From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Oct 09 2004 - 18:09:15 BST
David and Sam suggested a couple different ways of understanding
Cartesianism and modernism and I'd just like to comment.
David's first suggestion was, "Would it be fair to say that modernism was
either materialist or positivist in outlook, but later moves towards
post-modernism?" My reaction is no. Like Sam, I would for the most part
take "modernism" and "Cartesianism" to pretty much be synonymous and the
reason for this is that I take both to be about the idea of epistemology
being an important subject. If we were to limit one of the terms, I would
go for Cartesianism, which you could limit to kinds of dualisms, or whatever
(see below for a couple of other ways). I think we have to leave "modern
philosophy" as a designator for epistemological concerns (at least as long
as we are making historiographical demarcations, which I'm not necessarily
against revising; it might be important to do so at some point, in some
other direction) because if we made it revolve around materialism or
postivism, you'd have to leave out Berkeley and Spinoza, let alone the
"father of modern philosophy," Descartes, and then have to figure out what
Kant was, etc. You could do it, but I don't think it catches what these
people thought was important (certainly not what I think is important). The
other reason I would resist the move to identifying "modernism" with
"materialism" is that pragmatists think that once we forget about
epistemology (which I take to be the move towards post-modernism (which
really has nothing to do with ontological theses, but rather the status of
concepts like "truth")) we won't have any real desire to do ontology, no
reason to be all that concerned about materialism v. idealism, or any of the
others.
David's other suggestion was, "So SOM and cartesianism are both dualisms,
are there any candidates for non-cartesian dualisms?" I take this to be a
suggestion (rather than a question) because it considers the possibility of
there being non-Cartesian dualisms. I don't think there can be because I
think that as long as you are under any kind of dualism (or any other kind
of substance demarcating philosophy), you will hopelessly fall into doing
epistemology, having to answer the skeptic's stupid questions.
Sam's suggestion was this: "The central idea of Cartesianism is that the
mind is separate from the body and that the mind can be better and more
fully understood than the body. One's essential identity is one's mind and
the interior processes of the mind have more reality than the physical
processes of the body. It follows from this that what you think
(subjectivity) is more important than anything outside you in the physical
world (objectivity); from this would be developed the Enlightenment concept
of the subject." This is an example of a more specific, restricted sense of
"Cartesianism" and is perfectly accurate (though obviously "central idea"
may always remain debateable). This sense of Cartesianism reflects (using
the rough-and-ready designators still used by undergraduate philosophy
courses) pre-Kantian rationalism. Under this sense, though, I think we have
to say that SOM is _not_ Cartesianism. The above passage misleadingly puts
it as "subjectivity is more important than objectivity" (I don't think the
categories quite existed as they do now when Descartes was writing), which
is clearly not Pirsig's target when he first sets up the problem in ZMM.
Pirsig's target is at least the post-Kantian reconciliation of the
empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) and the rationalists (Descartes,
Leibniz, Spinoza) and more certainly the logical positivists (which is
clearly obvious by the time of Lila).
There are at least two problems at this point. If, at least in Lila, his
professed target is a more recent creation, than his philosophy can
reasonably called post-postivistic, as building upon the themes of
postivism, but without all the excess. And it does look like this when he
talks about the MoQ and logical positivism subscribing to empiricism, the
version of which is the exact opposite of the above, restricted sense of
Cartesianism. And though Pirsig does not go into any of the so-called
"problems of philosophy" in any great depth, in the case of the mind-body
problem, I think Pirsig has given us the tools to deal adequately with it
(though I won't go into that here). But calling Pirsig "post-postivistic"
seems a little much, as Pirsig doesn't write in the idiom of the analytic
philosophers. To be post-positivistic, I would think that you would have to
follow the trail of philosophy up to a certain point, and then diverge
(like, say Donald Davidson). This confronts us, again then, with the
Greeks. His professed target in ZMM are the Greeks, which then gives us a
much wider sense of SOM. It is this wider sense of SOM that I would want to
identify with modern philosophy/Cartesianism because I think the problem
Pirsig identifies in the Greeks is a problem that only reaches full
self-consciousness in the modern period. So, I think we can say that Pirsig
is post-postivistic in the sense that he's anti-Platonic or anti-Cartesian.
To sum up with what I've been saying, I would want to take "modern
philosophy" to mean the desire to do epistemology, the thought that the
skeptic needs to be answered rather than bypassed. I would want to take
"Cartesianism" in the wide sense to be synonymous with modern philosophy, or
in a restricted sense to be some form of the thesis that certainty proceeds
from the mind (this would extend "rationalism" to include Descartes to Kant
to Chomsky). In these general terms, SOM in the wide, Greek-as-target sense
is synonymous with modern philosophy, though I think its ambiguous as to
whether Pirsig is modern or post-modern then (I think there is evidence for
both). On the other hand, SOM in its more restricted,
logical-positivist-as-target sense is not synonymous with the specific sense
of Cartesianism because the logical positivist (and therefore SOM) is
already post-Cartesian (though I wouldn't be surprised if there remained a
few Cartesian remenants in Pirsig).
Matt
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