[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
Platonism... 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.

dmb says:
Yes, I understand how certain terms will raise red flags and I agree with the continual effort to avoid Platonism. BUT I think that such vigilance ought to be dropped when we are talking about James and Pirsig because they are anti-Platonists too. That sort of anti-Platonic sensitivity makes much more sense in a larger context. Like I've said, I use terms like "pure experience" and "primary empirical reality" simply because they accurately make reference to the texts we are here to discuss. There are many alternative terms for the same idea and so they could easily be avoided. But I don't think it's necessary. We can simply move forward knowing that Pirsig opposes Plato (the law of gravity is one of many ghosts), that he explicitly rejects the correspondence theory (the art gallery of truth). Mere reference to the evidence is enough for you guys, eh? We can move forward by discussing the meaning of his terms as he meant them, not as they might be construed by a scientific realist or a Platonist or a SOMer. We should be able to move forward knowing that Pirsig and James are offering Pragmatism and Radical empiricism as an alternative to those things. In that sense, we all share the same enemy. By transferring Rorty's anti-Platonism into this context, you just end up making enemies where there aren't any, see?

There are real differences, of course. Rorty's anti-Platonism is different from Pirsig's anti-Platonism. But that's a long story. 


I'm just saying that - in this particular context - your eternal vigilance against Platonism is unnecessary and inappropriate. I'm saying that Rorty's warnings don't apply to the MOQ.


Steve asks us to 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."


Steve said:
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.


dmb replies:
This is a good example. I think Pirsig's statement is anti-Platonism. Pirsig is saying very opposite of Plato. Plato thinks that ideals are more real than empirical reality, that experience is mere appearance but Pirsig is saying that ideas take us further away from experience, that experience is what's real and ideals are just abstractions and concepts that follow from experience. He is defying Plato is a way that is very different from Rorty, but he's not a Platonist. He's Sophist and mystic and pragmatist and a radical empiricist and but a Platonist? No. A positivist or traditional empiricist? No. A scientific realist? No. He's just saying that scientifically minded people tend to live in their heads and tend to become insensitive to their own experience as a result. He's referring to the numbing effects of attitudes of objectivity and disinterested observation. You know, it's a lesser form of the autistic mode of thought, which is tragic precisely because of the way such people are sort of cut off from their own lives and can only ever take in certain features of the overall situation, a certain kind of disengagement. I mean, Pirsig's comment is not about what's real in the ontological sense. Here, experience is not the way we get at reality. Reality is not something beyond experience itself. For this kind of pragmatism, reality is experience all the way down and conceptualization is a subspecies of that. This is a reversal of Plato's picture. This turns SOM on its head as well.