[MD] David M and DMB clearly disagree -what do others think?

[david buchanan]

Matt, David M and all MOQers:

Matt said:
So, essentially what I'm saying is that when you say that "the possible" is 
not real, but that imagination is, I think you are right and that that is 
all David is (or very well should be) saying.  His angle, however, sounds 
the way it does to combat certain pernicious tendencies in SOMist 
philosophical formulation, for instance Enlightenment philosophical 
exaltations of the God known as "Reason," at the expense of the imagination, 
which is why the Romantics reacted the way they did by exalting the 
Imagination.  I see David's suggestions as an offshoot of Romanticism. ...

dmb says:
I think that's about right and that this neo-romanticism is DM's problem 
here and elsewhere. And I have to say that this is not entirely unrelated to 
my criticism of Rorty as a broken-hearted Positivist. It seems to me that 
there is a difference between rejecting positivism and objectivity on the 
one hand, which is extremely common among 20th century thinkers, and 
rejecting the metaphysical assumptions on which they are based. With respect 
to Rorty, I've tried to show how he rejects the notion of objectivity while 
retaining the assumptions of SOM. I think David M tends to follow the 
continental philosophers in doing much the same. They're mostly liberal 
intellectuals and they're all at that same cocktail party Pirsig talked 
about.

Matt continued:
Now--as far as defending his redescription with phenomenology (not a good 
idea, for one person's demon is another person's hallucination) or physics 
(very bad idea, I've never been able to imagine how scientific studies are 
supposed to support (as opposed to change) philosophy--which is why David 
says I have a blindspot or lack of respect for science) or--God help us--an 
inner/outer distinction--clearly these demand some sort of explanation and, 
as need be, cuffs around the ears.  I don't have much sympathy with such 
things, but then that's why David I and still have our own outstanding 
disagreements.

dmb says:
Right. These are pieces of evidence on which I made the accusation above. I 
want to say more about this because I think its about the validity of all 
sorts of concepts, its about more than just "the possible". Its about the 
MOQ's relation to contemporary thought. Does phenomenolgy really bracket out 
SOM, as David M says, or does it just bracket out objectivity, for example? 
I'll be learning about that in school in a few weeks so I can't draw any 
conclusions quite yet. At this point, it looks very SOM to me. It is a 
method conducted from the first-person point of view and insists that 
consciousness is intentional, that is to say it always attends to an object. 
But the physics really gives it away, I think.

I'm supposed to be working on a paper right now and so I'm going to offer 
some thoughts as a way to get at the cocktail party problem and do my 
homework at the same time. Fortunately, this is not much of a trick because 
they are very much related. We've been asked to explain, in the space of a 
four-page paper, how Freud and other turn-of-the-century revolutionary 
thinkers altered our concepts of reality, reason, perception and symbolism. 
This is the historical moment Pirsig describes in Lila when the Victorian 
worldview collasped and the intellectuals took charge of society for the 
first time in history. From my readings I can see that the Victorian period 
was sort of put Romanticism to sleep so that it only ran as an undercurrent 
in the culture. The dominate worldview was, in short, Positivism and 
Christianity. It displayed a tension between realism for the elite and 
religion for the masses. The result was a world that was both disenchanted 
and repressive. At this point its worth pointing out that Victorian 
positivism was a rather naive form of realism. Its relied on the assumption 
that reality was more or less apparent to the eye. This sort of positivism 
more or less trusted the senses, it is that narrow brand of sensory 
empiricism which is discussed and rejected in Lila. Apparently this 
Victorian worldview was not limited to English speaking countries but also 
fairly well describes the context in which Freud, Einstein, Nietzsche and 
other revolutionaries were working.

The brittle and superficial world of the Victorians was totally shattered by 
the war and so it makes sense for Pirsig to pick the day the war ended as 
the beginning of a new era, but cracks were already starting to appear in 
the years leading up to it, when Freud and Einstein were first publishing 
their novel ideas. This is also when the Radical Empiricism of William James 
was born, by the way, and he was pen pals with Bergson who was developing 
similar notions of flowing consciousness. Its interesting to note that both 
really do tackle SOM as such and both have mostly been ignored for it ever 
since too. Anyway, the basic idea here is that realism became a serious 
problem. The revolutionary ideas of the period seemed to be coming from 
every direction all at once quite independently and yet they all seemed to 
suggest that reality is much more than meets the eye.

There was Plank's quantum theory in 1900, Einstein's special relativity in 
1905, Rutherford's studies into radioactivity in 1911 (which, for the first 
time since Democritus, asserted that atoms were mostly empty structures), 
and then Einstein's general relativity in 1915. Collectively, these 
discoveries in physics suggested that reality was unimaginably large, 
consisted of the unimaginably small, and that it was inconceivably complex 
too. Suddenly, there was a huge gap between appearance and reality. Sound 
familiar, Matt?

Freud, Nietzsche and Marx rocked realist conceptions too. The discovery of 
the unconscious, the notion that we are motivated by hidden drives and 
repressed desires, is just one more indication that there are invisible 
realities, realities beyond what the eye can see. This is not a problem for 
a MOQer, for a radical empiricist, but when Freud is set in his own context, 
against the backdrop of Victorian positivism one can see how it would be 
shocking in that world. Neitzsche's 'will to power' would also constitute a 
hidden force of reality. From his perspective Christian morality is 
nihilistic, that disguises resentment and revenge as virtues. Marx plays a 
similar role in the world of political economy, where the exploited masses 
suffer from a false consciouness and religion is used as an opiate to make 
sure it stays that way. Again, these ideas appeared independently in 
different fields but they all appeared at the same historical moment and 
they all did their part to kill sensory empiricism and the Positivist 
worldview. Copernicus and Darwin had already done their part in the 
dissolution of traditional christianity, but now we have direct atttacks on 
it saying that its not just false, that its even worse than that. So this 
means that both sides of the Victorian worldview - traditional religion and 
positive science held in tension and stratified along class lines - fell 
apart. The contingent validity of knowledge gained through the senses was 
fully exposed and all moral values were called into question. And this 
creates a vacuum where new things can happen and where we see the romantic 
impulse return, a.k.a. 20th century continental philosophers. Phenomenology, 
at this admittedly preliminary stage, looks like a romantic return to 
subjectivity except that it wants to be scientific about it. In Pirsigian 
terms, it looks like one more stage in the classic-romantic dialectic rather 
than a rejection of SOM.

On top of the revolutionary ideas in physics, biology, psychology, and the 
social sciences we can see a parallel in the art of this period. The 
Impressionist style, despite that fact that its very pretty stuff, was very 
much predicated on sensory empiricism. In fact, they were so dedicated to it 
that they were not rendering objects so much as they were rendering vision 
itself. It reflected that sort of naive realism so that they concieved of 
their painting as a rendering of exactly what hits the retina, the world as 
it is, directly recieved by the eye in a one to one correspondence. It was 
the painterly version of the correspondence theory of truth. Sound familiar, 
Matt? It was sensory empiricism with a paint brush and its subject matter, 
likewise, usually consisted of ordinary, pleasant, unchallenging and matter 
of fact objects. They were interested in surfaces. Monet's ponds spring to 
mind.

In painting, this shift expressed itself as a shift from vision to 
imagination, from objectivity to subjectivity. Enter Picasso and cubism. 
Enter Kandinsky and abstraction. Enter dada and surrealism. In all these 
schools we see a rejection of representational art, a rejection of the mere 
rendering of objects. Cubism, as Picasso concieved it, was not a rendering 
but a construction of what the eye sees and what the mind knows about that 
object. He called it an "intellectual game" and it was aimed at producing 
and image that was "more complete than the optical view" (Haftmann, Painting 
in the 20th Century, 1964). Kandinsky was interested in rendering a inner, 
spiritual vision using only color, line and form. He worked to get rid of 
objects altogether and produce "pure painting", pure abstraction. The 
surrealist demonstrate the interpenetration of discipline in this period in 
a very explicit way, adding Freudian ideas to dada and otherwise 
systematizing its vague ideas. Here we see dreamscapes and other images of 
the unconscious and otherworldly objects like Dali's soft watches. In each 
case, the artist is no longer interested in realism of any kind. We can see 
the rejection of plain, objective reality, but I think its also pretty easy 
to see that the shift is toward subjectivity rather than a rejection of 
SOM's assumptions. I mean, its pretty safe to say that Darwin, Marx, Freud, 
and Einstein were all materialists. They all thought they were being quite 
scientific and in their own ways all were trying to get to the bottom of 
man's material existence, the hidden and basic truths of our material 
conditions. Matter was not called into question so much as made marvelous, 
made to seems magical, alien, even bizzare and offensive. (Imagine how 
Darwin and Freud played in Victorian parlors. What, you mean I'm am a 
primate and I secretly want to fuck my mother and kill my father! These were 
people who would rather die than be scandalized.) These are the 
revolutionary thinkers who set the stage for us, who created the world we 
live in. These are among the first of the intellectuals of the 20th century, 
the ones, as Pirsig points out, who are working with a flawed intellect, 
a.k.a. SOM. Yes, positivism and realism took a serious hit, but did SOM? I 
think not.

In some ways, this revolution only made the problem worse. The same art 
critic, Haftmann, does a mighty fine job of explaining how these 
revolutionaries altered our conceptions away from this sort of realism but 
we can see the emergence of our problems in the very same moment. In the 
case of the revolutionary physics, for example, its pretty easy to see that 
it would force you to admit that there is much more to reality than meets 
the eye but still retain the basic assumption that we are subjects in an 
objective world. And that's pretty much what happened. As Haftmann (quoted 
above) describes the world's reaction to this news, it shifted the ground of 
reality. This is not as promising as it sounds. His metaphor for this new 
existential situation makes only one basic distinction, the reality of our 
perceptions and then an alien, antithetical plane of reality. This latter 
part surrounds our small island of perceptible reality. The idea here is 
that the hidden reality of physics can only be partially accessed by 
mathematicians and the unconscious can only be partially exposed by the 
psychoanalyst, like tiny cracks have been opened and we can see a tiny 
fragment of this hidden, alien reality. Again, the appearance-reality 
distinction really takes off here. The epistemic gap yawns widely here. As 
Haftmann says, "its impossible to establish a link between these two planes 
of reality". This conception makes sense if you realize they had not 
rejected materialism or SOM, but adjusting to the loss of positivisim, 
realism, the correspondence theory, sensory empiricism, etc.. We can see 
that this new ground of reality is still conceived in terms of materialism 
and the subject-object distinction and that is in fact what causes this 
sense of alienation, of "existential homelessness" and "helpless exposure in 
an indefinable void." The central feature of the shift for 20th century 
Westerners is that we are adrift in a hostile, meaningless and 
incomprehensible universe. And Haftmann betrays this stance when he explains 
that this crisis grows out of the fact that our "existential field" is 
defined by our evolutionary adaptations, just like all the other animals. 
The sense organs are adapted to filter out as much as they recieve, they are 
limited to the needs of survival in any given enviroment. And since the 
perception of those wavelength of light outside a certain spectrum are not 
factors in our survival, we simply have no capacity to percieve them even 
though they are part of reality. This same notion is then expanded into the 
realm of all unknowns, all those invisible depths and hidden mysteries. I 
think this is just about where Eagleton's God as "the conditions of 
possibility" comes in. All sorts of nonsense has been projected out onto 
this so-called alien reality. So I think this is also about where Pirsig 
comes in with his critique and also asks, rhetorically, why should reality 
be such that only a tiny handful of specialist can know what it is? That's 
ridiculous. Everybody knows what reality is.

Of course that's not as simplistic and dismissive as it might seem. Its just 
that the MOQ makes a distinction between knowing reality and being a 
physicist or being fluent in the language of mathematics. This crisis 
doesn't really show up in the MOQ. One thing that helps is the division into 
levels so that sensory experience (biological mediation) isn't expected to 
directly correspond with intellectual descriptions. It puts the social level 
between them in such a way that we could never be surprized by 
discrepancies. I won't complicate the issue with mysticism but have to say 
that radical empiricism is an alternative to that failed empiricism.

If the crisis of the Modern period is caused by the gap between appearance 
and reality, this sense of living in an unknowable reality, then at its core 
this is a crisis of empiricism. If there is no way to link reality and 
perception, then this is not only a rejection of objectivity but also the 
possibility of empiricism itself. Sound familar, Matt?

See how the rejection of objective knowledge is different from rejecting the 
assumptions of SOM, how the rejection of objective knowledge only makes 
sense from within SOM? I hope so. That's really my only point here.

And it seems to me that David M's notion of "the possible" just sort of fits 
in with the modern conception of that unknown reality. As the century 
progressed, apparently, all sorts of magic emminated from that dark place. 
Lots of crypto-theology, quasi-occultism crept in. I've only caught a whiff 
of it so far. Kandinsky was a devotee of Madame Blavatsky, for example. Ask 
me again in a month or two I expect to see more of it. It makes sense that a 
reaction to positivism would be romantic. But the MOQ is philosophical 
mysticism and radical empiricism and pragmatism, but the classic-romantic 
split of ZAMM is replaced for a reason. There has been much confusion in the 
20th century and romanticism is not the solution. The MOQ drops those terms 
in favor of something else.

Thanks for your time,
dmb

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