[MD] Julian Baggini Interview with Pirsig

[david buchanan]

Matt, DM and all MOQers:

Picking up where I left off yesterday, when I said:
"Radical empiricism is the pivot point of the MOQ's copernican revolution. 
Experience causes subjects and objects instead of the other way around."

last Sunday Matt said to dmb:
You've made that same sort of distinction when you've said that we can't 
have _intellectual_ knowledge of primary experience.  But I wanted to 
express what my qualms are about saying its knowledge we have of primary 
experience.  As I see it, if we have a relationship to primary experience, 
its something that _breaks up_ knowledge, the Dynamic breaking of old static 
patterns, but its not something we have a different kind of knowledge of. 
And this is partly why I still don't like to formulate the distinction 
between DQ and static patterns into epistemological terms.

dmb replies:
Don't like to put it in epistemolgical terms? I'm confused. If the MOQ 
subscribes to radical empiricism and its central distinction depends on 
radical empiricism, then what sort of tems would be better? I think the 
trouble may be, as DM pointed out, that you borrow so heavily from 
traditional philosophical language AND that I don't. I mean, you seem to be 
hung up by the idea that there is more than one kind of knowing, as if such 
a thing were simply impossible. But as I keep pointing out, the 
pre-intellectual experience is known in experience even if it can't be known 
intellectually. But I went thru that yesterday in this thread, so I'll spare 
you a repeat.

last Friday Matt said to DM
...I obviously demur on being too stuck in traditional philosophy, but 
sometimes it may feel like it because of the parasitic use of traditional 
philosophical language pragmatists use to make their point. And with the 
"primary kicking and kissing" before "secondary forms of interactions," if 
you are saying the primary/secondary distinction is more than temporal, then 
I can't see why we'd want any truck with it.  I tend to think anthing more 
desired is what hitches one up to traditional philosophy, not the other way 
around.  And with the placticity of Being, of the narrative that tells the 
"physicalist story of evolution" alongside the "experimental story of 
evolution," our cultural narrative of "ever changing maps," I can only 
agree.

dmb chimes in:
Firstly, let me say that my failure to respond to DM's comments is mostly 
due to my inability to get a handle on them. Primary kicking? Secondary 
forms? Huh? Anyway, I wanted to respond to this paragraph because both of 
you guys seem to be operating with "physicalist" assumptions. I recall 
seeing this before and maybe I even raised some objections at some point. 
But please indulge me. Please explain how it is the MOQ can go to such great 
lengths to defeat the metaphysics of substance and yet fail to defeat 
physicalism? Isn't that just something like materialism without the 
certainty, without the objectivity? As it says in my Oxford Companion to 
Philosophy, "physicalism. The doctrine that everything is physical. Also 
called materialism, ...physicalists hold that the real world contains 
nothing but matter and energy, and that objects have only physical 
properties, such as spacio-temporal position, mass, size, shape, motion, 
hardness,... The principle argument for physicalism is the success of 
physics. Physicists have been able to explain a large and diverse range of 
phenomena in terms of a few fundamental physical laws..." If you think about 
this definition of physicalism in light of Pirsig's general attack on the 
metaphysicis of substance, on scietific materialism, on objectivity and his 
more specific attacks on the law of gravity and the positivist's 
ass-gumptions about pre-existing subjects and objects, I think you'll see 
why I might have a problem with physicalism.  It seems to me that a 
discussion of the MOQ's key features is gonna get pretty wierd and confusing 
if we're operating with physicalist assumptions. As far as I can tell, 
physicalism is a slightly more sophisticated version of the view Pirsig is 
rejecting.

Let me try to explain the problem from a different angle. Pirsig's radical 
empiricism leads him to criticize the positivists for being less than 
thoroughly empirical with their assumptions about pre-existing subjects and 
objects. And you will also recall the description of the way an infant 
learns to deduce "objects" from the flux of experience and how we all learn 
to preform these deductions automatically, to jump through all the steps 
quickly and naturally just like learning to drive or preform any other task. 
And then add this to the statement that the entire world is a mythos, an 
imaginative creation, a huge complex web of inherited deductions. As I 
understand it, static patterns are not physical, not even at the inorganic 
and organic levels. They're assumptions.

I'm still on shaky ground when it comes to essentialism. Paul has been 
patiently trying to answer some questions off line, but the whole thing is 
still kind of fuzzy and weird in my mind. Despite my clumsiness on the 
topic, I'd like to bring it to bear on this discussion. Now it seems that at 
least part of my confusion is due to the fact that there are at least two 
broad categories of essentialism. There is a philosophological kind that 
pertains to Platonic forms, Kantian things-in-themselves and other 
philosophical assertions. Then there is a common sense sort of essentialism, 
also known as psychological essentialism. This second type is actually 
harder to detect because it is rarely stated explicitly. Apparently, 
psychological essentialism is a normal part of the cognitive process and is 
even exhibited by children. This form of essentialism is the common sense 
belief that water is made of water and rocks are made of rocks. As an adult 
might put it, it is the common sense belief that H2O is the essence of water 
and that rocks are made of minerals. Except for the vague idea that the 
mythos and common sense has adopted and absorbed philosophical ideas, I'm 
not sure how these two categories are connected. In any case, I wonder how 
physicalist assumptions can be maintained by one who is so conspicously on 
an anti-essentialist campaign. I wonder how physicalism escapes from this 
form of essentialism. I mean, are you not saying that reality is essentially 
physical? And isn't this the very thing Pirsig attacks in going after SOM? I 
think so.

Ouch. I just stubbed my toe on a deduction.

dmb

P.S. We should change the name of this thread.

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