[MD] What does Pirsig mean by metaphysics?

[Steven Peterson]

Hi DMB,


Steve said:
Rorty doesn't say that we [have] nothing without a foundation. That is a
fear that other people have that Rorty thinks we don't need to have.

dmb says:
Yes, I realize that Rorty doesn't worry about that. In fact, I learned the
meaning of the word "insouciance" from Hickman's discussion of Rorty. It
means "a casual lack of concern; indifference". Hickman says this is
precisely what "rankles" people. That means to "cause annoyance or
resentment that persists" and "irritate", although the term originally
referred to a festering sore.
 Steve:
Rorty is not indifferent to the issue. He in fact works hard to try to
convince people that this is an issue that we don't need to worry about. We
do just fine ethically and scientifically without access to such ahistorical
foundations such as "The Moral Law" or "Truth." Rorty paints us pictures of
what inquiry is like without such notions to show that we are better off
without them.

For example, instead of ethical inquiry into The Moral Law by which we might
hopelessly try to measure progress as getting in better and better relation
to this Law, we have an ever-widening circle of moral concern where progress
is obvious when we consider the inclusion of various minority groups.

Consider the following passage and see what a "relativist" Rorty is. You'll
recognize the last sentence since you quoted it before, but in context it is
a denial of relativism:

Rorty:
“It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment,
we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various
conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow
their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ ... It is a concept which
I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges
and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who
enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college
with views more like our own ... The fundamentalist parents of our
fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal
establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their
point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical
communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten
teachers talking with their students ... When we American college teachers
encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of
reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight
to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to
convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign
first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students
for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period
assigned The Diary of Anne Frank... You have to be educated in order to be
... a participant in our conversation ... So we are going to go right on
trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your
fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views
seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate
intolerance such as yours ... I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei
[domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I
think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent
Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of
their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents ... I am just as provincial
and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der
Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.”




> Steve said:
> The reason that there is no shortage of Rorty critics is because the way to
> say something interesting is to disagree with Rorty. That's how academia
> works.  I mean, there are no DMB critics out there, because DMB is not yet
> considered worth even disagreeing with. But if you turn out to be
> successful, I'm sure all kinds of people will be interested in disagreeing
> with you. If that happens, you will hope that such people at least show an
> understanding of what you are saying rather than just putting words in your
> mouth as you and Hickman seem to be doing.
>
> dmb says:
> Well, thanks for taking me seriously enough to disagree. I mean that. But I
> think it's quite unfair to dismiss Hickman or accuse him of putting words in
> anyone's mouth. He's a respected Dewey scholar, Director of the Dewey Center
> in fact, and his work is peer reviewed and all that. I certainly think he
> should be allowed to have an opinion of Rorty. The idea that Rorty has so
> many critics because he's so interesting and successful is only true to a
> point, however. That doesn't seem to be the consensus among other
> philosophers anyway.
> The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy has an article on Rorty, which Matt
> recommended a week or two ago, which says...
> "The broad scope of Rorty's metaphilosophical deconstruction, together with
> a penchant for uncashed metaphor and swift, broad-stroke historical
> narrative, has gained Rorty a sturdy reputation as an anti-philosopher's
> philosopher. While his writing enjoys an unusual degree of popularity beyond
> the confines of the profession, Rorty's work is often regarded with
> suspicion and scepticism within academic philosophy."
> And Susan Haack, one of Rorty's harshest critics and a big fan of Peirce,
> is much less kind about it. She says that he has a fan-base outside of
> philosophy, usually in English departments and such, because that's where
> you find the pretentious dilettantes. Ouch. Even I winced at that.
>
Steve:
Consider also Jeffrey Stout who wrote about Rorty: "No one, since Dewey, has
done more to give the American philsophical tradition a voice in the
conversation of humankind. No one, since Heidegger and Wittgenstein, has
done more to provoke thought about the path that led modern philosophy from
Descartes to Nietzche. No recent philosopher has addressed a broader
audience with less cant on the problems facing democracy. No American
intellectual in his generation has behaved with more grace in responding to
critics.

After Stout says this, he of course goes on to address Rorty's philosophy
and rips him a new asshole, because if you aren't responding to Rorty these
days, to some extent you just aren't in the conversation.


Steve said:
But you seem to have missed the point that Hickman and Rorty are using the
word to mean different things, so they may not even really be disagreeing.
Both agree that the project that Rorty labels metaphysics is one we are
better off dropping. And both think there is still a lot to talk about once
we drop that project.

dmb says:
> Yes, Hickman points out the areas of agreement and I realize that dropping
> everything bad about metaphysics is not very different from dropping it
> altogether and calling the remainder something else. But if you could read
> what I just read, you'd surely agree that it's really not plausible to say
> Hickman has no real disagreements with Rorty on these issues. In several of
> the essays, he lays out a disagreement or two on nearly every page. (In most
> of the essays he's not mentioned at all.) ".. his neopragmatism seems
> somewhat timid and even nebulous when compared to the robust program of
> experimental reconstruction advanced as a part of Dewey classical
> Pragmatism" "Rorty's postion on these matters hardly matches up with Dewey's
> version of Pragmatism." "Rorty may describe himself as a 'follower' of Dewey
> in these matters, but his Dewey is not one that I am able to recognize.



 Steve:
As a "follower of Dewey" Rorty didn't see himself as a recapitulator of
Dewey so much as he saw himself as carrying on with many of Dewey's projects
and using Dewey as a jumping off point. I'm sure there are lots of points of
inconsistency between Dewey's and Rorty's philosophies. I don't think we
need to argue about whether Hickman or Rorty is more true to the thinking of
Dewey in his time. I think that Rorty would have liked to think that his
views are how Dewey's thinking may have developed if Dewey were still alive
and had taken part in all the conversations of the past hundred years.

Best,
Steve