[MD] Ironistic Metaphysics

[david buchanan]

Steve said:
But Pirsig talks about the possibility of taking the glasses off. I can't see how that works if the glasses "constitute the world as we understand it." But maybe I'm pushing too hard against the text here since it was written to make a different point about the mythos as you say.

dmb says:

That's a fair question but, like I already said with respect to the objection to ocular metaphors, taking the glasses of doesn't mean seeing the objective world directly. The "objective reality" is just an idea handed to us by the culture because that idea is built right into the glasses. When you take them off, you get pure experience, the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum, the immediate flux of life. These phrases don't refer to any kind of pre-existing external reality, which is a concept, but simply experience prior to any such concepts. 


Steve said:
I suppose it is about semantics. I introduced the term [ironic] here because I thought it may be a useful term to for understanding and talking about what Bo is doing with the M in MOQ as compared to the way I think Pirsig is using it. What is really "ironic" for me is that Bo has found more to agree with in what I've said than anyone else!

dmb says:
Yea, but there is already a word in philosophy for what Bo is doing to the MOQ. When intellectual abstractions are mistaken for existential realities, it is called "reification". Rorty and others like to use the word "essentialism" in a similar way. Pirsig goes after "substance" as one of those a priori concepts that has been mistaken for an actual concrete reality, and for some materialists or physicalists it is the only actual reality. I mean, I think we agree about Bo's mistake, mistaking concepts (the MOQ) for reality (the Quality it refers to). 


Steve said:
This traditional (I think) view of metaphysics is what I see Bo as using when he says things like "the MOQ IS reality." While I see Pirsig as talking about his "metaphysics" as a way of talking about reality and one of an inexhaustible possibilities for talking about reality. In other words, I see Pirsig as an ironist while Bo is reading him as a traditional metaphysician. But I could be wrong. At least no one seems to like the distinction I've been trying to draw.

dmb says:

I agree but prefer to use different terms. It's just that construing the difference between traditional metaphysics and ironic metaphysics doesn't work particularly well here because it uses the term "metaphysics" in a way that is quite different from the meaning used in this forum's central phrase - the "metaphysics" of quality. Rorty uses the term to oppose metaphysics, as a response to the death of metaphysics but Pirsig is not at all doing what Rorty opposes and yet he's quite comfortable using the term as a label for his own work. And so I feel these terms are unnecessarily confusing. There are other words that express the same idea and I agree with the idea itself. I would say that Bo has reified the MOQ. I'd say Bo is an essentialist about the MOQ. I'd say that Pirsig is not an essentialist, maybe even an anti-essentialist. Then I'd be saying the same thing you're saying but without the potentially confusing terms.

Steve said:
I don't know about Sandy [Dr. Rosenthal], but I think you are demonstrating a strange allergy to Rorty. In other words, for some reason that I can't figure out you seem to have an over-active immune system when it comes to him. For example, for someone who sees truth as Pirsig and Rorty do   and as you and I do--as a word used to describe the quality of aesthetic intellectual creations--the charge of relativism should sound about as on point as the charge of blasphemy does to an atheist, but you seem to need this word to have something to grab onto to try to club Rorty with. The more I read of Rorty the more I agree with Matt K that you just haven't tried to understand Rorty at all. If you gave him a chance I bet you would really dig him.


dmb says:

Yes, much to Matt's chagrin I do not like Richard Rorty. I don't think it's quite fair to call it "a strange allergy" or "an over-active immune system" though. I mean, that certainly suggests that my reactions are founded on some personal quirk on my part but what if the guy really is poison? I've learned that there is a whole school of pragmatism that distinguishes themselves in opposition to Rorty's brand of the same. Sandra Rosenthal is a member of that school, the classical pragmatists. Like me, they insist that radical empiricism is central to the whole thing. 
And may I remind you that ZAMM was criticized for relativism, that Lila begins with Rigel accusing "the author" of relativism and that one of the important things going on in the second book is Pirsig denying that the MOQ is a form of relativism. I mean, we don't like absolutism either but relativism is not the only alternative. This is a pretty serious issue with practical consequences. I mean, if there is no such thing as a universal truth, not even a provisional one, then what happens to universal principles like "human rights"? You don't have to be a reactionary to believe that relativism is a moral disaster, you know?



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