[MD] Reason, Tradition, Absolute Truth

[ian glendinning]

Matt,

Thanks for that ... excellent.

That final quote says a lot to me on so many levels.
"If you don't allow people to be unclear, intellectual progress grinds
to a halt. It's the vague people who are the pioneers."

I shall be quoting that endlessly. Must read that collection of interviews.

Grinding people. You can understand the "depression". The attrition of
constantly being asked to explain and clarify, when you're initial
reaction is to say "you just don't get it and nothing I say seems
likely to change that".

It reinforces something that's been dawning on me slowly for some
time. All progress depends on "game theory" - tactics and ruses -
hearts and minds. A direct assault on anything is doomed. ie If you
want to advance philosophy, write a work of ficton.

Take care,
Ian




On 6/4/06, Matt Kundert <pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
> DMB,
>
> DMB said:
> Right, these questions get at the heart of almost everything you say. Its a
> shame that you don't have the time because almost everything you say would
> proabably make a helluva lot more sense to me if you could answer them.
> Can't you just give me a brief summary or something? I mean, if these ideas
> are so central to your thinking you should have something to say about it
> right off the top of your head, no? How about if I promise not to jump all
> over it? its doesn't have to be very elaborate or anything, I just want to
> get oriented. Yea, I ask you to do something like this every few months or
> so. Are you EVER gonna have the time? C'mon Matt, I'm only asking you to
> explain what you mean. I'm operating on the assumption that you know what
> you mean and that telling me what you mean would be pretty easy. I can take
> "no" for an answer, but it seems like a pretty reasonable request to me.
> ...
> Repeatedly failing to answer questions about your most central ideas is bad
> enough....
>
> Matt:
> I apologize, but do you understand why people think you're a jackass
> sometimes?  And why people don't enjoy having a conversation with you?
> "Repeatedly failing to answer questions"?  I've spent five years answering
> everybody's questions.  It _is_ a reasonable request, as I said, but did you
> ever think that, ya' know, I have job, I go to school, I'm hung over today?
> I've been flipping off pieces to the social/intellectual problem for several
> years, and I've been trying to pull it together for at least the last year.
> These aren't easy tasks.  We're all growing, all changing, becoming better
> and more sophisticated and learned in our philosophies.  Sometimes the
> static quality catechisms we throw at people aren't there, we still have to
> create them by following the wispy threads of Dynamic Quality.
>
> So, yeah, its a reasonable request made by an unreasonable person who's seen
> versions of the answer to this reasonable request before, and so I quite
> reasonably don't make reproducing a tightly bound version on his request a
> high priority.
>
> But you want a sloppy summary version off the top of my head?  Fine, here it
> is.  But someday we should perhaps talk about why you feel the need to talk
> to people the way you do around here.  It's bad, bad Quality and it shines
> all around you.
>
> Reason and Tradition
> ---------------------------------
> The Reason/Tradition distinction arose in the Enlightenment to account for
> the seperation of science from the Church.  We can call "tradition" all
> those things we learn from other people, by authority and socialization and
> stuff.  "Reason" is the activity of our minds to determine truth.
> Enlightenment philosophers thought that Reason could correct our beliefs by
> rejecting everything that was held merely because your parents held it.
> Descartes is the first and paradigmatic example when he set out to doubt
> everything to see what was really indubitable in his mind, and thus be able
> to construct knowledge, "clear and distinct ideas" that were totally
> independent of what they teach you in school.
>
> This distinction was born out in many different ways (scientism,
> transcendentalism, etc.), but considering this arose in a discussion of
> Mill, I'll concentrate on Enlightenment liberalism and how the distinction
> breaks down there.  Enlightenment philosophers roughly argued that
> liberalism was the politics of reason, that if you follow the principles of
> reason, and ignore the taint of traditions, you'll come up with liberal,
> secular democracy.  The problem is that when a secularist argues with a
> traditionalist (say, of a religious background) about their core values,
> they beg the question over the traditionalist.  That's a violation of
> reason's rules.
>
> Another angle is to ask Rawls (the greatest contemporary Enlightenment-style
> secularist), after he says that a liberal society is the kind of society in
> which each citizen has the freedom to have their own "conception of the
> good," if his "justice as fairness" principle that governs liberal society
> is not just one of these conceptions.  If it is (which it is), then a
> contradiction appears.  Its what happens when public schools say that they
> don't teach values at school, and religionists respond that the "secular
> humanism" they teach is a set of values.  And us Pirsigians concur: what
> else could things be?
>
> The argument is that secularist liberals can't get their arguments off the
> ground any more than the traditionalists without an inculcated, socialized,
> educated set of core values.  Logic doesn't work without assumptions to play
> with, and you can't argue with assumptions.  The Enlightenment philosophical
> project created the Reason/Tradition distinction in the hopes that they
> would be able to find assumptions that were self-justified--and then build
> the best society from those.  They haven't found them yet, and without them
> they've produced what critics call the "contradiction of liberal discourse."
>  "They say they're guiding the kids by the light of Reason, but they're
> really brainwashing the children just as much as we admit we're doing."
>
> The solution is to dump the Enlightenment project of self-grounding and
> simply admit that our values are as inculcated as anybody else's.  Doing
> this would be to say that Reason, the activity of our minds, only functions
> _within_ Traditions, bodies of evolving belief that we learn from school and
> our parents, not over and against Tradition.
>
> That's one version of the story of why the social/intellectual distinction
> doesn't work if it is shaped like the Enlightenment's Tradition/Reason
> distinction.  I'm not saying there aren't distinctions to be made between
> social and intellectual or reason and tradition.  But I don't think this one
> panned out.
>
> Absolute Truth
> ---------------------------------
> I called your question here a little facetious.  The reason is that you have
> all the bafflement and rhetorical questions in full force here, but you say
> 1) "this idea that 'Absolute Truth' is the problem with Plato and Western
> philosophy is still quite alien to me" and 2) "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."  The first indicates that you cannot
> believe that anyone has ever taken "absolute truth" seriously, which is why
> you ask for examples.  But the second says that the quest for this absurd
> thing occurs when Plato is taken literally and "he is almost always taken
> literally."  That indicates that almost everybody takes away from Plato an
> absurd quest for absolute truth, which you were previously baffled with the
> very idea of.  If you say the second, then you must already have a pretty
> good idea of examples, since there are so many of them and all that.
>
> I understand why you say 1 and I agree with the spirit of 2.  Agreeing to
> the letter of 2 would involve a turf war over the correct textual exegesis
> of Plato.  I certainly don't have the experience to do that (and am willing
> to admit that when I point at Plato I'm pointing at caricatures of Plato),
> but the correct interpretation of Plato is besides the point for this
> question: whether or not Plato's interpreters have misunderstood him, the
> point is that they _have_ understood him in a certain way and propounded an
> interpretation that has held the sway of Western philosophy--correct or not,
> an interpretation that breeds the quest for absolute truth.
>
> I understand why you find it so alien because you look to me like somebody
> standing on the other end of 2500 years of failed Platonism (Platonism being
> different from Plato).  The increasing failure of Platonism led to things
> like secularism and fallibilism, beliefs that make it very hard to take
> seriously a momentous notion of absolute truth.  I think you're on the right
> side of this and I wish we could just leave it there.
>
> But you also want to say that the exorcism of (possibly incorrect) Platonic
> ghosts is a pointless task that inflates the importance of something long
> dead.  Look at me, you say, I'm a product of its demise. I agree, but I
> guess I still see ghosts flickering in other people's eyes, which is why you
> keep asking me for examples.  David Hall has said that its difficult to
> teach Rorty if people don't fear Cartesianism--and that most people don't
> naturally fear Cartesianism.  So you have to pump up the ghosts, give them
> life, or else people won't understand what the point of it all is.  Rorty's
> lamented the fact that Philosophy 101 gives people a bunch of philosophical
> views that there is no point to.  It's the cost of understanding, say, him
> or Donald Davidson, but Rorty doesn't think it's all that important for
> laypeople to have a view about theories of truth or what have you.  They
> don't really connect up to everyday life, and putting Cartesian fears in a
> person might start to suggest that they do.
>
> The article you've pulled from the internet makes a lot of Rorty's
> biography, but I think its turned in the wrong directions.  I think the
> author doesn't really understand Rorty very well.  But he does get right
> that Rorty is a fallen metaphysician.  But while the article confusingly and
> wrongly suggests that Rorty's making a return to metaphysics, I think the
> right thing to take from that is that not everybody is cut out to be an
> academic philosopher--Platonic metaphysician or pragmatist debunker.  I
> don't think Rorty's obsession with never being fooled by (or letting others
> be fooled by) metaphysicians screws up his vision.  I don't know, I don't
> see it.  Others do, but I can't make out what its supposed to be.
>
> I think there are still ghosts, but I don't think the ghosts, for the most
> part, are that important.  Rorty talks about his differences with people
> like Habermas and Putnam as "highly technical philosophical issues."  He
> doesn't think anything would really change for everyday life if a
> deflationary view of truth or a Peircian eschatalogical view wins out.  Most
> of the issues dealing with representationalism are remote from everyday
> life.
>
> That's probably what still seperates us.  While you don't think
> representationalism is important at all (which I agree with), you do think
> something really important and momentous can be done in philosophy, that we
> lost something in Plato that concerns about representationalism just
> obscure.  I don't see it.  We both agree that representationalism should be
> debunked, but you see something else that I don't.  Which is what you've
> (kinda') been saying for years, but I have to confess: I still don't see it
> and I still don't see how concerns with representationalism could obscure
> it.  But, maybe that's because my fight against representationalism is in
> the way.
>
> Here's something else about Rorty from an interview article, "The Quest for
> Uncertainty", included in his new book of interviews, Take Care of Freedom
> and Truth will Take Care of Itself:
>
> -------------
> Why is Rorty--the advocate of pluralism, of not knowing things for sure, of
> openness and variety--not more comfortable with the balancing act that
> philosophers like [John] McDowell and [James] Conant want to pull off?  For
> all the important mysteries about Rorty, his colleagues call attention to
> one seemingly insignificant aspect of his personality: his voice.  Rorty's
> voice is, as Daniel Dennett notes, "sort of striking--these firebrand views
> delivered in the manner of Eeyore."  When philosophers talk about Rorty, few
> can resist trying to imitate his distinctively somber delivery.  Of Rorty's
> mode of presentation, the British philosopher Jonathan Ree says: "There's a
> tremendous kind of melancholy about it.  He tries to be a gay Nietzschean,
> but it's an effort for him."  For Conant, hearing Rorty speak for the first
> time was something of a revelation.  "It's easy to read his writings in a
> register of excitement and a heightened, breathless voice," he explains.
> "But the note that I heard when he was reading these sentences in his own
> cadences and rhythm was--for want of a better word--depression.  I thought,
> this is the voice of a man who feels as if he's been let down or betrayed by
> philosophy."  Jurgen Habermas concurs that Rorty's antiphilosophy "seems to
> spring from the melacholy of a disappointed metaphysician."  And for Conant,
> this melancholy goes far in explaining the intransigence which Rorty holds
> to his pluralistic philosophy of dialogue and playfulness.  "It's as though
> he's been let down by philosophy once, and he's not going to let it happen
> again," Conant says.
>
> But how are we to square this vision of philosophical depression with the
> explicit role that hope plays in Rorty's philosophy?  For David Hollinger,
> Rorty's somber intellectual mood is not one of depression, but rather one of
> hope wisely tempered by experience.  "I think Dick is rightly concerned
> about the legacy of naive optimism that Dewey is constantly being assaulted
> for," he says.  "There's this idea that the children of the Enlightenment
> were smug and Panglossian; they felt they had renounced God and could go
> forth on a Promethean basis.  In contrast to this, Rorty injects a sober
> realism about the evils of the world: Do you know about the Holocaust?  Do
> you know about the atomic bomb?  There is a feeling in Dick that this
> Enlightenment inheritance is basically right, if only we could be a little
> more chastened about it.  Dick really does see himself in world-historical
> terms.  And he is one of the few people who can do this without being
> pretentious about it."
> ...
> Has Rorty really rejected his one-time ideal of holding reality and justice
> in a single vision?  Or is he merely passing it off in another guise?  After
> all, though he encourages pluralism and not knowing, he puts forth a view
> that settles many questions, and settles them once and for all.  He suggests
> that the single measure for assessing all vocabularies is whether they are
> useful.  Has he, contrary to his own intentions, simply created another kind
> of metavocabulary--a general way of assessing all ways of talking?
>
> Achieving the proper sort of uncertainty may be hard to do, but it is
> critical to Rorty.  When reflecting on his early days at Princeton, he
> begrudges the intellectual climate there.  "Analytic philosophy was
> correlated with intellectual talent," he remembers.  "Exposing the hidden
> assumptions and unclear terms in arguments: That was the only skill that was
> valued."  Rorty confesses that he wasn't "good at it, wasn't sharp enough."
> But he regrets the inability of his sharper colleagues to second-guess their
> teachers or their own most basic assumptions.  For Rorty, the most
> pernicious idea in that intellectual atmosphere was that technical clarity
> in problem solving was the chief intellectual virtue.  "That's a recipe for
> scholasticism if I've ever heard it," he says, shaking his head
> disapprovingly.  "What about imaginative virtues?  If you don't allow people
> to be unclear, intellectual progress grinds to a halt.  It's the vague
> people who are the pioneers."
> -------------
>
> Matt
>
> p.s. You mentioned "I think one can see some Leo Struass in him, including a
> specific alliance with Harold Bloom."  Are you confusing Harold with Allan?
> If you meant Harold, I'm not sure where the influence of Strauss comes from.
>  Harold was at Yale his whole life and isn't exactly a philosopher (or
> political commentator).  If you meant Allan, then Rorty doesn't have a
> specific alliance with him.  He did, though, write a review in '91 for the
> New Republic of Allan's Closing of the American Mind.
>
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