[MD] DMB and Me

[david buchanan]

Steve said:
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.


dmb says:

Hmmm. No, actually, there is no difference. This is a good example of the kind of misunderstanding that keeps happening. Let me try once more to explain what I mean.

Pirsig's claim that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language MEANS that you can NOT nail it down. This fundamental reality is outside of language and language is what we use to nail things down. But when I use the terms that refer to this fundamental reality, Matt (and now you too, apparently) takes that to mean I'm trying to nail it down.

That's what I was trying to explain with the Fish article and the way it revealed the metaphysical assumptions at work in that kind of misunderstanding. If you think the fundamental nature of reality is "things in space and time" then a phrase like "pure experience" will be taken to mean direct access to "things in space and time". But that's not the claim at all. The things in space and time are all secondary concepts, according to the radical empiricists, and pure experience does not provide access to anything (or any things) other than the experience itself. This entails no claim about nailing anything down.

Steve said:
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.

dmb says:

Yes, I already addressed the paradoxical nature of talking about the nonverbal and conceptualizing the nonconceptual. (Sigh. Why does everybody make me repeat myself?) But this is not a contradiction unless you also claim your verbal terms can capture the fundamental nature of reality. Instead, one simply acknowledges the limits of language and then one goes forward despite the difficulty. Why? Because there is more to life that the things that can be nailed down. The central things in life can't be nailed down and so leaving them out of our philosophies is one the problems we're trying to solve here.  

In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It's been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The central part.  (ZAMM p. 294)


Steve said:
We don't like this "fundamental nature talk," it's too metaphysics-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.



dmb says:

That's another case of taking the anti-Platonic claims of radical empiricism as if they were Platonism. You're inadvertently rejecting the rejection of Platonism in the name of rejecting Platonism. These are just conceptual errors, not differences of personal preference or tastes or interests. It's just about the difference between what radical empiricism means and what you think it means. I see this error over and over and I keep trying to show you but you and Matt just keep making it anyway.

Again, if I seem emphatic it's only because of frustrated by the combination of the issue's importance and its difficulty. And then there is the repetition. That gets old anyway and John's been making me say the same thing like eight times. Wears a guy out, you know?



 		 	   		  
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