[MD] Julian Baggini Interview with Pirsig

[david buchanan]

David, Matt and all MOQers:

David M asked:
I would have liked to have heard how MOQ can be seen in relation to 
empiricism more.  Any thoughts on this?

Matt answered:
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.

dmb says:
Fetish? I can only guess what this word means in a philosophical context. I 
also have a problem reading this sort of map. Each on the thinkers you've 
named have said quite a bit, but you seem to have reduced all their efforts 
to a few simple choices. And these choices are condescendingly characterized 
as some kind of kinky obessession? My point? I can't follow this. Its the 
same kind of philosophological nonsense that lead to Baggini's failure.

Matt said:
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.

dmb says:
Actually, Pirsig has been asked and his answer refers to none of these 
thinkers...

"I think the trouble is with the word, "experience." It is...commonly used 
as a subject-object relationship. This relationship is usually considered 
the basis of philosophic empiricism and experimental
scientific knowledge. In a subject-object metaphysics, this experience is 
between a preexisting object and subject, but in the MOQ, there is no 
pre-existing subject or object....So in the MOQ experience comes first, 
everything else comes later. This is pure empiricism, as opposed to 
scientific
empiricism, which, with its pre-existing subjects and objects, is not really 
so pure." [LILA'S CHILD p548]

Pirsig: "In the MOQ empirical experience begins with Quality which generates 
intellectual patterns. One of these intellectual patterns is named 'senses,' 
but this pattern is derived from the study of anatomy and is not primary in 
the actual empirical process."

Matt said:
...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 too old and outdated.

dmb says:
What? Empiricism is unimportant, an old, outdated stepping stone that 
doesn't have much to teach? But, but, but that's just NOT what Pirsig is 
saying at all. Not even close. Since Pirsig calls himself a radical 
empiricist, equates reality with experience and refers to DQ as the primary 
emprical reality, I find your assertions to be quite incorrect, even 
bizzare. As I understand it, the MOQ is just about as empirical as it 
gets...

"The second of James' two main systems of philosophy, which he said was 
independent of pragmatism, was his RADICAL EMPIRICISM. By this he meant that 
subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and 
objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more 
fundamental which he described as 'the immediate flux of life which 
furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual 
categories'. In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of 
reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject 
and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make 
them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical; it 
logically precedes this distinction." ...

"What the MOQ adds to James' PRAGMATISM and his RADICAL EMPIRICISM is the 
idea that primal reality from which subjects and objects spring is VALUE. By 
doing so it seems to unite pragmatism and radical empiricism into a single 
fabric. Value, the pragmatic test of truth, is also the primary empirical 
experience. The MOQ says pure experience is value. Experience which is not 
valued is not exerienced. The two are the same. This is where value fits. 
Value is not at the tail-end of a series of superficial scientific 
deductions that puts it some where in a mysterious undetermined location in 
the cortext of the brain. Value is at the very front of the empirical 
procession." LILA P.365

Another reason I find your assertions so bizzare is that these clues from 
Pirsig should be taken up and expanded by philosophologists like yourself. 
But you mention James in passing and entirely overlook his radical 
empiricism. I mean, that does answer David's question doesn't it? You seem 
to be answering a different question. If DM had asked about the current 
status of empiricism among neopragmatists like Kundert and Rorty, your 
answer would have been quite relevant and to the point. But he didn't and so 
it wasn't.

I'd be a lot more happy with the philosophological approach if it worked 
better, but it never seems to add up or make sense, let alone shed light. 
May I suggest you put radical empiricism in your philosophological pipe and 
smoke it. And then let me know how it worked out.

Thanks.
dmb

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