[MD] Julian Baggini Interview with Pirsig

[David M]

Hi Matt

A reply at last.

Well I think these distinctions are harder to establish than you seem
to be saying. Yes we have to accept with Kant that to understand
our experience we need concepts right at the start so goodbye naive
empiricism. And yes since Kant we know that even the most familiar
of concepts may be subject to revision and have no a priori indubitability.

But I am not happy with this disembodied observing knower. With
Heidegger I think that we are typically a doing or coping being and that the
observing being is a secondary form of existence. This doing being
includes what we might call qualities of care and significance. This is
Heidegger's description, for an explanation we can turn to Merleau-Ponty
and recognise that we are in fact embodied beings and that our projects
are grounded in our interactions with the environment. We are embodied
so we are impacted upon by our environment and we can react to it.
Here is where value begins and is unavoidable, for the impact of the
environment on us is either positive or negative, good or bad. Only as
a development on top of these value based exchanges with the environment
can we start to see how this is employed and interpreted as information.
But we should not overlook what seems to be making these interpretations
of impacts (externals to our bodies that change our bodies) possible.
Rorty just talks about creativity as if it is a natural quality of language.
For me Heidegger's exploration of the way experience seems to be
structured has great ontological value. For Heidegger the pragmatic take
on Being is just one amongst many that can be taken and whilst it
has its uses it also has its dangers. The very fact that man can question
being is telling. This ability carries with it an awareness of Nothing, and
an openness to the vast possibilities that all somethings may be other-wise.
And our experience and response to it is somehow open, incomplete,
and requires a response to fill its under-determined lack. I think that
looking at Heidegger on Nothingness, the clearing, the opennes of Dasein
is clearly on the same investigation of elusive qualities that see Pirisg 
start
to talk about DQ.

David M








> David,
>
> David said:
> I would have liked to have heard how MOQ can be seen in relation to
> empiricism more.  Any thoughts on this?
>
> Matt:
> My own view is that the 18th-century empiricists' fetish with sense data
> leads inexorably to Kant.  After Kant you have to make a choice between
> Hegel (and the trail that leads to Nietzsche and Heidegger) or
> Husserl/Russell.  The Hegel trail repudiates empiricism insofar as it
> stops
> fetishizing sense data and the Husserl/Russell trail takes the fetish with
> it.
>
> I suspect that Pirsig still holds some Kantianism in him.  On the one
> hand,
> Pirsig repudiates it in the Hegelian mold (that leads to James and Dewey)
> by
> making reality = experience, thus relinquishing the fetish with sense
> data.
> On the other hand, though, some of what Pirsig says seems to suggest that
> we
> have "what the world hands over to us" and "what we do to what the world
> hands over to us," ala intellectual level symbolic manipulation.  This
> seems
> to me to be Kantianism, what Hilary Putnam called the "cookie-cutter
> view."
> I suspect that if Pirsig had been asked for his relation to empiricism, he
> would have answered more in the latter mold than the former, but I think
> he
> should stick to the former.
>
> So, on the one hand, Pirsig should be an empiricist in the sense that he
> (along with almost everybody else) repudiates divine drops of a
> prioriness,
> going along with the old-school empiricist's suspicion of rationalism.
> But
> on the other hand, he shouldn't keep up with talk about sense data.  There
> is nothing that philosophically interesting or important about sense data
> or
> experience that people deny and that we can regain by talking about it.
> Once you make reality = experience, then nothing important hinges on
> whether
> a philosopher talks about experience or talks about talking, the
> difference
> between pre- and post-linguistic turn philosophers.  As far as I can tell,
> Pirsig in his better (non-Kantian looking) moments is as empiricist as
> Rorty
> and neither of them, following Rorty, should place that much significance
> in
> empiricism.  It was a dialectical stepping stone in the conversation of
> Western philosophy, but one that doesn't have all that much to teach us
> anymore.
>
> At least, that's why I don't use "empiricist" as one of the labels I
> attach
> myself to.  It just seems to old and outdated.
>
> Matt
>
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