[MD] What does Pirsig mean by metaphysics?

[david buchanan]

Steve said:
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:


dmb says:

Okay, now you're starting to freak me out. Where you see a denial of relativism, I see a confession of relativism. And yes, the confession comes in the last sentence. "I'm just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi" is the groundless part and "I serve a better cause" is the social hope. That's what's ironic about the liberal ironist, see. He knows there is no ground, no basis for his liberal beliefs except his own provincial context but he joins in solidarity with others of the same tribe to serve the cause anyway. I mean, such a reading of this passage is only consistent with other Rorty quotes, no? In any case, I definitely don't understand how this can be read as a denial of relativism. Please explain.

> 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.”
> 
> 
> 



 		 	   		  
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