[MD] subject/object: pragmatism

[David M]

Hi Matt K

Matt:
I've discussed with you before my problems with your suggestion, but 
probably the shortest summation of why I've never sought to pick up your 
revision of Pirsig's philosophy is this: I think you make the same mistake 
on a systematic scale what some others make on a rhetorical scale--you 
conflate SOM with thinking.  In Pirsig's language, you conflate the 
Subject/Object dualism with the analytic knife.  As far as I can tell, in 
Pirsig--and this is the better part of wisdom--there is a difference between 
SOM and our ability to distinguish, to make distinctions, etc.  At the very 
root of the Quality thesis, waiting there implicitly, lies our ability to 
distinguish between X and Y, using the analytic knife, because if we didn't 
first have that power, then we wouldn't be able to value one more than the 
other.  In fact, Pirsig's very important point is that the analytic knife, 
our distinguishing ability, is the same thing as our process of valuing, 
that each movement of the analytic knife is a function of our evaluative 
relationship with the two that fall out of the cloven one.

Rorty once defended Derrida from his interpreters on this very same point by 
pointing out that there is a difference between Derrida's logocentrism and 
binary oppositions generally.  Distinctions aren't bad _inherently_.  A 
distinction is only as bad as the use to which it is put.  One of the things 
philosophers have been doing since Plato, to borrow the  way Putnam once put 
the point, is turning ad hoc distinctions into universal dualisms.  They did 
so because they thought eternity was better than ephemerality.  They did so 
because they thought eternity was a live option.

But it isn't, and neither is the analytic knife or binary oppositions 
inherently bad.  It is thinking so that makes me suspicious of people 
because it reminds me of another philosophical quest, the Route Back to 
Eden.  This quest takes it that Man is a Fallen Being and that one of its 
traits of fallenness is that it must distinguish, cleaving into two, four, 
eight, sixteen, and on, instead of being able to coalesce with the One.  A 
variation: if it weren't for language/concepts, we'd be able to get at what 
the essence of the object was.

DM: I think this is pretty much right. SOM is tied up with essentialism, 
de-valuing contingency and our actual world, quest for certainty & control, 
etc. Our basic abilities to think and make distinctions and become more 
individual, democratic, free, naturalistic are not SOM, or not necessarily 
SOM, despite some links and associations. Matt is also right to question the 
use of the term 'pure' in case it is some kind or primitivism or attempt to 
reject intellect or modernism. But that said I think we can use the term 
'pure' and make sense of it. We need to understand out culture in terms of 
it being an art, a way to cut up experience, something open. For me the word 
pure does two things. 1 It says lets sweep away the existing culture (SOM or 
whatever) and take a blank sheet of paper and start again.
2 'Pure' experience says that there is a ground level of 
differentiations/qualities that make up the base of our experience, before 
the culture and its art get to work.
At this core we may find certain divisions that it is hard to see how we 
could do without them. Pirsig suggests one such key division: DQ/SQ. Until 
you divide experience between the patterned and the non-patterned how can 
you get any culture going? On the other hand, and for the worse, SOM ignores 
DQ and is overly focused on SQ.  And worst still it takes some SQ 
(objective) as essential and other SQ (subjective) as somehow less real and 
ignores and dismisses it. So MOQ argues that if you get SOM out of your head 
(get 'pure') you can see how it fails to take account of key aspects of 
experience. If it is language all the way down you fail to be able to claim 
that MOQ has advantages over SOM in terms of doing more justice to the full 
range of qualities we experience. This is not to ignore the fact that 
language does allow us to enhance and change our experiences. But languages 
can be compared and seen as being more or less enriching and expressing of 
what we notice and feel about experience. It is a dissatisfaction with SOM 
that led Pirsig to suggest MOQ.