[MD] DMB and Me

[Steven Peterson]

Hi DMB,

I'll try to get back to you in greater detail when I have time, but
really quickly...

When did Matt ever say that what can't be talked about is not real or
is never experienced? When did Matt ever make the demand that
everything in our philosophies be defined?

As I understand Matt, he doesn't reject any of the things you are
saying he rejects. The difference between Matt (and I) and you and
Pirsig is that Pirsig claims that the fundamental nature of reality is
outside of language, and Matt and I have stopped trying to nail down
any fundamental nature of reality.

The assertion that the fundamental nature of reality is outside of
language is asserted using language. Doesn't this statement then
contradict itself? I mean, is it true? Does this statement really tell
us something about the fundamental nature of reality? If it is true it
is false. It would seem to Matt and I better just not to say such
things. This is not a denial or a rejection of the reality of
anything. It is a preference not to speak in certain terms.

We don't like this "fundamental nature talk," it's too metaohysics-y
for us and makes us fell all icky and Platonist. But if you can get
some anti-Platonist mileage out of such talk, we're all for you doing
it.

Best,
Steve







On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 3:35 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Steve said to DMB:
>
> Calling Quality the mystic reality that cannot be defined is to offer part of a definition of Quality. While Matt is happy to say that there is more to reality than just talk, to talk about reality (any practice of philospohy) is to put reality under some description. Even if your philosophy includes an insistence that what you are talking about cannot be talked about, all of it is still talk.
>
> dmb says:
>
> Well, you're just pointing the paradoxical nature of talking about the pre-verbal, of conceptualizing the non-conceptual. That paradox is what concerns the mystics and it's what motivates their resistance to metaphysical systems as a restaurant where they have a 30,000 page menu and no food. This is the paradox that compells Pirsig to admit that the MOQ is a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity. (Lila, chapter 5)
>
> The other kind of objection comes from a very different direction. Logical positivism objects to metaphysics because it, "emphasizes science as the only source of knowledge. It sharply distinguishes between fact and value, and is hostile to religion and traditional metaphysics. It is an outgrowth of empiricism ... and is suspicious of any thought ... that is incapable of being reduced to direct observation. Philosophy, as far as positivism is concerned, is limited to the analysis of scientific language." (Lila, chapter 5)
>
> Matt's position is lot more like the positivist's objection than the mystic's objection. It is just a philosophological fact that the analytic tradition grows out of this logical positivism and that's exactly where Matt's intellectual heroes are coming from. "Logical positivism's critera for 'meaningfulness' were pure metaphysics, he thought." By contrast, the MOQ "says that values are not outside of the experrience that logical postivism limits itself to. They are the ESSENCE of this experience. Values are MORE empirical, in fact, than subjects or objects." (Emphasis is Pirsig's.)
>
> Before I bring this to bear on the issue, here is a restatement of the issue as I understand it: There is more to reality than just talk but we can only talk about reality under a description so all of it is still just talk.
>
> Yesterday I tried to show how the assumptions of subject-object metaphysics could be seen in Rorty's position, even as he was denying the possibility of objective knowledge. "They [Fish's idea of pragmatists] believe with Richard Rorty that 'things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include mental states' - the world, in short, is 'out there' - but they also believe that the knowledge we have of the world is not give by it [the world], but by men and women who are hazarding descriptions within the vocabularies and paradigms that arein place and in force in their cultures. Those descriptions are judged to be true or false, accurate and inaccurate, according to measures and procedures that currently have epistemic authority, and not according to their fit with the world as it exists independently of any description." "While there surely is such a world, our only access to it, Rorty and Margolis say, is through our own efforts to apprehend it. Margolis: 'Th
>  e real world ... is not a construction of mind or Mind ... but the paradigm of knowledge or science is certainly confined to the discursive power of the human.'" (Stanley Fish quoting Rorty and Margolis and explaining their neopragmatic position.)
>
> If Rorty and Margolis are saying that knowledge is confined to the discursive and Matt is saying that philosophy is confined to the things that can be put under a description, then they are all saying the same thing. Nobody here will be surprised by the claim that Matt follows Rorty of course but I'm trying to show you both why following Rorty means not following Pirsig, especially on these issues. The demand that everything in our philosophies be defined is exactly how the "Good" became subservient to the "True" in the first place. Despite Matt's anxiety over Platonism, his position is exactly the kind of Platonism that Pirsig attacks and overturns. This neopragmatic emphasis on discourse and vocabularies and their insistence that we can only have reality UNDER a description is very simpatico with the way Plato's dialectics put pressure on the Sophists to define their undefined Good. His demand for intelligibility from the Rhapsodes and other artists was also a way to denigr
>  ate the ineffable aspects of reality. The dialectic squeezes such things out and thereby eliminates everything that can't be rationally defined. And so does this insistence that we can only talk about reality as it is under a description. It re-asserts the original problem that the MOQ is trying to fix. The MOQ wants the true to be subservient to the good, not the other way around. In terms of the MOQ, that means DQ is the primary empirical reality and static intellectual quality is a species of the good that follows from and is subservient to DQ.
>
>
> Steve continued:
> You want to say that Matt is missing something by not maintaining a term in his vocabulary for "undefined reality" or "preconceptual experience" or the "mystical reality."  All Matt needs to do is ask you what it is he is missing and you're then stuck having to use concepts to put your "undefined reality" under some description or else refuse to enter the arena.
>
>
> dmb says:
>
> Well, if I'm refusing to do anything, it would be a refusal to LEAVE the arena. I talk about Quality all the time. This is a paradox with which I'm completely comfortable. And yes, I think Matt is missing something. I think he's missing the point and the meaning of the MOQ. Without "Quality", the MOQ is meaningless. I would have thought this obvious fact goes without saying and yet I find myself having to repeat it. That's kind of weird, considering the context. Don't you think so?
>
>
> Steve said:
>
> Either way, your "mystical aspect" then starts to look more and more like a place holder for your own inability to come up with descriptions for what you want to talk about. Granted that sometimes it is better to say nothing than to say something stupid, but it just sounds like you are making a big deal about how great it is that you are saying "Nothing!" in those moments when we shouldn't say anything.
>
> dmb says:
>
> That's just not true. I can and do come up with descriptions all the time. So do Pirsig and James. The paradoxical nature of their claims is fully acknowledged by both of them but they both think it's worth the effort because it is unempirical to dismiss actual experience simply because that experience can't be defined or put under a description. That is a matter of putting the conceptual cart before the preconceptual horse. It excludes the vague, the affective, the inarticulate and the ineffable from our philosophies despite the fact that we know from experience that these elements are among the most important in our lives. The kind of rationality that excludes this side of things is the narrow, empty, meaningless form of rationality that James and Pirsig are attacking and it is based on the metaphysical assumptions they're rejecting. Pirsig and James say that these elements have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons. Pirsig says that Quality or Value
>  or pure experience is MORE empirical than subjects or objects. In other words, the fact that it is not definable is not a good enough reason to deny its importance or its reality. So what you can do is talk about WHY it is not definable. You can say what it is NOT. And so you see that the descriptions are all negations of various kinds: nonverbal, preconceptual, nonconceptual, preintellectual, nonintellectual, undivided, undifferentiated, no-thingness. Even terms like "continuum" work this way. It means not discrete, not divided. And terms like Value and Quality are so open ended that we can't even say they're positive or negative, physical or psychical or anything else because Quality can be all those things. It gets you going in the morning and it gets you off the hot stove. It leads you to a new scientific hypothesis and it makes you turn down that cheeseburger. And one can talk about this in terms of the phases of experience, in terms of how the brain works, in terms of
>  what happens to people in religious experience, in terms of what artists and athletes and all kind of people do every day. There are gazillions of ways to talk about it without having to define it or turn it into a fixed, rigid thing. I think that's what the Sophists did, what Pirsig did and it's what I'm doing too. Not only aim I talking about the preconceptual, I'm making a case for its centrality to the whole project we call the MOQ.
>
>
> Steve said:
>
> Saying "Nothing!" is of course saying something. Matt simply isn't saying anything when saying nothing seems to him like the most appropriate thing to do. It just seems odd to me that you are giving him such a hard time about that. You said that Matt is leaving out "half of the world" in his philosophical talk. Which half is that? Why, the half that can't be talked about of course! So the big issue is that Matt isn't talking about what can't be talked about??? How is that a problem?
>
>
>
> dmb says:
>
>
> Well, it's like I just said. Pirsig maintains that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language. Since this primary empirical reality is this preconceptual reality Pirsig calls Quality or DQ, the confines Matt has set down are wildly inappropriate. Pirsig is saying that the undefinable has been excluded for metaphysical reason and Matt, for metaphysical reasons, is saying we should exclude the undefinable. I think this only shows that he doesn't quite understand what going on here. That sounds harsh and frank but I'm really just trying to be clear.
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