[MD] Relativism

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
... You seem to be offering a wildly incoherent view of truth wherein Rortyism and realism are mixed in with a rejection of everything except SOM.

Steve replied:
I wasn't even talking about truth.


dmb says:

I wasn't just complaining about that particular post but rather the whole arc of our conversation so far this year. Your repeated insistence that truth and justification be kept separate, for example, is wildly at odds with Rortyism. There are tons of examples like that. You can't have it both ways, not unless you're willing to embrace a self-contradictory position. Considering the topic, it's more than a little ironic that you're willing to be so sloppy. Anyway, I just wanted to be clear about the scope of this complaint. It's a big one and I think it has created a lot of unnecessary frustration. Anyway,..


Steve continued:

I was talking about the issue of language as something that ought to be transcended--whether a pragmatist ought to agree or disagree with the mystic who says that the fundamental nature of reality is out side of language. ... Perhaps you could try reading it again and tell me where I get all SOM on you. I don't see how since I was criticizing the Pirsigian notion of getting outside language as being an SOM idea about language intervening between a subject and an object as he did in his lens metaphor: "The culture in which we live hands us a set of intellectual glasses to interpret experience with, and the concept of the primacy of subjects and objects is built right into these glasses.  If someone sees things through a somewhat different set of glasses or, God help him, takes his glasses off, the natural tendency of those who still have their glasses on is to regard his statements as somewhat weird, if not actually crazy." 

I think he is using an SOM metaphor to attack SOM. What the heck could it mean to take the glasses off? No he sees the world as it actually is instead of with SOM blinders? ...You are right that Rorty doesn't see any value in the notion of getting outside language. Nor do I, but I do recognize that Pirsig clearly does. I agree with Rorty, pace Pirsig, that the notion is incoherent once we drop the subject-object picture. While Pirsig sees the mystic as saying that the fundamental nature of reality is outside of language, Rorty is saying that that notion is incoherent unless you imagine reality in one hand, you on the other, and language as what James sarcastically called a tertium quid intermediate between the two. ...


dmb says:

This is at the heart of the issue. And this is exactly where it's very easy to get confused. 

First of all, please notice that the SOM glasses interpret experience, not the world as it actually is. The idea of the world as it actually exists IS the idea of an objective world and that is what's built right into the glasses. It is the interpretation, not reality before it's interpreted. As you've construed it, we take off those SOM glasses and find ourselves looking at.... (wait for it, wait for it --- dramatic pause) ...the exact same thing we saw before we took off the glasses. I think it's pretty clear that this would be absurd. The whole point of taking off those glasses is to see things differently, of course, and that's where the next point comes in.

The trick to understanding the MOQ is in understanding what it actually means to claim that the fundamental reality is outside language. The first thing to do is tell yourself that this fundamental reality is NOT the objective reality, is NOT the world as it actually is. Trust me here, Steve. Rorty's arguments against the possibility of getting outside language have absolutely nothing to do with the claims of mystics. That's what we're talking about here, NOT the claims of Positivists. It's very, very important to NOT confuse mystics and positivists. Seriously, you've got to put Rortyism aside at this point or you'll only be confused.
The fundamental reality he's talking about is DQ or pure experience. This is NOT a claim to have direct access to the world as it actually is because, again, that just an idea that's derived from experience, a conceptual interpretation of experience. The primary empirical reality is just experience itself, not experience OF things-in-themselves. In the MOQ, there are no things-in-themselves because, again, that is just one of the ideas built into the SOM glasses. Instead, the cutting edge of experience is not so much "outside" language as it is "prior" to the conceptualizations that quickly and habitually interpret it. In this immediate flux of life there are as yet no differentiations. The whole situation has a qualitative feel or an aesthetic charge, as in the hot stove example. By the time you realize the situation in terms of stoves and injured butts, you're looking at the situation through conceptualizations. These two kinds of experience, conceptual and pre-conceptual, work in tandem all day long whether we realize it or not. 

There is a kind of brain disorder wherein the person's rational faculties are perfectly in tact but there is no ability to let feelings weigh into the decision making process. You know what happens to people so afflicted? They are intellectually paralyzed. One such person, for example, would find himself standing in the cereal isle in the grocery store for hours. He could not make the simplest of decisions with rationality alone. It's a miracle that he even got to the grocery store in the first place. Remember that thought experiment in ZAMM where he removes quality from the world and finds that only math and logic and stuff like that remained unchanged? Well, it turns out there is a medical phenomenon that shows just what that experiment showed. The case of Jill Bolte Taylor makes a similar point from the opposite direction. She was a brain scientist who has a stroke and lost the use of her rational, verbal hemisphere and could only experience reality as a whole, so much so that she could not tell where she ended and the universe began. She now says that what she experienced was Nirvana and she cries tears of joy when she tells the story. We can think about this pure experience or undifferentiated experience in terms of the lack of distinction between subject and object but it is a lack of all distinctions. To fully realize this lack of division is to be enlightened. That's the fundamental reality that Pirsig is talking about. That's what the primary empirical reality is. Traditional empiricist and especially positivists would never touch this, not even with a ten-foot pole. 

Now, the idea of language coming between subjects and objects is basically Kantian. But like I said, there are not things in themselves in the MOQ because that would just be another version of SOM. In the MOQ, ideas not "represent" the things in themselves or the world as it really is. Instead, concepts are derived from experience and constitute the world as we think it is. In this picture, concepts are an additional reality. They're "taken" from the stream of experience and used in the ongoing process of experience and that's all the reality you get. You get experience, dynamic and static, and that's it. There is no world as it actually is, except as a secondary concept. It's kinda funny, actually. We create the world in which we live and then torture ourselves with the thought that we're cut-off and alone in a hostile universe. It's crazy. And so Pirsig is saying lets make a better universe. We can, you know. We made the whole up anyway. Why not do some major revisions? Isn't that what quality writing is all about?


Steve said:
... Trying to compare language to something else that is outside of language is in this analogy an attempt to step out of your own skin. Why would anyone who has already dropped the correspondence notion even think of trying to do that?


dmb says:

Yea, but who is trying to do that? Positivists? If you think I am, then you don't understand what I've been saying. This is the kind of thing I mean. You're looking at this as if I were making claims from within that SOM perspective. But I'm not and so you objection is really quite meaningless.


The primary empirical reality is undifferentiated awareness, it's the reality you experience before you have a chance to think about it. In what sense does that constitute an attempt to get outside your skin? I'd say it's quite under your skin and right under your nose. Anyway, I don't know who is trying to compare language to what's outside language but the mystics and Pirsig will tell you that it can't be done. And that's why they say the fundamental nature of reality is outside language and that's why DQ can't be defined, why the MOQ is contradiction in terms. And that's pretty much the central point isn't it? That Quality has been left out of philosophy, BECAUSE it's the parent and can't be contained by the verbal conceptualizations that are derived from it. 


This would be about where I bring up Rorty's emphasis on language and accuse him of being the contemporary embodiment of Pirsig's least favorite kind of Platonism, but it's fixin' dinner time.





















 		 	   		  
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