[MD] DMB and Me

[Matt Kundert]

This is from near the end of my "Ode to DMB" at my site (from 2006):
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/10/dewey-pirsig-rorty-or-how-i-convinced.html

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In his letter to me, David repeats an often applied diagnosis, 
one
Rorty has acknowledged in a certain way: Rorty is a 
broken-hearted
positivist. I think one of the bad impressions 
that I may have given
(and that Rorty has regretted giving 
himself) is that, as David also
says of Rorty, "the failure of 
the positivistic project is central in
such a way that it 
changes everything about philosophy". It is a big
deal for a 
certain kind of philosophy (the post-Cartesian "epistemology

industry," as Dewey called it, and all the subsidiaries who 
work in its
shadow), but philosophy is one of those things 
where there is always
more than any particular, arbitrarily 
demarcated section of it
(remember Pirsig's advice from Lila 
that Pirsig sometimes
forgets: never define philosophy). 
Rorty's past works feed that image
whenever he said 
something to the effect of "the linguistic turn was
the 
greatest thing to ever happen to philosophy." Hildebrand 
picked out
a quote like that in his paper: “By focusing our 
attention on the
relation between language and the rest of 
the world rather than between
experience and nature, 
post-positivistic analytic philosophy was able
to make a 
more radical break with the philosophical tradition.” (from

Rorty’s “Dewey’s Metaphysics”) Rorty regrets to a certain 
extent saying
things like that now.

It is instructive to pick up the reprint of his famous 
anthology, The Linguistic Turn,
and read the postscripts to 
it. The intro to the anthology is gigantic,
judicious and 
extremely informative on what analytics thought of

themselves at that period (reading it is as good as most 
classes on
positivism). He says in it, though, that: Linguistic
philosophy, over the last thirty years, has 
succeeded in putting the
entire philosophical tradition, 
from Parmenides through Descartes and
Hume to 
Bradley and Whitehead, on the defensive. It has done 
so by a
careful and thorough scrutiny of the ways in 
which traditional
philosophers have used language in 
the formulation of their problems.
This achievement is 
sufficient to place this period among the great
ages 
of the history of philosophy.In the "Ten Years Later" postscript, he talks less 
enthusiastically about analytic philosophy (he was writing 
PMN,
the book analytics hate, at that time). But in the 
"Twenty-five Years
Later" postscript, he says “What I find 
most striking about my 1965
essay is how seriously I took 
the phenomenon of the ‘linguistic turn,’
how portentous it 
then seemed to me. I am startled, embarrassed, and

amused to reread the [above] passage…. That last sentence 
now strikes
me as merely the attempt of a 
thirty-three-year-old philosopher to
convince himself that he 
had had the luck to be born at the right
time….” Or, “Er, 
yeah, ya’ know when I said linguistic philosophy was
better 
than sliced bread? Yeeeah, that was a little overboard, 
wasn’t
it?”

What I suggest what one does with all those passages 
where
he lauds the linguistic turn is to read them as saying, 
"the linguistic
turn was good for academic philosophy 
because it has led them
to more and more doubt 
representationalism" (which we can see by the
renaissance 
of pragmatism). There isn't any necessary reason
for this to 
have happened. Becoming post-linguistic doesn't give you

necessarily a better philosophy, nor does it necessarily make 
you
immediately more predisposed to pragmatism. Many of 
the doctrines
pragmatists call their own, for instance holism, 
were precursored by
philosophers who didn’t think all that 
much about language.

Saying
that, though, I do tend to agree with Rorty that

antirepresentationalism does seem less counterintuitively 
when stated
in "linguistic terms," or, as Hildbrand quotes 
him, “‘Language’ is a
more suitable notion than ‘experience’ 
for saying the holistic and
anti-foundational things which 
James and Dewey had wanted to say.”
Again, “suitable” is 
perhaps the wrong word, but the point is that it
really 
doesn't matter which notion we use. I suggest we read 
those
comments as historical comments about the way 
things have turned out
and progressed, not as statements 
about where we should necessarily go
or how we should 
necessarily do things. Its philosophy: there are all
sorts of 
things we can do and still stay out of the way of

representationalism.

So when David defines radical empiricism in
his letter as 
"there is no reality outside of experience AND that there
is 
no good reason to exclude any kind of experience from an 
account of
reality," I can only concur and say that Dewey, 
James, Pirsig, and
Rorty would all fall into place, too. I think 
there are two things that
bug Pirsigians about Rorty in this 
regard. One, he doesn't talk about
mysticism, which Pirsig is 
quite focused. In this regard, the answer
I've been trying to 
forward over the years is that Rorty isn't denying
the 
empirical nature of mystical experience. He just doesn't have

anything to say about it. He isn't offering a general account 
of
reality, he's giving arguments against representationalism 
(which is
very pervasive, far more than some think, though 
that's probably a
debatable point). Like I said before, there 
are a lot more different
kinds of philosophy than the kind 
Rorty and academics do and Rorty
considers the function 
he plays is as an underlaborer (an image
pioneered by Locke 
and used a lot by Dewey, and even by Pirsig at the
beginning 
of ZMM) for clearing out all the arbitrary
divisions that keep 
out stuff like mysticism. Its kinda' like Rorty
engages the 
academics on the behalf of mystics (and others), though not 
as a mystic. He wants people to stop thinking that 
philosophy looks like this and
not like anything else. It is 
possible that Rorty doesn’t find
mysticism interesting, but 
surely it doesn’t follow that the effect is
that he denies its 
possibility. If one can accept the idea of beer and
not 
become a beer drinker, then one can find beer uninteresting 
and
still find a place for it in their account of reality.

The second thing that I think gives Pirsigians a bad taste 
about Rorty is the fact that Rorty doesn't
give a general 
account of reality. They see Rorty suggesting that
Dewey's 
hankering after a general account of reality and experience 
in Experience and Nature
is bad metaphysics and, because 
they like that kind of thing (which is
what Pirsig does), they 
get the feeling that Rorty's doing something
bad. What I 
want to suggest is that giving an "account of reality" is

necessarily a never-ending task if one accepts what I 
suggested all
pragmatists can get behind—experience is 
infinitely expandable. And if
that's the case, than a 
non-exclusionary "account of reality" will look
less and less 
like a series of propositions about reality and more and
more 
like a series of history books that keeps adding volumes. If 
there
is "no good reason to exclude any kind of experience 
from an account of
reality," then because there will always 
be the open-endness of
experience, there will always be 
the possibility of new kinds of experience. That means that 
a truly full "account" will look less like something you can do 
generally
and more like something you need to stay in the 
particular about. That,
I think, lays at the heart of Rorty's 
suspicions about Dewey's Experience and Nature,
which is 
where most of Rorty's talk against the philosophical concept

of "experience" comes from (and even Dewey later in life 
distanced
himself from that book). And remember: it’s just 
about "experience" as
a philosophical concept. He just finds 
it personally easier to stay away from it when attacking 
representationalism.

This
aversion of the general is also what keeps me from 
sidling up easily to
David’s sometimes virulent anti-theism. 
I've never been quite able to
put my head around it, how 
one can stay pragmatist and not think that
James was right 
in "The Will to Believe". Don't get me wrong: when it
comes 
to politics, screw Bush, Robertson, and Fatwell. But when it

comes to individual believers, and not politics and institutions, 
I
have trouble dissociating what Christians would call an 
"experience of
God" from what mystics would call a "mystical 
experience". I'm not
saying they're totally interchangeable 
terms, that what Buddhists call
Enlightenment, Christians call 
God. What I am saying, however, is that
when we consider 
that what gets mystical experience in the door of
radical 
empiricism is that it is reported as happening (because that 
is exactly what gets every
experience in the door, from rocks 
to moral disgust), then I'm not sure
how "experience of God" 
gets booted, thus making theism look stupid and
making one 
an anti-theist as opposed to anti-Christian
Coalition or 
anti-clerical (which is what Rorty has started to call
himself 
in the last six or seven years). (For some other takes on

mysticism and atheism, see my "What is Enlightenment?" and 
"How is Atheism a Religion?".)

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Matt
 		 	   		  
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