[MD] Taking words Seriously

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
What I am disagreeing with is the idea that we ought to privilege certain experiences as "primary" while trivializing others as "secondary" along the lines of concepts being distinct from rather than part of reality. ...Ideas aren't any more secondary than anything else though he
[Pirsig] seems to say they are in some places. As Matt said previously and I agreed with him, Pirsig seems to backslide into some Platonic appearance-reality crap at various points, and we would prefer that he hadn't done that (or leave himself so open to being construed that way if he wants to avoid it).

dmb says:
You are disagreeing with your own misreading. I'm convinced the distortion is a result of reading the MOQ with a Rortian lens, as I explained in the last post. You're interpreting the MOQ's first and most basic distinction as if it were a version of the appearance-reality distinction and then rejecting it for being a form of Platonism. Platonism? C'mon guys, that's hardly plausible, maybe even laughable. Phaedrus called Socrates and liar and Aristotle and asshole. He says Plato is a low, mean, vicious slanderer. He's not exactly subtle about it, you know?

Plato is the father of rationalism while Pirsig is radically (all the way down to the roots) empirical. Philosophers don't get much more opposed than that. Pirsig is on the side of Plato's enemies, a defender of all the artists who were denigrated by the Socratic demand intelligibility (just like Nietzsche did in his Birth of Tragedy). In fact, set of the ground rules in radical empiricism is to rule out Platonic metaphysics. It was virtually designed to sink Absolutism or any kind of excessively intellectualist approach. To translate the first rule into the contemporary American vernacular, radical empiricism says reality is what we actually experience and everything else is bullshit. The pragmatic theory of truth says that if your ideas don't make a difference in experience, they're bullshit. ( I love how much bullshit there isn't.) The main thrust of this, of course, is to insist that there is no reality (worth discussing) beyond reality as it appears to us. There is no veil to be lifted here. 

If the MOQ's primary empirical/secondary conceptual distinction were equivalent to the Platonic reality/appearance distinction, then DQ would somehow have to be equal to the Platonic Forms or Ideas and static concepts would have to somehow be equal to the world of sight and sound. Clearly, that's backwards. Unlike Plato's "real" reality, DQ very empirical and is nothing like an ideal form. Unlike Plato, Pirsig says ideas are always secondary in the sense that they are derived from experience and their value lies in their ability to work in experience. Ideas are not outside of reality and they aren't supposed to represent the real reality, but they have to function in reality. They have to agree with reality in the sense that they serve life, in the sense that they have to answer to life as it's actually lived. That is where our concepts and abstractions come from and that's where they are tried and tested. That's what our ideas are about; life as it's lived. As Charlene Seigried says, "The pragmatic stance is that we seek to know, not for its own sake, but to enable us to live better." (Seigfried in "James's Radical Reconstruction", page 323.) Or, as James says, 'The world is surely the TOTAL world, including our mental reaction." (Seigfried, 356.)