope".
>Assuming this Religion shakes out in this sort of direction, it will not be
>captured in a philosophical text, but philosophical texts can be skillful
>means for understanding why Nagarjuna said this.
>
>Matt said:
> The reason I think your philosophy is only slightly tainted with this
>metaphysical impulse is because, for the most part, you refrain from
>metaphysical addendums to philosophical theses (after sorting out the
>theses
>into the appropriate piles; sometimes you say "metaphysics" where I would
>replace it with "philosophy." For instance, "metaphysics . has to learn to
>stop thinking of itself as answering "what is X" type questions, and
>replace
>them with "what is a more useful vocabulary for dealing with 'things in
>general.'" I would take this to be urging us to stop metaphysics and stick
>to philosophy.).
>
>Scott:
>I see it as metaphysics that does without truth by correspondence. It
>remains to be seen whether there can be such a metaphysics.
>
>Matt said:
> And the crack in those addendums, the spill of pragmatist
>acid (as I see it), is in the above claim I quoted from you. The part that
>the ellipsis is muffling is "whatever it turns out to be." The One, True
>Religion is whatever it turns out to be. In my last post I commented on
>the
>Peircian quality of this claim. What pragmatists like Rorty can't
>understand is how positing the existence of the language Peircish, that
>perfect language we will all be speaking at the end of inquiry, or the
>OneTrueReligion religion, which we will all be participating and believing
>in at the end of inquiry, makes any difference at all to our inquiries into
>better languages and better religion. As long as we have the Miltonian
>claim that truth will win out in "free and open encounters" and Peirce's
>strictures against blocking the road of inquiry, we need no such posits.
>The reason "truth will win out" doesn't look like a Peircian posit is
>because people like Rorty and I can't ever imagine inquiry or philosophy or
>cultural evolution ever stoping. This is why Rorty has started calling
>pragmatism "antiauthoritarianism." The only thing that can stop the
>conversation is other people, not some non-human authority like Reality or
>Truth or God. And without political fiat, how are we ever going to get
>people to stop bickering and disagreeing? And why would we want to? Some
>of the most interesting things come out of disagreement.
>
>Just keep the conversation going.
>
>Scott:
>As I see it, the reason that you and Rorty cannot imagine inquiry not
>stopping is that you are Darwinians. I can imagine the inquiry stopping
>because I include in my metaphysics that we are all ignorant, deluded
>sinners, but that redemption (Awakening) is a-coming. (What happens then I
>haven't a clue.) The Darwinism is a consequence of that ignorance.
>
>
>Scott said:
>My different take is that the bullcrap arises because of the Cartesian
>separation of nature from mind. So as I see it, the Dennett's of the world
>accepted that separation, saw the problems that creates with respect to
>mind
>(and therefore consciousness), and decided to do away with mind. Berkeley
>took the opposite tack. My response is to go back to the thought before the
>separation took place and reformulate it in a modern vocabulary.
>
>Matt said:
>I think this is a mistake. I don't think we should take Dennett as
>proposing that we do away with mind (whatever Dennett thinks of himself;
>even if he has rid himself of reductionism (which I think he has), he still
>does have a residual taint of scientism). Dennett, Davidson, and Rorty are
>concerned with eliminating the separation between nature and mind, same as
>you. You are right, Berkeley took one direction and the materialists took
>another. But part of the see-saw the pragmatists are trying to hop off of
>is just this choice: materialist or idealist? When we eliminate this
>separation between nature and mind, though, we have some loose ends to wrap
>up, some new vocabularies to create to make things hang together. One
>thing
>the separation between mind and nature allowed was the easy claim that
>science was about nature, but not about minds (or God), thus making room
>for
>our moral discourse and free will. So one thing pragmatists have to
>account
>for, after destroying the separation between nature and mind, is what
>science does, how the scientific vocabulary hangs together with our other
>vocabularies (like psychological and religious). One way Dennett does this
>is by distinguishing between different levels of looking at things:
>physical, design, or intentional. These different levels each have there
>own vocabulary, vocabularies that are inappropriate at the other levels.
>
>Scott:
>To explain myself I need to invoke Barfield's thesis, that it wasn't
>Descartes and Bacon who invented the split between mind and nature. Rather,
>the texture of consciousness changed from where there was no such split, to
>where there is (this change taking place gradually over the 2000 years
>prior
>to Descartes' time). The split at the beginning (in the Axial Age) meant
>the
>beginning of intellect, as making possible reflection on things, but the
>thinking was thought of as participation with the things. One knew about X
>because one's concepts about X were also the concepts about which X thought
>itself into existence (or which God used to think X into existence). By the
>time of Descartes, though, any sense of a Geist in nature had gone away, so
>it was then possible for philosophy to say there is mind and there is
>nature, and they are completely distinct. With that arose the
>epistemological problem of how the mind could know about nature.
>
>What Dennett -- and most everybody -- assumes is that what the Greeks
>perceived and what we do are basically the same, but we have developed a
>better vocabulary for dealing with what we perceive (science). What
>Barfield
>is saying is that we were only able to develop that vocabulary when we did
>because only by that time was nature perceivable as lacking the Geistliche.
>That scientific vocabulary is very useful, of course, but with the loss of
>the vocabulary of participation it also lets in certain metaphysical
>mistakes, mainly Darwinism. Darwinism assumes a long stretch of time in
>which there was nothing to which our mental vocabulary applies. The
>ancients
>could not have thought this because they did not *perceive* a nature to
>which the mental vocabulary did *not* apply.
>
>What this implies is that Dennett's philosophy is based on accepting the
>Cartesian view of nature, while rejecting Descartes' view of mind as an
>independently existing substance. To do the latter, he has substituted
>"different levels of looking at things" for mental substance. This gets
>over
>the epistemological problem of dualism, but creates a new problem: how did
>these vocabularies, or any, come about?
>
>Scott said:
>As I said in the other post, I think Rorty is arguing as a materialist and
>not a pragmatist when he says one should just stop having such intuitions.
>
>Matt said:
>With the above distinctions between meta-, philosophy, and metaphysics in
>mind, I think
>I can say that Rorty is arguing from a metaphilosophical standpoint because
>he is saying that we shouldn't be the form of life that thinks there is
>something more to physical pain than brain-states (or at the very least, we
>should repress the idea that pain tells us something about how the world
>really is). When you start talking about which intutions we should save
>and
>which ones we should repress, I think that means you are at the
>metaphilosophical level because our intutions are what make us a particular
>form of life.
>
>Scott:
>As always, I have difficulty seeing how this isn't an argument between two
>metaphysical positions. I argue that reflection on physical pain (or any
>percept) does tell us something about reality that reflection on
>brain-states does not, namely, that consciousness transcends time, and so
>time isn't fundamental. This is a metaphysical claim, so it seems that if I
>am urged not to see something more in pain than brain-states, that must be
>because one holds a different metaphysical position, one that says "there
>once were no beings who could have had any use for an intentional
>vocabulary, since there were no beings who had language."
>
>Scott said:
>I think that Sam is right that until recently mysticism gains
>intelligibility only within a tradition, but that now things are, or are
>becoming different. ...
>
>Matt:
>The first comment I want to make is that I'm not sure that Sam is claiming
>that _until recently_ mysticism only gained intelligibility within a
>tradition. If I understand Sam correctly, he is saying that mysticism
>_only_ gains intelligibility within a tradition, but this is only because
>tradition is not opposed to reason, as the Enlightenment taught us to do.
>
>Scott:
>I see that I goofed in what I said. It should have been "I think that,
>historically, Sam is right that mysticism gains intelligibility only within
>a tradition, but I think that now things are, or are becoming different."
>
>Matt said:
>In the above, you use such an opposition to enunciate the changes that have
>undertook religious mysticism, but I think you need to look for a new
>distinction to formulate the changes because what Wittgenstein, Gadamer,
>and
>Rorty (and almost every other post-modernist) have taught us is that
>_everything_ is embedded in a tradition, a social practice, a language
>game,
>which is something I think you follow in by saying all experience is
>semiotic. Reason isn't a faculty that swings free of a tradition.
>Reasonableness arises within a tradition of discourse when certain criteria
>have been met, criteria determined by each particular language game.
>
>Scott:
>But is this still true now that we are aware of the myriad ways reason has
>been held captive by a tradition? The reason I have been arguing that
>Intellect (which I am using interchangeably with Reason) should be treated
>as being another name for Emptiness is that intellect can both work within
>a
>language game and it can deconstruct them and build new ones. For sure, in
>saying this I am still bound by a great deal of tradition, if for no other
>reason that I am doing it in English. But that doesn't prevent me from
>pointing to Emptiness, which is saying that every thing in every language
>game is empty. Since 'Emptiness' is a word in the mystical language game,
>it
>too is empty. On the other hand, it is ridiculous to say that this computer
>I am typing on doesn't exist, or that I can't know anything, or that
>everything is meaningless. That is nihilism. To resolve these two one has
>recourse to the logic of contradictory identity -- which doesn't resolve
>it,
>but keeps us in the Middle Way, in a vocabulary that is neither logocentric
>nor nihilistic. Emptiness is not other than language games, language games
>are not other than Emptiness. So the claim I am making is that the language
>game of pragmatism/Wittgenstein/Gadamer, when augmented with the logic of
>contradictory identity, and when the language of Darwinism is overcome, is,
>or at least has potential to be, a final vocabulary. In any case, why I see
>it as escaping the "no metaphysics" metaphilosophical maxim of pragmatism,
>and Sam's view that all mysticism is within a tradition, is that I see no
>way that the culture can move past this point of pointing out that
>"everything is embedded in a tradition, etc." It can, of course, regress.
>
>The big question in my mind is, should I be calling this metaphysics? I
>think it is, in part because it requires changes in what I think of as the
>unstated metaphysical view of contemporary intellectual society, which is
>basically Darwinian and nominalistic. More importantly, though, if one
>starts to say that everything "really is" a token in a language game (which
>implies that it manifests a type, i.e., universals are as necessary as
>particulars) then the logic of Nagarjuna starts to become more accessible.
>
>Matt asked:
>And second, your "generic mysticism" ("language game of permanent
>self-critique") looks an awful lot like Rorty's ironist. Is there a
>difference?
>
>Scott:
>The difference is that I see this irony as soteriological. One does this,
>that is, adopts this a way of life, to remove obstacles to Awakening.
>
>- Scott
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