From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Jun 16 2005 - 20:34:45 BST
Bo,
Matt said:
A summary of the position that I believe all four of us stand in/with/as:
What we call "mind" is better refered to as a collection of static
intellectual patterns.
Bo said:
But "mind" is part of the mind/matter dualism of SOM which is replaced by
MOQ's DynamicStatic dualism, thus making the intellectual level equal to
mind is the source of all ills....
Matt:
No, Bo, I just don't think you are reading me right. "Mind" may be part of
the "mind/matter dualism," but I don't think "'mind'" necessarily is.
Philosophers use scare quotes when (among other things) they want to warn
people that the term contained is one they don't want to use, are about to
deconstruct, and/or about to redescribe. When philosophers find problematic
terms that contain deep-seated intuitions and that they want to make less
problematic, they redescribe the term to get rid of the problems, which does
one of two things to the intuitions: recommends we get rid of them because
we can live without them or recommends we can keep them without the
accompanied problems. As I said to Scott a day ago, I do think there is
something about the "mind" that needs keeping, roughly the sense of what
makes us individual, continuous persons. For instance, I wrote out my
entire response to you two days ago, but do to a computer glitch, lost the
whole thing. What I'm writing now is a pale reflection of my original
response, but the continuity between the two is there. What I wrote existed
somewhere and its continuity between there and here is in what we vulgarly
call the "mind" and is what Pirsigians call a static intellectual pattern.
Unless you want to toss out that notion completely, which I currently can't
imagine is possible, you need to use "mind" (as a placeholder for those
intuitions you're keeping) in your process of redescription or else you
won't be able to make the translation work because there will be no
reference to the old intuitions. When you keep on like this, Bo, calling
everybody who even mentions the word "mind" a subjectivist, it just makes me
think more and more that DMB is right, that you're just mistakenly reading
everybody as a subjectivist already.
The issue at hand is what _you_ translate "mind" into in the SOL-MoQ,
because presumably that would provide the clue as to where the SOL-MoQ is
"contained."
Bo said:
If anything uttered by language are ideas, we certainly are idealists and
idealism rules, but even the most rabid idealists shies this linguistic
"black hole" and postulate something that language reflects ...which makes
idealism part of the SOM - or of the intellectual level!
Matt:
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying, but it is certainly not the
case that (all) idealists postulate that language reflects something. Its
the exact point of idealism that there's very little use in saying that
language or ideas reflect anything because we'd never know what it is
because all we have are the reflections (language/ideas).
Bo said:
... I don't postulate "a sharp divide" between a metaphysics and reality. I
say that the MOQ is the Quality Reality. Look. SOM was the S/O reality and
the first move by Pirsig was to point to it, split it from reality, and the
first reactions (from the few who noticed) were to deny a SOM ...which
proves my point: it WAS reality itself. The S/O reality.
Matt:
If I understand your reasoning about the SOL-MoQ, it looks something like
this: SOM used to be the truth of us. We used to exist in the SOM-Reality.
But the creation of the MoQ has made it possible to move from one reality,
the SOM-Reality, to another, the Quality-Reality. When making that switch,
from SOM-Reality to Quality-Reality, we are literally entering a new
reality. That new reality is the SOL-MoQ. The SOL-MoQ is simply short-hand
for all the machinations we make in our reality, the Quality-Reality, and
the SOL-MoQ is the correct interpretation of our new reality.
The question I will continue to press is, "What is the SOL-MoQ? Where is
it?" Why would I press it if I just answered it with, "'Where' isn't the
right word because the SOL-MoQ is everywhere because it is everything, all
of reality"? Well, you first answered it by saying that a "theory does not
reside anywhere within itself," which I said doesn't make any sense when the
theory in question is a theory of reality. You then claim that you don't
make any "sharp divide" betwen theory and reality, which looks like a repeal
of your first response, but makes sense of your earlier remarks that "a
theory changes the element of reality it treats" and that because the MoQ is
a general theory of reality it "consequently changes EVERYTHING." But if
you take back your first response, that SOL-MoQ doesn't have to be
"contained" in your picture of reality because theories don't contain
themselves, how does that make sense if your theory of reality is about all
of reality? Wouldn't that include theories? If the SOL-MoQ is reality, is
the Quality-Reality, the new reality we live in having transcended or
replaced the SOM-Reality, why wouldn't it contain itself?
In effect, what are you doing right now, writing the words you do, thinking
about the MoQ, arguing for your interpretation of the correct reality, the
SOL-MoQ? What are you doing, what is being created? You can't be arguing
for reality itself, as a whole, because reality doesn't need your help.
Reality does just fine existing without your help. What you're trying to do
is change our reality, our interpretation of reality. But how are you doing
it? You seem to have disarmed yourself.
I said that our (the current coalition of, as I would call us, pragmatist
sympathizers) answer was that the MoQ is an intellectual pattern. You
replied that "if Pirsig's container logic is valid it is grossly violated
here." You're absolutely right, but part of our move is a repeal of this
"container logic." That logic is dead wrong. It doesn't make sense and
I've argued against it before. All we need is the claim that the MoQ is a
better intellectual pattern than SOM. And so when it comes time to describe
what we are doing when we are arguing for the MoQ over SOM, we can say that
we are battling an outmoded intellectual pattern. But it doesn't look like
you can say that. In fact, it doesn't look like you can say you can argue
for the MoQ at all. It would appear that the switch from the SOM-Reality to
the Quality-Reality is just something that mysteriously occurs, because to
argue would be to use intellectual patterns, and intellectual patterns are
the Subject-Object Logic.
The one move I see that is left to you if you go on in this fashion is to
argue that the Quality-Reality is the reality that was always sitting behind
SOM, its just that we didn't know it until now. Pirsig showed us that
Quality "contains" SOM, thus preserving the "container logic." But to go
this route you'd have to not only repeal the theory/reality divide, you'd
also have to repeal the idea that Pirsig _changed_ reality, because now he
didn't--he discovered it. We were always living in a Quality-Reality, we
just didn't know it. Going this route, however, also commits you to the
same problems of thinking of the MoQ as a fifth level that you'd repealed
even earlier. The four levels are "surrounded" by the Quality-Reality, by
the SOL-MoQ, but with the logic of discovery at work, with discovering that
the Quality-Reality was the true reality sitting behind the SOM-Reality
(which would have been true had it not claimed to be the True Reality), it
commits you to an ascension paradigm, where we ascend beyond the SOM (which
was right in its way) to the MoQ (which is more right).
In the end, I'm not sure what is left. When I run through the possible
directions of your argument, I either come up with the above dead-ends or
end up pushing the SOL-MoQ into a position where any disagreement between
what you are saying and what we are saying is pretty much verbal and
uninteresting. So, what is the SOL-MoQ, what is it you are doing when you
propound it, what are you arguing _for_? Not an intellectual pattern...so
what?
Bo said unrelatedly:
Can you Matt show me anyone referring to a subject/object metaphysics, I
mean in the sense of it having an origin and maybe a exit?
Matt:
Yeah, quite a few. I think it incredibly and dangerously naive to think
that Pirsig is the only one to do anything like this. Scott's examples are
people like Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit), Coleridge (?), and Barfield
(Saving the Appearances). My favorites currently are Rorty (Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature), Jeffery Stout (The Flight from Authority), Stephen
Toulmin (Cosmopolis), Richard Bernstein (Beyond Objectivism and Relativism),
Bernard Yack (The Longing for Total Revolution), and Susan Neiman (Evil in
Modern Thought), to name a few. One of Sam's favorites, in addition to
Toulmin, is Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue). One of DMB's favorites is
Ken Wilber. And there are more: Jurgen Habermas (The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity), Michel Foucault (The Order of Things), Jacques
Derrida (Of Grammatology). And some older ones: Nietzsche (Beyond Good and
Evil), Heidegger (Being and Time), Dewey (The Quest for Certainty).
Not all of these people agree. But they are all, in my estimation, working
the same vineyard. I went on to a lengthier discussion of the very idea of
Pirsig's "radical originality," but I'm not sure it is needed. It roughly
revolves around that idea that, if Pirsig really was as radical as some
people say he is, nobody would understand him. We would simply think he
were unintelligibly insane. I think Pirsig would agree, what with his idea
of "to step out of the mythos is to go insane." For us to even understand
him, and then to even agree, our entire philosophical culture is far enough
along the track to throw out SOM that we should see others ready to give it
up, too. Others like Barfield, Rorty, MacIntyre, Wilber, etc., etc.
Matt
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