From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sun Feb 16 2003 - 23:10:02 GMT
DMB, Sam,
I think I know what you mean now when you say, "I [DMB] guess your [Matt]
style doesn't work for me." If you have as much trouble trying to read my
posts as I just had reading yours, then no wonder we usually talk past each
other.
Uh, I guess I just don't quite see the point of your last post. I mean,
you make a convincing enough case for perennial philosophy in Pirsig and
for it not being a foundation. Certainly I agree (whatever the particulars
of perennial philosophy), being as I'm one of the strongest supporters of
reading out any foundation activity in the MoQ. Your discussion would be
one of the things one could emphasize in Pirsig when arguing that the best
way to read Pirsig is as an antifoundationalist. As I see it, you aren't
arguing with me, really, but with people like Platt and Bo. They see the
MoQ as giving us the correct reading of reality that will allow us to use
reason to decide moral disputes once and for all. They argue that without
this correct _foundation_ for our moral arguments, this platform that we
can hash out our differences, we will be led to moral nihilism, relativism,
paralysis, degeneracy, and a number of other scary prospects that I don't
see as being entailed by the lack of a theory.
I think Sam said it best when he distinguished between two senses of
metaphysics. Sense 1 ("how we organise the filing cabinet of our minds -
how does physics relate to chemistry, ethics to literature, theology to
economics - 'the big picture'") is what I call "philosophy," following
Wilfrid Sellars. Sense 2 I think needs some touching up to get at what I
think the difference is. Sense 2, I would say, is "the search for the
correct final vocabulary of reality." Sense 1 is about pushing around the
contents of our minds, which is essentially what our final vocabulary is.
Sense 2 is the desire to get our individual final vocabulary closer to the
final vocabulary that reality uses. It is what leads to what Dewey called
that "whole nest and brood of Greek dualisms."
I think the issue is whether Pirsig thinks he's found the correct final
vocabulary that reality wishes we would just get on and describe it as or
whether Pirsig thinks he is just offering us one more way of describing
reality. I'm pretty sure I remember reading in Lila once a line like, "The
MoQ exists whether we know it or not," or something along those lines (for
the life of me I can't remember where it was). If that line exists, or
lines like it, then support is given to the Platt/Bo interpretation. If
they don't, and we are only left with the lines I like such as, "saying
that a Metaphysics of Quality is false and a subject-object metaphysics is
true is like saying that rectangular coordinates are true and polar
coordinates are false," (Ch. 8) then we are left with support for a
pragmatist reading.
Matt
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