[MD] Transhumanism

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Arlo,

At the end of your reply, you say whatever disagreement 
we have in the area, we are likely splitting hairs.  I feel 
like I want to say yes and no.  With Pirsig's rhetorical 
conduct, and a lot of the attendant issues, we seem to be 
in accord--as I suspected we would--but there's one 
particular hair that I get the feeling we aren't.  On the one 
hand, it's just one tree in the forest we pretty much agree 
on calling "green," but on the other, I think it's a pretty 
important tree to think about.  Indeed, the way I think of it, 
it's a tree that often leads people to color the rest of forest 
blue, which is why I'd like to press again on it.  You're almost 
all green, but then this one blue tree...

Matt said:
Just as in the law, the spirit/letter distinction is not only 
important, but I think there's a real sense in which only 
later generations know what a visionary "really meant."

Arlo said:
This is poetic, but its inaccurate. Later generations may 
decide that thirdness "meant" hamsters, but I don't think 
that reflects in any way on Peirce's intention. This isn't to 
say that they are always "wrong", they may be spot on, its 
just that in the face of ambiguity to claim "this is what 
they meant" is always porous. Sometimes, in the face of 
untimely deaths, we have no choice, but at other times 
knowing what they "meant" could be clarified by the author.

Matt:
Hmm, I don't think accuracy is in play here--this might be 
a substantive philosophical disagreement.  Coinciding 
"meaning" with "authorial intention" is an important step in 
the interpretive process, but what I'm calling the 
"visionary" will be too contradictory for a consistent sense 
to emerge (on, e.g., a heavily leaned-on concept or 
passage).  The visionary aspect will often appear as 
oscillation, that when questioned on exact meaning, a 
visionary philosopher will oscillate between two 
contradictory positions (I wish I had good examples at 
hand).  So in the abstract, we have four points, A, B, C, 
and D.  D sounds strange, fitting in with A and B but 
creating tension with C, so a friend asks, "What does D 
mean, because it doesn't sound right with C?"  The 
philosopher responds with E.  The perceptive friend, 
however, notices that D-as-E fits with A and C, but now 
there's tension with B.  So now the friend asks, "wait, 
D-as-E doesn't fit with B--so what do you mean by D and 
E that fits with both A, B, and C?"  Or, the friend could 
have just as well asked at any moment about C or B 
instead of D or E (since A seems to be the only one 
stable and fittable with all of the others).

The sheer number of points to be isolated with captial 
letters promises the possibility of a philosopher never being 
able to iron out and be entirely consistent.  I think this 
coincides with life being just too fucking complicated, and 
the work of every individual being the unfinished task of, 
as Nietzsche put it, "becoming who you are"--you say 
"untimely death," but I say every visionary's death is 
untimely no matter how long they live because the more 
visionary they are, the more difficult it is to put everything 
in it's right place, make it all consistent.  This isn't about 
ambiguity, or slippage in language, or underdetermination--all 
those things exist, but in the stabilization of an "authorial 
intention" to every piece of the puzzle (and in the visionary, 
part of the problem comes from interpreters also slicing the 
pieces into different shapes to be put together--one more 
wrinkle of complication) it is absolutely _in principle_ 
possible, but what I'm driving at is that the visionary's 
dialogic exchange to explain what he meant about complex, 
visionary points would just as likely lead him--like future 
generations sifting the bad from the good--to _drop_ parts 
that cannot be put together.  "What you mean," I don't 
think, can be separated from the overall production of 
coherence in thoughts--nobody _wants_ to be 
contradictory, and if you _do_ (recall Emerson's 
"consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"), that desire 
is just one more piece to be put into coherence with all 
the other pieces.  If you assimilate "what you mean" to 
overall coherence, then you'll see genuine changes of mind 
in the philosopher as of a piece with what they meant.  
"I meant D-as-E at Y-point-in-time, but that just can't be 
put together with B.  You're right, good friend, I need to 
just drop D."  This scenario, in the questioning of "meaning" 
leading to the changing of mind, is why _narrative_ is 
important, and why the question of meaning (coherence) 
cannot be isolated in any fundamental way from a story 
of change.  And if that's the case, that means it is possible 
that the great visionary might have had to live 3,000 years 
before she would have gotten straight on what she meant 
through dialogic encounters.

This is what my encounter with Pirsig is like for me.  He 
glosses an earlier statement, and I see the later gloss as 
clearing up one mess but creating another one.  This, for 
the visionary, is normal.  It is the importance of Pirsig's 
assimilation of Dynamic Quality to Whitehead's "dim 
apprehension": the visionary glimpses a "world of 
discourse" that he then tries to put the words to, but not 
all of those words are going to get that glimpsed world 
right (which is to say, consistent and coherent).  Most 
often, the visionary writer creates the door through which 
we pass into the new world, and it is only in hindsight that 
_we_ see, but not the creator, what that door means 
because it is only after going through the door that you 
can see both sides (narrative being needed to encapsulate 
what it is like to be on one side and then the other).  

The obvious objection to the door metaphor is, why can't 
the visionary step through the door?  The answer is: 
that's what they spend their entire life doing by the 
production of visionary statements, but it is their _life_ 
that is the door.  Their writings from beginning to end 
constitute the door through which we step by putting their 
writings/thought/vision in a greater context.  The obvious 
objection to this gloss is, isn't _their_ writings the "greatest 
context" for their vision (the Pirsigian objecting that the 
MoQ is the greatest context)?  My answer: only if you 
don't want to step through the door and live in the world 
the visionary is trying to create.  And what the visionary 
wants most is for people to step through that door (which 
I believe is the right gloss on Pirsig saying "first figure out 
what you believe, then read philosophy books").

The intellectual historian is the kind of person whose job it 
is to resist going through the door, and simply provide the 
writer in all of their authorial intentive glory.  That means 
creating a mirror (that bridges the shifts in language over 
years) that reflects the writer, warts and all.  All of the 
falsities will show up, the parts that were wrong, but also 
all of the ambiguities and inconsistencies.  We will want to 
call the correct interpretation of these passages 
"underdetermined" because, as in my abstract account 
above, if my visionary had died before being able to answer 
her friend the first time, it wouldn't be clear whether we 
should gloss D in the direction of B (coinciding with a 
D-as-E _we_ provide) or C. This is where we think, "well, 
if only she'd lived a little longer, then we'd know what she 
meant."  But if I'm right that we cannot separate 
meaning-of-statements in any wholesale way from 
overall-coherence-of-web-of-beliefs (which is the upshot 
of Quine, Davidson, Brandom and post-positivistic 
philosophy of language), then the dialogic process required 
to find out "what was really meant" cannot be separated 
wholly from the dialogic process required to change 
people's minds, and that Peirce or Pirsig may have died 
2,000 years too early for enough dialogic questions to have 
been put to them to figure out what they themselves 
_mean_, because what they mean coincides with "what 
they want to say," and they don't want to say things that 
are inconsistent.

I don't know if enough of that makes sense, but I take it to 
be a substantive philosophical disagreement between 
making a strict distinction between, as E. D. Hirsch put it in 
the Validity of Interpretation, "meaning" (authorial intention) 
and "significance" (shucking the good from the bad, true 
from the false) and, on the other hand, thinking that there 
is a continuum between the two such that the visionary 
aspect of anybody coincides with overall _in_consistency in 
belief, and that the visionary _attempt_ that goes into 
writing is the attempt to create as many new beliefs to 
create a new context (the new "world of discourse") for 
the vision to be completely consistent.  And the more 
visionary, the longer one would have to live to complete 
the process.

You mention off-handedly that you think I understand Pirsig 
pretty
well.  What I would like to say is yes (and thank you), 
but whatever
clear, articulable understanding of Pirsig I 
have, it is predicated on
my occasionally and deliberately 
_ignoring_ some passages of Pirsig in
order to articulate a 
clear, consistent understanding of what Pirsig
"meant."  Mr. 
Buchanan is good at bringing up these ignored passages. 

He articulates a (relatively) clear, consistent understanding 
that
claims to hold it all together, but as far as I can tell, 
requires just
as much of an occasional ignoring of some 
passages as my articulation
does (passages I then try to 
respond with).  The difference between the
two of us, on 
this particular score, is that I'm deliberate and he is
not.  

The capsule sum of why I deliberately ignore is that, when 
Mr.
Buchanan brings in the other passages, and glosses 
what they mean, the
glosses make consistent sense 
_only_ if one were a Platonist/SOMist. 
Since both of us 
understand Pirsig to be rejecting SOM, I view those

passages as backsliding because I am unable to glimpse 
a coherent
understanding of the two kinds of passages 
together.  Mr. Buchanan--able, he thinks, to construct a 
consistent sense in which Pirsig isn't a backslider--is 
correct, it is an inability on my part.  What I remain 
unconvinced of is that there is an overall, consistent 
context in which all the parts can be made sense of in 
the way Mr. Buchanan suggests (in other words, I remain 
unconvinced that his interpretation is successful and 
coherent), and that my inability to do it, because of my 
unconvinced state, isn't insufficient imagination, but the 
inability of putting oil and water together.  

I might be wrong on this score, and Mr. Buchanan right, 
but as an honest inquirer I have to confess my 
recalcitrance.  This also means that if someone asked me, 
"given your brilliant and correct interpretation of Pirsig's 
philosophy, what did he mean by 'pre-intellectual cutting 
edge of experience'--and let me stipulate that you cannot 
say it is a Platonic wild oat or explain it away in a gloss 
that ignores the role of 'direct,' 'philosophology,' the 
glasses metaphor, and the menu metaphor--now: go, 
tell me," I would likely have to confess, "I don't know what 
he meant by it, not if it means knocking over the other 
things you stipulated as 'correct' already in my 
understanding--because as far as my imagination and 
ingenuity will let me, I do not see how they can be put 
together while holding on to Pirsig's visionary status."

Calling me short-sighted, unimaginative, and 
un-understanding because I am unable to so, while impolite, 
would be more or less right.  However, it would also be 
rhetorically silly to do so because such epithets rest on the 
question-begging claim that one has already offered that 
visionary and coherent understanding.  This claim is no 
more question-begging then the one that carves out two 
halves and says they are oil and water, but showing 
enough fallible foresight suggests stopping at the part 
where you notice that your conclusion begs the question 
over the opposite understanding.  So when history passages 
judgement in 2,000 years, you might be proven wrong, but 
at least you were a cool person to talk to.

Okay, at any rate, Arlo--this was another monologue, but 
if the position I tried to outline makes enough sense, what 
do you think?  Does the continuum between "particular 
meanings of statements" and "overall coherence" make 
sense, and does it suggest to you, as it does to me, the 
real sense in which only later generations know what a 
visionary "really meant"?  You said, "to critique Peirce's 
'thirdness' one must have an understanding of what he 
meant by the term," which I think is right, but the 
movement known as "hermeneutics," which finds 
adherents not just in Gadamer but also Kuhn, suggests 
that you have to posit "an understanding," and then 
grapple with a bit of text, modify the understanding to 
incorporate it, grapple with a bit more text, modify the 
understanding a bit more, grapple with a little more, etc., 
etc. (a notion of reading I suspect you find completely 
agreeable), _and_ after a number of spins around the 
circle you may find yourself noticing that your 
10-times-modified understanding has actually _lost_ the 
meaning of the bit of text you started with, so you 
begin grappling all over again
with bits you thought you 
grasped.  It may turn out that you will someday, with 
enough spins of the wheel, figure out the overall, 
coherent context in which to fit _all_ of the statements.  
But it may turn out that repeated spins of the wheel, 
and your record of those spins (forming a little narrative), 
causes you to notice a pattern in the spinning, that 
whenever you are at 12-o'clock on the wheel, the 
passages at 6-o'clock drop out into inconsistency, and 
vice versa.  This might cause you to conclude that 
there are two disparate elements at work here, oil and 
water, and that the overall, coherent context  in which 
to fit all of the statements is a narrativized account of 
the past meeting the future, artifacts of the old 
meeting visions of the future, old wineskins holding new 
wine.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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