[MD] Quality Conversations

[david buchanan]

Matt said to dmb:
Yeah, that sounds about what I thought you and Pirsig (and certainly Heidegger) thought.  That might be the difference that everything else stems from--politics first v. spirit first. ..Let me also add, that because of the nature of cultural change, what Dewey called the means/ends continuum (where you decide on means to get to an end, but then as you enact the means, your end changes, so you have to perform the whole routine again), that we'll be doing them all at once, at about the same time.  I don't think we will (nor should we) neglect the spiritual and focus all our cultural energy on the political.  That's why I do philosophy--it is a focus on, what I call though others may find it a perversion of the word, the spiritual, though I try and stay up on politics.  There are others who focus on politics and I think our culture may be better off with this kind of division of labor.

dmb replies:
I don't know about the means/ends continuum but its interesting that you would mention Dewey in this context. I recently looked at his ideas concerning cultural change as they're presented in the last chapter of ART OF EXPERIENCE, titled "Art and Civilization". I found that he essentially agrees with Pirsig's code of art there. He says, "Art is more moral than moralities". Heidegger is comparable to a certain extent as well. (An essay about this should be posted on Ant's site soonish.) Anyway, the idea is basically that cultural changes occur because of imaginative visions and this doesn't necessarily involve the fine arts. This kind of artist can and has included philosophers and political leaders as well as poets and prophets. Once in a while, when an imaginative vision meshes with the wider culture in a certain way, big things happen. It is in this sense that I mean the problems are metaphysical. That is to say there are problems with our most basic beliefs, our way of seeing the world. You know, the imaginative vision of Descartes has become our common sense and I think all three think its time for a new vision. We can see that the old one is breaking down in art, in physics, in philosophy, and in general. I guess I can see how a guy might take this for some kind of reductionism but I'm not saying all the main problems will be solved by a single solution or that they can only be boiled down to a single problem. I'm just saying the problem is very basic. Like I said to Gav, the myth we live by is inherently alienating. In that sense, we can talk about Platonism and "the great funeral procession" (morning rush hour) at the same time. In this sense, our consumer culture can rightly be framed in terms of scientific materialism. Its in this sense, that Pirsig's diagnosis of 20th century political conflicts are linked to the underlying metaphysical assumptions. 

Matt said:
...Besides, you are right, you can find Platonism in any statement, and possibly even in any metaphor--"it's more like a personality disorder" and all that.  But some metaphors make it harder than others to develop Platonic angles.  With the health metaphor, I don't take it to be that hard.  But like I said before, have at it--I prefer different metaphors, and if my reasons are annoying, then what can I do?  I've accepted that we both annoy each other.

dmb says:
I shouldn't have used the word "annoying" at all because I hoped you would respond to my actual answer here, which was deleted. I probably shouldn't mention how annoying that is too. As you may recall, I said your charges of Platonism were unwarranted and tried to explain how illness and health are not even metaphorical, let alone Platonic. The difference between sick and well is concrete. Likewise, the difference between real fruit and plastic fruit or the difference between a fake Rolex and the genuine article. None of these distinctions requires an appearance/reality distinction or any kind of essentialism. And in this context, where all the philosophers under discussion were involved in addressing the problem of Platonism, such charges seem to have no merit at all. That's WHY I find it annoying, because it seems completely irrelevant to our conversation.

dmb said:
I'm trying to get you to make a connection here. What if SOM and Platonism ARE the spiritual crisis? Then it starts to look more like we're on the same side.

Matt replied:
Yeah, I understand what you are trying to say, I just disagree.  We are largely on the same side and in a qualified sense, SOM and Platonism and other monikers drawn from specialized traditions of discourse (in this case philosophy) _are_ the spiritual crisis, but I tend to think that that inflates the ego of philosophers so I try and stay away from such reductionistic formulations (which stem from the "are").  I'm not prepared to say that people's individual problems in their own individual lives are Platonic problems, because that tends to lead one to think that one must then become a Plato-buster, or at least that I'm saying they should become Plato-busters, which would involve learning philosophy and all that jazz.  I think people's individual spiritual problems are more specific than that.  It's only when we look wide, at the whole culture, do people's problems homogenize together, but I think the downside to that is that we might tend to overinflate our own angle on the problem.

dmb says:
I'm confused. You just disagree and agree in a qualified sense. And the qualifications are concerned with the egos of philosophers and the reductionist nature of the word "are"? And do you sincerely think I'm saying everybody has to become a philosopher? What were you saying about quality conversations the other day? How they require a certain generosity? Well, I think you're being mighty stingy here my friend. It looks like you're just making stuff up and then basing the disagreement on that. I mean, that was obviously a pithy summary of a longer, fuller explanation but you're sort of pretending its an isolated claim. I believe the word for this is "disingenuous". 

Matt said:
...so should we also not say that either philosophy or common sense/everyday life can be reduced into the other.

dmb says:
Okay. But I don't know of anybody who says one CAN be reduced to the other. Could it be that you are taking my attempts to be specific about the subject matter as some kind of reduction? I honestly don't see it.

Likewise, Matt said:
...By "de-Platonizing" culture, I don't mean something that only philosophy can do.  I don't think there is a metaphysical puzzle that we need to solve in order to move our culture forward.  I think all levels of life are interconnected in such a complicated way that it is pointless to think that there is only one thing we need to do to move our culture forward to a better future.  This, I think, is what Dewey meant when he said that philosophy gets its problems thrown up on its shores by the larger culture.  We are reacting to larger cultural patterns, and philosophy can (and should) add its opinion, its angle, to the larger cultural conversation, but there isn't a one to one equation here.

dmb says:
Yes, but who said otherwise? Who said things are NOT interconnected in a complicated way? Who said there IS a one to one equation between philosophy and culture? Certainly not me. We could say the artful mechanic in ZAMM was de-platonized without the help of philosophical jargon or concepts. The Zen meditator is non-dualistic without being philosophical about it. The vision quest of young native Americans did not involve any epistemology lessons. And in fact all my intellectual heros are interested in the limits of rational argument and in re-asserting the importance of non-rational experience, pre-reflective experience, aesthetic experience. Again, I just don't see how these charges can have any merit in such a context. 

Matt said:
...we can formulate a strand of the cultural picture in metaphysical/philosophical terms, and try dealing with it in those terms, but I think we must 1) avoid reducing the strand we picked out to the terms we are currently using to deal with it and 2) be careful in our suggestions when we move back from our specialized terms (who, after all, talks about "metaphysics" in everyday life?) to the cultural strand we picked out and the larger populace concerned by the same problems with that strand.

dmb says:
Okay, this must be one of the points that is confusing the issue. I'm not using "metaphysics" as a reference to philosophical specialists. I'm talking about the most basic assumptions held by educated Westerns. I'm talking about our worldview, our vision of reality as its handed to us by the culture and language. Studying philosophy helps us to get a better handle on what that is and where it comes from, but I'm talking about something everybody has inherited. Language is like Heidegger's tools, ready to hand. We it functions properly it is invisible, but what it becomes too heavy or breaks we take it up more deliberately and scrutinize it in an effort to fix it. That's how our basic assumptions work too. They're invisible until there's a problem. These problems can show up in the philosophical realm, on the fringes of the physical sciences, by way of psychological and sociological analysis and simply in the way people feel about there lives. In fact, I'm presently in an interdisciplinary program precisely because I don't think its possible to pursue an interest in Pirsig's work any other way. It can't rightly be squeezed into a single discipline, let alone a specialty within a single field. In my opinion, the most interesting and intractable problems have to be approached from several angles at once. The borders between these fields make a certain amount of sense in terms of institutional organization and such, but they're not made of stone.

Matt said:
But if you want to call me a member of a tradition of mysticism for being an anti-Platonist, I'm fine with that.  I conceded quite a long time ago on the issue of mysticism being essentially Platonic.  I don't think it is, just like nothing is, but can be so interpreted.  So, if philosophical mysticism is a tradition that contains an array of positions, we can just say that I specialize in a number of them, but not all of them.

dmb says:
You'll be glad to know that I'm not yet ready to call you a mystic. In broad strokes, you might say the process of cultural change involves creation and destruction at the same time. The new imaginative vision, when it works, exerts enough power to drive the final nails into the coffin of the previous vision. We can even see in history that there is a flourishing of the arts as a culture disintegrates. And we see this in the philosophical reaction to the death of God and the death of metaphysics. Some put the emphasis on what they hope to be a new unifying vision and some put the emphasis on the destruction of the old vision. Rorty is among the latter while Caputo (to name one of DM's favorites) is one of the former. And, sadly, these former types are basically sophisticated, articulate religious reactionaries. Religious or theistic mystics, as opposed to non-theistic mysticism, would fit there too. The debate between these two camps looks like a high-brow version of the culture wars. They line up along liberal and conservative, secular and atheist lines pretty much as you'd expect. I suppose they have the temperaments that go along with those things. You know, the conservatives are horrified by pluralism and the progressive types feel oppressed by anything like an absolute truth. If those were my choices I'd certainly stand with Dick. But there is a third type that balances these two aspects more or less equally. Pirsig and Dewey pull it off nicely, I think. They don't stop with the destruction. Their anti-Platonism is just one phase of the movement, if you will. But the next movement is not to establish a new essential truth or revive the old one. They both manage a kind of realism without resorting to objective reality or single, exclusive truths. They're both atheists and yet they manage to build a place for spiritual experience within their thought. They both embrace pluralism without resorting to relativism or nihilism or "irony". Rorty just leaves me hanging like a movie stopped halfway through. And yet I don't want anything to do with these crypto-theological reactionaries either.

Here's a question for you. As I understand it, Rorty dismisses certain parts of Dewey. You said some things here about that. Do you think it would be fair to say that he's selecting out those points that would take him beyond the first phase, the anti-Platonism. Isn't that where he would suspect Dewey of slipping back into "metaphysics" in the Platonic sense? I mean, would it be fair to say Rorty's treatment of Dewey fits with the debate as I've sketched it? And that's why he's forever talking about what we should give up and what we should no longer ask. He puts most of the emphasis on the negative side, on hunting down the ghost in every corner and crushing it? And any attempts to go beyond this extermination are nothing more than the trickery of that same naughty ghost? Other than my flippant tone, isn't that about right?

Its chilly and damp and grey outside today. I'm glad to have this conversation.






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