From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Mon Oct 13 2003 - 18:45:04 BST
Hi Matt
Don't remember saying anything about anyone agreeing with the Nazi, but
never mind, apologies if my keys slipppeeeed, sure you seem to open
your position when pushed, part of dealing with Nazi ideology would be
to understand it, get it all in context, German reparations and WWI trauma
and all
that. But then we seem to have walked away from notions of you can't argue
about
vocabularies only swap them. The point is that you have experience to refer
to, sure its complex
because vocabularies can enrich/reduce your experience, but you gotta decide
if the vocabularies
make sense of your existence/experiences. Just look at SOM language, Pirsig
gives lots of
good reasons why it does not make sense of as much of our experience as we
sometimes try to
pretend it does. Also DQ is unmediated, that's how Pirsig defines it,
entirely negatively, it is
therefore the horizon of our understanding. What does mediated mean if
nothing is unmediated?
regards
David M
----- Original Message -----
From: "MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2003 4:52 AM
Subject: Re: MD Begging the Question, Moral Intuitions, and Answering the
Nazi, Part III
> David,
>
> David said:
> I think I can see where you are at, and I can assure you that there is
another place to be. You are giving us the US/Rorty/pragmatist-style of
post-modernism, but there are other ways of considering morality in a
post-Heiderggerian, post-Derrida context. I think one of these for example
is Levinas, another is Charles Taylor, another is Jean-Luc Marion. Sure
argumentation, static patterns of analysis, vocabularies are pretty
essential to the way we can talk about and value aspects of our experience.
For you pragmatists you want to leave it there, there is simply a choice
between vocabularies, but how do you choose between them? For me, there are
various sources of value that appeal to aspects of our experience that do
not sit easily in any of the vocabularies we currently have. They make us
uncomfortable, they saturate our experience, they are a kind of holy terror,
where we intuit that our concepts are failing us, where we intuit that we
lack understanding, or that our conce
> pts lack something, that they do not grasp the phenomenon. The concept of
DQ is substantially a negative concept, in the way that god is in negative
theology. This is because DQ is Pirsig's way of pointing to the
transcendent, what is beyond the horizon of our conceptual grasp. In fact
our conceptual tools are very limited.
>
> Matt:
> I can't think of one reason why a pragmatist wouldn't agree with
everything you just wrote here.
>
> David said:
> I have an ontological position, the pragmatists has unstated ontological
assumptions (that you can choose between vocabularies) and this gives me
something firmer to bang the Nazi over the head with, to encourage him to
believe me when I say I do not have to agree, and even under threat of death
we can make our Byronic stand.
>
> Matt:
> Good lord, who said anything about agreeing with the Nazi? I was talking
about the limits of argumentation. You say "bang over the head" and I think
that's about right when dealing with convinced Nazis. There are only so
many tear-jerking tactics we can try before we should feel quite alright
about muscling them. The point of clarification I want to make is that,
after you beg the question over me, your parenthetical says "that you can
choose between vocabularies". Is that supposed to be a pragmatist
assumption? Well, if it is, its not quite right. Most of the time, making
the change on the truth-value of your assumptions doesn't really feel like a
choice. Its just, suddenly, your assumption looks stupid, so you get rid of
it. It all depends on your experiences. The issue of converting a Nazi
rather than answering him, for instance. Converting a Nazi isn't about
explaining to him his options, that he can either play with a Nazi
vocabulary or an American vocabulary
> . Its about moving him in a way that forces him, compels him, to change
the truth-value of his assumptions. What's the difference between what I
said just now and what I argued that Pirsig was saying with DQ? I'm not
saying that the Nazi's perception of reality is distorted, that he has a
mis-handle on reality. I'm arguing that Pirsig seems to want to say this,
that DQ is unmediated experience, that it gets at the way reality _really_
is and that, because of this, the Nazi is always wrong, and always has been
wrong, based on our correct understanding of reality. We've seen the Truth,
all he's got is distortion. What I just said is that converting the Nazi is
not about getting him to take off his glasses, but about changing from his
glasses to ours.
>
> Matt
>
>
>
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