From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Sat Feb 12 2005 - 06:00:10 GMT
Matt,
Matt said:
First some things about metaphilosophy, philosophy, and metaphysics.
Here's how I would put these three
different areas:
1) Metaphilosophy: What way of life are we going to follow?
2) Philosophy: How do things, in the broadest sense of the term, hang
together, in the broadest sense of the term?
3) Metaphysics: How do things _really_ hang together?
The first is taken from your use of Pierre Hadot (whose book I've just
started reading), which is a use the rhymes very well with Wittgenstein.
Each form of life uses certain vocabularies with which they make sense of
the world. So while doing philosophy (stolen from Wilfrid Sellars), we try
and develop a vocabulary with which we try and get the rest of our
vocabularies (scientific, moral, religious, literary, political, etc.) to
hang together. Doing metaphilosophy involves a conversation about which
form of life is better, which kind of philosophical vocabulary we should be
using to get our other vocabularies to hang together. One way of describing
metaphysics, then, is as a particular kind of philosophical vocabulary, a
kind of philosophy that tries to have metaphilosophical consequences. By
bit by bit hammering down how things really hang together, the choice of
what form of life we are going to be is taken away from us, determined
instead by something other than us (i.e. Reality).
Scott:
I like this a lot. I think there is one additional distinction to make,
though, within the category "metaphysics". One might call it "finalizing" or
"asymptotic" metaphysics versus (as Whitehead describes his) "speculative"
metaphysics. Finalizing metaphysics matches your definition, but speculative
metaphysics doesn't quite. In the latter there is an acknowledgment that the
hammering cannot be finally carried through, and that it is only good until
the next Copernican revolution or whatever. It recognizes that it is working
within some contingent perspective. (Modern, non-fundamentalist theology is
generally speculative, by the way -- for a theologian, the theology is not
likely to determine the choice of form of life. What will is grace, so the
best that theology can do is make one more open to grace, using the
vocabulary of the present time. So it is metaphysical, in that it it does
try to have metaphilosophical consequences that are determined by Reality,
but it acknowledges its limitations.) The MOQ would be speculative, as must
any that posits an ineffable. Mine -- assuming it is a metaphysics (which I
think it is -- see below) is more finalizing, but with a twist. (N.b., I do
not "posit" an ineffable, as that is logocentric. This may be casuistry,
though.)
Matt said:
In the sense of these terms, most propounded philosophies by philosophers
are a tangle of meta- and philosophical theses, though most philosophers in
the past (and present for that matter) take their meta- theses for granted
and disentangling them is a bit of a chore. What Rorty shunts under the
name "pragmatism" is mostly just metaphilosophical theses, though from time
to time he'll be inconsistent (in the sense that pragmatism is _only_ the
name for a metaphilosophical stance, which historically it hasn't only been)
and attribute a philosophical thesis to pragmatism. (I think this may be
what's happening with materialism.) But with the above distinctions in
hand, it is fairly easy to distinguish Rorty's meta- from philosophical
theses (with the realization, then, that he spends most of his time doing
metaphilosophy).
Scott:
Makes sense.
Matt said:
So: I see your philosophy as retaining a mix of that bad, bad metaphysics,
as when you say, "the One, True religion . is something that should be a
goal to work out publicly, as a matter of intellectual responsibility."
This makes it seem as though the One, True Religion is out there waiting for
us to discover it. That propositions that make up this Religion will force
themselves on us-deciding for us what form of life we are going to be.
Scott:
Mostly correct (i.e., yes, I am doing bad, bad metaphysics, but I will be
arguing why this is not so bad). However, I think it unlikely that this
Religion will be made up of propositional truth claims. One might quote
Nagarjuna: "For those who make a view out of emptiness there is no hope".
Assuming this Religion shakes out in this sort of direction, it will not be
captured in a philosophical text, but philosophical texts can be skillful
means for understanding why Nagarjuna said this.
Matt said:
The reason I think your philosophy is only slightly tainted with this
metaphysical impulse is because, for the most part, you refrain from
metaphysical addendums to philosophical theses (after sorting out the theses
into the appropriate piles; sometimes you say "metaphysics" where I would
replace it with "philosophy." For instance, "metaphysics . has to learn to
stop thinking of itself as answering "what is X" type questions, and replace
them with "what is a more useful vocabulary for dealing with 'things in
general.'" I would take this to be urging us to stop metaphysics and stick
to philosophy.).
Scott:
I see it as metaphysics that does without truth by correspondence. It
remains to be seen whether there can be such a metaphysics.
Matt said:
And the crack in those addendums, the spill of pragmatist
acid (as I see it), is in the above claim I quoted from you. The part that
the ellipsis is muffling is "whatever it turns out to be." The One, True
Religion is whatever it turns out to be. In my last post I commented on the
Peircian quality of this claim. What pragmatists like Rorty can't
understand is how positing the existence of the language Peircish, that
perfect language we will all be speaking at the end of inquiry, or the
OneTrueReligion religion, which we will all be participating and believing
in at the end of inquiry, makes any difference at all to our inquiries into
better languages and better religion. As long as we have the Miltonian
claim that truth will win out in "free and open encounters" and Peirce's
strictures against blocking the road of inquiry, we need no such posits.
The reason "truth will win out" doesn't look like a Peircian posit is
because people like Rorty and I can't ever imagine inquiry or philosophy or
cultural evolution ever stoping. This is why Rorty has started calling
pragmatism "antiauthoritarianism." The only thing that can stop the
conversation is other people, not some non-human authority like Reality or
Truth or God. And without political fiat, how are we ever going to get
people to stop bickering and disagreeing? And why would we want to? Some
of the most interesting things come out of disagreement.
Just keep the conversation going.
Scott:
As I see it, the reason that you and Rorty cannot imagine inquiry not
stopping is that you are Darwinians. I can imagine the inquiry stopping
because I include in my metaphysics that we are all ignorant, deluded
sinners, but that redemption (Awakening) is a-coming. (What happens then I
haven't a clue.) The Darwinism is a consequence of that ignorance.
Scott said:
My different take is that the bullcrap arises because of the Cartesian
separation of nature from mind. So as I see it, the Dennett's of the world
accepted that separation, saw the problems that creates with respect to mind
(and therefore consciousness), and decided to do away with mind. Berkeley
took the opposite tack. My response is to go back to the thought before the
separation took place and reformulate it in a modern vocabulary.
Matt said:
I think this is a mistake. I don't think we should take Dennett as
proposing that we do away with mind (whatever Dennett thinks of himself;
even if he has rid himself of reductionism (which I think he has), he still
does have a residual taint of scientism). Dennett, Davidson, and Rorty are
concerned with eliminating the separation between nature and mind, same as
you. You are right, Berkeley took one direction and the materialists took
another. But part of the see-saw the pragmatists are trying to hop off of
is just this choice: materialist or idealist? When we eliminate this
separation between nature and mind, though, we have some loose ends to wrap
up, some new vocabularies to create to make things hang together. One thing
the separation between mind and nature allowed was the easy claim that
science was about nature, but not about minds (or God), thus making room for
our moral discourse and free will. So one thing pragmatists have to account
for, after destroying the separation between nature and mind, is what
science does, how the scientific vocabulary hangs together with our other
vocabularies (like psychological and religious). One way Dennett does this
is by distinguishing between different levels of looking at things:
physical, design, or intentional. These different levels each have there
own vocabulary, vocabularies that are inappropriate at the other levels.
Scott:
To explain myself I need to invoke Barfield's thesis, that it wasn't
Descartes and Bacon who invented the split between mind and nature. Rather,
the texture of consciousness changed from where there was no such split, to
where there is (this change taking place gradually over the 2000 years prior
to Descartes' time). The split at the beginning (in the Axial Age) meant the
beginning of intellect, as making possible reflection on things, but the
thinking was thought of as participation with the things. One knew about X
because one's concepts about X were also the concepts about which X thought
itself into existence (or which God used to think X into existence). By the
time of Descartes, though, any sense of a Geist in nature had gone away, so
it was then possible for philosophy to say there is mind and there is
nature, and they are completely distinct. With that arose the
epistemological problem of how the mind could know about nature.
What Dennett -- and most everybody -- assumes is that what the Greeks
perceived and what we do are basically the same, but we have developed a
better vocabulary for dealing with what we perceive (science). What Barfield
is saying is that we were only able to develop that vocabulary when we did
because only by that time was nature perceivable as lacking the Geistliche.
That scientific vocabulary is very useful, of course, but with the loss of
the vocabulary of participation it also lets in certain metaphysical
mistakes, mainly Darwinism. Darwinism assumes a long stretch of time in
which there was nothing to which our mental vocabulary applies. The ancients
could not have thought this because they did not *perceive* a nature to
which the mental vocabulary did *not* apply.
What this implies is that Dennett's philosophy is based on accepting the
Cartesian view of nature, while rejecting Descartes' view of mind as an
independently existing substance. To do the latter, he has substituted
"different levels of looking at things" for mental substance. This gets over
the epistemological problem of dualism, but creates a new problem: how did
these vocabularies, or any, come about?
Scott said:
As I said in the other post, I think Rorty is arguing as a materialist and
not a pragmatist when he says one should just stop having such intuitions.
Matt said:
With the above distinctions between meta-, philosophy, and metaphysics in
mind, I think
I can say that Rorty is arguing from a metaphilosophical standpoint because
he is saying that we shouldn't be the form of life that thinks there is
something more to physical pain than brain-states (or at the very least, we
should repress the idea that pain tells us something about how the world
really is). When you start talking about which intutions we should save and
which ones we should repress, I think that means you are at the
metaphilosophical level because our intutions are what make us a particular
form of life.
Scott:
As always, I have difficulty seeing how this isn't an argument between two
metaphysical positions. I argue that reflection on physical pain (or any
percept) does tell us something about reality that reflection on
brain-states does not, namely, that consciousness transcends time, and so
time isn't fundamental. This is a metaphysical claim, so it seems that if I
am urged not to see something more in pain than brain-states, that must be
because one holds a different metaphysical position, one that says "there
once were no beings who could have had any use for an intentional
vocabulary, since there were no beings who had language."
Scott said:
I think that Sam is right that until recently mysticism gains
intelligibility only within a tradition, but that now things are, or are
becoming different. ...
Matt:
The first comment I want to make is that I'm not sure that Sam is claiming
that _until recently_ mysticism only gained intelligibility within a
tradition. If I understand Sam correctly, he is saying that mysticism
_only_ gains intelligibility within a tradition, but this is only because
tradition is not opposed to reason, as the Enlightenment taught us to do.
Scott:
I see that I goofed in what I said. It should have been "I think that,
historically, Sam is right that mysticism gains intelligibility only within
a tradition, but I think that now things are, or are becoming different."
Matt said:
In the above, you use such an opposition to enunciate the changes that have
undertook religious mysticism, but I think you need to look for a new
distinction to formulate the changes because what Wittgenstein, Gadamer, and
Rorty (and almost every other post-modernist) have taught us is that
_everything_ is embedded in a tradition, a social practice, a language game,
which is something I think you follow in by saying all experience is
semiotic. Reason isn't a faculty that swings free of a tradition.
Reasonableness arises within a tradition of discourse when certain criteria
have been met, criteria determined by each particular language game.
Scott:
But is this still true now that we are aware of the myriad ways reason has
been held captive by a tradition? The reason I have been arguing that
Intellect (which I am using interchangeably with Reason) should be treated
as being another name for Emptiness is that intellect can both work within a
language game and it can deconstruct them and build new ones. For sure, in
saying this I am still bound by a great deal of tradition, if for no other
reason that I am doing it in English. But that doesn't prevent me from
pointing to Emptiness, which is saying that every thing in every language
game is empty. Since 'Emptiness' is a word in the mystical language game, it
too is empty. On the other hand, it is ridiculous to say that this computer
I am typing on doesn't exist, or that I can't know anything, or that
everything is meaningless. That is nihilism. To resolve these two one has
recourse to the logic of contradictory identity -- which doesn't resolve it,
but keeps us in the Middle Way, in a vocabulary that is neither logocentric
nor nihilistic. Emptiness is not other than language games, language games
are not other than Emptiness. So the claim I am making is that the language
game of pragmatism/Wittgenstein/Gadamer, when augmented with the logic of
contradictory identity, and when the language of Darwinism is overcome, is,
or at least has potential to be, a final vocabulary. In any case, why I see
it as escaping the "no metaphysics" metaphilosophical maxim of pragmatism,
and Sam's view that all mysticism is within a tradition, is that I see no
way that the culture can move past this point of pointing out that
"everything is embedded in a tradition, etc." It can, of course, regress.
The big question in my mind is, should I be calling this metaphysics? I
think it is, in part because it requires changes in what I think of as the
unstated metaphysical view of contemporary intellectual society, which is
basically Darwinian and nominalistic. More importantly, though, if one
starts to say that everything "really is" a token in a language game (which
implies that it manifests a type, i.e., universals are as necessary as
particulars) then the logic of Nagarjuna starts to become more accessible.
Matt asked:
And second, your "generic mysticism" ("language game of permanent
self-critique") looks an awful lot like Rorty's ironist. Is there a
difference?
Scott:
The difference is that I see this irony as soteriological. One does this,
that is, adopts this a way of life, to remove obstacles to Awakening.
- Scott
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