[MD] Language, SOM, and the MoQ

[david buchanan]

Matt, MOQers and talkers:

Firstly, I want to say Merry Christmas to the Pirsigs and wish everyone 
heaps of comfort and joy. (Yep. I'm at work and posting on Christmas, but 
don't worry. I'm well supplied and have the whole place to myself.) Having 
said that, I now return to being my old nasty self...

Matt said:
I never simply "saw" Pirsig's philosophy or it's mystical aspects 
asbad-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 says:
Your objections have been difficult to understand for lots of reasons and 
I've already named the biggest ones many times. I won't bother to repeat 
them. But lately I've been investigating things in a more philosophological 
mode. Understanding your perspective was not the aim, just a lucky side 
effect. Well, maybe "understanding" would be too strong a word. But it has 
helped. Its still not very clear why some formulations "look like" bad 
metaphysics to you. From my perspective, you take things too far. There is 
an extremism to your objections that makes little sense to me and that I 
find hard to reconcile with Pirsig's claims. I'm still convinced that your 
brand of neopragmatism would fail to solve, or rather un-solve, the problems 
addressed by the MOQ. The skeptic vs idealist thing still seems useful here 
too. I think its not just that your project is limited to the negative, that 
the reconstruction is a different phase of the project. I think your 
negative project is too skeptical and so extreme that some of Pirsig's 
formulations WOULD be seen as bad metaphysics to you. And what I have yet to 
understand is exactly what your objections entail. And I really do what to 
understand - so that I can PROPERLY defeat them.

Matt said:
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."

dmb says:
Is there a good formulation of the "kingdom of heaven"? I posted the line, 
"Heaven is this world, rightly seen" and thought your response was pretty 
funny. You objected to the phrase "rightly seen" rather than the word 
"heaven". I thought, "Man, that is some wacky kind of skepticism."  Its ok 
to talk about a mythological place but not to make any claims about seeing 
things rightly. Anyway, the point of that line is simply that its a mistake 
to think of heaven as some other place, as a supernatural realm. It asserts 
that heaven is a state of consciousness, a different way of "seeing". It 
says that Nirvana is not elsewhere, that it is given in experience in this 
life. So anyway, your objection not only failed to address this assertion, 
it seems to be based on the idea that nothing can ever be "rightly seen". 
This is the kind of extremism that I do not get. It strikes me as 
unjustified and quite paralyzing.

Matt said:
...Well, I kinda' don't. (have a problem with Sam's Christianity.) I think 
Sam is fairly thorough in his philosophical rejection of Platonism and SOM.

dmb says:
If you took "philosophical rejection of" out of that last sentence, I'd 
agree with you. I mean, if Augustine was right and "Christianity is 
Platonism for the people", and if Sam is a Christian, then I fail to see how 
he has thoroughly rejected Platonism. I think his re-formulation of the 
MOQ's fouth level basically puts the emphasis back onto the isolated 
subjective self too. It all looks pretty damn SOMish too me. I suspect Sam 
has merely adopted the some of those extreme post-modern moves, the ones 
that will allow him to treat science and rationality is such a way that it 
does not threaten his faith. (I'm sending a copy of this to Sam so that he 
can reply if he wants.) I should also mention that the relationship between 
Platonism and Christianity was explored in a little more detail in 
yesterday's MF forum, where the issue of theism is under discussion yet 
again.

Conerning the death of God and the subsequent loss of morals and values, 
Matt said:
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 says:
I don't think its important that you get "excited" about the problem. I just 
think its important to understand what Pirsig is trying to do. Any given 
solution only makes when you understand the problem, right? And yes, Pirsig 
is saying that the whole she-bang is all about value, that even a chair can 
be seen as a little moral order. But that's the solution, not the problem. 
The problem is scientific materialism. That's what killed God and caused the 
loss of morals. And as we all know, Pirsig goes after the metaphysical 
assumptions that have led the West to this catastrophe. I would add that if 
Pirsig and many others are right, this same catastrophe is still very much 
going on. This is what's behind the conflict between science and religion, 
behind the rise of fascism, fundamentalism, militant Islam and other 
anti-intellectual reactionary movements. Dude, we're talking about millions 
and millions of corpses here. See, Pirsig is not just saying that SOM can be 
improved or otherwise dealing with strictly academic issues. He's saying 
that its killing us. And I think he's quite right. Not to mention the 
spiritual emptiness and other more subtle tragedies. Excited? I just think 
its important to appreciate the scope, the scale and the nature of this 
problem.

Matt said:
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...

dmb says:
Let me interupt you right there because I think we disagree about what it 
means to reject the privileging of any single perspective. I don't think it 
"just means" we make "practical choices" about which perspective to use. 
Don't get me wrong. Of course we have to make choices and use the appropiate 
tools to the task. But as I see it, fragmentation is part of this same 
problem and your approach only makes matters worse. There is an atomistic 
feel to it. The hostility between science and religion, for example, can't 
ever be resolved by making practical choices between them. I don't think it 
works to judge intellectual truth on the basis of our own purposes. I mean, 
can we, should we be religious on Sunday and scientific on Monday even 
though the two views tend to cancell each other out? That doesn't solve the 
problem so much as sweep it under the rug. Beyond the further fragmentation 
of knowledge involved in this approach, it seems to be rather capricious or 
cavalier too. Instead, I think the rejection of a single exclusive truth 
means that perspectives should be added up, reconciled, and integrated. If 
you want to explore the nature of your nation's government, for example, it 
makes sense to look around at other governments, maybe add some 
anthropological truths and sociological truths too. If you want to explore 
your religion, it makes sense to look around at other religions, maybe add 
some mythology and psychlolgy. In that sense, sure, it Really is a matter of 
using the right tools and making appropriate choices. But I think that 
rejecting the notion of a single correct perspective means that we need a 
multiple perspective, a view that includes and transcends the narrow 
perspectives of which it is built. And I think we can be creative in what we 
choose to add into the mix. Christmas holds a deeper meaning that it might 
otherwise hold, for example, because I can add some knowledge about 
astronomical events, hibernation, a form of depression known as Seasonal 
Affective Disorder or SAD and the ancient Siberian Shamans who liked to 
dirink reindeer urine. The whole is greater than the sum and all that. As I 
see it, this is the only decent way to advance intellectual truth itself. It 
is pluralistic without being grotesquely even-handed and holisitic rather 
than atomistic. It lets the various forms of truth speak for themselves, if 
you will, rather than bending them to our purposes or excluding them for 
several days each week.

This is an example, by the way, of where your negative project isn't just 
imcomplete but actually prevents a re-construction. Or at least one worth 
building. It seems to stand in the way of advancement through integration. 
In the MOQ, for example, science and religion have a matter-of-fact 
evolutionary relationship and even though one is not any truer than the 
other, Pirsig's approach still allows us to rank them and otherwise make 
distinctions. I suppose one of the reasons you reject the MOQ's distinction 
between social and intellectual values is that your approach will not allow 
such rankings. To you, it looks like some kind of priviledging. But to me, 
going without such rankings and distinctions is exactly what un-solves the 
problem. It only exaggerates the disassociations that mark modernity. It 
seems to go beyond the rejection of a single exclusive perspective to the 
point where intellectual truth itself is replaced by practical choices.

Matt continued:
...So its not the case that I am "trying to 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."  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.

dmb says:
As you already know all too well, I don't think neurology helps in trying to 
understand mysticism. I would even say that such an approach is based on the 
kind of exclusive truth Pirsig attacks most directly, namely scientific 
objectivity, the correspondence theory of truth. Big time. And as you can 
tell from that, I agree that its quite possible to mistakenly connect 
perspectives that should probably remain unconnected and that some of our 
choices are better than others in this respect. But I don't really see you 
making any connections. That's all I'm saying on this point.

Matt said:
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...

dmb says:
I just explained why I think the neurological perspective is reductionistic, 
is the kind of perspetive that tends to exclude all others and is in fact 
ofter used to explain things AWAY rather than explain things. I don't want 
to beat a dead horse, so just let me remind you that Pirsig's distinction 
between DQ and static biological quality, among other distinctions and 
rankings, makes a neurological description of a mystical event not only 
inappropriate and useless, but an absurd confusion of categories.

Matt said:
(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.)

dmb says:
I don't get that. My assertions about the perennial philosophy are aimed at 
adding up the spiritual truths of the world to get at the meaning of DQ, 
about which materialistic reductionism has practically nothing to say. And 
haven't I been listing the advantages of adopting this multiple perspective? 
I mean, what the difference between saying a multiple perspective is less 
partial and more holistic and saying it offers advantages. Wasn't I just 
being specific about those advantages? I think so. But most of all I want to 
disagree with your assertion that a multiple perspective "can only be 
another perspective". As I see it, this is quite obviously false. Take the 
rivalry between Judaism, Islam and Christianity, for example. Each one tends 
to assert its own perspective over the other two. (With murderous 
consequences over an extended period of time.) There is apparently no way to 
reconcile this conflict EXCEPT by moving to a perspective that can include 
them all at the same time. I mean, from the multiple perspective that is the 
perennial philosophy, this rivalry looks totally crazy and absurd, like 
three brothers killing each other in a fight over who has the best dad. From 
a broader perspective we can see that they don't really disagree about much 
and that the differences are relatively trivial. This is just the most 
obvious and relevant example that springs to mind, the point simply being 
that there is an important distinction between rival perspectives that tend 
to exclude other perspectives and a view that does not allow such 
exclusivity. Or to put it much more simply, the perennial philosophy does 
not say this broad view is better than their narrow view and we offier it 
instead,. it says their narrow view is included and transcended. Naturally, 
this multiple perspective is going to demand that certain features of the 
narrow perspective be ejected, especially the more chauvanistic attitudes 
and exclusive doctines. But the general idea is that you don't destroy or 
shelve these narrow perspectives so much as dust them off and re-examine 
them in the light of the other perspective and evaluate them impartially.

Matt said:
...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 says:
I don't think the piecemeal approach works very well and is in fact just an 
extension of the problem to be solved. Its an example of the fragmentation 
that's only perpetuated by your approach. As I understand it, Pirsig's aim 
is to produce an expanded rationality in which we don't have to choose a 
secular future at the expense of Christianity or vice versa, but in which we 
can have an improved version of both at the same time. As I understand it, 
mysticism can be seen in the core of all the world's great religions, 
including Christianity of course, and secularists are not threatened by 
mysticism in least because there is nothing supernatural about it. Don't you 
find it interesting that Pirsig can be a philosophical mystic, a 
metaphysician, a damn good liberal, a fan of Meister Eckhart, have no 
problem with ritualistic religion as long as it works AND be anti-theistic 
all at the same time.

Reconciliation through aperspectival integration, not partial and fragmented 
truths, that's what I'm talking about. And again, we're not just trying to 
solve an academic problem here. We're talking about trying to keep the body 
count down to a minimum, you know?

Matt said:
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.

dmb says:
All perspectives are single and exclusive? So there is no possibility of a 
perspective that is multiple and inclusive? You'll have to explain that one 
because I really don't see it. I don't see how it has anything to do with 
bad metaphysics or why the idea should send up a red flag. I don't even see 
how there is any tension between two sentences. In fact, I was only 
re-inerating the same assertion in positive rather than negative terms. The 
first says its not exclusive and the second says it is inclusive. So, 
where's the tension? What's the problem? As I understand it, this objection 
makes no sense at all.

Matt continued:
...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.

dmb says:
This is not entirely clear. How can a single perspecitve be inclusive? What, 
besides the perspective itself, is included in a single perspecive? And 
what's the difference between a meta-view that "houses more particular ones" 
and a broad view that includes more narrow ones? The only difference I can 
detect is that house the view where I want to add them up. You want to put 
them together in one place as they are where I want to integrate them into a 
new, larger perspective.

Matt concluded the paragraph:
...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.

dmb says:
I want to say that? I think I have been saying that. For years.

Matt said:
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.

dmb says:
I'm really not much of a swinger. Maybe that's why I'm not following you 
here. I mean, I don't see how that weapon hits me or how it becomes 
reductionist. But at least I can try to expalin something about that weapon, 
which must be the criticism you quoted. By now it should be pretty clear 
that I think there is an important distinction between adding things up and 
merely putting things in a house. The difference is somthing like the 
difference between a home and pile of unconstructed building materials, 
between a structure a heap. I don't think your approach really produces 
harmony so much as it lets everybody sing their own song. Don't get me 
wrong, I do think just about every perspective has something valid to offer 
and so every voice deserves to be heard. I just think that's not enough. I 
think a genuinely pluralistic view has to be more than the sum of its parts, 
it has to do something with those voices.

Matt said:
...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.

dmb says:
I don't know if my complaints will help or if I'm just bitching about the 
conversation. I may have lost track of things by now, but it seems to me 
that my attacks on your neopragmatism lack nuance in direct proportion to my 
understanding of your neopragmatism. I also think my attacks, at least most 
of the time, were really just attempts to overcome your objections and move 
on to the issue at hand. I'd say something. You'd object. In order to 
overcome the objection I'd have to spend some time trying to figure out what 
the problem was. And most of the time, it seems to me, your objections 
amounted to refuting assertions I never made.  And by the time that process 
was over the original "objectionable" comment was all but forgotten. Or 
maybe that process is still going on.

I really wouldn't mind all the objections if they weren't so hard to 
understand. While reading in this area lately, I've learned that its not 
really very hard to explain or to grasp. But your objections are so 
consistantly naked and jargonistic, your red flags so easily sent up, that 
its always been hard to tell what the problem is. I'm not saying that you 
are consciously trying to sabotage any meaningful discussions of mysticism 
here, but this has been the effect. These objections are so persistant and 
so weakly justifed that they seem more like a diversionary tactic rather 
than a genuine concern. I'm not saying that you are deliberately avoiding 
the issue of mysticism, but that is the effect,  you don't seem to have a 
problem with that effect and you've confessed to a dearth of opinions on the 
topic. If somebody did that to you, I suspect you wouldn't like it whether 
it was intentional or not.

To be fair, I think there has been some progress and apparently at least 
some of what I'm saying no longer seems quite so objectionable to you. Maybe 
now were just down to splitting some hairs between things like structures 
and heaps. And I think most of the differences come down to the fact that 
your view entails a level of skepticism that I find excessive, unjustified 
and far too restrictive. To illustrate this, let me end with something 
that's relatively fresh. In the MOQ, data is data, right? Paul posted this 
quote the other day. Think about this for a moment...

Pirsig says in SODV:  "The bottom box shows inorganic patterns.  The 
Metaphysics of Quality says objects are composed of "substance" but it says 
that this substance can be defined more precisely as "stable inorganic 
patterns of value."  This added definition makes substance sound more
ephemeral than previously but it is not.  The objects look and smell and 
feel the same either way.  The Metaphysics of Quality agrees with scientific 
realism that these inorganic patterns are completely real, and there is no 
reason that box shouldn't be there, but it says that this reality is 
ultimately a deduction made in the first months of an infant's life and 
supported by the culture in which the infant grows up."

dmb resumes:
I imagine your level of skepticism would lead you to have a bit of a problem 
with this kind of realism, while i don't have a problem with it. I mean, 
think about this quote while recalling the broad outlines of our 
conversations. It might be helpful to recall how often I used the phrase  
"epistemological pluralism" and my repeated emphasis on "experience" or 
theory. By contrast, I seem to recall that you used to say we can no longer 
do epistemology at all. There is also your Wittgenstienian 
the-limits-of-my-language-are-the-limits-of-my-worldism and my objection to 
that. Basically, I find it hard to swallow the idea that reality is limited 
to words and concepts. As Pirsig says, the data remains unchanged. You seem 
to think of science as just another perspective, just another vocabulary 
while I think it really is true in some sense, that science makes real 
progress, that it isn't just a species of poetry. I mean, in some sense even 
rocks are known to us through words and concepts, but not entirely. A rock 
can be wieghed and photographed. Its existence can be registered by scales 
and light-sensitive paper despite the fact that neither of them have words 
or concept with which to interpret it. If a rock falls on the infants foot, 
he's gonna scream like the devil despite the fact that he doesn't yet have 
any concepts or words to interpret that experience. And you can't land a man 
on an interpretation of the moon. But I imagine your skepticism is such that 
assertions like mine here only look like I'm slipping back into plain old 
modernism and red flags are up all over the place.

Sorry, but I've stubbed my toes too many times to be THAT skeptical. So 
while I'd agree that reality doesn't have to be interpreted in any 
particular way, there are features of experience that can't be ignored. 
Experience is not only hard to deny, its all we have in terms of being able 
to justify any assertion. I guess I'd even say that our use of language and 
logic and the other interpretive tools constitutes experience of a certain 
type, but its not the only kind.  Progress and science and good metaphysics 
has to be based in experience, has to be constrained or limited by 
experience. It has to agree with the data, if you will. Otherwise, what's 
the difference between intellectual truth and sheer speculation?

Ouch. I think one of your red flags just poked me in the eye.

Thanks for your time, exhausted reader. If you only had half the fun...
dmb

_________________________________________________________________
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! 
http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/