LS Re: DeCartes


peter@pzw1.resnet.cornell.edu
Sun, 15 Feb 1998 17:07:04 +0100


Hello,

First off: I think I knew a Donny Palmgren from Science Olympiad when I
attended Hixson High School, if you are him then hello again, if not, then
nevermind. (If you *are* him, then to jog your memory, I am the kid that
everyone threw into the pool at the 1993 Nationals...)

On Fri, 13 Feb 1998, Donald T Palmgren wrote:

> What counts as understanding in philosophy?

What counts as understanding in anything? For me, understanding is
achieved upon the completion of internal mental structures, so that the
philosophic system I am trying to understand can be applied to various
questions and issues. I guess the Platonic argument of Truth in knowledge
comes in here, so we must assume that the knowledge (generating the
internal mental structures) is correct and complete.

> Diana suggested (and resonably so, for this is what most achademic
> philosophers do) that you understand X (MoQ, for instance) if you can see
> his or its position in relation to what goes before in the history of
> philosophy and maybe see the impact X had on what followed. That's not

Hmm... isn't it possible to understand a particular philosophy by
investigating and studying its tenets, without necessarily investigating
the development leading up to it? Philosophies are usually entirely
self-contained worldviews that don't necessarily need history to justify
their statements, right?

> I'll try and help you see why the achademics don't much care for
> Pirsig, but keep in mind that I'm not really an academic philosopher
> myself -- I've been around the University block enough to see that scean
> is in pretty sorry shape. (Keep grooving on that question, "What is
> Philosophy? What's the pay-off here?") Really their issue w/ Pirsig has to
> do w/ the whole direction philosophy has taken since the death of Hegel in
> 1831. I'll come to that, but...

It seems to me (from what I've seen of various aspects of our University)
that the growing trend, in many departments, is to move away from deep,
fundamental questions and towards doing research on little detailed
things. Which is not so bad, except that people seem to lose focus and
tend to see research on the minor things to be on par with research on the
deep fundamental things. This happens in physics, sociology, biology,
biochemistry, you name it - where there is a need to look at details,
there are always 50 year-old Ph.Ds who have looked at details their entire
lives and disdain the 30 year-old Postdoc that has ideas about the
fundamentals.

This also seems to happen in Philosophy. When such a major shift of
worldview occurs (as Pirsig is proposing), when someone comes along and
looks at the deep fundamental questions (that could destroy the lifetime
of looking at details that many academics have done) then there is
naturally antagonism.

> DeCartes came up w/ this idea of Mind and Body. Under Body he put
> anything that is spacially extended (My chair, my PC...); under mind he
> placed anything that is not spacialy extended (thoughts, ideas,the laws of
> physics, etc.). DeCartes said everything is either one or the other. A
> less than bold statment, really: "Everything is either embodied or not."
> Well obviously! It becomes a metaphysics only when you go on to say that
> both of those "really exist." Does everyone see that?

Perhaps this is an issue of semantics, but once you say "everyTHING" is
either embodied or not, isn't that already implying existence?

> "Subject" means "knowing subject," and "object" means "known
> object." This termonology really comes in to play w/ the Germans, and the
> German etamology is much clearer. The German Gegenstand (object) makes
> clear that an object is "was steht entgegen," "what stands over against" a
> knowing subject (sometimes our language does the thinking for us). So in
> (what should I call it?) gramatically correct subject-object talk (?) an
> idea is an object (although admitedly an object of a odd type). A thought
> -- a mentel picture, is something that stands over against the knower --
> "held before the mind's eye" so to speak. Now, again, just having
> subject-object talk dosn't make a metaphysics. What makes a SOM is saying,
> "Both S and O exist and everything is one or the other."
> Now which does Pirsig talk about? It seems to me (I'll leave to
> you to conferm or deny) that he's thinking about something more a kin to
> Cartisan Mind-Body dualism -- as is more the style of thought in the
> Anglo-Amarican world. (Call it MBd if you want.)

I think that for me, the power of the Metaphysics of Quality lies not just
in what it says about what is real and not real. In the standard Subject-
Object Metaphysics, things like ideas, thoughts, emotions, etc. are very
real. But the issue here is one of the relationship between things.

It easy to to say that "stories" exist and transistors exist. It is
somewhat more difficult to determine what REALLY exists when the stories
reside in the organization of transistors. Even though Subject-Object
Metaphysics acknowledges that *pattern* is the key to existence of
anything, it doesn't really say much about the interactions between the
various patterns, and it leaves us totally in the dark when the patterns
are superimposed on top of each other. The beauty of the Metaphysics of
Quality, at least for me, lies not so much in its definition of the
levels of static Quality but rather in its description of the interactions
of the different levels of Quality.

> Now let me say on a personal note, so you know where I'm coming
> from: I really distrust these broad catagories. As a rule they carry
> little explanitory force. Generally what hapenes is people pick some word
> ending in -ism and turn it into some sort of battle cry. If one feels the
> need to bow down, well there are worse churches to do it in than the
> church of Robert M Pirsig, but, personally, I find this partisanship
> unphilosophical and frankly undignified. Lets not worry just now about
> who's right or wrong, or who wins the game (One first wants to ask, "what
> game are playing?" (a re-stating of "what's philosophy?")) and insted just
> look at what Mr Pirsig tried to do, how, and why? As Wittgenstein said (or
> if he didn't he should have), "It's more important to be clear than correct."

Well, this is a valid point, but I think that in a sense the Lila Squad is
doing exactly this. From what I've seen people are trying to put together
a coherent statement of the Quality of Metaphysics, and is Quality
Metaphysics not what Pirsig tried to do? I don't know about the "Why?"
question, but the "How?" question is detailed to a certain extent in Lila
and ZAMM themselves...

I agree that, in general, it is better to determine exactly what a
philosopher said before arguing the validity and correctness of his
points. <g> But in a sense, we cannot do the former without doing the
latter at the same time, especially when the Metaphysics of Quality was
inspired by the shortcomings of the Subject-Object Metaphysics.

> O-kay, I'll give TLS a couple of days to respond w/ questions and
> comments about DeCartes, MBd, and this clearer (I hope) rendering of what
> "subject" and "object" mean... Personally I don't want to spend a lot of
> time on DeCartes (I think this is rather straight forward stuff), and go
> on into Kant, whom I see as very much a kin to Pirsig.

In the ubiquitous words of Monty Python, "Tell us more! Tell us more!" :)

Peter

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