[MD] Language, SOM, and the MoQ

[Matt Kundert]

DMB,

DMB said:
I think we've actually made some progress in that we both now agree that 
Pirsig has NOT given us "mere metaphysics", which usually consists in making 
assertions about otherworldly abstract entities like "God" and the Platonic 
"forms" for which there is no evidence. I was under the impression that you 
saw the MOQ as one of these, and was criticizing as such. See, its not that 
you fail to distinguish between the kind of speculative metaphysics about 
absolute and eternal truths that can never be proven and the less grandiose 
systems of coherent and rational descriptions. I think the problem is that 
you are reading the mystical aspects of the MOQ as if it were that kind of 
mere metaphysics, as if it weren't based on reality as we actually 
experience it.

Matt:
I never simply "saw" Pirsig's philosophy or it's mystical aspects as 
bad-metaphysics.  What I've always argued is that some of Pirsig's 
formulations _look like_ bad-metaphysics.  So what I've tried to do is 
explain why they look like it, why the formulation will shift into 
bad-metaphysics if taken to mean certain things, and then try to show how a 
reformulation would make his philosophy not look like it anymore.  I just 
don't understand why its taken you so long to understand that (though I'm 
not sure that you do yet).

DMB said:
I think you've confused DQ, which is a category of experience and can be 
empirically verified, with the Christian 'Kingdom of Heaven', which has no 
basis in experience and can only be verified after death, which means it 
can't be varified at all. I think it sort of interesting that "Christianity 
is Platonism for the people", that you are so thorough in your rejection of 
Platonism and yet you have no problem with Sam's Christianity.

Matt:
I don't think I confused them so much as I was pointing out the still 
similarities between certain (bad) formulations of DQ and certain (bad) 
formulations of the "Kingdom of Heaven."

And its not that I have "no problem with Sam's Christianity."  Well, I 
kinda' don't.  I think Sam is fairly thorough in his philosophical rejection 
of Platonism and SOM.  But we still do have outstanding disagreements (which 
I'll touch on).

DMB said:
I think this pretty well describes "the problem" that Pirsig's MOQ tries to 
solve. I think this is not just a philosophological problem, but a cultural 
and historical problem. I think the "plight of modern Western culture", the 
one that "may well end in catastrophe", is all about the loss of moral and 
values. ... I think Pirsig wants to get rid of Platonism and theism and even 
empty catagories like Kant's realm of things-in-themselves without getting 
rid of values, morals and mysticism.

Matt:
This is probably why I don't get as excited about "the problem" when I look 
at it from a philosophical angle.  From where I'm standing (which should be 
where Pirsig's standing), you couldn't get rid of values or morals if you 
tried.  Pirsig didn't say "Quality is reality if you want it to be."  
Quality = reality.  He was making a statement about the indelible link 
between value and humanity's place in the world.  We couldn't _not_ make 
moral choices if we tried.  The only way to get rid of "values, morals" is 
if you restricted their senses quite a bit more than Pirsig usually does.  
But then you're dealing with a slightly different problem.

DMB said:
And so, when I object to neurological descriptions, its not because I want 
to privilege one perspective over another. Quite the opposite. Its just that 
it smacks of materialistic reductionism and the belief that mystical 
experience can be explained in terms of brain activity. It introduces the 
very perspective that excludes mysticism. I mean, the neurological 
description is often advanced in order to preclude the kind of descriptions 
that come down to us through the myths and religions of the world. ... But 
the objection has nothing to do with insisting on a particular description. 
In fact, the perennial philosophy is supposed to be an alternative to any 
one perspective.

Matt:
Okay, so we agree that when "privilege" means "ahistorical privilege" that 
there is no privileging that can be done to a vocabulary or perspective.  
But that just means we are left with the practical choices of which 
vocabulary or perspective we do use.  That's the okay kind of privileging we 
do when we "privilege," say, democracy over fascism.  So its not the case 
that I am "trying to equal weight and validity to the various descriptions 
from the various contexts as if each one were an isolated island unconnected 
to any other place."  They are connected, but there are different kinds of 
connections, one of which is the kind of connection where there isn't much 
of a connection.  The vocabulary I'm trying to house all other vocabularies 
in (the metavocabulary that connects everything) is a vocabulary that says 
that we can have vocabularies that don't have much to do with each other, 
that don't really connect up.  We can say that neurology doesn't have much 
to do with mystical explanation.  They don't have much connection because 
they are doing different things.  I think trying to make all the 
vocabularies connect more closely than that is what leads to reductionism, 
which is something that neither one of us wants.

What I want you to see with neurological descriptions is that they are no 
more inherently reductionistic (taken in the bad-metaphysical sense of 
privileging above) than mystical descriptions.  What we are left with then 
afterwards is a choice in which description we use when.  The only sense in 
which neurological descriptions cannot explain mystical experience is the 
sense in which they are inappropriate to the kind of explanation that's 
being looked for.  This is a lot of what I've been talking about with 
vocabularies has revolved around.  Take the car analogy we used briefly.  By 
themselves, a vector description of the car crash is no more wrong then a 
first-person description.  But when trying to figure out how fast your face 
went through the windshield, it is inappropriate to answer "It was the most 
terrifying thing..." because it doesn't help for what you're looking for at 
that moment.  And likewise, when recovering from the emotional trauma of the 
accident, the particular velocities of your body and the car and the 
windshield aren't any help ("How did you feel during the accident?" "My head 
went through the windshield at 70mph." "Okay, but how did you feel?").  They 
are different descriptions for the same event that are only useful depending 
on what you're doing, just as Pirsig said sometimes Cartesian coordinates 
help, sometimes polar.

(And by the way, I think its a mistake to say "the perennial philosophy is 
supposed to be an alternative to any one perspective" because an alternative 
to a perspective can only be another perspective.  If it were otherwise, it 
would start to look like bad-metaphysics (which you do not want).  It would 
be better to say that the perennial philosophy perspective offers advantages 
over, say, a material-reductionistic perspective or a idealism perspective 
or a dualistic, SOM perspective, etc.)

The way I ultimately view our last conversation (that is, putting aside 
little squabbles over "vocabulary" and "pure sensation") is that our hearts 
are both in the right place, we just disagree on the best way forward.  
Which, from my point of view, isn't as dire as all that.  It may be more 
dire from your perspective, though.  If we both agree that bad-metaphysics 
is impossible, then we are left with the practical problem of solving the 
various cultural and political and spiritual problems of modern society.  
And which way we think is best is an empirical question that can only be 
answered by our children, after we've tried out various approaches to the 
problems.  If I understand you correctly, you think that eventually for our 
culture to move forward, everyone will need to find some form of mysticism.  
Contrariwise, Sam thinks that eventually for our culture to move forward 
everyone will need to be some kind of Christian.  And I think, contrary to 
you both, that eventually our culture will need to become more fully 
secularist.  And almost everybody else in this forum has a different view 
from the three of us.  I don't know how to argue for any one of those over 
the others except in the piecemeal ways in which you point out the potential 
advantages of one over the others.

DMB said:
I sincerely hope this explanation makes mysticism more acceptable. I hope 
you can see how Pirsig's claims about mysticism can be made and are made 
without resorting to mere metaphysics and without insisting on any exclusive 
truth or particular descriptions.

But I'm not holding my breath.

Matt:
Again, its only because of your own cotton in your ears that you haven't 
understood that I already have accepted mysticism without a resort to 
bad-metaphysics.  All I've been enunciating are fears I have over some of 
your (and Pirsig's) choice in words, like "pure sensation."  I still think 
that's a bad idea.  And I also think its a bad idea to say that the 
perrenial philosophy you're touting is _not_ a perspective.  That sounds 
like bad-metaphysics.  When you say right at the end that "Philosophical 
mysticism is most definately NOT a single, exclusive perspective. I can 
hardly imagine a broader view that includes so many different contexts and 
perspectives," red flags go off in my head.  The first sentence is under a 
lot of tension with the second.  Philosophical mysticism _is_ a single, 
exclusive perspective just because all perspectives are single and 
exclusive.  However, it is the kind of _view_ (which means the same thing as 
perspective) that is what I called above a metavocabulary, the kind of 
perspective that houses more particular ones, like physics and religion.  In 
this case, exclusivity is taken to mean reductionistic.  And that means that 
perspectives, though still single, can be inclusive.  You want to say that 
philosophical mysticism is better than SOM because SOM _reduces_ all other 
perspectives and vocabularies to a single, physical perspective or 
vocabulary.  Philosophical mysticism, on the other hand, _includes_ the 
other perspectives without reducing them to any particular perspective.  It 
lets them rub elbows without becoming identical.

So on the one hand I want to say that that's what I've been talking about 
this whole time and on the other hand, since you see a difference between my 
deprivileging maneuvers and yours, why doesn't your housing vocabulary give 
"equal weight and validity to the various descriptions from the various 
contexts as if each one were an isolated island unconnected to any other 
place"?  If you swing that weapon at me, it either hits you too, or your 
view becomes reductionistic (which is why, every time you swing a weapon 
like that at me, I say you're insisting on a particular description; 
insisting isn't bad by itself (as I once tried to argue without response), 
its just insisting in certain contexts that's bad; and it looked as though 
you were insisting in a bad context and not explaining yourself well).  
However, if you put that weapon down, then you're free to say, as I have 
been trying, that all of our descriptions can live together in harmony, 
though perhaps not in identity.

So, like you, I sincerely hope this addition to our on-going drama helps 
break this conversation to another level.  As I see it, you either have to 
be a bit more nuanced in your attacks on my neopragmatism (because so far, 
it looks like you are as much a neopragmatist as I am in spirit) or start 
offering the advantages of mysticism that I may be missing out on, the 
piecemeal suggestions about empirical questions of which way our culture 
should go.  The first is the conversation you never wanted to have but say I 
forced you into having.  The second is the conversation you wanted to have 
all along but have refrained from.

And looking again back at how the conversation started, I have to again 
assert blame on you.  You steered the conversation from the get go when you 
"hailed" me at the top to make good on your claim that both Sam and I suffer 
from "a cultural blind spot with respect to mysticism and that [our] views 
exhibit that bias."  I thought before, I thought then, and I think now that 
"blind spot" is still the (very) wrong weapon to use.  If you'll recall, my 
response didn't _try_ to pin bad-metaphysics on mysticism.  It said I wasn't 
sure if it had to be bad or not, thus giving you an opportunity to offer a 
non-bad version.  But at the end of my first comment, I said that I thought 
mysticism probably could fit in fine with my pragmatism, indicating that I 
think I already have an idea of what a non-bad version looks like.  I think 
its when you tried to offer your version of mysticism while simultaneously 
trying to pin "blind spot" that mucked everything up, that sent off red 
flags everywhere while I read your posts.

I think trying to pin "blind spot" in a philosophical sense will inevitably 
lead to bad-metaphysics.  I've been trying ever since that day to untangle 
all the red flags from what you're _trying_ to say, but for a long while the 
more we talked the more red flags appeared.  Blame me if you want for having 
cotton in my ears, but I think all those red flags were for real and that 
you still talk with a mouthful of bad-metaphysical sounding terms.  That's 
not bad by itself, but when you attack my philosophical position, when we 
should be agreeing, why shouldn't I take those red flags to be indications 
of real difference?  And if attacking, then real difference means 
bad-metaphysics.  If it doesn't mean bad-metaphysics, then you shouldn't be 
attacking.

See, that's the advantage of being a one-trick pony.  If you're only 
performing one trick at a time, then it makes it very easy to see who is 
with you and who against (on that particular topic).  I do in fact perform 
other tricks, and have done so on many occasions here.  But I try very hard 
not to put too many balls in the air at once, and if I do, to keep track of 
them _seperately_ so that some clear answers can be developed about where I 
stand in relation to others.

Matt

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