[MD] Mill: Quality philosopher

[david buchanan]

Matt and all vodka drinkers:

Matt said:
If you're willing to agree that the notion of an "Absolute Truth" that is an 
object of inquiry creates an activity that has no criteria for even knowing 
if we had found what we were looking for (an activity that would go on 
indefinitely with no parameters for even knowing which direction is the 
right direction to go hunting in), then you should be willing to agree with 
me (to this limited extent) that the notion of "absolute truth" in 
philosophy is a wheel that spins idly by itself, that its dead weight, that 
it would be best to cut it loose from your philosophical language, thus 
trimming your own philosophical language and not letting it get away from 
you with pointless jargonizing.

dmb says:
That might be the longest sentence I've ever seen. But I wonder if you could 
educate me here. There has been quite a lot said against the notion of 
"Absolute Truth", but I only have a vague notion of what that means. Could 
you give an example? Could you quote somebody who actually asserts such a 
thing? I've always been baffled by this. My reaction to the notion has 
always been to think, "of course there's no such thing. Who ever said 
otherwise besides religious fanatics?"

I realize how strange this may seem to a person who views Plato and just 
about every Western philosopher that followed as committing this crime, but 
maybe that's part of my problem. That's just too huge, too everything. I'm 
asking you to explain what the concept of "Absolute Truth" means. If it 
means what I think it means, its quite impossible. Doesn't it refer to the 
kind of truth that has always been true and will always to true? I honestly 
don't understand how this notion can be taken seriously enough to even 
bother with rejecting it. Its like rejecting the notion that there are space 
aliens under my bed. Not gonna want to spend a lot of time on that one, you 
know?

See, this idea that "Absolute Truth" is the problem with Plato and Western 
philosophy is still quite alien to me. As I've mentioned before, the 
thinkers who have informed my understanding of that moment in history 
(Pirsig and Campbell and Wilber and Kingsley) have led me to believe that 
there was a mistake of a different kind. There is a moment in ZAMM toward 
the end, where young Phaedrus is engaged in a battle with the Chairman. You 
know, where he finally scores big time by pointing out that everything the 
Chairman has been saying about the Platonic text comes AFTER Plato tells us 
its all a MYTH. The Chairman was taking it literally, but it was a myth. And 
as I've also mentioned a number of times, the meaning and truth of a myth is 
destroyed by literalism.

My hunch is that the quest for "Absolute Truth" is what happens when Plato 
is taken literally and that he is almost always taken literally. Just like 
the Chairman did. And it hard to imagine he could have become the Chairman 
unless he was interpreting Plato in a way that fit into this long tradition 
of misunderstanding. I think the explanation that Plato was wrong in trying 
to pin down DQ, made a mistake in trying to define DQ , to make it into a 
fixed and rigid thing - I think that mistake is connected to this problem of 
literalism too. Campbell assigns more blame to the later advent of 
Christianity and Kingsley thinks it began in the  pre-Socratic period when 
mystics like Parmenidies and Empedocles (sorry about my spelling there) were 
being misunderstood. And as you know, I think Pirsig and Wilber basically 
take Plato as a misunderstood mystic and point to that point in history as 
both a gain and a loss. Intellect and rationality was born so that we could 
doubt the gods and question the myths, but we lost contact - sort of - with 
the realities refered to in those myths.

I'm just wondering if you know of some classic passages from Plato or the 
Platonic types - passages that are the basis of the concept of "Absolute 
Truth". Maybe it would be interesting to look at them through Cambpell's 
eyes instead of Kant's or Wilber eyes instead of Rorty's. I was thinking it 
might be useful to get a HELLUVA LOT more specific about "Absolute Truth". 
Why? Because, as my six year old boy might say, it sounds made up.

dmb

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