[MD] Taking words Seriously

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Matt and Steve:
...really shows that you're both misreading the central concepts as well as the main point and purpose of the MOQ. I mean, the over-arching theme is that, "our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world," because, Pirisg says, "the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is...emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty." He says this problem "can't be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem". That's the problem you just denied. And you reject the solution to the problem you don't recognize as legitimate.



Steve replied:
I did no such thing. ..Matt and I are talking about philosophy in terms of making the world better. What I am trying to distinguish is the real problem of making the world better from the fake problem of being out of touch with reality. You seem to see the way to make the world better as to get in touch with it while I see us as always already in touch with reality. 


dmb says:

You deny that you are denying the problem and then you deny the problem again. Unbelievable. Pirsig says our modes of rationality tend to prevent us from seeing quality. It's the problem of squareness and attitudes of objectivity and value-free science. If you ask, "how can the problem be that we aren't in proper relation to it?", then you are saying that Pirsig's work is aimed at solving a fake problem. The MOQ's solution IS exactly what you say it isn't. Pirsig is saying that the world will be improved by a rationality that isn't value-free, that prioritizes the empirical reality from which our concepts come and to which they must answer. It is NOT concepts RATHER than an intimacy with reality that will improve things. It is a form of rationality that has a working concept of Quality built right into it, from the ground up. 


The discrepancy, properly understood, puts concepts into a secondary role so that they are subservient to Quality instead of the other way around. Concepts are functional tools that operate within reality, and this reality is directly empirical so that the LAST thing you'd contrast it with is the world of appearance or the phenomenal. In that sense, in the MOQ the "real" reality is just what appears in the immediate flux of life, in direct everyday experience. This is as far from any objective or Platonic reality as one can get. The "real" Platonic reality and the pre-existing objective reality are considered to be secondary concepts, reified secondary concepts, in the MOQ.



"Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which [James] described as 'the immediate flux of life [DQ] which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories [sq]'."
" 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing'  Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality."