[MD] Philosophy as Biography

[Ian Glendinning]

Very good Matt, I'd forgotten the piece you'd blogged earlier in 2006.

You're right - I said I was "stating something obvious" - but those are the
reasons why.

Wisdom is the word too - a "guru" is not wise because the PR says so, but
because the wisdom gels with the back-story, a back-story you can recognise
through your own story-so-far ... you said:
"we should care about the story behind the ideas,
but the ideas are not themselves reducible to the story"

Yes, the relationship is "meta" - a level removed by metaphor, or
metaphysics even.
I keep coming back to meta-meta - but that's another story - to describe
the relationship between the story and the meta-story - meta-meta-physics.

As you point out this is only obvious, once you let go the Netwonian /
Caretsian "doubt" - seeing worthlessness in anything that cannot be reduced
to objectivity. (What this does depend on however is "faith" in your own
ability to bridge the public and private metaphors - that seems
inescapable, but preferable (value-building)  to reductionism
(value-discarding.)

Ian

On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 6:22 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com>wrote:

>
> Hey Steve,
>
> Phaedrus to Lila:
> "I've just had feelings that maybe the ultimate truth about the world
> isn't history or sociology but biography."
>
> Steve said:
> A statement that I always found curious is RMP's one to Bagini about
> the originality of the MOQ. He said that his philosophy is unique
> because it starts with a practical question about quality in rhetoric or
> something like that. When I read that I remember thinking, Why is
> THAT important??? Why should we care about the story behind the
> ideas rather than just the ideas?
>
> Matt:
> I think it's important to try and understand precisely why Pirsig's
> statement above has rhetorical force in the context Steve is
> wondering about.  The first place to start is to say that while Ian is
> saying something that seems obvious, we must also recognize that it
> hasn't always been taken as so obvious (and by certain, important
> individuals to be named later).  Implicit in Pirsig's assertion is that
> there is a resistance to this idea.  Ian said, "The reason for (say) my
> own biographical timeline work was precisely because the personal
> rhetorical story behind the philosophical output IS important. Where
> was the man (or woman) coming from ?"  The question Steve is
> allowing is: "okay, but _why_ is it important to see where the
> philosopher was coming from?"
>
> Philosophy is the search for wisdom.  If this wisdom is going to be for
> more than just one person, then it must be able to take some sort of
> abstract form.  What is abstraction exactly?  The simplest definition
> we can offer that fits with the philosophic movement is that
> abstraction is the cutting away of features that ground a
> thought-pattern in its original context of production (the context that
> produced the thought).  Why would we do this?  For philosophic
> reasons: to be able to _transport_ the wisdom of one specific
> situation to other situations by a process of analogy (situation-X is
> _like_ situation-Y, so why not try Wisdom-A in Y since it worked for
> me in X).  If intellectual patterns are the abstract manipulation of
> symbols, then philosophy is in some sense the manipulation of
> abstract wisdoms apart from the original contexts.
>
> So: why do we need to know about the original contexts?  That's the
> story of ZMM.  Plato started Western philosophy on its path by
> instantiating in its metaphysical description of reality the separation
> of Ideas from the Context-of-Their-Production (one way of
> understanding the Forms vs. Appearances contrast).  Plato, still
> writing in dialogues and logging deep concerns about writing vs. oral
> conversation (in the Phaedrus, of all places), yet kept an implicit
> sense of the dynamic of contextual production of ideas.  This was
> further erased by Descartes, whose method of doubt--while
> responding to the specific intellectual context of his time (a
> post-Reformation, anti-scholastic scientific crisis)--convinced
> philosophers working in his wake that philosophy is
> _paradigmatically_ done in isolation from the whirl of human
> realities, something that _can_ be done by anyone, and therefore the
> most abstract and therefore the most philosophical: one philosopher
> meditating by oneself, considering the possibility that every
> experience is fake.
>
> This, indeed, can be done by anyone.  Hence its seductive power.
> The question for philosophers like Pirsig is: _should_ this be the way
> philosophy is approached?
>
> If we understand wisdom to not be first and foremost a thing that
> should be perfected in isolation from the whirl of human realities, but
> rather as something that must be _used_ in that whirl
> _to even call it wisdom_, then you'll begin to have a new respect for
> the consideration of original contexts of production.
>
> I think the full answer is that biography can't be everything (nor do I
> think Pirsig thought that), but that good philosophy will be a weaving
> back and forth between contexts of intellectual production and
> abstraction away from those contexts.  If a bit of wisdom was
> produced in a certain kind of situation, it behooves us to remind
> ourselves what that situation was in order to figure out whether
> _our situation_ is analogous in the requisite way.  But
> _finding the analogy_ will require imaginative effort on our part in
> abstracting away features of both contexts to toy with them in
> abstract space.  So we should care about the story behind the ideas,
> but the ideas are not themselves reducible to the story.
>
> I have another really old piece I kind of wrote about this:
> http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/04/philosophy-and-biography.html
>
> I'm not sure how much I agree with the end on systematic philosophy
> any more, but it still has a certain taste that I find useful.
>
> Matt
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