[MD] Ironistic Metaphysics

[david buchanan]

Steve said:
I'm wondering amount the image of the person selecting among paintings in a gallery. If a person recognizes the contingency of all metaphysical systems and sees herself in the position of selecting among various philosophical systems with no meta-method for choosing among them while maintaining the idea that none of these systems represent reality but rather offer different descriptions that are useful for different purposes, hasn't this person avoided being a metaphysician?


dmb says:
Ha. Yea, maybe that's what it means to be ironic about metaphysics. The ironist holds a metaphysical view that says there is no way to choose a metaphysical view. She knows that this is a performative contradiction but she just can't help herself. She knows that choosing different systems for different purposes is a meta-method of selection that denies any mets-method but she just can't help herself. In other words, I understand it, the painting gallery analogy takes a specific metaphysical stance. It denies that there is a single exclusive truth, an objective truth that allows only one correct construction of reality. It says there can be many such constructions and I don't think this position is held ironically. I don't think such a position is outside of philosophy or metaphysics or that anyone can escape metaphysics. "The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does" (ZAMM chapter 7) Or, as he puts it in Lila, the only one who hasn't polluted reality with metaphysics hasn't been born yet. 
But take a look at this passage from chapter 7, just a few paragraphs after the sand-sorting metaphor...

"Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other.
What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one. Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of unsorted sand for its own sake. Such an understanding will instead seek to direct attention to the endless landscape from which the sand is taken. That is what Phædrus, the poor surgeon, was trying to do.
To understand what he was trying to do it's necessary to see that part of the landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, is a figure in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape without seeing this figure is not to see the landscape at all. To reject that part of the Buddha that attends to the analysis of motorcycles is to miss the Buddha entirely.
There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask that question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. About the Buddha that exists independently of any analytic thought much has been said...some would say too much, and would question any attempt to add to it. But about the Buddha that exists within analytic thought, and gives that analytic thought its direction, virtually nothing has been said, and there are historic reasons for this. But history keeps happening, and it seems no harm and maybe some positive good to add to our historical heritage with some talk in this area of discourse.
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts. Mark Twain's experience comes to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something is always killed. But what is less noticed in the arts...something is always created too. And instead of just dwelling on what is killed it's important also to see what's created and to see the process as a kind of death-birth continuity that is neither good nor bad, but just is."


Dmb says:
This is what's BEHIND the various painting in the gallery and this is where the differences between Pirsig and Rorty really makes it hard to even compare them. 
More later.



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