From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sun Oct 19 2003 - 23:20:45 BST
Because I'm bored,
DMB said:
And your essay seems to suggest that the problem with the Nazis is that they reject DQ in favor of static patterns.
Matt:
My essay would only seem to suggest that if you take me as endorsing what I think Pirsig is suggesting.
DMB said:
Yes, DQ has lots to do with the evolutionary process, but you're trying way too hard to make DQ anything other than religious mysticism, because it freaks out your atheist ass. :-)
Matt:
I've never been freaked out by mysticism because I've never really identified it with theism. I don't want to get into a debate about mysticism, religion, organized religion, atheism, and theism (etc.) because I haven't sorted my thoughts out on them yet. But I will say this, I've never been involved in making DQ into something other than religious mysticism. I think my startling slogan that DQ is no more than a compliment is perfectly commensurate with mysticism. This is partly because of what I've read of Rorty, what I've read of David L. Hall on Rorty, and what Sam's said about Wittgenstein. I think in some (very curious and significant) ways, Rorty is a mystic in a professorial disguise. There are some good biographical reasons for this, too.
DMB said:
Ignoring the idea that DQ is the mystical reality has led you to the conclusion that "unmediated" experience only represents "unneeded conceptual problems".
Matt:
Nope, not what I said. The _distinction_ between mediated and unmediated experience is what leads to a lot of unneeded conceptual problems. Pragmatists would like to just have experience.
DMB said:
But an unmediated experience is just a descriptive name for a mystical experience. Since Lila sorta begins and ends with that scene in the teepee, I think its clear that Pirsig does not share the Pragmatists view. Pirsig gets at this kind of experience personally in at least two ways: by way of insanity and peyote. Then there is all that talk about ZEN and the pricelessness of solitude and empty space.
Matt:
All of that is easily pragmatized. Instead of saying that words get in the way of our experience (making a split between mediated and unmediated), pragmatists think that some experiences are unconveyable in language. When this happens, if you want to convey it, you end up expanding our language, expanding the limits of language, expanding what can be conveyed. Pragmatists would view Pirsig's insanity the way he explains it as being outside of the mythos (ZMM) or outside static patterns (Lila). This simply means that when he speaks, he talks in a way that doesn't make any sense to people who are inside the mythos. What Pirsig eventually tries to do is expand our language, expand our mythos, so that people will understand what he means.
(Footnote: I wouldn't normally use a spatial metaphor for insanity, but for simplicity sake I've done so.)
DMB said:
To say Pirsig is a bad pragmatist is nearly as weird saying Rorty is a bad mystic.
Matt:
It would seem weird to call Rorty a bad mystic, but I think of it more like Rorty is trying to clear space for mysticism.
DMB said:
I think that Plato has been wildly misunderstood by guys like Rorty. Plato seems to be in Rorty's sights because he's taken for a foundationalist asserting ahistorical truths or whatever, but he was actually talking about the mystical reality.
Matt:
This is where I make a distinction between Plato's writings and Platonic philosophy. Plato's writings admit for all sorts of interpretations, one being a "foundationalist asserting ahistorical truths" and another as "talking about the mystical reality". I know you won't accept this because we've been over it before, but Platonic philosophy doesn't look back to the complicated writings of Plato so much as it looks back to the long line of interpretation done on Plato. Rorty's enemy is the foundationalist, not the mystic, and so the Plato Rorty is talking about is the one that sounds like a foundationalist, the one that has convinced much of Western Philosophy that he was a foundationalist.
DMB said:
He was talking about something beyond history and prior to intellect.
Matt:
"Something beyond history"? What does "ahistorical" mean to you if not "beyond history"?
DMB said:
Seriously? No knockout argument can be delivered? How about this? Genocide is evil. Murder is wrong. Coming up with arguments against the Nazis makes shooting fish-in-a-barrel look like rocket surgery.
Matt:
Holy Cow!!! I am convinced!!! Your twin arguments "genocide is evil" and "murder is wrong" have shut me down! Holy bazookas was I wrong! Thank you for convincing me!
DMB said:
The problem is trying to grasp how anyone could have thought that Nazism was a good thing, as millions certainly did.
Matt:
That is a problem, and the pragmatist thinks it has little to do with being logical.
DMB said:
The Nazis and the fundamentalists would probably go along with you on that, but I think unjustified convictions are just about exactly what we DON'T need.
Matt:
Look closer Watson. I said "philosophical justification". Any conviction can be justified, but no conviction can be justified in all possible vocabularies. The American moral vocabulary and the MoQian vocabulary are two examples where the Nazi would not be able to justify his convictions. That's why they used Hitler's and Rosenberg's, though. My point was that pragmatists don't think our convictions, in other words our vocabularies in which our convictions are spelled out, need a philosophical underpinning. And I know you don't think this, because if you did think it in the relevant sense, you'd be a foundationalist and a Kantian.
DMB said:
What I object to here is the idea that Pirsig's explanation of the Nazis rests upon "a claim about the way Reality REALLY is". You're confusing claims about the mystical reality with foundationalist claims about the world of experience. Pirsig's claims about the Nazis only assert that some static values are better and more evolved than others.
Matt:
The problem that my posts were attempting to get at is the problem of arguing with the Nazi that our static values are better and more evolved than their's. As Platt amazingly agrees, this is impossible.
DMB said:
I'm a Kantian? You've mistaken mysticism for something else again!
Matt:
Actually, Kant can be read as having a little bit of the mystic in him with the noumena and all. And as wanting a philosophical justification for our liberal intuitions.
Matt
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