From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Jan 14 2005 - 19:38:28 GMT
Hey Paul,
I’m not sure that everyone is on the same page. I’m not sure that it’s
quite understood what the full force and significance of the skeptic is and
I’m pretty sure that I don’t have the power to do that much backgrounding.
The discouraging thing for me is that, people here constantly claim that the
MoQ is the best philosophy they’ve seen, or that it dissolves all of
philosophy’s problems. I can’t see that such claims hold much water if
people aren’t actually attuned to the problems and vicissitudes of
philosophy, outside of such claims being simply references to what Pirsig’s
claimed in his books. Inattention to the history of philosophy is a common
problem here, which wouldn’t be a problem if people were willing to reign in
their claims about what they know. I would never claim that people have to
do or understand mainstream philosophy. But if you are going to claim
Pirsig’s superiority to mainstream philosophy, it would be nice if it were
backed up somehow. My interest in Pirsig is in his intersection with the
history of philosophy, how Pirsig joins in that conversation. But I don’t
know how to express those thoughts if there isn’t a general understanding of
how the history of philosophy has played itself out. (I’m certainly not
claiming to be an expert, but I am claiming to have a general knowledge of
it.)
I’m certainly not ending the dialogue, I simply want to note my
discouragement and frustration. I’ll keep trying to figure out ways of
saying what I want to say, but I feel like I’m playing with a handicap.
First, let me say that I’m picking up the mediated/unmediated distinction
from Pirsig. He uses it to describe what he’s doing and I do think it
fairly integral to they way he describes his philosophy. If people want to
discard it, that’s perfectly fine, great in fact considering I prefer
discarding it. But I’m not interested in pursuing other people’s visions of
Pirsig’s philosophy at the moment. I’m interested in Pirsig. I’m
interested in investigating the way Pirsig’s philosophy hangs together as
gleaned from his writings. (As it happens, I don’t think moving to a
differentiated/undifferentiated distinction removes the particular problems
I’m currently pointing to, so it currently doesn’t matter in our dialogue.)
Paul said:
The first thing about this statement is that it is more that Dynamic Quality
is 'betterness' itself, rather than - "is better than static patterns." The
statement that "this is better than that," to me, is more applicable to
static quality in which things can be defined by such fixed relationships.
Matt:
I’m not exactly sure what the difference is supposed to be between
“betterness itself” and “better than static patterns.” If we are talking
about the relationships between things, doesn’t DQ have a relationship to
static patterns? Didn’t you just quote Pirsig at me that said something
about how everything is relational? (Though this is, I think, what Dan is
denying, though I doubt both the usefulness in denying it and the denial’s
fidelity to Pirsig’s philosophy.)
Paul said:
The second thing is that, if you accept my modification of your terms, then
the statement becomes, "undifferentiated reality is better than
differentiated reality." In this sense one may say that any response to
undifferentiated reality is better because undifferentiated reality is
simple, unambiguous and direct and will 'provoke' a simpler and direct
response. … By hitting value dead on there is no confusion and no
comparative reflection about what to do. The Quality of the action, with the
right patterns to support it, may result in the latching of new and better
patterns to be repeated in future behaviour.
Matt:
This relates to what you say later about Pirsig’s stove/pain example,
kenntnis and wissenschaft, and knowledge by acquaintance.
First, I would like to forward the superficially stupid and obtuse question,
“How do you know a ‘simple, unambiguous and direct’ response is better than
a ‘complex, ambiguous and indirect’ one?” Now I just seem obstinate, but I
hope to give force to such a question and some flesh to the conceptual
difficulties I would like to raise, in relation to the notion of criteria.
That question, after all, is the next round of skeptical questioning.
Pirsig’s deployed distinction between kenntnis and wissenschaft is roughly
that between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. This
is a distinction popularized in Anglophone philosophy by one of the princes
of logical positivism, Bertrand Russell (e.g., in The Problems of
Philosophy). I would think that parallel alone would make our hair stand on
end, but here are some of the problems as I see in it.
Can we look at a philosophical proposition and instantaneously know whether
it is good or not? Isn’t this what Pirsig’s implying, that the Dynamic
insight is the one immediately in front of you? But how do we know that our
immediate impulse of accepting a proposition as true is Dynamic Quality and
not the coherence that proposition has with our other beliefs? Furthermore,
how do we know this immediate flash of insight is leading us aright and not
afoul? As Wittgenstein said, “If intuition is an inner voice—how do I know
how I am to obey it? And how do I know that it doesn’t mislead me? For if
it can guide me right, it can also guide me wrong.” (Philosophical
Investigations, No. 213) How do we know our immediate flash of insight is
better and not degenerate?
The hot stove example is commonly trotted out to defend the certainty of
Dynamic Quality, immediate sensation/impression/intuition/etc. If you touch
a stove, you will immediately sense it as low quality. Or will you? I have
consistently trotted out my own counterexample and I have yet to see it
answered (and I’m not quite sure how it would be). What if the person
touching the stove is a masochist? If a masochist touches a hot stove,
they’ll sense it as high quality.
But maybe the emphasis has been wrong when the hot stove example has been
ushered onto stage. Maybe the emphasis should be on _having_ an immediate
impression, that we do have privileged access, epistemological authority,
over our immediate impressions, that we can be absolutely sure that “this
sucks/is great!” But what if we come across a person who says he’s in pain
whenever he eats cheese cake? He eats the cake, groans in pleasure, and
says sincerely, “I’m in pain!” Is he in pain or is he wrong? I think we
might come to the conclusion that he is simply misusing a word. Which
raises the question of how we are ever to know with absolute certainty that
a person is actually feeling something or misusing the language. At this
point, we should wonder what this absolute certainty, this epistemological
authority, does for us. This leads to Rorty’s early dictum that “the price
of retaining one’s epistemological authority is a decent respect for the
opinions of mankind.”
This is how my question, “How do you know a ‘simple, unambiguous and direct’
response is better than a ‘complex, ambiguous and indirect’ one?”, gains
flesh. All of the above questions were driven to eliminate the notion of
absolute certainty, which is the epistemological dream. When I talk about
“what criteria are you going to give the skeptic” I’m asking you how you
determine when you’ve hit upon something safe and solid, how you are going
to stop the infinite regress of questions. You located it in knowledge by
acquaintance, but I kicked the skeptical questioning up to the next level.
The skeptic’s purpose is to make the entire search for absolute certainty
look hopeless.
How do you know the way you’ve “described” Dynamic Quality is the right way?
How do you know when you are experiencing Dynamic Quality? How do you
know whether you are being Dynamic or degenerate? How do you know whether
you are following static patterns or being Dynamic?
C.S. Peirce said this many years ago:
“Now it is plainly one thing to have an intuition and another to know
intuitively that it is an intuition, and the question is whether these two
things, distinguishable in thought, are invariably connected, so that we can
always intuitively distinguish between an intuition and a cognition
determined by another…. There is no evidence that we have this faculty,
except that we _feel_ we have it. But the weight of the testimony depends
entirely on our being supposed to have the power of distinguishing in this
feeling whether the feeling be the result of education, old associations,
etc., or whether it is an intuitive cognition; or, in other words, it
depends on presupposing the very matter testified to.” (“Questions
Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man”)
We feel like we can distinguish between whether our immediate impression is
the result of static patterns (“education, old associations, etc.”) or
Dynamic Quality (“intuitive cognition”), but it would appear that we’d have
to assume we were able to do it to do it, which does nothing in the way of
establishing our ability to do it.
So in response to the originally insipid question, “How do you know a
‘simple, unambiguous and direct’ response is better than a ‘complex,
ambiguous and indirect’ one?”, I think you have two options. One option is
to claim that you have an intuition that “simple…” is better than
“complex…,” which is another way of saying that it’s Dynamic that “simple…”
is better, or it is better that “simple…” is better. These are all those
bad answers that lead to Peirce’s claims, that lead to you having a
superintuition about your intuitions. The other option, which I think will
be the first one that will occur to you (based on how I’ve seen you respond
in the past), is to claim that “simple…” has proven to work better in the
past, so it is a good bet that it will work better in the future. This is a
pragmatist answer, but it won’t work as a response because it completely
cuts off the criteria (“simple, unambiguous and direct”) from the contested
notion of DQ. If you insist on that answer, I would ask what part DQ plays
then, what part does the absolute certainty we have from it play?
Another way of pointing to my difficulties is by pointing out that in my
original post I said that “I
have been told time and time again that this distinction [between
static/Dynamic, mediated/unmediated, differentiated/undifferentiated] is
_descriptive_ and not normative, unlike the appearance/reality distinction,
and so does not need an epistemology” and that “this line of defense is
essentially what all the other particular ones boil down to.” In Paul’s
responses to me, I notice that the way he is responding seems to call up
this distinction between descriptive and normative. For instance, in
response to the question (from my original post) “you need to explain why we
need a mediated/unmediated distinction at all. What part does it play, what
work does it do?”, Paul said, “It describes two aspects of experience,”
which is exactly the type of answer I wanted to head off at the pass. In
response to my use of the mediated/unmediate distinction in describing the
static/Dynamic distinction, Paul replied that “My preferred distinction is
undifferentiated/differentiated which I think is also more descriptive and
meaningful to what the MOQ is talking about,” which both calls upon the
descriptive/normative distinction for aid, comfort, and rhetorical value
_and_, in good Pirsigian/pragmatist fashion, blurs and ultimately denies
that very distinction (“My _preferred_ distinction,” “more…_meaningful to
what the MOQ is talking about_”). When contesting a notion like DQ being
neutrally descriptive, as opposed to being normative and having an agenda,
goes right out the window. We _are_ describing things like the
static/Dynamic distinction, but we aren’t doing it neutrally. We are
describing them in our preferred to terms (or as close to them as possible)
in order to work out the consequences of those descriptions.
I think one other way of putting my difficulties are in response to Dan’s
misguided reply: “To answer Matt's question: The best way I know of is to
ask oneself, is this a Quality path I am on? Only you will know the answer
(kenntnis). If the answer is no, then go a better way.”
Okay, so I ask myself, “Am I on a Quality path? Is my cross-examination of
Pirsig’s philosophy going in the right direction? Am I really detecting an
appearance/reality distinction unbeknownst to Pirsig or his mainline
interpreters?”
Answer: “Oh yeah, absolutely.”
How does one respond to that?
Matt
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Jan 15 2005 - 08:11:46 GMT