[MD] The Hero's journey

[david buchanan]

Matt said to dmb:
..I wonder whether you think I successfully dissolved raised hackles.

dmb says:
If I follow your thinking, intellectual patterns out of the natural sciences tend to have a "flavor" of pre-existence. (People tend to think that a lot of the stuff in "nature" was around before we personally were.)" As Dan said, this is where "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's what raised his intellectual hackles. You "used 'flavor' to try and suggest the idea that there wasn't anything better about intellectual patterns that extend in this way," you said, because you "don't want to suggest that the natural sciences have better patterns or something. It's just a different taste," you said, "like people who like chocolate on their pancakes, but butterscotch on their ice cream". My approach to the issue was very different in that it heavily emphasized the empirical basis of common sense and the natural science. If two rival visions are equally supported by empirical evidence and there is no other way to decide the issue, then it becomes a matter of taste but your version seems to ignore the empirical dimension. To say that scientific truths are just a matter of taste is to present a very different, very un-empirical vision, one that lives right next door to solipsism. This is Rortyism, not the MOQ. It's like the difference between no empiricism and radical empiricism. It's like the difference between truth as a compliment we pay to sentences and truth as agreement with reality. You're always talking about the MOQ in terms of Rorty's view and this is almost always a philosophical train wreck. 



dmb said:

Dan has made it pretty darn clear that he doesn't do philosophological jargon, so Matt's concluding sentences seem intentionally obscure. [Matt had said Pirsig is "a post-Kantian, quasi-Hegelian empiricist, which is pretty close to just saying he's a Deweyan pragmatist".]



Matt replied:

Well, I don't know--should those of us, like yourself and I, who know a little philosophology stop alluding to the philosophological context when others don't care about it?  I'm not sure why.  I doubt Dan skips those parts in ZMM and Lila just because he doesn't care for them.  (I'm, of course, imputing this to Dan based on Dave's view of Dan, not my view of Dan.)  And besides, as Dan knows since he always addresses all of his posts to everyone, our posts are read by more than just the person we are seemingly directly engaged with, and so I'm not sure why writers should just limit themselves to one audience member only at all times.


dmb says:
Seriously? You really don't see why obscure jargon is a problem? Is there ANYONE here who is going to find such labels helpful? I seriously doubt it. Without any explanation as to the meaning and the relevance of such philosophological categories, your response to Dan is just pretentious name-dropping. I think Dan is a very intelligent dude who understands the MOQ as well as anyone and I'm sure he's perfectly capable of understanding the ideas behind those labels. Phrases like "post-Kantian, quasi-Hegelian empiricist" can work as a neat form of shorthand if you're talking to those who are familiar with such jargon but that's not who you're talking to. At best, using that kind of jargon makes it look like you don't care about being clear in your communications and I even suspect that your aim is to be baffling and obscure. From here, it looks like a smug evasion tactic. What's more, I'm not even sure this jargon makes sense as jargon. "Isn't it oxymoronic to even say "Hegelian empiricist", I asked. 


Matt replied:

I don't think it's oxymoronic.  Like I said, I'm thinking particularly of Dewey, who was deeply impressed by Hegel's historicism and holism.  Think of it this way: pre-Kantian empiricism is loaded down with the Myth of the Given.  Pragmatists are, in some fashion, empiricists who are not so loaded.  That means something purified empiricism of that Myth.  I think Hegel is someone who can do that purification. Was Hegel an empiricist?  Well, only in a post-Kantian sense, following out Kant's claim that the only one who can be an empirical realist is a transcendental idealist.  But I'm not really interested in what pigeonhole Hegel really falls into, only with the philosophical traditions he played an important role in initiating (historicism and holism).

dmb says:
It's not quite apparent or obvious but once again you are trying to convert Pirsig into some kind of post-Analytic neo-Pragmatist. There is a group of Analytic philosophers (your heros Wilfred Sellars and Robert Brandom among them) and they have tried to revise "absolute empiricist philosophy in the light of Hegel". Everyone who did philosophy in James' and Dewey's time was influenced by Hegel. It was all the rage among English-speaking people everywhere, from St. Louis to Oxford. But their (James and Dewey) sensible emphasis on the cultural and historical context of knowledge becomes a kind of unhinged relativism in the hands of the post-structuralists and the new historicists. I mean, people draw very different conclusions about the extent and meaning of contextualism. The similarities between Pirsig and these other neo-Pragmatists is mostly just a superficial resemblance based on some common enemies. But, following them, you've landed in a very different place. Their Hegelian revisions are mostly a matter of exorcising their own demons, of disavowing the assumptions and projects of their own quasi-Postivistic tradition.
Think about this way; when Pirsig gets around to the point where he is explicitly identifying his MOQ with James's radical empiricism, with mainstream American Pragmatism and Instrumentalism, he also thinks it's worth mentioning Hegel in order to rule him out as saying something comparable. Why do you suppose he felt the need to deny Hegel at that point? The comparison to Hegel isn't crazy because Phaedrus was some kind of Monist and the MOQ is a Monism in some sense, among other things. It's plausible enough that Pirsig feels the need to explicitly deny it just as he's identifying with pragmatism.
"The MOQ is a continuation of the mainstream of twentieth century American philosophy, It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism, which says the test of the true is the good. It adds that this good is not a social code or some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute. It is direct everyday experience." (Lila 366)


dmb asked:
 .., who are the critics? Who sees the specter of solipsism?



Matt replied:
They might be fictions of my imagination.  However, ...a wrong turn could have landed Pirsig in this or that philosophological quandary. ...



dmb says:
So the "aggressive critics" turn out to be vague and distant memories (or even fictions) who are concerned about hypothetical turns that could have been taken. Dude, sometimes I think you're just making this stuff up. If a statement and claim is going to be that vague and flimsy, maybe you ought to think twice about posting it. I mean, you've got to know that people are going to ask questions. That's just the nature of a discussion group, don't you think?