[MD] Taking off the glasses

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
For pragmatists like myself, concepts are better and worse with respect to one or more of our purposes. Are you suggesting that "getting us in touch with reality" is a purpose that MOQers ought to have for our concepts? Surely not. I see the MOQ as a remedy for such misguided purposes.

dmb says:
Pragmatists like yourself are basically just relativists. Pragmatists like Pirsig and James both emphasize the centrality of human purposes but agreement with experience is every bit as crucial to their conception of pragmatic truth. And yes, I'm not just suggesting that getting in touch with reality is a purpose that MOQers ought to have, I'm saying it explicitly. The "reality" they are talking about is NOT Plato's eternally fixed reality NOR Descartes' dualistic reality NOR Kant's reality of things in themselves NOR the physical reality of scientific materialism but getting back in touch with the primary empirical reality is the whole idea.



dmb said to Steve:
Pirsig's metaphor implies what he wants to reject? I think that accusation is both outrageous and ridiculous. The glasses metaphor is situated in a context where Pirsig denies all those implications quite explicitly. In order for your accusation to be true, Pirsig would have to be pretty oblivious to the meaning of his own words. It would be insulting if it weren't so implausible.



Steve replied:
I'd like to think that Pirsig would see my point as to why his choice of metaphor is problematic if I made my case to him. But neither of us can speak for him or feel insulted on his behalf.


dmb says:
Given the context of the metaphor, it is not problematic. Your reading of it is the problem. It's ridiculous to discount line after line of explicit claims in favor of the impression that an image could or might suggest. Given the context of the metaphor - the surrounding paragraphs as well as the whole book - your interpretation isn't even plausible. Images can do all kinds of work, of course, and the analogy between seeing and understanding has probably been used by every thinker who ever thought about understanding. But if you and Matt want to scream Platonism every time someone mentions an eyeball, knock yourself out. I think it only shows that you don't really understand the problem as such.
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> dmb:
> > As a matter of fact, the analogy adds a layer to the "ocular metaphors" that concern Rorty fans like you and Matt. Pirsig's metaphor says that we don't simply peer out at reality as it's given, that we see only what the culture pre-disposes us to see, as in Pirsig's correction of Descartes. ""If Descartes had said, "The seventeenth century French culture exists, therefore I think, therefore I am," he would have been correct." Unlike SOM's claims about objective reality and the corresponding objective truth, Pirsig's analogy says that we are suspended in language.


Steve said:
Why would the notion of being suspended in language be a problem for Rortians like Matt and I? The problem I have is with the notion that there is a way to NOT be suspended in language (to take off the glasses). We agree that "we see only what the culture pre-disposes us to see," but there is no "taking off the glasses" where we see from an acultural perspective.

dmb says:
The problem is that you don't see that the glasses represent the culture and language in which we are suspended and you don't rightly see what it means to take the glasses off. This is where the Zen and the philosophical mysticism come into play but you're reading this through Rorty goggles and so this is where things so haywire for you and Matt. You're assuming that taking the glasses off will give you access to the world as it is in itself, which is exactly what the passage in question says we can't have. Like I said, you and Matt have a habit of using Rorty's anti-Platonism against Pirsig's anti-Platonism. The glasses metaphor says that the so-called subjective self and the so-called objective reality is actually within the glasses, is an interpretation of reality rather than the starting point of reality.


Steve replied:
Yes, interpretations all the way down. That's not the problem. The problem is the "taking off the glasses" part which seems to suggest that interpretations bottom out somewhere. We can somehow aspire to the clear (uninterpreted) view of things, the way things really are, the reality that we are supposedly out of touch with.




dmb says:

Rorty is interfering with your ability to see the point again here too. You're going to continue to be confused if you try to understand the MOQ by way of Rorty's slogans. At certain very crucial points Rorty and Pirsig are saying very different things - and this is one of them. In the MOQ, interpretations do bottom out somewhere. For Rorty there is no taking the glasses off, there is no primary empirical reality, no DQ, no radical empiricism, no Zen, no philosophical mysticism and they subscribe to substantially different kinds of pragmatism. There is some overlap. They have common enemies. But at a certain point, Rorty simply doesn't fit here. Pirsig says our interpretations are responses to Quality and their truth value is measured in terms of how they function in experience. In other words, the MOQ says it's not interpretations all the way down because the primary empirical reality is outside of language, prior to language and our interpretations exists in relation to that totality of experience. Basically, Rorty leaves out half of Pirsig's world, and of course it's the DQ half that SOM filtered out too. I'm pretty sure that is why you and Matt continue to suffer from this blind spot. If Rorty is a therapist, he's made you crazier and not saner.