[MD] Neopragmatism isn't pragmatic.

[david buchanan]

gav said:
really interesting following this thread. really getting to the core of the 
impasse.

dmb says:
I'm find it interesting too. And it does look like the two different 
starting points, the one's Hildebrand's book brings out, really do get to 
the core of the impasse. It seems to me that these two starting points 
reveal the fact that Pirsig and Rorty, despite a large area of agreement, 
are operating with two distinctly different epistemologies. I hope you and 
Matt and others will explore this area with me, not least of all because I'm 
doing a paper on it.

Tell me more about Baudrillard's 'perfect crime' and the 'spectacle' of the 
situationists, will you? I have a hunch that the continental philosophers 
resemble Pirsig in the same way that Rorty does, that many of them would 
have the same kind of anti-realist approach that Rorty does. I've heard that 
Foucault and Rorty are two peas in a pod on this point, for example.

Seems like an important distinction if it leads to the relativism Pirsig 
wants to avoid.

Here's a line of questions for you, Gav. Think about the pomo idea that its 
"power all the way down". That sounds like a species of relativism to me. 
What happens if we take that rather cynical notion and think of it in terms 
of the MOQ? I'm thinking here about Pirsig's descriptions of the Giant. (You 
know I'm with you already on the idea that conspiracy theories can be 
explained as a way of telling stories about what the Giant is doing, what 
the Giant wants and such.) This way of thinking about social level values 
goes along pretty welll with the notion that its all about power. But then I 
remember Pirsig's descriptions of the ingratitude of liberal intellectuals 
like himself and how, because of the amoral, scientific worldview in which 
they were trapped, they took sides with biology and thereby put social level 
values in the crossfire. You know, Mead and Freud gave everybody permission 
to fuck their brains out like the animals Darwin says we are and the 
victorian prudes freaked out about it. They're still freaking out about it. 
(Picture Bel wearing a veil at Wreck Beach - I mean, JUST a veil.) This, I 
think, marks a difference between the MOQ and pure cynicism. I mean, if its 
about power all the way down and there is no evolutionary purpose or 
rational point then it can all be deconstructed without consequence. But if 
there is a point and a purpose, then unqualified deconstruction is likely to 
result in disaster. I think that why the MOQ says that power and authority 
and tradition should be re-examined in terms of what it has actually 
acomplished in the course of evolution. Doesn't the notion that its "power 
all the way down" express the same SOM ingratitude? Doesn't the MOQ's 
hierarchy of levels suggest that power goes down to biology rather than all 
the way? See what I'm getting at here?

Thanks.
dmb

PS Oh, Gav, picked up some Dirty Three. Got lucky and bought the same album 
you played for me. I'll very likely end up owning everything they ever made. 
A fabulous discovery for me. Thanks again for that.

PSS I've been sending my posts to Paul and Dean, by the way, and hope to 
hear from those pragmatists as well.
>
>  two realities seem two be opposed here but why can't
>they co-exist?
>
>there is immediate experience - primary reality; then
>there is the intellectual world - another reality,
>created by language, which we overlay on primary
>reality (as an expediency), so regularly that we can
>forget about primary reality altogether.
>
>This is Baudrillard's 'perfect crime';  it is the
>'spectacle' of the sitationists, and it is the reason
>why julian jaynes likened 'consciousness' (meaning
>that recently evolved capacity for the manipulation of
>representational symbols in an abstract space) to
>someone using a  flashlight in a very dark room:
>
>wherever the flashlight searches it sees light. it
>can't see the dark. the intellect sees the reflected
>'light' itself shines as proof that reality is only
>'light', intellectual only. and since the intellect is
>created by language, 'reality' is created by language.
>
>language creates intellectual reality: the realm of
>analogues; an abstract plane. but the abstract has to
>be abstracted from something...and that something is
>pre-intellectual primary reality.
>
>we can't find primary reality with the intellect but
>it is a necessary precondition for the intellect's
>existence; and i am usually pretty sure the intellect
>exists.
>
>
>
>
>
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