[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[david buchanan]

DMB said to Matt:
...The terms in question are things like "pure experience" and "pre-intellectual experience". I don't know how perniciously you're excluding them but this conversation is mostly about why you and Steve want to avoid them. Isn't that the main topic here?

Matt replied:
Yes, the _terms_ in question, not the things being _referred to by_  the terms.   And the conversation can't be just why I (or Steve) avoid them, because _you know already know why_ we avoid them.  Knowing why is what enables you to make your criticism that we are reading a non-Platonist as a Platonist, and therefore getting him wrong.  Because you are a thorough-going anti-Platonist, you already know why anti-Platonists like Steve and I are wary of certain forms of expression.  You're concerned to express the fact that Pirsig (et al) is an anti-Platonist too and so has purged his terms of Platonic baggage. Since this isn't about Dynamic Quality itself, but about the use of adjectives such as "direct" and "pure" to _refer_ to DQ, the conversation has to be in part about why you think a philosopher _needs_ to use those terms to discuss DQ.


dmb says:
I don't think a philosopher NEEDS to use those terms. These complaints are not about philosophers in general. They are about you and Steve and myself. I'm talking about our conversations in this discussion forum. And I'm simply saying that your anti-Platonic tactics are exceedingly unhelpful in this particular context. Why? Because these tactics forestall discussion of the MOQ, particularly its central term. This central term is at the center of the MOQ's epistemology, which is not distinct from its ontology and ethics. Getting that part of it right or wrong is a pretty big deal.
Anyway, as I've said, there are many alternative terms for DQ or pure experience. And I'm honestly NOT saying that any of them are indispensable, not even when we're conversing in this particular context. I'm just saying it's silly to be afraid of them of prohibit their use in this particular context. Here, it only makes good sense to use Pirsig's terms or James's terms, especially where they are the same.   


Matt also said:
You don't want to just be a Pirsig exegete, you want to put his answers into play against other philosophies.  This is how, for example, you think you can get Pirsig to criticize Rorty.  But to do that, you have to clear a common ground upon which they can give answers to common questions so that one doesn't get _either_ of them wrong. .. At the level of philosophical commitment, where one attempts to cross-translate different philosophical vocabularies to see where agreement and disagreement lies on substantive philosophical issues, there needs to be another answer than "because Pirsig does."  If there wasn't another answer, then "pure" and "direct" would be established by fiat rather than reasons.

dmb says:
Well, there is a difference between determining what Pirsig is saying and determining if his position is better than the next guy's. The 'what' has to come first and getting at the actual, non-Platonic meaning of Pirsig's central terms is definitely aimed at that part of it, at WHAT he's saying. If fact, we could rephrase my complaint: HOW he says it should not get in the way of WHAT he means. I think there is a lack of clarity on what Pirsig is saying precisely because there are substantive differences between Rorty and Pirsig. And it seems that you really don't see any important differences. What you see as little tweaks to the MOQ, I see as an evacuation of Pirsig's central point. You think I'm unfairly using Rorty as a punching bag but there are more than a few pragmatists that are loyal to neither of them. As far as neutral ground, that's about as close as we're likely to get. 

I think Charlene Seigfried, a first-rate James scholar, describes the differences between Rortyism and radically empirical pragmatism pretty well: 
"In actual reasoning processes the feedback from experience constitutes an essential aspect of reasoning, which is incomplete and cannot be accurately describe without it. Therefore, in answer to what Rorty calls 'a bedrock metaphilosophical issue'; namely, whether one can 'ever appeal to nonlinguistic knowledge in philosophical argument,' the answer is an unambiguous 'yes' and 'no'." (p.115)

And here she gets at the issue of mistranslated anti-Platonism pretty well too, although she calling it metaphysics instead of Platontism:

"To hold that the pragmatists rejected classical metaphysics but then kept doing metaphysics of some sort anyway is to unhistorically remove them from the central debate of modern philosophy, which became more acute with the Darwinian revolution and re-emphasized with quantum physics. How can we legitimate any claims about the world now that we know that we can never grasp it as it is in itself but only in relation to us? If metaphysical claims about reality are no longer possible, what will replace them? Derridean deconstructionists say the endless play of unverifiable word games and Richard Rorty says conversations. Against such nihilism and relativism pragmatists argue for warranted assertions, understood within a hermeneutical, concrete angle of vision, not new metaphysical assumptions.   ...To say that the pragmatists insisted that 'metaphysical generalizations must be grounded in immediate experience' is to miss the force of their arguments against metaphysical speculation, against metaphysical grounding, against metaphysical experience. All these terms have specific meanings if understood metaphysically and radically different meanings if understood in post-metaphysical terms. These meanings are hopelessly muddled by retaining the word 'metaphysics' for metaphysical and post-metaphysical discourse." (p.349)     


Matt said:
So, why do I need to use qualifiers like "pure," "direct," and "pre-intellectual" in my descriptions of DQ's effect on philosophical discourse?  If I understand the rules of being an anti-Platonist properly, one kind of answer is unavailable to you: that it "fits" reality better.  If we agree on what anti-Platonism is, then neither one of us can say that this or that description is forced upon us because otherwise we'd get reality, or experience, or whatever, wrong.  It might fit _Pirsig_ better, but nobody's questioning that.  And if your answer is "because it works better," then you have to delineate more specifically _how_ it works better than _what_ alternatives before we can have a useful conversation about what works better than what.

dmb says:
Again, I'm only saying that it makes little sense to ban Pirsig's central terms in this particular context. I'm not insisting that you must use them so much as defending my right to use. I'm objecting to the notion that there is something wrong with using Pirsig's terms to discuss Pirsig's ideas or using James's terms to discuss James's ideas. It's really that simple. I think, in this context, it's silly to ban them. What we should want to do is ban the Platonic interpretation of those terms. As Siegfried says, the question is what do we do "now that we know we can never grasp the world as it is in itself but only in to relation to us"? I'm saying that Rorty and Pirsig give very different answers to that question and roughly those answers are "conversation" and "experience" respectively. That's why I focus on the central terms; namely, pre-intellectual experience and pure experience. The purity and the pre-conceptuality are certainly important parts of the concept behind those terms but "experience" is really what radical empiricism and pragmatism are all about. On this view, conversations are always secondary and subservient. And this is a post-metaphysical claim, which means it is not an ontological claim. It is epistemology. It entails an assertion about the nature of lived experience as an integral feature of knowledge. 
Anyway, I think Siegfried is making the same point I was making. "All these terms have specific meanings if understood metaphysically and radically different meanings if understood in post-metaphysical terms." That's what I meant when I said, "If one construes Pirsig as a Platonist, it changes the meaning of his central terms quite dramatically. And then the MOQ is made out to be claiming all kinds of things that it specifically rejects elsewhere in text. And then the books are full of contradictions." See, if the central terms used by Pirsig and James are not taken as anti-Platonic or post-metaphysical terms, their work falls apart. Unless their terms are taken as anti-Platonic and post-metaphysical answers, their ideas can't be properly understood. I honestly don't see how either one of them make any sense unless they're taken as anti-metaphysical and as very, very empirical. Rorty is anti-metaphysical and very, very linguistic. That's the difference we should be talking about. That's where the map analogies get tricky, but still...