[MD] Quality Conversations

[David M]

Hi DMB

Very interesting post below. Interesting to see how you are work through 
Heidegger having read Pirsig first.
I, of course, started with Heidegger before discovering Pirsig. Just been 
reading a good book by John Caputo
called 'On Religiion' that describes what religion after Heidegger and 
post-modernism might look like, all part
of the post-secular movement that is currently on the move and which I have 
raised a bit on MOQ discuss.

When Heidegger talks about Being as having been seen in terms of beings and 
mis-conceived I think it
is useful to see this as Being as having been described in terms of SQ much 
as science does and
misses half of reality that can only be understood in terms of DQ. Hence 
Being needs to be seen in
a larger SQ/DQ context and not reduced to just SQ.

Regards
David M



Matt said:
I absolutely believe that Pirsig's motivation in developing a systematic 
metaphysics was intended to rebut charges of relativism.  I think the 
motivation was misguided, because I don't think you need a system to rebut 
relativism.  On the other hand, the system itself doesn't mean a devolution 
into absolutism, as in the past I've often seemed to intimate.  I still 
think it's _suspicious_, but I think Pirsig's better angels were looking in 
a much different direction than Plato's.

dmb says:
Well I'm glad to learn that your Platonic suspicions about Pirsig have 
mellowed. I recently read some Rorty for my philosophy of religion course 
and was tickled to see him voice the same Platonic suspicions against 
Heidegger. This tickled me because there is no doubt that Heidegger fully 
intended to overturn the whole metaphysical tradition of the West and loved 
the pre-Socratic philosophers just like Pirsig, expresses a Western form of 
Taoism just like Pirsig, thought art would save us from the scientific world 
view just like Pirsig, attacked Descartes and SOM just like Pirsig. I mean, 
its pretty clear where you got your suspicions. It would be relatively easy 
to transfer Rorty's criticisms to the MOQ. But even there, I thought he was 
misreading Heidegger. And I think it is related to a confession he made 
about his attitude toward religion. Called himself "unmusical". Said he just 
didn't get it and hoped it would be relegated to a private matter and then 
hopefully, in time, it would all be forgotten. If it weren't for 
philosophical mysticism and such, I'd tend to agree with him about religion. 
But I'm thinking that when it comes to mysticism he is not just unmusical. 
He's downright tone-deaf. This is why he tend to view guys like Pirsig and 
Heidegger as Platonists. Apparently, he didn't know what else to make of it. 
Which brings us to...

Matt continued:
The real disagreement is on the importance of what James called radical 
empiricism.  As I understand the issue now, you, Pirsig, late James, and 
middle Dewey think it is an important piece, without which damage is done. 
Myself, Rorty, early James, and late Dewey think it isn't so important, more 
of an add-on.  Because if we construe "radical empiricism" as a non-Platonic 
description of our relation to the world, then there would seem to have to 
be a placeholder for that in neopragmatists (as I think there is) because a 
"description of our relation to the world" is just too general a notion for 
anybody to not have one, let alone a philosopher.  That still leaves the 
question of how they match up.  As I see it generally, James didn't like 
empiricism because it denied the reality of the relations between 
particulars.  So he made it more radical by suggesting that relations are 
real, too, but I think in doing so he took out everything that made 
empiricism an interesting philosophical thesis.

dmb says:
Hmmm. What is the neopragmatist's view of "our relation to the world"? I'd 
sincerely like to know what that is. Basically, what I find in Dewey, James 
and Pirsig is a version of Heidegger's being-in-the-world. Instead of being 
a subjective mind encountering an external objective reality, we are always 
already situated in a pre-reflective world. We see a version of this in 
James's description of pure experience as pre-reflective. Dewey used a wide 
variety of descriptions for this already-always-situated. His insistence 
that the initial experience was no less real than the cognitions that 
follows, his naturalistic description of the organism AND the environment as 
a whole system and even his ideas about art and the aesthetic experience, 
the commentators insist, can't be properly understood except in terms of 
radical empiricism. The move James made, to insist that the relations 
between things be accounted for, is an interesting way to get the job done. 
Notice how the relations act as a glue. They provide a continuity to 
experience or rather including the relations is a way to recognize the 
continuity in experience. In his deceptively folksy example he walks to a 
building he has in mind. He's trying to show how so-called subjective ideas 
and objective realities are NOT set over against each other with some 
epistemic gap between them. They are joined in a series of experiences, a 
continuous flow. Sure, there is a difference. Imaginary water won't douse a 
real fire and real water won't necessarily douse an imaginary fire, but 
these are phenomenological or qualitative distinctions, not metaphysical 
categories. Heidegger's complaint about Western metaphysics was that Being 
has always been understood in terms of beings. If I understand it, he's 
saying that existence has always been understood in terms of things or 
entities, what Pirsig would call the metaphysics of substance. It seems 
"Being", for Heidegger, was not just raw existence but more like a 
particular mode of being, a way of taking the world. This would be like a 
grandiose version of Pirsig's SOM glasses. He says something like, "being is 
that on the basis of which all things are intelligible, the basis on which 
things are always already known to us. In that sense, our being is our way 
of seeing the world, our way of seeing everything that makes up our world. 
In Heidegger's terms this is our basic familiarity with the world, the way 
we know how to use thing like rooms and hammers and language. It is this 
sense in which Pirsig's Quality is direct everyday experience. Like Pirsig, 
he thought there was more than one way to cut reality up and that in fact 
our way of being changed from time to time. The earth supports many worlds, 
but not all at the same time. Anyway, his complaint about our own time was 
ruled by a technological mode of being, which turns everything into an 
object for a subject. It was a way to criticize everything from consumerism 
to scientific materialism and everyone from Plato to Husserl. He thought our 
world was Descartes world come to life and suggested that art might be the 
only way out. It provides a clearing of this conceptual framework in the way 
it disrupts and defies our expectations. He thought we had to think in a 
whole new way, a poetic way, in a "clearing", an openness to being. 
Following a hunch, I discovered that, yes, this "clearing" can be fruitfully 
compared to meditation and all that Zennish no-mind stuff. John Caputo does 
an interesting comparison of Heidegger and Meister Eckhart but the 
comparisons to Eastern thought work better because of their non-theistic 
tendencies. Maybe that's too much info. The point is simply that they all 
share a notion that there is an important non-conceptual mode of experience 
that has been dismissed and ignored for various reasons and that recognizing 
is important, also for various reasons. But they're all more or less 
convinced that its a cure for a kind of cultural illness. Yes, the notion of 
being always already in the world is going to effect epistemological issues 
but I think they're all concern with the state of our civilization and the 
quality of our lives. Rorty is no less concerned, I'm sure. But I think he's 
tone deaf in this area. It just sounds like Platonism to him. Or religion, 
if there's a difference.

Matt said:
Concurrently (but later), in analytic philosophy you have a series of 
philosophers attacking empiricism for having certain dogmas that are 
unsustainable.  I think the two series dovetail, which is why I think if you 
are looking for a metaphysical description of our relation to the world that 
fits where James' radical empiricism does, one needs to look at Sellars' 
"psychological nominalism."  I don't think the "linguistic turn" was any big 
deal at all--I don't think it was great like the logical positivists did, 
nor do I think it was the devil like recalcitrant metaphysicians (of which 
there is a rising tide of in contemporary philosophy).  It was just a shift 
in terminology, and in that sense both sides were wrong.

dmb says:
Okay, maybe I'll go look up "psychological nominalism", but I'm extremely 
skeptical of the analytic approach. Tastes like math to me. These are among 
the tone-deafest philosophers when it comes to the sort of stuff I was just 
explaining. Some of those guys made a career out of mocking Heidegger. Maybe 
its just a matter of temperament but I think this amounts to a logical 
analysis of poetry, an autistic critique of art. I don't understand language 
to be a logical thing and think its fundamentally wrong to expect it to 
conform to formal logic. I can see how that approach might develop some 
important tools, but language much bigger and deeper more mysterious than 
any such tools. But, I have to admit that my distaste for the analytic 
philosophers has left me in the dark about them. Foolishly perhaps, I've 
decided its not worth the time or effort to find out.



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