[MD] Reason, Tradition, Absolute Truth

[ian glendinning]

Matt,

In the sense that reason is just one aspect of intellect evolved from
a social tradition, they are not "separate".

At the stage of "the" enlightenment that was how far the distinction
had evolved - tradition vs reason - but we've moved on.

I think we agree.

The rest I'll need to read more carefully.
Ian

On 6/8/06, Matt Kundert <pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Ian,
>
> Ian said:
> I see us "refining" an approximate tradition / reason distinction, and
> better defining both reason and tradition in the process (using social /
> intellectual language), but are you saying it's SOMist to consider a
> distinction on this axis at all ?
>
> If you are, I suspect we really just have a lingusitic definition problem
> somewhere.
>
> Matt:
> Yeah, I suspect we are having definitional issues, and that's part of the
> problem I'm trying to untangle.  People have been fighting over how we
> define "social" and "intellectual" for a long time, and fighting over them,
> it being a bad or good distinction, all depends on how we unpack the terms.
> So I'm trying to suggest how one way of unpacking the distinction, i.e.
> making it look like the Enlightenment's  Reason/Tradition distinction, is a
> bad idea.  But everything's muddy in the area so its hard for me to get a
> handle on other people and vice versa.
>
> So, on the one hand I'm not saying that it's bad to consider a distinction
> on this axis at all--unless the axis itself depends on the Enlightenment
> dichotomies.  Or to put it another way, clearly there is something that can
> be distinguished between the terms "reason" and "tradition" and
> "intellectual" and "social".
>
> What I consider to be a bad way of distinguishing them is to say that
> "reason" is seperate from "tradition" and that some traditions make more
> room for reason than others.  A tradition is what it is because it has a
> system of reasoning internal to it.  Reason is distinguishable, but internal
> to a tradition.
>
> A related way is to distinguish between social and intellectual is to say
> something like "social is what we do with other people, like in politics, or
> at work, or at a bar" and "intellectual is what we do when we are alone,
> like in mathematics, or philosophy, or a physics lab".  This rings true to
> Pirsig's description of intellectual as essentially abstraction.  We can
> abstract in total isolation from other people.  We don't need input when we
> are just manipulating abstract symbols, basically just a logical game.  I
> think this way breaks down, too.  I don't think its very hard to see that
> "intellectual" is a stand in for "philosophy" (look at the way Pirsig places
> its "birth" in Greece).  But then we get a series of dichotomies like this:
>
> Social / Intellectual
> Politics / Philosophy
> Rhetoric / Dialectic
> Sophists / Platonists
> Consensus / Truth
>
> But if people agree with "Absolute Truth" bit I talked about with Platt
> recently, then the dichotomy between the search for Consensus and the search
> for Truth is spurious and ill-fated.  Plato created that distinction because
> he thought the Sophists were just out to convince people of things.  Plato
> didn't think people being convinced would tell you if it was _true_ or not.
> That, in hindsight, is _correct_, but consensus is the only lead on truth we
> have.  Justification is the only criterion we have for truth.  They aren't
> the same, but they aren't distinct projects either.
>
> So I'm not sure whether that connects up at all with the way you conceive
> the "approximate tradition / reason distinction".  Saying there approximate
> suggests to me that you'd unpack it differently than I have.  The way I
> unpacked them to disperse the Enlightenment dichotomy was basically as
> reason-as-thinking and tradition-as-an-historical-pattern-of-thinking.
> Basically analogous to a philosopher arguing and the series of previous
> philosophers the current one picks out as his forefathers.  Like, Rorty
> writing PMN versus Rorty in relation to McKeon, Carnap, Wittgenstein, Dewey,
> Whitehead, Hegel, Hume, etc.  Rorty makes it obvious that he stands in a
> tradition of thinking.  Pirsig doesn't.  But whether you do or not, you
> couldn't help it just as you can't help but stand somewhere in history.  I
> think the fact Pirsig disowns almost all traditions of philosophy, and calls
> his own a radical break, might be a subtle indication of something like this
> bad tradition/reason distinction.
>
> Matt
>
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