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

[Matt Kundert]

DMB,

Matt said:
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.

DMB said:
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.

Matt:
Leaving David aside, I think you're absolutely right to see these two 
criticisms as related, though I still think you are wrong about Rorty.  
Accepting the above potted philosophical narrative, I would suggest that 
Rorty has (much so in response to these types of criticisms) rebuked the 
Romantics for there exaltation of Imagination--we should exalt nothing (the 
whole "get rid of God and his doubles" thing).  I don't think Rorty 
"rejects" objectivity, I think he rejects, just like Pirsig, the 
subjectivity/objectivity problematic.  Pragmatism, in his view, is a further 
offshoot of Romanticism in so far as Kantianism further calcified Platonism 
and Romanticism's reaction was a rejection of Platonism, just as the 
Sophists were the counterpoint to Plato.  We've gotten better at rejecting 
Platonism since the Sophists and the Romantics, taking their good ideas at 
how to batter Platonism and trying to evade reinstating it in something else 
(like Imagination).

This is, however, an exegetical dispute over what Rorty's saying.  I could 
give you a list of the essays I would look at to combate your analysis, but 
I won't (except to mention that, particularly in Acheiving Our Country, 
Rorty talks explicitly about the kinds of people that were at Pirsig's 
cocktail party, calling them the Academic Left) because actual fidelity to 
Rorty is besides the point when figuring out better philosophy.  If the two 
of us can agree to reject both Enlightenment exaltation and Romantic 
exaltation, then that's enough agreement about which philosophical theses to 
agree on.  The fact that I think I got such ideas more or less wholesale 
from Rorty (granted a blend of reinforcement from a host of other writers 
like Richard Bernstein, Clifford Geertz, Robert Pirsig, Stanley Fish, 
Jeffrey Stout, Annette Baier, etc.), and would in another context be willing 
to debate the finer points of Rortyan exegetical analysis, is besides the 
point--I could, unbeknownst to me, be augmenting Rorty (though I currently 
don't think I am).

Matt said:
Now--as far as defending his redescription with phenomenology [and physics 
and an inner/outer distinction] ... clearly these demand some sort of 
explanation and, as need be, cuffs around the ears.

DMB said:
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.

Matt:
I'd be interested to hear how you come to understand the relationship.  For 
my own part, the thing that makes me the most suspicious about phenomenology 
is its claims about having found a "method" that acheives neutrality, a way 
in which we can finally settle all these stupid disputes.  The first-person 
point of view is no more neutral than any other point of view.  
Phenomenology hoped, by what Husserl called "bracketing" (I forget the 
technical term), to cut the wheat from the chaff, the accidents of our 
experience (and descriptions) from the essence of our experience (and 
descriptions)--just as every attempt at methodical neutrality supposedly 
does.  Pragmatism, and I think Pirsig agrees, suggests that such neutrality 
is no where for the finding and that the accident/essence distinction is 
just one more in the constellation around Plato, creator (possibly 
inadvertant) of SOM.

As far as the narrative of how we got from the 19th century to the 20th, I'm 
not going to quibble with it too much.  Its nice enough for what it is, 
though I think it tries to do too much.  I don't think there's a huge 
unified thing going on between the 19th and the 20th century (or any other 
century for that matter).  There may be a lot of surface similarities, but I 
think the only way to get from mid-19th century philosophy (meaning Hegel) 
to end of the 20th century philosophy (meaning Derrida, at least as far as 
Continental is concerned) is by telling a tale more specific to the 
philosophical dialectic.  That isn't to say that there are interconnections 
and the like, but the trouble is when we get to the 70s and people start 
talking about something called "post-modernism."  The crap that gets thrown 
on (or under) that bus--for the life of me I can't figure out what the 
similarities are supposed to be that are substantial and not cosmetic.  For 
instance, the relation between literature and philosophy.  Rorty, I think, 
was the first to call it: what goes by the name of postmodern in philosophy 
(Foucault, Derrida, whatever) is basically philosophy catching up to 
literary modernism, what--to take the list of authors I studied in a lit 
class--Eliot, Woolf, and Faulkner were doing at the Fin-de-siecle.

That being said, a warning of "don't lose sight of too many of the details 
of intellectual history when telling your Geistesgeschichte," while a few of 
the details didn't sound right with training, it was a fine enough tale.  
And well written.  My sense of discordance probably comes from the fact that 
I sense you've been reading Peter Gay (and if you haven't, you'd probably 
find him a good source).  My main intellectual history teacher was Laurence 
Dickey and he once told us that Gay was more or less oudated and outmoded by 
more recent historical scholarship.  But since I'm not qualified to lodge 
more detailed complaints than that, I'll simiply highlight a few of the 
parts I think are right and I would focus on if I were you:

DMB said:
It 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.

Matt:
Ocular metaphors?  Sound familiar, DMB?  I think use of ocular metaphors, 
and the creation of appearance/reality distinctions, in the philosophical 
landscape is the right trail to tumble down.  But of course I think that, 
that's the tale Rorty tells....

DMB said:
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.

Matt:
Maybe my sense is off, but I would hesitate before saying that about James 
in America these days, but I have no sense about Bergson.  I've never heard 
of really studying him in America, but I don't know about the Continent 
(they tend to study their history pretty good, unlike anglophone 
universities).

A detail and connection in this regard:  1) One of the things Bergson did 
was change our assumptions about time--he elongated it, as it were.  I think 
this is interesting because, in a certain sense and under certain 
interpretations, Pirsig is behind Bergson on this score, given e.g. Pirsig's 
metaphor of the train.  2) Nietzsche is famous for being a huge fan of 
Emerson and Emerson was a huge influence on James.  (Two different 
histories, see Cornel West's The American Evasion of Philosophy--which 
traces pragmatism to Emerson first, before Peirce--and Loius Menand's The 
Metaphysical Club, which is a heavy-on-the-detail intellectual history story 
about the group James and Peirce belonged to at Harvard--though I should 
note that Susan Haack hates Menand's anthology of pragmatist writings, 
mainly because they not so subtly lead up to Rorty--who usually, when 
talking about pragmatism's roots lately, mentions James and Nietzsche 
together.)

DMB said:
Freud, Nietzsche and Marx rocked realist conceptions too. ... In Pirsigian 
terms, it looks like one more stage in the classic-romantic dialectic rather 
than a rejection of SOM.

Matt:
I can agree with this, but the reason I think so has little to do with 
materialism.  The reason these three got into problems is because they 
played into an assumption that holds materialism up (I doubt many people 
would call Nietzsche a materialist)--the appearance/reality distinction.  
Marx and Freud are the easiest to see because they used scientistic 
rhetoric, they both thought they had discovered a (surprise, surprise) 
neutral method to cut past appearances to reality (they both call it 
"science," though in what regard it's hard to say).  Nietzsche's harder to 
put a finger on in this regard, because it is _really_ hard to say what kind 
of method he has, but his deployment of the "will to power" was an inversion 
of Plato, and despite the wisdom we can glean from such an inversion, an 
inversion still plays by the same rules as what it inverts, using the same 
material as it were.

DMB said:
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?

Matt:
Well, what can I say: I again deny that Rorty rejects "objective knowledge" 
as opposed to the whole problematic.  Sound familiar?

And while we're at what sounds familiar, do I really need to smirkinigly 
remind you who first introduced you to the very idea of the 
appearance/reality distinction and how it needs to be rejected?  Or have you 
forgotten our first conversations in which you couldn't make out the 
connection between SOM and the appearance/reality distinction and blasted me 
for talking about such a thing?  Or the fact that, apparently until quite 
recently, you couldn't imagine _anybody_ who'd _ever_ thought the way you 
now seem quite content to paint them--ways in which philosophers thought 
they'd cut to the absolute truth of things, appearance to reality?  If 
you've finally figured out how to use that vocabulary, and how SOM, Pirsig's 
vocabulary, links to it, why have you continued with the one note tune of 
Rorty rejecting one half of a dualism that Pirsig rejects the whole of when 
the primary promulgator of the vocabulary of the appearance/reality 
distinction--_and how it needs to be rejected_--is Richard Rorty, primarily 
through Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature which singles out the metaphor 
of _sight_ as the main lynchpin in the problematic we should be rejecting?  
Sound familiar?  We have you continued where you should perhaps think about 
revising?  By taking on Rorty's vocabulary you've made it even _easier_ for 
me to rebut the accusations because now, instead of traveling the road of 
translation from Pirsig's vocab into Rorty's, all I have to do is cite a 
line in which he explicitly denies what you accuse.  Or just repost old 
stuff.  That doesn't mean it isn't true and you aren't right, but I would 
think it requires a more explicit handling of his arguments.  To deny that 
Rorty rejects the appearance/reality distinction when a _whole_ lot of what 
he does is explicitly show us ways to reject it and replace it with other 
things--and especially in the tone you've adopted, where it sounds like 
Rorty's never even thought rejection was possible or sometimes even _heard_ 
of the distinctions he should be rejecting--is a very suspicious kind of 
treatment.

You sound scorned.

I don't know by what, but it's a very suspicious sound.

Matt

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