[MD] Intellectual Level

[Matt Kundert]

Arlo said:
I mean, I think Pirsig is a better judge about whether someone 
understands his ideas than I am. Do YOU think you're a better judge 
of who understands Pirsig than Pirsig? Does this you mean 
understand Pirsig better than he understands himself?

John said:
An interesting question, actually.  I'd say its possible.  I'm not sure. But 
often others see me more clearly than I see myself.  Often I notice 
things about others that they don't notice about themselves, so I can't 
just discount the possibility entirely.

Matt:
I think it is not only an interesting theoretical question, but it might be 
the most difficult one on the table right now for philosophy (and has 
been for a while, whether philosophy knew it or not).  Additionally, I 
take it be a practical platitude that we are not always our own best 
judges.  The trouble has been with figuring out how to articulate this 
to be the case (the theory-question).

Socrates said that a person would never knowingly do evil.  This was 
partially an expression of the externalization known as the "daimon," 
a quasi-divinity that intercedes in our action and thinking.  What 
commonly gets translated as "passion," the Greek "thumos," is 
commonly said to interject itself from the outside.

These Greek efforts to retain a pristine inside to our minds were 
transformed by Descartes, who set the stage for the problem (and 
probably obfuscated it more than if we had stayed Greek) when he 
said that there was nothing we know better than the contents of our 
own minds.  Kant's notion of "norms" transformed this sense of an 
inviolable internal center called "the mind," and Hegel added a 
temporal dimension to these public norms, but nobody until recently 
knew how radical the implications of Kant's notion of a "concept" 
were, and Freud had in the meantime nearly blown apart the 
commonsense intuition we have that we know ourselves pretty well, 
and at the very least better than anyone else.  The ability to pull 
together Hegel and Freud is now the task ahead of our theorists.

Just a day or two ago, I wrote in a post to Marsha that she had an 
inviolable center that I wasn't commenting on, and that I was saying 
that "fully in the face of Freud."  This is the big struggle: how do we 
articulate the Freudian sense that sometimes we don't know anything 
about ourselves, the Hegelian sense that sometimes we only know 
later what we meant then, and the common sense that it's my 
goddamn brain, how could anyone know what's going on up there if 
I don't tell them?

I don't have a potted summary.  I can only say that Robert Brandom 
has articulated the most sophisticated analysis of how this can be the 
case (first in the first, synoptic part of Tales of the Might Dead, which 
complements the systematic understanding of how language works 
in his Making It Explicit; and more recently in the three chapters on 
Kant and Hegel in Reason in Philosophy).  However, in relationship to 
thinkers and what they think about their own thoughts, and what they 
think about what others think about their own thoughts, two things 
come to mind: 1) if we don't absolutely trust a thinker when they 
think an opponent gets them _wrong_, why should we think the 
converse? and more generally, 2) I think of what Stanley Cavell said 
about John Austin many years ago:

"To accept Austin’s explanations as full and accurate guides to his 

practice would be not only to confuse advice (which is about all he 
gave
 in this line) with philosophical analysis and literary-critical 

description (which is what is needed), but to confer upon Austin an 

unrivaled power of self-discernment.  It is a mystery to me that 
what a 
philosopher says about his methods is so commonly taken 
at face value.  
Austin ought to be the last philosopher whose 
reflexive remarks are 
treated with this complacency, partly because 
there are so many of them,
 and partly because they suffer not 
merely the usual hazards of 
self-description but the further 
deflections of polemical animus."

I think it is generally the best practical policy to remember that 
every statement has to be _read_, and doing that means interpreting, 
which means bringing into train a large apparatus of considerations 
including intentions, motives, and context (which includes things like 
the mood of the speaker or the audience the speech-act is intended 
for).  Understanding is never simple, even when it is simple.

And none of these considerations, themselves, speak directly to any 
particular issue about a particular thinker.  They just speak to trying 
to get what is at issue right (like whether there can be an issue).

Matt