[MD] Through a glass darkly

[david buchanan]

Ham said to Adrie:
....I realize that my hypothesis is often regarded as "uncommon" sense.  Indeed, if common sense could provide the solution to our enigma, we would have had it by now.  Forgive me for injecting what may appear to be a "theistic" thought here, but it is my suspicion that we were "not meant to know" the truth about reality.   ...Unlike scientific theories, metaphysical hypotheses cannot be made subject to "fallibility testing", and I would be foolish to claim empirical proof for my ontology.


dmb says:
I think Ham's position is profoundly anti-pragmatic. It is the kind of Platonism or "vicious intellectualism" against which James and Pirsig are diametrically opposed. As they see it, common sense is a vast collection of concepts invented by our ancestors and handed down to us as we learn the language and become a part of the culture. Common sense is made up of those static patterns that work so unproblematically that they larger go unexamined. But when common sense concepts are taken up by more abstract intellectual pursuits like science and philosophy all sorts of problems seem to emerge.

Chief among these problems is reification, the error of treating an abstract concept as if it were an actual entity. Plato's forms are the classic example and that's why they call it Platonism. For Plato, you'll remember, the beautiful things and good things in this dirty old world aren't really real. What's real it Beauty and Goodness itself but most humans live their lives down in a dark cave, believing mere shadows are the real world. If that sounds a bit too lofty and otherworldly, that's only because it's too lofty and otherworldly. It's a world-hating, life-negating, logic-confounding mistake.

And James and Pirsig also say that subject-object metaphysics makes exactly the same mistake. It takes practical, common sense concepts out of their context and then treats these abstractions as if they were the very structure of reality, as if they were the real stuff behind our experience.

Instead of confusing ourselves with abstract notions of Truth and Reality, let's remember that concepts are only be called true to the extent that they can be used in our experience right here on earth. Ideas, they insist, are human inventions and they're supposed to serve human needs. Why should reality be something only a hand full of geniuses can understand? What good is philosophy if it doesn't help actual people in their actual lives? As health is a biological good and wealth is a social good, truth is a species of the good. It is a high quality concept, not the answer to the riddle of the universe. That sort of quest only makes sense if you believe that the intellect has divine powers but James and Pirsig are looking at these issues with the assumption that the human powers of intellect are a product of evolution. As the James scholar Charlene Seigfried points out, intellectualism had become vicious already with Plato and Socrates because they deified the intellect and denigrated the flux of life from which are concepts originate.