From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 11 2003 - 03:13:59 GMT
Johnny, Andy,
This goes back to the conversation you two had a week or two ago.
Johnny said:
I don't see how intersubjective agreement could be called arbitrary. It is what it has to be. I think dmb imagines people having a meeting or something, and reaching some hasty compromise about what is true.
What happens is that history dictates what people believe, our shared mythos, morality, creates intersubjective agreement, and from that intersubjective agreement, more history and mythos and morality are created into the future. I think we should think of intersubjective agreement and quality as synonyms, though perhaps each brings to mind a different part of the same cycle.
Matt:
This is exactly right. History is the story of how our current mythos was created and the mythos we inherit, the mythos that dictates where we begin, is contingent upon where in the story we are. And like all stories, history has an arc (actually, very many) and our hopes and dreams are our projections of certain arcs that we like (democracy, pragmatism) and the destruction of arcs we don't like (despotism, metaphysics/SOM).
"Intersubjective agreement as Quality" is also, I think, what Pirsig is saying in this quote:
The quote, from Lila's Child, note 97, p. 526:
"It is important for an understanding of the MOQ to see that although 'common sense' dictates that inorganic nature came first, actually 'common sense' which is A SET OF IDEAS, has to come first. This 'common sense' is arrived at through a web of SOCIALLY APPROVED EVALUATIONS of various alternatives. The key term here is 'evaluation', i.e. quality decisions. The fundamental reality is not the common sense or the objects and laws approved of by common sense but the approval itself and the quality that leads to it."
Johnny said:
I don't think Rorty is wrong about anything, I just think it obfuscates because it seems to put the focus too far down the line and doesn't highlight the dependence on history and morality. When he says truth is a cultural phenomen, it seems to denigrate truth, culture, and phenomenons all at the same time, when what is called for is great respect of these things. It is right that morality and truth are maleable, but it is morality and truth that hold themselves together even as they change. Rorty seems to be saying that it is US that do that, and that makes people upset. The respect should be given to Morality, not us, as we are just one of Morality's creations.
Andy agreed with the first half, adding that Rorty pays great attention to history (some call his historicism "radical contingency"), but disagree with the second half with:
Well, I don't think I can buy that. Saying that we are morality's creations gets back to the idea of a divine creator, which pragmatists think is irrelevant to truth and morality. I addressed this in a little more detail in a post on 11/01/2003 to DMB (same thread as this). WHen you say morality and truth hold themselves together, you don't tell us how they do that. Pirsig says ideas are contained in language which is only possible if we have a society. From a quote of Pirsig's I used earlier today in responding to DMB, "Without society there is no intellect since there would be no one to talk to anyone else and thus no language to speak and thus to contain the idea." We do hold these ideas together through communication and agreement. I don't see how morality and truth can do this on their own without our help.
Matt:
I think Andy's right here because pragmatists would agree that morality, Quality, and intersubjective agreement are more or less interchangeable, but we don't know what it means to have greater respect for them, other than the philosophical realization of contingency. After that, greater respect doesn't make any sense, at least not in a sense where having greater respect for Morality will make us more moral.
I'm not quite sure yet where the major source of divergence is between Johnny and the pragmatists, but it may have something to do with "Matt pretty much denied that Pragmatism ought to call for giving greater respect to Morality as the source of intersubjective agreement. He seemed to feel that Pragmatism called for re-examining Morality from an outside perspective, now that we know it is created by us, and changing it to what we decide is better by creating fresh intersubjective agreement. In other words, not respecting Morality at all as such."
First, I don't know what it means to re-examine "Morality from an outside perspective" because if we make Morality and Quality synonymous, both are synonymous with reality, and that's all there is: you can get outside of it, we are radically contingent. An advocation of an "outside perspective" would be advocating SOM, a Kantian transcendental ego, a God's-eye view, a skyhook, etc., etc., which I am certainly not doing.
Now, I think we can change Morality, we should change it, and we can call this "creating fresh intersubjective agreement." But I think the only respect we need for Morality, Quality, History, and intersubjective agreement is the respect for continuing the narrative arcs of history that are good and not opting for what Bernard Yack called "total revolution," the idea that the only way for us to change anything is to change everything. Pragmatists think that intersubjective agreement, that which is needed to move forward in our hopes and dreams, is much more plausible if people agree on a few items. It's what Hegel described as the dialectical movement of history, thesis/antithesis/synthesis. It's what Marx, as a good Hegelian, tried to do in his story of economic development. He said that capitalism was one stop and a necessary one at that, but that we should move on from there.
One of the ways I can put my insouciance towards respecting Morality-as-such is to pick up one of Andy's lines of criticism: that Johnny is divinizing Morality/Quality. The analogous problem from theology is the problem of evil. If God is all-powerful, then why does he allow evil? Well, if everything emanates from Morality, if everything is Quality, how do we explain the presence of immorality? Because we don't respect Morality? But everything is Morality, even the bad stuff. Does that mean we should respect the bad stuff and the good stuff? This is certainly what Andy is objecting to. Neither of us sees the point. If you respect Morality-as-such, you respect all of it, unless you are able to lauch yourself out away from it, attain some transcendental view point, and pass judgement on the whole thing, which we've already ruled out of court.
Aside from the idea of "respecting Morality-as-such," which I find fairly superfluous to leading a good and moral life, I do find Johnny's use of expectation in place of Quality as a good place for developing Pirsig's Quality insight.
Matt
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