From: Ant McWatt (antmcwatt@hotmail.co.uk)
Date: Tue Mar 08 2005 - 19:12:45 GMT
Ant McWatt stated February 18th 2005:
“Sam’s essay on MOQ.org isn’t an argument. Instead of concluding that the
MOQ is a form of Kantian SOM, he might as well as have concluded that the
MOQ is a form of Neapolitan ice cream. Like melting ice cream Sam’s essay
has some nice elements in it but it has no real substance.”
Sam Norton remarked March 7th 2005:
>Hi Anthony,
>
>An overdue response to your Neapolitan ice cream ;-)
Ant McWatt replies:
Sam,
I think my remark about Neapolitan ice cream came at the end of a rather
long discussion on MOQ Discuss about your essay so there’s not much more I
can add here without repeating many of these arguments. However, as you
specifically requested a “full meal of a response” (on top of a PhD thesis
which also addresses many of your points!) here are some further thoughts:
Sam Norton stated March 7th 2005:
>Two things, one minor, one major.
>
>1. It’s not that the MoQ is a form of Kantian SOM, it’s that it has a shape
>which bears a remarkable resemblance to the shape of Schleiermacher’s
>philosophy (which then descended to James (and to Northrop?) before
>reaching Pirsig).
According to your essay, Schleiermacher is making the case that mysticism
can bridge the gap between phenomena (the everyday world that is perceived)
and the Divine found in the noumenal.
However, the mystic tradition (of Zen Buddhism) that the MOQ is derivative
from perceives the Divine as being found in the phenomenal. There is
therefore no need for the MOQ to use mysticism to bridge the gap between the
noumenal and phenomena on the lines sought after by Schleiermacher.
>In other words, there was a reaction AGAINST Kant, giving rise to a
>particular pattern of thinking, and the MoQ seems to share major elements
>with that pattern.
Schleiermacher’s pattern of thinking is following the tradition of Western
religion in locating the Divine with the inferred unseen factor in the
nature of things. As explained by Northrop (“Logic of the Sciences &
Humanities”, 1947, p.376-77):
“The divine object in the West is an unseen God the Father. This means that
He cannot be known by the aesthetic intuition after the manner of the divine
being of the Orient. Christ tells us that His kingdom is not of this world.
St. Paul asserts that the things that are seen are temporal and that it is
only the things which are unseen which are eternal. All the theistic
religions affirm in addition that the determinate personality is immortal.
Certainly this is not true of the self given with immediacy in the aesthetic
intuition…. Western religion becomes [therefore] defined as one which
identifies the divine with the timeless or invariant factor in the theoretic
component [of knowledge].”
“This explains why the Far Eastern religions do not need a religious prophet
if the divine is to be revealed to man, and why the Western religions must
have one. If the divine is given with immediacy then it is here in the world
of immediate intuition already without the mediation of a divinely inspired
representative. Thus all that religious sages in the Orient have to do is to
direct one’s attention to the factor given with immediacy [i.e. Kant’s
phenomena] with which the divine is identified…”
“If, however, the divine is identified with an unseen factor in the nature
of things, then obviously the only way in which man can know God with the
immediacy of the aesthetic intuition is by a divinely inspired being
representing God coming into the world of immediacy. Hence the religious
prophet without whom man in the theistic religions cannot be saved, becomes
essential.”
>So the Kantian problematic is that there is no room for God (value) and
>Schleiermacher was attempting to argue for a way of understanding God
>(value) that would withstand the critique,
As inferred from Northrop, Schleiermacher was operating from a Western
framework when dealing with mysticism and noumena. The fact that this was
later perceived as an untenable position is therefore completely irrelevant
to Pirsig’s work as, of course, the MOQ is operating from an East Asian
framework when dealing with mysticism. Moreover, as noted by Paul Turner
during January, due to there being no idea of noumena in the MOQ, there is
no epistemological gap to be bridged between noumenal and phenomena (or
between appearance and reality).
>and used the language of an experience preceding the division into
>subjective/objective etc.
Again, as already noted, Schleiermacher is referring to a pure experience
found in noumena while Pirsig is referring to a pure experience found in
phenomena. Hence, Schleiermacher and Pirsig are clearly not “doing the same
thing” and Pirsig’s system therefore bears little relation to the “Kantian
problematic” rather than “quite exactly” as you state in your e-mail of
March 7th.
>2. More importantly, I would be very interested to read a proper analysis
>from you of why that argument fails.
See above.
>Obviously to make it properly academic and respectable I would need to
>provide much more in the way of argumentation. But what the last part of
>the essay was sketching out was some of the ways in which the academic
>community (at least, the bits I’ve been exposed to) think about this whole
>issue of ‘experience’, especially as it relates to religious experience (or
>‘pure experience’ - which I think you accept as an equivalent term for DQ).
>In particular, what do you make of this point from Nicholas Lash (which I
>quoted before):
>
>“However hostile to Cartesian dualism [[SOM]] we suppose ourselves to be,
>it is not possible to escape its clutches while continuing to treat the
>distinction between mind and matter as empirical, as being (that is to say)
>a distinction between two different kinds of ‘thing’ or substance...
See my PhD thesis, Chapter 3 for why I think we can escape SOM on a genuine
metaphysical basis rather than fudge or avoid the issue as most
Western-orientated philosophers have tended to do recently.
>[in my earlier book] I took William James as my conversation partner
>precisely because I respected his influence, originality and power. If
>James, of all people, could be shown to be still mesmerised by the
>Cartesian spell…
Sam, I seem to remember your discussion in January with Paul Turner ended
with Paul showing that Pirsig had not inherited James’ SOM-like conceptual
framework. Paul’s conclusion is supported by Section 2.8.1. of my PhD
thesis and by James’ own “Pragmatism” and “Radical Empiricism”. James –
despite his criticisms of the system – still employed SOM (to divide “pure
experience”) while, of course, Pirsig introduces a new metaphysical system
based essentially on Mahayana Buddhism and cosmological evolution.
If you get round to read Northrop at some point, you will see that he had
certainly broken away enough from SOM to avoid the Kantian problems that
your essay is concerned with so when Pirsig was reading James in the 1970s
(to research LILA), thirty years had nearly passed since he had first been
influenced by Northrop’s East Asian conceptual framework in “The Meeting of
East and West”, the work on Zen by D.T. Suzuki and the philosophy tutors in
Benares.
There is therefore no substance (hence that melting Neapolitan ice cream
imagery!) to the argument that a Kantian metaphysic had been transferred to
Pirsig via James and Northrop.
As far as the point about “pure experience” is concerned, Pirsig is careful
to keep “pure experience” more “pure” than James because (as also noted by
Paul on January 23rd 2005) he takes issue with James’ use of the phrase
“pieces of pure experience”:
“I think the MOQ would say there is no ‘piece’ of pure experience. By the
time it has become a piece it is already a static pattern. To call a
perceived book ‘pure experience’ is, I think, to slip back into a subject
object metaphysical format.” (Pirsig to McWatt, November 3rd 2000)
As far as Kant is concerned, I think I’m right in assuming that he had to
use the noumenal world so that human free-will would have somewhere to exist
- free-will not being possible in the determined Newtonian world of
phenomena. Considering noumena are meant to be unknowable
“things-in-themselves” I can’t see how Kant could coherently make such an
assertion. However, because Newtonian science was implying that everything
in the phenomenal world is determined, I think Kant had little choice but to
“fudge” the issue and assign free-will to the noumenal realm.
Of course, since Kant’s era, evolutionary theory and quantum mechanics have
both developed. This has enabled the MOQ to provide a far more satisfactory
metaphysical solution (to the problem of free-will and determinism) because
conditioned reality can be perceived as four distinct static value levels
that have evolved different laws. As noted in Chapter 3 of my thesis, this
enables free-will to exist in a largely determined physical world without
metaphysical difficulty and without requiring dubious ideas such as noumena
or a pre-set harmony created between mind and matter by a God etc.
>then the power of that bewitchment’s grip would have been dramatically
>displayed. I was, moreover, well aware of the fact that I was taking issue
>with what is probably still the most widespread account in our culture of
>what is meant by ‘person’ and ‘experience’, by ‘religion’ and by ‘God’;
This is no doubt Western notions of these terms that Lash is referring to
and will therefore be largely different to the understanding of these
notions found in the MOQ.
>an account subscribed to by both the friends of religion and its foes. It
>therefore seemed to me important (on, if you like, something like Popperian
>grounds) to challenge this account, not in its casual and slipshod
>versions, but in the strongest, most persuasive version that I knew...
>Whether or not I made my case, where James’ residual Cartesianism is
>concerned, is up to other people to decide. But, if I did, the chances are
>that those who still endorse more or less Jamesian accounts of what is
>meant by ‘consciousness’ and by ‘experience’, by ‘religion’ and its
>‘objects’, are still operating within Cartesian parameters [[this is what I
>accuse Pirsig of doing]]......
As I indicated above, I think you accuse Pirsig wrongly. However, if
Eastern mysticism is valid there seems to be no requirement for a postulated
God when he/she/it is immediately accessible. Possibly it should be the
Christian tradition (and all its static entourage which tends to gild and
distort the Dynamic to destruction) that should be in question here? Is
this an issue for MOQ Focus?
>Although Oxford may be among the last places to discover this, the
>philosophical, psychological, sociological and now... biological criticisms
>of empiricist construals of the grammar of ‘experience’ are, by now,
>cumulatively so devastating as to require, at the very least, from those
>who wish to keep such usages alive, *arguments* and not mere expressions of
>preference.
Again, as noted above, Nicholas Lash seems to be referring to the Western
tradition rather than philosophies based on East Asian thought.
>Finally, as I put it [in my earlier book] if there is now ‘very little to
>be said in favour of, and a great deal to be said against, retaining a
>contracted account of experience *in general* [[ie the inheritance from
>SOM]], then there is even less to be said in favour of retaining a
>contracted account of *religious* experience.” (Nicholas Lash, “The
>beginning and end of ‘religion’“, 1996.)
>
>Now, you deal with this in a section of your thesis (when you avoid some of
>the more obvious problems),
What “obvious” problems are these?
>but you say “mental substances and material substances can be perceived as
>ontologically identical i.e. as intellectual quality patterns and inorganic
>quality patterns respectively.” (p 168) My question to you is: how does
>this avoid Lash’s point? (i.e. that treating the distinction between mind
>and matter as that between two types of substance is still to be trapped in
>SOM; he’s drawing a lot on Wittgenstein there, of course).
I state in my thesis that mind and matter are the same types of substance
(i.e. Quality patterns) so I think you’ve misread it at this point or the
above paragraph is muddled.
>I look forward to a full meal of a response, rather than a Neapolitan ice
>cream!
Well, Sam, without having read Schleiermacher or Lash this response is going
to be limited. However, I have carefully re-read your essay since yesterday
so I hope the above is at least some assistance in clarifying the issues
involved.
Best wishes,
Anthony.
www.anthonymcwatt.co.uk
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