[MD] the Aesthetics of Belief or Truth and the Passions

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb, Mark, all:

...Sure "the passions" influence people's ideas, but to what extend _should_ they do so? When Pirsig explicates the aesthetic aspect of distinguishing true beliefs from false beliefs, he doesn't give permission to believe or disbelieve a claim based on such considerations as "it would make me happy/sad if that were true" (the position dmb was pushing in the now defunct free will/determinism threads of recent months). The aesthetic that is in play with regard to truth is an _intellectual_ aesthetic which Pirsig takes pains to distinguish from social and biological aesthetics. Intellect is not outside the "affective domain." The "passions," in the sense of Quality, must be part of our philosophies about what is true or false, but there is still the question of _which_ passions should be thought of as counting in the consideration of beliefs and which should not. For example, we certainly should not admit so-and-so's earnest belief that she just couldn't live in a world where she thought Jesus isn't the savior of all mankind as evidence in favor of the claim that Jesus is the savior of all mankind.  ..dmb seems to think that his "shuddering" should count for more than RMP would say it does, but such negative biological or social quality ought to be distinguished from intellectual quality.


dmb says:

If you had a real argument you wouldn't have to resort to dishonest slander. You can't really believe what you're saying about my view. I've been saying over and over and over again that truth is an intellectual species of the good and that it's highly wedged and controlled, wedged between two constraining factors; namely empirical experience and the conceptual order. The earnest believer of your example would fail to meet all three of these demands. Here is how James responded to the kind of criticism you're offering. This fine Victorian gentleman called it "impudent slander" and a silly, discreditable lack of imagination. I'd probably use stronger words. 

"When Messrs. Schiller and Dewey now explain what people mean by truth, they are accused of denying ITS existence. These pragmatists destroy all objective standards, critics say, and put foolishness and wisdom on one level. A favorite formula for describing Mr. Schiller’s doctrines and mine is that we are persons who think that by saying whatever you find it pleasant to say and calling it truth you fulfil every pragmatistic requirement.
I leave it to you to judge whether this be not an impudent slander. Pent in, as the pragmatist more than anyone else sees himself to be, between the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of sense about him, who so well as he feels the immense pressure of objective control under which our minds perform their operations? If anyone imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day, says Emerson. We have heard much of late of the uses of the imagination in science. It is high time to urge the use of a little imagination in philosophy. The unwillingness of some of our critics to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our statements is as discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know in recent philosophic history. Schiller says the true is that which ’works.’ Thereupon he is treated as one who limits verification to the lowest material utilities. Dewey says truth is what gives ’satisfaction.’ He is treated as one who believes in calling everything true which, if it were true, would be pleasant." (James, Pragmatism)

dmb resumes:
Jesus Freaks, Nazis, Flat-earthers, racist bigots and slave holders. These are the examples you choose to discuss the meaning of truth? This sort button-pushing bullshit approach is common on right-wing talk radio shows but it hardly seems like a sincere approach to philosophical debate. As we can see from the following passage, pragmatic truth is squeezed very tightly and yet rival visions are sometimes "equally compatible with all the truths we know" and that's where tastes and sensibilities can become the deciding factor. In the case of free will and determinism, for example, we see James and Pirsig both saying that case cannot be decided by the facts, that both positions are equally compatible with the data. Your examples are way too silly or sensational and none of them meet this test. Their status as claims of the intellectual variety is extremely dubious, just for starters. Pirsig's example of plural truths involved rival geometries, not fundamentalism, fascism or pre-Modern folk wisdom. Be serious, will you?


"Yet in the choice of these man-made formulas we cannot be capricious with impunity any more than we can be capricious on the common-sense practical level. We must find a theory that will WORK; and that means something extremely difficult; for our theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences. It must derange common sense and previous belief as little as possible, and it must lead to some sensible terminus or other that can be verified exactly. To ’work’ means both these things; and the squeeze is so tight that there is little loose play for any hypothesis. Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial; we follow ’elegance’ or ’economy.’ Clerk Maxwell somewhere says it would be “poor scientific taste” to choose the more complicated of two equally well-evidenced conceptions; and you will all agree with him. Truth in science is what gives us the maximum possible sum of satisfactions, taste included, but consistency both with previous truth and with novel fact is always the most imperious claimant." (James, Pragmatism)


dmb resumes:

Wedged and controlled, Steve. Remember that phrase. It's the main idea and the main point. It just won't do to pretend that pragmatic isn't tightly wedged and controlled. This is "always the most imperious claimant", James says. On the one hand we have all the previous truths or the inherited conceptual order AND on the other hand we have experience as it comes or novel facts. Pragmatic truth is provisional and plural and one of the central aims of pragmatism is to "loosen up our theories" and yet this truth is tightly WEDGED or squeezed between these two controlling factors. Like I said, traditionally, philosophers have repudiated and rejected the personal and aesthetic factors. This tendency, as James and Pirsig see it, is the main reason that philosophy needs to be radically reconstructed. Re-integrating the affective domain is part of the solution to this problem. As James says, why shouldn't we use all our faculties, emotional as well as logical? Why should we try to philosophize with half our brains tied behind our backs? Why, so to speak, exclude the heart? This is the math nerd attitude by which values got to be denigrated as "just" subjective in the first place. 


In Zen and the Art, Robert Pirsig says: "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 re-assimilating 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."


As William James puts it: "Their persistence in telling me that feeling has nothing to do with the question, that it is a pure matter of absolute reason, keeps me for ever out of the pale. Still seeing a that in things which Logic does not expel, the most I can do is to aspire to the expulsion. At present I do not even aspire. Aspiration is a feeling. What can kindle feeling but the example of feeling? And if the Hegelians will refuse to set an example, what can they expect the rest of us to do? To speak more seriously, the one fundamental quarrel Empiricism has with Absolutism is over this repudiation by Absolutism of the personal and aesthetic factor in the construction of philosophy. That we all of us have feelings, Empiricism feels quite sure. That they may be as prophetic and anticipatory of truth as anything else we have, and some of them more so than others, can not possibly be denied. But what hope is there of squaring and settling opinions unless Absolutism will hold parley on this common ground; and will admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical, help us, and the truest of which will at the final integration of things be found in possession of the men whose faculties on the whole had the best divining power?"