[MD] Another parallel

[John Carl]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com>wrote:

Matt:
> That's interesting.  I think I remember when you first
> started posting, and you had a bit on Royce.   And I think
> somebody said I might know something a little more about
> him.  But I don't have anything interesting to say about
> Royce.


yes, well, join the crowd.  Royce the forgotten.

William James once wrote, "Two hundred and fifty years from now, Harvard
will be known as the place where Josiah Royce once taught." Well, we only
have to wait about 150 years to find out if his prediction is accurate. From
this vantage point, at least, it looks like the ascendance of his fame is
right on schedule."


Can't remember where I clipped that quote from, but Joanna Kegely in her
address at the Harvard Divinity School said a few interesting things about
Royce.  One is that her undergraduates really like him.  And I can see why.
 He had an excellent reputation as a teacher and philosopher, was giving,
open and logically meticulous.  All reasons for my enthusiasm.



>  My instinct is to say that, between pragmatism and
> idealism, pragmatism is the way to go, but that's mainly
> because I go in for neither system-talk nor God-talk, which
> most 19th/turn of the century idealists have in spades.



Right now I'm working on a rebuttal of Pirsig's comments on British Idealism
which I found on Ant's website.  There is definitely more than a little hint
of an axe to grind on his (Pirsig's) part which I think stems from this same
concern - the way Idealism seems to feed into Theism.





>
> Royce's reading of evil as error is an interesting
> transmogrification of traditional theodicy into terms more
> applicable to modern times, but I confess to not getting
> that much out of theodicy in general.  A notable episode in
> the wheel of history, but, I suspect, not a ghost with much
> breath left.
>

I don't even know what a Theodicy is... easily remedied.  Ok, my cursory
reading of Royce on evil is akin to Pirsig on suffering:

"If you eliminate suffering from this world, you eliminate life.  There's no
evolution.  Suffering is the negative face of Quality that drives the whole
process. All these battles between patterns of evolution go on with
suffering individuals like Lila."

Royce contends that the Good is perfected in the struggle to overcome evil -
and he also makes a point that very much seems to be making the case for DQ
- if everything is statically perfect, there is no opportunity for growth.


> For my money, the neglected philosopher to read is George
> Santayana.  And in that regard, you might try reading his
> short Character and Opinion in the United States.  It offers
> incisive commentary on both James and Royce, and the
> general character of the American intellectual milieu.  It's
> absolutely magnificent.
>


I wouldn't have said that sounded very interesting half a year ago.  But it
does now.


>
> John said:
> Philosophologists are always certain about their subject,
> and philosophers almost never are.
>
> Matt:
> Sure, but do you know why "philosophologists" are so
> certain?


Yup.


>

Because they demarcate their subject-material
> very finely, cutting off a slice of life, rather than trying to
> gaze at the whole.



Well I thought it was because they were restricting knowledge to what
other's said - to who said what and why.  They study what is said and known
by others rather than investigate for themselves the knowable and how best
to say it.


 It's the same for any profession.  The
> only thing that distinguishes a philosopher is that they
> can't help but continually be distracted by the whole.  But
> if every person was a philosopher full-time, then we'd have
> no civilization, because no one would've been able to stuff
> their doubt into a sack long enough to make a wheel or
> start a fire.


Yup.  I quoted a great deal of Royce from The World and the Individual that
was right along those lines.




>
>
> If a "philosophologist" is someone who confuses the part
> for the whole (knowing a lot about Kant for knowing a lot
> about wisdom), then "philophilosophers"--lovers of the love
> of wisdom--are those who confuse the whole for the part:
> knowing a lot about wisdom for knowing about X.  For as
> the Greek word sophia makes apparent, its an ineffable
> object that you can't know a lot about qua sophia.  Every
> good philosopher knows--and most through history have
> known--that you need the part and the whole, and that
> the struggle is knowing how to relate the two.
>


My rough sketch so far sees Pragmatism concerned with the parts, and
Idealism with the whole.  Here's a quote about reason from that piece I'm
working on, followed by Pirsig's comment.

Reason, however, is the vehicle of ideas which are presupposed by all
experience, and in this sense it predetermines and governs experience. It
also perceives truths which are incapable of verification in
sense-experience, and it intuitively apprehends spiritual realities.

 The MOQ denies this. Reason grows out of experience and is never
independent from it.
I myself have been having much trouble with "the undifferentiated continuum"
as part of my critique of pre-intellectual experience is that if you define
"intellect" in any way but the most abstract, it makes no sense whatsoever.
 Perception is intellection.  Even Pirsig says of "facts" well which facts
are you going to pay attention to?  Reason and experience arise mutually and
neither one has ever been "experienced" apart from the other.  If there is
no reason, there is nothing to experience - nothing to plug sense data
"into".  Nothing to recieve and collate and assimilate and is exactly the
same as if nothing occurred.

Thanks for responding to a beginner,

John


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