[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[Steven Peterson]

Hi DMB, Matt,

> dmb says:
> There's nothing wrong with dissolving bad questions. What concerns me is your sincere and earnest attempt to avoid accidentally giving answers to old riddles. As I understand it, you're reading Pirsig's claims through the lens of Rorty's particular strain of anti-Platonism and anti-representationalism. By doing so the key terms are put into a different context, where they have a very different meaning. That particular recontextualization doesn't work because the meaning of the terms is dramatically altered in the process. Like I said, this is just a plain, old-fashioned mix up.
> A Jamesian term like "pure experience" and a Pirsigian term like "primary empirical reality" comes to look like claims about "perfect correspondence" or some kind of direct realism. I think that Rorty's targets are positivism and traditional empiricism and they all subscribe to some version of SOM and he's right to tell them that they cannot have what they seek. James and Pirsig are also saying that traditional empiricists and the positivists cannot have the kind of truth or knowledge they think they can. They reject the correspondence theory and the metaphysical dualism underlying it and then go on to make claims involving terms like pure experience and direct experience. So I think this Rortian lens leads you to misread the alternative to the correspondence theory as if it were essentially re-assertion of the correspondence theory. The alternative to Platonism is taken as more Platonism.


Steve:

Matt has said in the past that he doesn't think that Platonism is
something that we become cured of and never need concern ourselves
with it again. It is something that we have to make a continual effort
to avoid if we wish to stay clear of it. While "direct experience" and
"primary empirical reality" need not be taken as a sort of Platonism
and may be useful teaching tools for getting out of Platonism, it is
easy to nevertheless construe them as more Platonism, so Matt and I
see such terms as best dropped.

Consider the following from Lila:

"Phædrus thought that of the two kinds of students, those who study
only subject-object science and those who study only meditative
mysticism, it would be the mystic students who would get off the stove
first.  The purpose of mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from
experience but to bring one's self closer to it by eliminating stale,
confusing, static, intellectual attachments of the past."

The anti-Platonist in me gets concerned when he talks about this
primary reality as something that we can get closer to or further
from, as something that the mystic is in touch with and the rest of us
are not. Are we non-enlightened folks out of touch with reality? Are
there two realities, a primary and a secondary one where one of these
is the _real_ reality and the other mere appearance? You'd rather we
not read such statements as Platonism, but Matt and I wish that he
wouldn't say things that can be so easily construed as Platonism. Or
rather we think it's just fine that he said such things as scaffolding
to teach anti-Platonism, but once we understand anti-Platonism better
we ought to drop such scaffolding.

Best,
Steve