[MD] Representationalism

[david buchanan]

Matt and all MOQers:

Matt said:
...This muddle occurs because you'll notice that thesis one says that humans 
invent everything.  But where did humans come from?  You only find that out 
in thesis two.  It is by slightly incautious formulations of the two theses 
that leads to a lot of fire on this topic.  My suggestion for cleaning up is 
as above in how I exposited Paul's first thesis: all knowledge is 
linguistic; the only way we know things is by talking about them....

dmb says:
I don't see it that way at all. I think that in the MOQ, all knowledge is 
derived from experience. I think this difference is subtle yet huge. I think 
that Pirsig's system certainly rejects representationalism in the process of 
rejecting the metaphysical assumptions (SOM) that lay underneath. And its 
clear that the basic insight of postmodernit is reflected in Pirsig's 
comments about how we are suspended in language, how Descartes thinks only 
because French culture exist, how we have to account for the sorter as well 
as the sand being sorted, ect., etc.. But Pirsig's system also retains an 
empiricism, a radical empiricism that puts experience first. This, I think, 
is quite different from what your friends like Rorty are saying. As THE 
NATION's reviewer puts it in the June 12th issue, "Rorty dismissed 
experience altogether"....

"During the last thirty years, as Jay confirms, the postmodern turn in the 
humanities has challenged the very notion of "lived experience" as a 
meaningful concept--as well as the assumption of an autonomous, coherent 
self who does the experiencing. Yet among the thinkers who might be 
characterized as postmodern in Jay's book, only Rorty dismissed experience 
altogether. He insisted that everything was mediated by language, even such 
apparently straightforward sensations as the taste of an onion, and he 
dismissed any notion of a nonlinguistic realm as a regression to Kantian 
mystification."

And I also have to say that my hunch about Rorty - that his anti-metaphsical 
stance is mostly just a matter of exorcising his own demons - was pretty 
well confirmed when I found an interesting article titled, "HOW RICHARD 
RORTY FOUND RELIGION". You should check it out just for the light it might 
shed on your own "CONFESSIONS" if for no other reason. Here's a small 
taste...

Rorty broke from his parent’s conscientious Leninism (they denounced 
Stalin’s Russia) after he matriculated as a precocious fifteen-year-old at 
the University of Chicago and immediately fell under the tutelage of 
Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins. They taught him that the only way to 
refute both a Nazi and a Stalinist was to defend democracy as “something 
eternal, absolute, and good.” He was immediately seduced by their Platonic 
promises, not least because he thought their approach to philosophy seemed 
to leave room for the love of pure beauty.

Still, Rorty felt that there was at least one unexplored option: religious 
faith rather than philosophical knowledge. He describes this decision as 
choosing between Dostoevsky’s Karamazov brothers: Would he become a pious 
Alyosha (whom Rorty says he alternately envied and despised) or a rational 
Ivan? Having read T. S. Eliot, he was attracted by the idea that “only 
committed Christians (and perhaps only Anglo-Catholics) could overcome their 
unhealthy preoccupations with their private obsessions, and so serve their 
fellow humans with proper humility.” But in the end, he could not become an 
Alyosha, Rorty writes, because of a “prideful inability to believe what I 
was saying when I recited the General Confession.” Platonism appealed to 
Rorty because it “had all the advantages of religion, without requiring the 
humility which Christianity demanded, and of which I was apparently 
incapable.”

But Platonism proved just as unsatisfying. Rorty could not decide whether 
Platonism was aimed at “private bliss” or at “irrefutable argument.” As a 
potential Ivan, Rorty knew that he had a knack for disputation that allowed 
him to wriggle out of circular arguments and dialectical corners, but he 
could not help fearing that, although he was learning the skills of 
argument, he was not becoming “either wise or virtuous.” In fact, he had yet 
to find anything like an irrefutable truth (or even a coherent one for that 
matter). He began to suspect, to his distress, that there was no ground of 
rational certainty for his Platonic faith to rest on. Philosophy seemed to 
do nothing but help one get out of linguistic dead ends; it could not set 
one entirely free. Becoming an Ivan seemed to offer no long-term payoff.

By the time he left the University of Chicago to attend Yale for his 
doctoral studies, Rorty had begun a forty-year period of disillusionment, 
“looking for a coherent and convincing way of formulating my worries about 
what, if anything, philosophy was good for.” For most of those forty years, 
no one knew that he was disillusioned; he was a well-regarded analytic 
philosopher, employable and widely published.

When he wrote the introductory essay to his book The Linguistic Turn (1967), 
he still had some small hope that the right approach might resolve the 
perennial philosophical questions. The promise of analytic philosophy and 
its linguistic turn was that “philosophical problems . . . may be solved (or 
dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understanding more about the 
language we presently use.” If we can create an ideal and logical language 
for philosophy, one without the confused concepts embedded in much 
philosophical language, philosophy might be put on surer footing.

But even before The Linguistic Turn was published, Rorty saw that no 
foundation was less problematic than any other. Around 1970, Rorty went into 
a deep “clinical depression” and found himself unable to write for more than 
a year. Although he has not written openly about his dark night of the soul, 
it led to his very public break with mainstream analytic philosophy and his 
subsequent conversion to American pragmatism.

During a five-year period following his breakdown, Rorty devoured the works 
of the great pragmatists—James, Dewey, and Sydney Hook. Their work led him 
to conclude that both analytic philosophy and the linguistic turn were 
nothing more than the “last refuge” of representationalism. What was needed 
was a “cosmological” turn, much like the transition from a 
“Ptolemaic-Aristotelian cosmology to a Copernican-Newtonian one.” The 
pragmatists—a philosophical school that Rorty believes includes not only 
Dewey and James, but also the “proto-pragmatist” Friedrich Nietzsche—had 
already effected that cosmological turn, but few had noticed. Philosophy’s 
most vexing problems, they taught, can never be solved; they can only be 
dissolved. Pragmatism would serve for him as an antidote to both the hubris 
of analytic philosophy and, ultimately, the circularity of postmodernism.

His pragmatic formation can best be understood as an alternative to 
religious conversion. Rorty reports that at the age of twenty, “I 
desperately wanted to be a Platonist—to become one with the One, to fuse 
myself with Christ or God or the Platonic form of the Good or something like 
that. Pragmatism was a reaction formation.” Pragmatism would have to fill 
the hole left by religion and his quest for certainty. Analytic philosophy 
had been his last-ditch effort at realizing a single vision. Through it, 
Rorty had hoped to find convincing arguments for a unified account of the 
universe. But he came to realize that his earliest quest to hold reality and 
justice in a single vision “had been a mistake—that the pursuit of such a 
vision had been precisely what led Plato astray.”

Jürgen Habermas describes Rorty’s pragmatic turn as the behavior of a 
“spurned lover”; his desire to “do away with all philosophy seems to spring 
more from the melancholy of a disappointed metaphysician, driven on by 
nominalist spurs, than from the self-criticism of an enlightened analytic 
philosopher who wishes to complete the linguistic turn in a pragmatic way.” 
Fellow pragmatist Richard Bernstein concurs: “So much of his recent writing 
[as of 1987] falls into a genre of the ‘God that failed’ discourse. There 
seems to be something almost oedipal—a form of patricide—in Rorty’s 
obsessive attacks on father figures in philosophy and metaphysics. It is the 
discourse of a one-time ‘true believer’ who has lost his faith.”

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