[MD] The Hero's journey

[david buchanan]

Dan said to Matt:
> It was how you phrased your statements: [Matt from earlier] "Not all intellectual patterns have this flavor, but a lot of the one's out of the natural sciences do. (Principally, I think, because a lot of the stuff in "nature" was around before we personally were.)"  You seemed to be saying that certain intellectual patterns pertaining to natural sciences hold a higher value on account of "stuff in nature" being around before we personally were. That is what got a rise out of my intellectual hackles, but I see better now what you were saying... thank you.


Matt said:
...I think that we believe, as a high-valued intellectual pattern, that "there exists a world apart from us" is true.  The reason I'm trying to distinguish between personal evolutionary history and longitudinal evolutionary history is to distinguish between the history of an individual and the history of a community (and this as another intellectual pattern of high value).  Not holding this distinction is how one flirts with solipsism, I think.  

dmb says:
I can see how Matt's comment would raise Dan's hackles. It's complicated because there are solid empirical reasons to believe in a world that exists apart from us and as a practical matter it's hard to imagine how one could get through the day without that belief. Without that belief, you'd be unable avoid speeding cars and you'd mistrust the ground under your feet. But when this common sense idea is taken up by science and philosophy the result is physicalist objectivity and subject-object metaphysics. When one considers the idea that our ancestors have been making stone tools for a million years, it seems that the basic idea of object permanence must go back to the remotest times and it still works on the practical level. People have been avoiding the sharp end of the axe for a very long time. But when this is elevated and extrapolated beyond practical doings and becomes a description of reality's basic structure, then it becomes a problem. As a practical matter each infant needs to learn object permanence and science wouldn't have gotten very far without elaborating on that idea. 

To put it in common sense terms, what could it mean for a stone to be "sharp" except in relation to human flesh? What does "heavy" and "hard" mean if there are no human bodies to hold, to carry, to bump up against? The so-called objective properties of external things are actually qualities of our own experience. What we call heaviness, sharpness and hardness are the empirical realities which give rise to the idea of external objects. Inner and outer are names for the way we sort experience and "outer" realities are the one's that resist our wishes and intentions. It's an elaborate and well developed idea that stands for the empirical fact that resistance and recalcitrance is known in experience. "Mental" spears cannot pierce your liver and imaginary fire will not burn "real" wood so that sorting experience into inner and outer is extremely useful on a practical level. It gets out of hand at the level of metaphysics but I think it's important to remember that the idea is derived from experience. In other words, it is based on empirical reality, which is more real and more basic than the idea. We could come up with a whole range of ideas but they'd all be answerable to the primary empirical reality. Concepts come and go. Our abstractions change and grow but always in relation to actual, concrete experience. I'm pretty sure this is what Pirsig meant when he said reality as we understand it, which is to say conceptual reality, is a pile a analogies invented in response to Quality. This is a blending of East and West, I think, wherein the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki isn't simply dismissed as illusory. Being a mystic doesn't save you from the slings and arrows of misfortune or nuclear war. In the MOQ, mysticism and scientific knowledge are both empirically based.



Matt continued:
...Pirsig's discourse on Western ghosts can be read as flirting with a kind of solipsistic idealism (as I think I've seen aggressive critics of Pirsig pursue in the past), but Pirsig is more like a Hegelian idealist, whose root idea is the primacy of the community in understanding where ideas come from (rather than an individual's confrontation with the world, which is rooted in the pre-Kantian empiricist tradition).  A beginning formulation of understanding Pirsig's relationship to the classical empiricists is to say that he is a post-Kantian, quasi-Hegelian empiricist (which is pretty close to just saying he's a Deweyan pragmatist).



dmb says:

Dan has made it pretty darn clear that he doesn't do philosophological jargon, so Matt's concluding sentences seem intentionally obscure. In any case, I'd really like to know who these aggressive critics are, the one's who see solipsism in Pirsig's ghost stories. I think one would have to be a pretty bad reader to criticize Pirsig for that. As you rightly point out, Pirsig says our understanding of the world is a cultural inheritance. We are suspended in language, he points out, Descartes was wrong not to realize he can only think because of the cultural context in which he exists, the culture hands us a pair of glasses with which to interpret reality. He makes this point in many ways and the ghost stories are one of them. If the ghost stories and the other analogies are understood rightly, I think, their point would preclude solipsism.

I wonder about your use of Hegel, Matt. Isn't it oxymoronic to even say "Hegelian empiricist"? Isn't that like saying "Humean idealist" or "Rortarian Platonist"? And again, who are the critics? Who sees the specter of solipsism?