Donald T Palmgren (lonewolf@utkux.utcc.utk.edu)
Tue, 17 Feb 1998 04:46:44 +0100
Hey, gang,
I want to say in my defence that before throwing Peter into the
pool we asked him if he wanted to take off his watch and take out his
wallet first. He were considerate thugs.
(By the way Peter, John, Randolph and Timm (back in Germany but
w/in reach of e-mail) all say hi.)
O-kay we have two possibilities about what counts as understanding
in philosophy: (1) seeing where it all fits in relation to itself --
somebody once said "Philosophy is the study of its own history," and in
universities it by-and-large is, and (2) what I call the "machine idea" --
that a philosophical system is like a machine that, if you've understood
it, you can climb inside and make it run for you -- if you understand the
MoQ then you can, say, explain Chaos theory in MoQ terms. Can anybody
name other tests of understanding?
See this facinates me because philosophers can't agree on what
philosophy is. If you give a friend a coppy of ZMM to read and they ask,
"Why should I?" what will you say?
In medicine what counts as understanding -- bottom line -- is that
you can heal the sick. What counts as understanding in philosophy? I'd
like to keep this as a running side-bar to our walk through German
Idealism/MoQ, if that's cool. When we get to Hegel on the far side of
Kant he'll say that philosophy has no content, and has no form either. (?)
Boy, Diana, you just took off like you were shot out of a canon
(pun intended)! I hope that overview helps everyone not so steeped in the
history of philosophy, but everbody keep in mind that when you take
somthing inherently complex and simplify it you also distort. Rather than
chalanging point-by-point what I don't agree w/ I'll just stick w/ Kant
For The Masses, for now. I want to examin German Idealism in particuler
because there, there has always been a mingeling of East and West from
Eckhardt to Bohme to Kant to Hegel to Shopenhower to Nietszche. (Frankly
if Pirsig was from Germany he wouldn't be very radical at all.)
But before I press on to Kant I'll first re-emphasize my Sub-Ob vs
Mind-Body point. In the Anglo-Amarican tradition we're infected w/
Decartes and tend to interpret Sub-Ob as insubstantial-substantial.
"Quality can not be independently derived from either mind or
matter."
-- RM Pirsig, "Subjects, Objects, Data and Values" p.12
But if you read the German Idealist this way then you'll missrepresent
them. So, there, when you see "subject" and "object" you can substitute
"knower" and "known."
The other set of (related) words that Pirsig throws around are
"subjective" and "objective" -- what do they mean?
Well, something is objective if it is a "brute fact." If I look at
a blue shirt can I convince myself that I am seeing green? Well, I can
imagine a green shirt there, but I'm still looking at a blue shirt. (You
could say, "Well, you might wear colored glasses, or you could be color
blind," but these sort of objections stand out because they contrast w/
the vast manifold of instances in which we all agree. 99.9 % of the time
we can agree that the male cardinal has red plumage and the female,
brown.) The existance of science depends upon brute facts.
If something is not a brute fact then we say it's "subjective."
Star constilations are a good example. I can look at a cluster and see it
as now one thing, now another. Or think of cloud wathching. Now even
subjective things can be by-and-large's -- by and large Picaso is
considered the greatist artist of the last 100 years, but not everyone
likes Picaso, and one might be at one time more atracted to his early work
and at another more attracted to his late works. And in Golden Age Athens
Picaso would not have been appreciated at all. Go back to our star
constilations: By and large we see the European Zodiac, but there is a
whole different zodiac for Native Amaricans.
The purpose of LILA was to account for the apparent subjectivity
in taste -- to explain, as it were, the koan of the brujo. Regardless of
what he says, Pirsig is constantly trying to make Quality, goodness,
excellence... into a brute fact -- to render it objective. After all, if
it's not a brute fact how would you grade students in a rhetoric class?
I'm sure that's longer than it needs to be, but there's a reason
for clearifying all these words so we know just what we mean. If Pirsig
wants to get rid of SOM then it's significant if what he really means is
MBd, because that's something the German Idealist set out to do while not
at the same time rendering the world totally subjective (as Hume did --
'it's all in your mind').
Okay, now I promise, next time: Kant! And I'll show you how Kant
re-defines "object" in a pretty wild and original fashion (much like
Pirsig did w/ his "static patterns of value").
TTFN
Donny
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