This is something I wrote while writing "Philosophologology" (at www.moq.org). It eventually got cut because it didn't fit in very well with the direction of the paper, but it is useful for picking out another section of Pirsig (and going over the glasses analogy section again) that is ambiguous over how good a pragmatist Pirsig is. It also makes some connections with Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.
------------------
At the outset I suggested that Pirsig’s distinction between philosophy and philosophology is at best muddy and misdirected and at the worst untenable. The degree to which the distinction is untenable is the degree to which you are a pragmatist. It's difficult to get a good bead on Pirsig on this matter because Pirsig consistently talks both like a pragmatist and a traditional philosopher. I have so far spent most of my time on how Pirsig talks like a traditionalist in the passages on philosophology and I have elsewhere suggested how Pirsig talks like a pragmatist in general.[1] There is one place in particular that is pertinent to this discussion where Pirsig is particularly ambiguous. In ZMM, Pirsig talks about the mythos-over-logos argument. Pirsig says, “the term logos … refers to the sum total of our rational understanding of the world” and that the “mythos is the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos.”[2] “The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man.”[3] Pirsig’s “continuing, ongoing mythos” as our “huge body of common knowledge” recalls Nietzsche’s claim that truth is “a mobile army of metaphors,” “a sum of human relations.”[4] Pirsig’s claim that “Everything is an analogy” and that “Dialectic … came itself from rhetoric” are of a piece with Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonic philosophy.[5] That the mythos can be transformed is the pragmatist point about changing our intuitions. Pirsig wants to change our intuitions about truth and reason, like that we should “do what is ‘reasonable’ even when it isn't any good,” and replace it with a “new spiritual rationality.”[6]
This so far is all good pragmatist stuff. Like Nietzsche, pragmatists want to get rid of God and his doubles, they want to remove the capitalization from all of the traditional playmates of traditional philosophers: Truth, Reason, Nature, Science, History, etc., etc. This, of course, is what makes the pragmatist immediately careful about Pirsig. Pirsig seems to be Nietzschean enough, but his insistence on calling Quality the “pre-intellectual reality” makes the pragmatist a little nervous, let alone his insistence on capitalizing his moniker for the pre-intellectual reality. In the present context, this nervousness is spelled out when Pirsig says that “Quality is the generator of the mythos.”[7] Quality is completely ineffable, undefined, and our definitions of Quality are not actually definitions of Quality, they are definitions of our responses to Quality. Pirsig says that we respond to Quality and that is how we create the mythos, “analogues upon analogues upon analogues.”[8] Outside the mythos lay insanity, “the terra incognita surrounding the mythos.”[9] Pirsig then, gathering all his rhetorical strength, says that our Western mythos is insane: “the mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of the world is unreal, that is insane!”[10]
It is not clear that pragmatists can say this, however. It would require a pivot that doesn’t move, that philosophical holy grail known as the Archimedean point. For pragmatists who think that “everything is an analogy” and that everything from the “laws of nature” to the “laws of logic, of mathematics” are human inventions, that, in fact, “the whole blessed thing is a human invention,”[11] as Pirsig says in his discourse on Western ghosts, Archimedean points are hard to come by. If Pirsig wants to claim that the Western mythos is insane, he must be standing in another mythos. But it is not clear why the Western mythos could not respond as he does: that he is insane. This is how the Western mythos responds, which makes one wonder why we should even start exchanging the epithets. I think Pirsig fingers the Greeks as “the villains who had so shaped the mythos as to cause us to accept this insanity as reality”[12] because he thinks he has found such an Archimedean point. He doesn’t think he’s created a better mythos, a better invention, he thinks he’s found the correct mythos, the mythos that actually follows Quality, “the track that directs the train.”[13] To call our mythos insane must mean that our mythos, “the whole train of collective consciousness of all communicating mankind,”[14] has been derailed.
Pirsig’s Archimedean point is Quality, his own capitalized, philosophical playmate, his own God-surrogate. If “everything is an analogy,” that would mean everything, not just everything up until the point at which it reaches Quality. When Pirsig says that “Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live,”[15] Nietzsche would respond, “A nerve stimulus, first transposed into an image—first metaphor. The image, in turn, imitated by a sound—second metaphor….”[16] All of our knowledge is built on metaphors, up to and including Quality. Pirsig seems to get to the second metaphor and stop. When Pirsig declares that our present mythos is insane, after saying that insanity exists outside the mythos, he sounds like the early Wittgenstein when he said the traditional problems of philosophy arise because “the logic of our language is misunderstood.”[17] Pirsig is essentially trying to say that we misunderstand Quality.
Wittgenstein then notoriously goes on to make fun of himself, as he evolves from the early Wittgenstein into the later one. In Section 114 of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein begins by quoting the Tractatus: “The general form of propositions is: This is how things are.”[18] He then says, “That is the kind of proposition that one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.”[19] Wittgenstein is here making fun of the idea that we can get at the nature of anything, that there is a correct mythos. Even this, however, is slightly misleading because you might begin to think that there is a nature, it just happens to be the fact that we can’t get to it. When Wittgenstein says famously that, “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably,”[20] Wittgenstein is creating an analogy exactly like Pirsig’s analogy of the glasses in Lila.[21] Like Pirsig’s analogy, you can’t press it too hard, for if you do, you might be tempted to say that if we could discard language entirely, we could reach the nature of the thing. You would be tempted to suggest, as Pirsig does, that you could get rid of the glasses through which you see the world. For pragmatists, it's pictures and glasses all the way down. Wittgenstein’s later question to his earlier self is, if we misunderstand language, how are we to phrase our realization if the only thing we have is language? Analogously, what we should ask Pirsig is how we are supposed to misunderstand Quality if we are all everywhere and always in touch with Quality?
The reason I’ve spent so long on this particular passage from ZMM is that the muddiness in interpreting this passage is directly related to the muddiness in interpreting Pirsig’s use of philosophology. They revolve around his use of Quality. The generator of the mythos, our knowledge, is Quality. In Pirsig’s Lila analogy between the horse of philosophy and its cart, the mythos is the cart that follows behind the horse: Quality. Quality is the hinge on which hangs the distinction between philosophy and philosophology, Quality is what we can all reflect on and expect to generate beliefs. Pirsig seems to oscillate between making a “new spiritual rationality” and finding an Archimedean point on which we can pivot with some assurance. If Pirsig sticks to handing in his discovery metaphors for creation ones, then he can say that philosophy is individualistic and that we can create a better one, but he can no longer be assured that everyone will be talking about the same thing nor that we aren’t the ones seen as insane.
[1] see my “Confessions of a Fallen Priest” at www.moq.org
[2] Pirsig, ZMM, p. 358
[3] Pirsig, ZMM, p. 359
[4] Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 46-7. When Pirsig says later that “Religion isn’t invented by man. Men are invented by religion,” (ZMM, p. 360) he recalls Nietzsche’s successor, Heidegger, when he says that “language speaks man.” (see Heidegger, “…Poetically Man Dwells…” in Poetry, Language, Thought)
[5] See Christopher Norris’ discussion of Pirsig and Nietzsche in his Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, p. 61-4.
[6] Pirsig, ZMM, p. 368
[7] ibid., p. 360
[8] ibid.
[9] ibid.
[10] ibid., p. 361
[11] ibid., p. 36
[12] ibid., p. 361
[13] ibid., p. 360
[14] ibid.
[15] ibid., p. 255
[16] Nietzsche, “Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” p. 46
[17] Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 3
[18] ibid., 4.5
[19] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, sec. 114
[20] ibid., sec. 115
[21] Pirsig, Lila, p. 112-3
Showing posts with label glasses analogy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label glasses analogy. Show all posts
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Begging the Question, Part III
Moral Intuition(s)
--------------------------
There are two senses of intuition that we should distinguish. The first are ideas that we feel without argument. The second is a way of accessing something nonrational, something beyond argument. The two are obviously related, but the first sense is the sense of "intuition" as ideas that we feel are fairly obvious. The second sense is the sense of "intuition" as a faculty that gives us access to ideas that should be fairly obvious.
By "moral intuitions" I mean certain ideas about what is good. For instance, we Americans have intuitions that democracy is the best form of government yet realized, that freedom is the best route to happiness, and that Nazis are despisable. We feel these things without argument and we agree to them without argument. They are in our blood, so to speak. By "moral intuition" I mean an ability to access ideas about what is good, ideas that we accept without argument.
What I will argue is that Pirsig holds to both senses of intuition and that pragmatists hold to only the first sense.
The reason people want to answer the Nazi, want to be able to argumentatively and dialectically wrestle the Nazi down, is that they fear "that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form 'There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you.'" (Rorty, CP, xlii) Rorty says that our moral intuitions are temporary resting places, that there is nothing ahistorical or universal about them. They are simply the best that we have come up with so far. They are what make us us, or as Wittgenstein would put it, they are a form of life, the best form of life we have yet seen. When Sartre says, "Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us" ("Existentialism is a Humanism," quoted by Rorty in intro to CP), the "us" Sartre is referring to is not some universal image of mankind, but us Westerners, we who have lived through the Enlightenment and WW II, who have seen the terrible things that fascism and totalitarianism can do.
Pirsig however does refer to something that is beyond our practices, something that will condemn us even if there is nobody else around but us. He calls it Quality and Dynamic Quality. Quality is reality for Pirsig. This is consistent between ZMM and Lila. In Lila, however, Pirsig develops two ways in which we access Quality: through static patterns of quality and through Dynamic Quality. Pirsig calls Dynamic Quality the "pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality." (Lila, 133) For Pirsig, "Static quality ... emerges in the wake of Dynamic Quality." (ibid.) One way we can interpret this is that Dynamic Quality represents our intuition, our access to the nonrational, our access to Quality. It gives us our moral intuitions, which take the form of static quality patterns. Static quality patterns are what is left over and these are arguable. These represent our patterns of argument over the years that have accumulated, arguments for democracy and freedom. But unlike Rorty who says that we can never reach outside of the cicle of these static patterns, Pirsig says that the argument begins and ends with Dynamic Quality.
To help see this interpretation, I think we should first stop and look at the way Pirsig literally writes these two things: static patterns of small "q" quality and Dynamic big "Q" Quality. Quality as reality, for Pirsig, is always capitalized, just like Dynamic Quality. Static patterns, on the other hand, are never capitalized, the "Quality" that comes with them is never capitalized. I don't think this is just some German pretension. I suggest that we take this as a sign that Pirsig is suggesting that static patterns are not quite "Quality," not quite reality, but that Dynamic Quality does give us access to reality, to Quality.
My main analysis starts with Pirsig's glasses analogy at the beginning of chapter eight in Lila. "The culture in which we live hands us a set of intellectual glasses to interpret experience with, and the concept of the primacy of subjects and objects is built right into these glasses. If someone sees things through a somewhat different set of glasses or, God help him, takes his glasses off, the natural tendency of those who still have their glasses on is to regard his statements as somewhat weird, if not actually crazy." (Lila, 112-3) The "intellectual glasses" that we are given by our culture is our static patterns, they are our intuitions. The shift to another set of glasses represents the shift to another set of intuitions, another vocabulary. Pragmatists would agree to all of this. However, Pirsig continues and says that we can take our glasses off. This is Pirsig's split between mediated and unmediated experience, his idea that static patterns are a veil and a distortion of our experience, of the true reality.
What Pirsig does is privilege unmediated experience. Pirsig says, "The purpose of mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from experience but to bring one's self closer to it by eliminating stale, confusing, static, intellectual attachments of the past." (Lila, 134) We must "eliminate" our static patterns so that we can become closer to unmediate experience. Our static patterns are "stale" and "confusing". Further, Pirsig says that "All life is a migration of static patterns of quality toward Dynamic Quality." (Lila, 160) Life is a movement towards unmediated experience. The privileging is solidified with "In general, given a choice of two courses to follow and all other things being equal, that choice which is more Dynamic, that is, at a higher level of evolution, is more moral." (Lila, 183)
This isn't a minor interpretation of Pirsig that is hard to get a handle on. It is pervasive. Pirsig says, "Mystics will tell you that once you've opened the door to metaphysics you can say good-bye to any genuine understanding of reality. Thought is not a path to reality. It sets obstacles in that path because when you try to use thought to approach something that is prior to thought your thinking does not carry you toward that something. It carries you away from it. To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding." (Lila, 73) Static patterns, thought itself, will never lead to a "genuine understanding of reality," "it carries you away from it", it "destory[s] real understanding." To think about something is to "subordinate" it, it is to make static patterns higher than Dynamic Quality and, all other things being equal, this is immoral.
Not only is this theme pervasive in Lila, the later, more metaphysical Pirsig, it has precedent in ZMM. Linking together Pirsig's cooptation of the rhetoric of science and Dynamic Quality as a faculty of intuition, a capacity for that which is beyond rational means, he says, "What guarantees the objectivity of the world in which we live is that this world is common to us with other thinking beings. Through the communications that we have with other men we receive from them ready-made harmonious reasonings. We know that these reasonings do not come from us and at the same time we recognize in them, because of their harmony, the work of reasonable beings like ourselves. And as these reasonings appear to fit the world of our sensations, we think we may infer that these reasonable beings have seen the same thing as we; thus it is that we know we haven't been dreaming. It is this harmony, this quality if you will, that is the sole basis for the only reality we can ever know." (ZMM, 273)
This, in itself, seems to simply refer to a redescription of objectivity into intersubjectivity, which every pragmatist can rejoice in. However, Pirsig says that there is a "guarantee". Pirsig is saying that intersubjectivity, alone, is not enough, we need a guarantee for this intersubjectivity to be objectivity. Pirsig spins his words to make it look like intersubjectivity guarantees objectvity, but a close reading shows that this is not the case. Preceding this passage, we find that the guarantee is "... the sense of harmony of the cosmos, which makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony. It is not the facts but the relation of things that results in the universal harmony that is the sole objective reality." (ZMM, 273) "The sense of harmony of the cosmos" is Dynamic Quality, intuition, and this sense "makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony." It makes us, it forces us, it compels us. This is what forces the Nazi to play our game, a game in which the Nazi has no chance of winning. The force is our intuition of Dynamic Quality, a capacity that every person has, that every person has a moral obligation to follow. If the Nazi denies it, then we should feel righteous in saying that he is subordinating Dynamic Quality to immoral static patterns. The Nazi is immoral because he denies Dynamic Quality.
Pirsig's force comes from Dynamic Quality as bringing in something outside of static patterns; this in effect reconstitutes Kant's analytic/synthetic dichotomy and Mill's real/verbal dichotomy, the ones that Quine gets rid of. Rather than following the pragmatists and saying that our language never brings in or refers to something that is outside of itself, Pirsig becomes a Kantian by suggesting that some static patterns, like "All bachelors are single", are analytic, wholly internal to themselves, and that some static patterns, like "Nazis are immoral", are synthetic, they refer and are forced by something outside of the pattern. This allows, in argumentation, for Pirsig to not simply make verbal inferences, but real inferences, like the kind that would be made when answering the Nazi, when engaging in an argument where you can triumphantly and dialectically declare "You are immoral!"
But the pragmatist gets rid of this distinction. He dissolves our ability to distinguish between analytic truths and synthetic truths, verbal inferences and real inferences. By doing this, the pragmatist is saying that our moral intuitions are inside of a vocabulary, too. That the distinction between Dynamic Quality and static quality, between unmediated and mediated experience, is inside of a vocabulary. Pirsig wants to say that our vocabulary is only our static patterns of quality (specifically our intellectual static patterns of quality) and that Dynamic Quality exists outside of our vocabularies. Dynamic Quality then becomes our trump card, that which forces people to use certain vocabularies rather than others. But the pragmatist simply becomes metaphilosophical and says that you are begging the question. By saying that something exists outside of a vocabulary, you are begging the question over the pragmatist who says that nothing can, that nothing can force us to play a vocabulary. The pragmatist instead says that some vocabularies are better than others, but the choice in vocabularies is always a question-begging experience.
People should notice that I've conveniently walked around in a circle: I've ended with Quine's dissolution of the analytic/synthetic dogma, which was one of my original premises. I didn't actually conclude with Quine's dissolution, but I could try by pointing out that "Dynamic Quality" exists as a static pattern, that we can't seperate any of those words from a vocabulary, from the Quality vocabulary. That any effort to point or refer or demonstrate the existence of something unmediated is doomed to mediation. But that's not my main point. My point isn't to argue for the pragmatist position, for Quine's dissolution of one of the dogmas of empiricism. The point is that Rorty is showing us the consequences of pragmatism. My effort is to show that Pirsig fails as a pragmatist part of the time, and succeeds some of the time. I am not arguing for pragmatism. I am showing the fruits of its labors. It's up to each individual interlocuter to decide whether or not pragmatism seems persuasive.
I've continually tried to point out Pirsig's ambivalence concerning these subjects, what I've called his pragmatist impulse and his Kantian or Platonic impulse. People have taken this to mean that I am debasing Pirsig's genius. But this isn't so, not in the least. I believe the grey space in Pirsig's writings is enormous, compounded by the fact that the volume of Pirsig's writing is very small while the topics he convers are large. Rorty writes that "the works of anybody whose mind was complex enough to make his or her books worth reading will not have an 'essence,' that those books will admit of a fruitful diversity of interpretations, that the quest for 'an authentic reading' is pointless. One will assume that the author was as mixed up as the rest of us, and that our job is to pull out, from the tangle we find on the pages, some lines of thought that might turn out to be useful for our own purposes." ("Taking Philosophy Serious" quoted in Hall, 166) I think that, given in particular the kinds of books Pirsig wrote, books about a man who went "insane" and then came back to tell the tale, this is as true of Pirsig as it was for Heidegger.
--------------------------
There are two senses of intuition that we should distinguish. The first are ideas that we feel without argument. The second is a way of accessing something nonrational, something beyond argument. The two are obviously related, but the first sense is the sense of "intuition" as ideas that we feel are fairly obvious. The second sense is the sense of "intuition" as a faculty that gives us access to ideas that should be fairly obvious.
By "moral intuitions" I mean certain ideas about what is good. For instance, we Americans have intuitions that democracy is the best form of government yet realized, that freedom is the best route to happiness, and that Nazis are despisable. We feel these things without argument and we agree to them without argument. They are in our blood, so to speak. By "moral intuition" I mean an ability to access ideas about what is good, ideas that we accept without argument.
What I will argue is that Pirsig holds to both senses of intuition and that pragmatists hold to only the first sense.
The reason people want to answer the Nazi, want to be able to argumentatively and dialectically wrestle the Nazi down, is that they fear "that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form 'There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you.'" (Rorty, CP, xlii) Rorty says that our moral intuitions are temporary resting places, that there is nothing ahistorical or universal about them. They are simply the best that we have come up with so far. They are what make us us, or as Wittgenstein would put it, they are a form of life, the best form of life we have yet seen. When Sartre says, "Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us" ("Existentialism is a Humanism," quoted by Rorty in intro to CP), the "us" Sartre is referring to is not some universal image of mankind, but us Westerners, we who have lived through the Enlightenment and WW II, who have seen the terrible things that fascism and totalitarianism can do.
Pirsig however does refer to something that is beyond our practices, something that will condemn us even if there is nobody else around but us. He calls it Quality and Dynamic Quality. Quality is reality for Pirsig. This is consistent between ZMM and Lila. In Lila, however, Pirsig develops two ways in which we access Quality: through static patterns of quality and through Dynamic Quality. Pirsig calls Dynamic Quality the "pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality." (Lila, 133) For Pirsig, "Static quality ... emerges in the wake of Dynamic Quality." (ibid.) One way we can interpret this is that Dynamic Quality represents our intuition, our access to the nonrational, our access to Quality. It gives us our moral intuitions, which take the form of static quality patterns. Static quality patterns are what is left over and these are arguable. These represent our patterns of argument over the years that have accumulated, arguments for democracy and freedom. But unlike Rorty who says that we can never reach outside of the cicle of these static patterns, Pirsig says that the argument begins and ends with Dynamic Quality.
To help see this interpretation, I think we should first stop and look at the way Pirsig literally writes these two things: static patterns of small "q" quality and Dynamic big "Q" Quality. Quality as reality, for Pirsig, is always capitalized, just like Dynamic Quality. Static patterns, on the other hand, are never capitalized, the "Quality" that comes with them is never capitalized. I don't think this is just some German pretension. I suggest that we take this as a sign that Pirsig is suggesting that static patterns are not quite "Quality," not quite reality, but that Dynamic Quality does give us access to reality, to Quality.
My main analysis starts with Pirsig's glasses analogy at the beginning of chapter eight in Lila. "The culture in which we live hands us a set of intellectual glasses to interpret experience with, and the concept of the primacy of subjects and objects is built right into these glasses. If someone sees things through a somewhat different set of glasses or, God help him, takes his glasses off, the natural tendency of those who still have their glasses on is to regard his statements as somewhat weird, if not actually crazy." (Lila, 112-3) The "intellectual glasses" that we are given by our culture is our static patterns, they are our intuitions. The shift to another set of glasses represents the shift to another set of intuitions, another vocabulary. Pragmatists would agree to all of this. However, Pirsig continues and says that we can take our glasses off. This is Pirsig's split between mediated and unmediated experience, his idea that static patterns are a veil and a distortion of our experience, of the true reality.
What Pirsig does is privilege unmediated experience. Pirsig says, "The purpose of mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from experience but to bring one's self closer to it by eliminating stale, confusing, static, intellectual attachments of the past." (Lila, 134) We must "eliminate" our static patterns so that we can become closer to unmediate experience. Our static patterns are "stale" and "confusing". Further, Pirsig says that "All life is a migration of static patterns of quality toward Dynamic Quality." (Lila, 160) Life is a movement towards unmediated experience. The privileging is solidified with "In general, given a choice of two courses to follow and all other things being equal, that choice which is more Dynamic, that is, at a higher level of evolution, is more moral." (Lila, 183)
This isn't a minor interpretation of Pirsig that is hard to get a handle on. It is pervasive. Pirsig says, "Mystics will tell you that once you've opened the door to metaphysics you can say good-bye to any genuine understanding of reality. Thought is not a path to reality. It sets obstacles in that path because when you try to use thought to approach something that is prior to thought your thinking does not carry you toward that something. It carries you away from it. To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding." (Lila, 73) Static patterns, thought itself, will never lead to a "genuine understanding of reality," "it carries you away from it", it "destory[s] real understanding." To think about something is to "subordinate" it, it is to make static patterns higher than Dynamic Quality and, all other things being equal, this is immoral.
Not only is this theme pervasive in Lila, the later, more metaphysical Pirsig, it has precedent in ZMM. Linking together Pirsig's cooptation of the rhetoric of science and Dynamic Quality as a faculty of intuition, a capacity for that which is beyond rational means, he says, "What guarantees the objectivity of the world in which we live is that this world is common to us with other thinking beings. Through the communications that we have with other men we receive from them ready-made harmonious reasonings. We know that these reasonings do not come from us and at the same time we recognize in them, because of their harmony, the work of reasonable beings like ourselves. And as these reasonings appear to fit the world of our sensations, we think we may infer that these reasonable beings have seen the same thing as we; thus it is that we know we haven't been dreaming. It is this harmony, this quality if you will, that is the sole basis for the only reality we can ever know." (ZMM, 273)
This, in itself, seems to simply refer to a redescription of objectivity into intersubjectivity, which every pragmatist can rejoice in. However, Pirsig says that there is a "guarantee". Pirsig is saying that intersubjectivity, alone, is not enough, we need a guarantee for this intersubjectivity to be objectivity. Pirsig spins his words to make it look like intersubjectivity guarantees objectvity, but a close reading shows that this is not the case. Preceding this passage, we find that the guarantee is "... the sense of harmony of the cosmos, which makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony. It is not the facts but the relation of things that results in the universal harmony that is the sole objective reality." (ZMM, 273) "The sense of harmony of the cosmos" is Dynamic Quality, intuition, and this sense "makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony." It makes us, it forces us, it compels us. This is what forces the Nazi to play our game, a game in which the Nazi has no chance of winning. The force is our intuition of Dynamic Quality, a capacity that every person has, that every person has a moral obligation to follow. If the Nazi denies it, then we should feel righteous in saying that he is subordinating Dynamic Quality to immoral static patterns. The Nazi is immoral because he denies Dynamic Quality.
Pirsig's force comes from Dynamic Quality as bringing in something outside of static patterns; this in effect reconstitutes Kant's analytic/synthetic dichotomy and Mill's real/verbal dichotomy, the ones that Quine gets rid of. Rather than following the pragmatists and saying that our language never brings in or refers to something that is outside of itself, Pirsig becomes a Kantian by suggesting that some static patterns, like "All bachelors are single", are analytic, wholly internal to themselves, and that some static patterns, like "Nazis are immoral", are synthetic, they refer and are forced by something outside of the pattern. This allows, in argumentation, for Pirsig to not simply make verbal inferences, but real inferences, like the kind that would be made when answering the Nazi, when engaging in an argument where you can triumphantly and dialectically declare "You are immoral!"
But the pragmatist gets rid of this distinction. He dissolves our ability to distinguish between analytic truths and synthetic truths, verbal inferences and real inferences. By doing this, the pragmatist is saying that our moral intuitions are inside of a vocabulary, too. That the distinction between Dynamic Quality and static quality, between unmediated and mediated experience, is inside of a vocabulary. Pirsig wants to say that our vocabulary is only our static patterns of quality (specifically our intellectual static patterns of quality) and that Dynamic Quality exists outside of our vocabularies. Dynamic Quality then becomes our trump card, that which forces people to use certain vocabularies rather than others. But the pragmatist simply becomes metaphilosophical and says that you are begging the question. By saying that something exists outside of a vocabulary, you are begging the question over the pragmatist who says that nothing can, that nothing can force us to play a vocabulary. The pragmatist instead says that some vocabularies are better than others, but the choice in vocabularies is always a question-begging experience.
People should notice that I've conveniently walked around in a circle: I've ended with Quine's dissolution of the analytic/synthetic dogma, which was one of my original premises. I didn't actually conclude with Quine's dissolution, but I could try by pointing out that "Dynamic Quality" exists as a static pattern, that we can't seperate any of those words from a vocabulary, from the Quality vocabulary. That any effort to point or refer or demonstrate the existence of something unmediated is doomed to mediation. But that's not my main point. My point isn't to argue for the pragmatist position, for Quine's dissolution of one of the dogmas of empiricism. The point is that Rorty is showing us the consequences of pragmatism. My effort is to show that Pirsig fails as a pragmatist part of the time, and succeeds some of the time. I am not arguing for pragmatism. I am showing the fruits of its labors. It's up to each individual interlocuter to decide whether or not pragmatism seems persuasive.
I've continually tried to point out Pirsig's ambivalence concerning these subjects, what I've called his pragmatist impulse and his Kantian or Platonic impulse. People have taken this to mean that I am debasing Pirsig's genius. But this isn't so, not in the least. I believe the grey space in Pirsig's writings is enormous, compounded by the fact that the volume of Pirsig's writing is very small while the topics he convers are large. Rorty writes that "the works of anybody whose mind was complex enough to make his or her books worth reading will not have an 'essence,' that those books will admit of a fruitful diversity of interpretations, that the quest for 'an authentic reading' is pointless. One will assume that the author was as mixed up as the rest of us, and that our job is to pull out, from the tangle we find on the pages, some lines of thought that might turn out to be useful for our own purposes." ("Taking Philosophy Serious" quoted in Hall, 166) I think that, given in particular the kinds of books Pirsig wrote, books about a man who went "insane" and then came back to tell the tale, this is as true of Pirsig as it was for Heidegger.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Dynamic Quality as Pre-Intellectual Experience
I want to cover again similar ground to which I addressed in "The Pathos of Distance." One of the troubles I've always had with Dynamic Quality as a concept is that so many ideas are shunted under its mantle (no less an ostensibly "undefined" mantle). DQ is used in many different ways. One of the ways it is used is as "pre-intellectual experience". I'd like to run through a dialectical sequence, all tied around several ways in which we describe DQ--directly knowable, inexpressible, unlensed (per the glasses/filter analogy of Ch. 8 of Lila), betterness, and finally as just plain different. My effort in running through this is to try and show some of the snags we will encounter if we persist in unpacking "pre-intellectual experience" with ocular metaphors like the glasses analogy, if we continue to throw up mediation between us and reality to create distance and the pathos that follows.
I want to start with "pre-intellectual experience" in the sense of "directly knowable." Something that is directly knowable is something that is knowable without language. You know it before language. The trouble with the directly knowable is that you can't say what it is. If you could, that raises the spectare of whether it wasn't really directly known at all, and really indirectly known. How does one "know directly"? How would you help someone? One could say that the unenlightened do know directly, they just don't recognize that they do. Well, if one gets along just fine with their descriptions of things, but they just don't describe things with the distinction of direct and indirect knowing, how does one "wake up" to see the distinction? How does one "know directly" if there's no way to tell them whether what they just "knew directly" is actual or fake "knowing directly"? If there were a way of telling them, it would be linguistic and that would make whatever it was under discussion not actually "known directly," but simply thrown into the linguistic pile.
This leads to "pre-" in the sense of inexpressible. The tough question for inexpressibility is, "How do you know 'pre-' is inexpressible?" Every time you try to enunciate why its inexpressible is a case of expressibility. And further, how do you know it is impossible to express the pre-intellectual and not simply difficult? Marking off an entire area of experience tout court as impossible to express before any attempt at expression is what you might call baptizing a problem. Instead of dealing with the practical difficulties of expression, you declare that area as an eternal feature of reality.
The first two senses exhibit a conversational problem. It either ends with the mystical dogmatist (because only dogmatists insist that something is unknowable or inexpressible and that every attempt to know or express it is ruled, a priori of any actual attempt, to have failed) shrugging his shoulders, smiling, and saying, "Well, you'll know it when you see it," at which point there's nothing else to say because the conversant is hopeless (not that conversation supplied any hope in the first place because conversation itself to the mystical dogmatist is hopeless) or with the pragmatist shaking his head and saying, "Well, maybe we should just try not to talk about that stuff, or really, in that way. Afterall, talk won't help. Maybe we should just concentrate on the linguistic pile when it comes to conversation." This has the effect of changing the subject. But why should this be a problem for a mystic? Afterall, what's the point of talking about something that is inexpressible? Whatever "knowing directly" is, it can't be shared with other people. The pragmatist reaction is just that maybe we should fix up the rules of the conversation so that we don't get stuck in those kinds of cul-de-sacs.
Next I want to turn to "pre-" in the sense of unlensed. Sometimes people describe the relation between the two kinds of experience, static and Dynamic, as intellectual static patterns filtering our experience. This is an image Pirsig uses and I want to focus on his glasses analogy from the beginning of Ch. 8. Pirsig says, "The culture in which we live hands us a set of intellectual glasses to interpret experience with…. If someone see things through a somewhat different set of glasses or, God help him, takes his glass off, the natural tendency … is to regard his statements as somewhat weird…." (Lila, 112-3, italics mine) The italicized part underscores the possibility of going "unlensed," which is pre-intellectual experience, seeing things with the naked eye. The question I want to ask is simple: How do you know you've become unlensed?
Ignoring the problems of inexpressibility, how do you become convinced that what you experienced was unlensed experience? The ability to convince is the ability to justify, to others or yourself. But say you justify to someone else that the experience you just had was unlensed. Haven't you just given them a new lens to filter their experience with, so now, with your guidance, they'll be able to identify that kind of experience as unlensed experience? More importantly, though, how do you know that you weren't using that lens, which you just enunciated to another, unconsciously in your original experience, the unconscious lens you were handed from your education? And even more striking, how do you know that Pirsig hasn't just given you a new lens to filter experience by making the distinction between lensed/unlensed and showing you how to use it by examples? That the way you seem to be experiencing things seems to be this way because of the lens you're seeing with?
This is the most important problem with using the glasses/filter analogy. It relates to Pirsig's identification of DQ with the experience of babies. At the end of Ch. 9, Pirsig equates the learning a baby goes through, making "simple distinctions such as pressure and sound," with DQ. "From the baby's point of view, something, he knows not what, compels attention." The effort to become unlensed is the effort to be a baby again. But why do we want to be babies again? Would babies have built the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty? No, but the French, working this side of the course of Western civilization, would have. So why are we so eager to toss aside what made Shakespeare and Van Gogh and Lao-tzu possible? And more to the point, we can't actually ever be babies again. Pirsig himself says that we have to settle for something less pure, that "the only person who doesn't pollute the mystic reality of the world with fixed metaphysical meanings is a person who hasn't yet been born...." (Lila, 74) This strikes me as a passage indicating the impossibility of ever being pure, of having to simply try and figure out how to deal with impurity. And if one goes that far, I would think the first thing one would try and do is dissolve the distinction between purity and impurity. We are always lensed, and in fact becoming unlensed doesn't even make any sense. And that should suggest that the lens analogy isn't even very useful.
The next link I want to turn to is "pre-" in the sense of "betterness." I don't just mean the sense of DQ-as-innovation, I mean the sense that, all other things being equal, DQ is better in toto than SQ, pre-intellectual experience better than intellectual experience. The question is again simple, "How do you know pre-intellectual is better than intellectual?" Ignoring the problems of inexpressibility and lensing, we can simply focus on its non-linguistic nature. How would you know non-linguistic is better than linguistic? My continual answer to "how would you know?" has been, "Well, you'd need to justify it and that's linguistic," but here that question can be answered because you could justify the betterness of watching a sunset to talking about a sunset without accidentally evacuating the area where the justification is supposed to occur (unlike for inexpressibility and lensing).
But now there're two different questions. The first is "Why should non-linguistic experience, all other things being equal, always be better than linguistic?" Why should eating a hot dog always be better than reading Proust? Or watching a sunset always be better than writing a poem about a sunset? One could give justification for why they are always better for you, i.e. justify it to yourself, but how do you justify it for everyone whether they like it or not, which is the force of the intended split? The second question poses another problem: how does a non-linguistic experience innovate on linguistic experience? Now I have gone back to the other sense of DQ, as innovation, as the breaking of old static patterns, and I want to know why all innovation should be intrinsically non-linguistic? Is it really the case that the only linguistic innovation, the breaking of patterns, happens when you stub your toe, see a sunset, get eaten by a tiger, or go shrooming? Was Pirsig doing nothing Dynamic when he sat in his office or on his boat trying to work out the Metaphysics of Quality by breaking its ties to SOM?
One could argue that Pirsig was simply working out the implications of his original peyote experience, but are we really going to argue that? That Pirsig didn't use any linguistic ingenuity of his own aside from the peyote experience? What I would want to suggest is that in the case of the first question, you can't justify for everyone that sunsets are better than poems of sunsets without violating the Quality thesis, "Quality is what you like." In the case of the second question, I would suggest that DQ-as-innovation should be pulled apart from DQ as non-linguistic. DQ-as-innovation cuts across the divide between linguistic and non-linguistic. Sometimes you're caused to break some patterns by something non-linguistic, sometimes by toiling around in the linguistic patterns you're given reason to break them apart (which is why Donald Davidson argues that reasons can be causes, though causes can't be reasons).
The last sense I want to turn to is "pre-" as just different than intellectual experience. Paul Turner once took this line in dialogue with me at the MD. But if one makes knowledge internal to language, trade inexpressible for difficult-to-express, eschew lenses and filtering, and make DQ cut across non-linguistic/linguistic, then you've already gone a long ways to the sense in which I would like to use "non-intellectual." At this point, the two will look indistinguishable. The only sense of "pre-" (as opposed to "non-") that makes any sense at this point is the sense that you stub your toe before you say "Ow." But aside from that commonsensical point, there isn't any further philosophical utility as far as I can see. And at this point it becomes cogent to ask in what sense the intellectual is a barrier to the non-? That’s what this whole discussion revolves around, that Pirsig thinks that the intellectual--language--is blocking something. But what is the intellectual a barrier to at this point? To you stubbing your toe?
In the end, I would suggest three different senses of DQ. The first is DQ-as-non-intellectual-experience. This is the DQ of stubbing your toe, watching a sunset, and shrooming. In this sense, DQ causes you to shift your static patterns of belief in some way (though it doesn't offer you any reasons to do so). The second sense is DQ-as-pre-reflective. This is the DQ of offering off the cuff answers to questions like "Is that sunset beautiful?" or "Which student paper was better?" or "Does Lila have quality?" The third sense is DQ-as-innovation. This is the DQ of your static patterns being shifted to the point of breaking. This can happen when a non-intellectual experience shifts them or when you shift them yourself by reflection. All three of these senses can be seen to have links to the others, but I think all three need to be distinguished and that its when you conflate them that problems start to emerge. All three of these senses are commonsensical and there may be good, practical wisdom to be drawn from them, but I think problems will also emerge when you start to push them into philosophical service.
As a postscript, I want to say something more about the baptism of problems. Sometimes philosophers are wont to say that this or that paradox (like free will/determinism) or facet of reality (like consciousness) is simply eternal and will repel every effort to get a handle on it. Oftentimes they will call such things ineffable. Generally in philosophy, you don't get to leave acknowledged paradoxes and ineffable depths lying around without taking a hit for it. This is obviously a point of contention with some philosophers. Why can't we leave them around? Well, comes the responding question, why would you want to? The answer at some point has to be, "Because they're unresolvable." But all that means is that you've changed yourself into a dogmatist, baptizing whatever problem or paradox you're facing. You've made it into a feature of reality and as an eternal feature, you've determined ahead of time that it can never be solved or explained. But if there is no way that reality is in itself, as all post-Kantian philosophers have to agree, then all features of reality are features we've played a part in putting there. Reality can't tell us when something is unresolvable. The answer we don't get to have after Kant when asked, "Why would you leave a paradox?" is "Because its an unresolvable feature of reality that we have to deal with." After getting past Kant, we realize that the way we deal with paradoxes is by making distinctions and as many linguistic innovations until the paradoxical air is cleaned up.
If you leave a paradox, you don't get to baptize it. You don't get to say that that's just the way things are. You might say that leaving the paradox makes things more flavorful, like in poetry, but then you're not playing the game of philosophy anymore. Philosophers don't leave the playing field with unresolved paradoxes. That means they've failed in why they took to the field in the first place, to see how things hang together. (One should note that in the above I've defined philosophy in a certain way, which I've before suggested one shoudn't do. What I don't think we should do is hypostatize any definition. We should, though, define it for particular purposes, like seeing whether two people are playing two different games, talking past each other. Another way of putting my above implicit definitions is to say that paradox-mongering is okay in the game of philosophy-as-poetry, but not okay in philosophy-as-hanging-things-together-coherently.)
I want to start with "pre-intellectual experience" in the sense of "directly knowable." Something that is directly knowable is something that is knowable without language. You know it before language. The trouble with the directly knowable is that you can't say what it is. If you could, that raises the spectare of whether it wasn't really directly known at all, and really indirectly known. How does one "know directly"? How would you help someone? One could say that the unenlightened do know directly, they just don't recognize that they do. Well, if one gets along just fine with their descriptions of things, but they just don't describe things with the distinction of direct and indirect knowing, how does one "wake up" to see the distinction? How does one "know directly" if there's no way to tell them whether what they just "knew directly" is actual or fake "knowing directly"? If there were a way of telling them, it would be linguistic and that would make whatever it was under discussion not actually "known directly," but simply thrown into the linguistic pile.
This leads to "pre-" in the sense of inexpressible. The tough question for inexpressibility is, "How do you know 'pre-' is inexpressible?" Every time you try to enunciate why its inexpressible is a case of expressibility. And further, how do you know it is impossible to express the pre-intellectual and not simply difficult? Marking off an entire area of experience tout court as impossible to express before any attempt at expression is what you might call baptizing a problem. Instead of dealing with the practical difficulties of expression, you declare that area as an eternal feature of reality.
The first two senses exhibit a conversational problem. It either ends with the mystical dogmatist (because only dogmatists insist that something is unknowable or inexpressible and that every attempt to know or express it is ruled, a priori of any actual attempt, to have failed) shrugging his shoulders, smiling, and saying, "Well, you'll know it when you see it," at which point there's nothing else to say because the conversant is hopeless (not that conversation supplied any hope in the first place because conversation itself to the mystical dogmatist is hopeless) or with the pragmatist shaking his head and saying, "Well, maybe we should just try not to talk about that stuff, or really, in that way. Afterall, talk won't help. Maybe we should just concentrate on the linguistic pile when it comes to conversation." This has the effect of changing the subject. But why should this be a problem for a mystic? Afterall, what's the point of talking about something that is inexpressible? Whatever "knowing directly" is, it can't be shared with other people. The pragmatist reaction is just that maybe we should fix up the rules of the conversation so that we don't get stuck in those kinds of cul-de-sacs.
Next I want to turn to "pre-" in the sense of unlensed. Sometimes people describe the relation between the two kinds of experience, static and Dynamic, as intellectual static patterns filtering our experience. This is an image Pirsig uses and I want to focus on his glasses analogy from the beginning of Ch. 8. Pirsig says, "The culture in which we live hands us a set of intellectual glasses to interpret experience with…. If someone see things through a somewhat different set of glasses or, God help him, takes his glass off, the natural tendency … is to regard his statements as somewhat weird…." (Lila, 112-3, italics mine) The italicized part underscores the possibility of going "unlensed," which is pre-intellectual experience, seeing things with the naked eye. The question I want to ask is simple: How do you know you've become unlensed?
Ignoring the problems of inexpressibility, how do you become convinced that what you experienced was unlensed experience? The ability to convince is the ability to justify, to others or yourself. But say you justify to someone else that the experience you just had was unlensed. Haven't you just given them a new lens to filter their experience with, so now, with your guidance, they'll be able to identify that kind of experience as unlensed experience? More importantly, though, how do you know that you weren't using that lens, which you just enunciated to another, unconsciously in your original experience, the unconscious lens you were handed from your education? And even more striking, how do you know that Pirsig hasn't just given you a new lens to filter experience by making the distinction between lensed/unlensed and showing you how to use it by examples? That the way you seem to be experiencing things seems to be this way because of the lens you're seeing with?
This is the most important problem with using the glasses/filter analogy. It relates to Pirsig's identification of DQ with the experience of babies. At the end of Ch. 9, Pirsig equates the learning a baby goes through, making "simple distinctions such as pressure and sound," with DQ. "From the baby's point of view, something, he knows not what, compels attention." The effort to become unlensed is the effort to be a baby again. But why do we want to be babies again? Would babies have built the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty? No, but the French, working this side of the course of Western civilization, would have. So why are we so eager to toss aside what made Shakespeare and Van Gogh and Lao-tzu possible? And more to the point, we can't actually ever be babies again. Pirsig himself says that we have to settle for something less pure, that "the only person who doesn't pollute the mystic reality of the world with fixed metaphysical meanings is a person who hasn't yet been born...." (Lila, 74) This strikes me as a passage indicating the impossibility of ever being pure, of having to simply try and figure out how to deal with impurity. And if one goes that far, I would think the first thing one would try and do is dissolve the distinction between purity and impurity. We are always lensed, and in fact becoming unlensed doesn't even make any sense. And that should suggest that the lens analogy isn't even very useful.
The next link I want to turn to is "pre-" in the sense of "betterness." I don't just mean the sense of DQ-as-innovation, I mean the sense that, all other things being equal, DQ is better in toto than SQ, pre-intellectual experience better than intellectual experience. The question is again simple, "How do you know pre-intellectual is better than intellectual?" Ignoring the problems of inexpressibility and lensing, we can simply focus on its non-linguistic nature. How would you know non-linguistic is better than linguistic? My continual answer to "how would you know?" has been, "Well, you'd need to justify it and that's linguistic," but here that question can be answered because you could justify the betterness of watching a sunset to talking about a sunset without accidentally evacuating the area where the justification is supposed to occur (unlike for inexpressibility and lensing).
But now there're two different questions. The first is "Why should non-linguistic experience, all other things being equal, always be better than linguistic?" Why should eating a hot dog always be better than reading Proust? Or watching a sunset always be better than writing a poem about a sunset? One could give justification for why they are always better for you, i.e. justify it to yourself, but how do you justify it for everyone whether they like it or not, which is the force of the intended split? The second question poses another problem: how does a non-linguistic experience innovate on linguistic experience? Now I have gone back to the other sense of DQ, as innovation, as the breaking of old static patterns, and I want to know why all innovation should be intrinsically non-linguistic? Is it really the case that the only linguistic innovation, the breaking of patterns, happens when you stub your toe, see a sunset, get eaten by a tiger, or go shrooming? Was Pirsig doing nothing Dynamic when he sat in his office or on his boat trying to work out the Metaphysics of Quality by breaking its ties to SOM?
One could argue that Pirsig was simply working out the implications of his original peyote experience, but are we really going to argue that? That Pirsig didn't use any linguistic ingenuity of his own aside from the peyote experience? What I would want to suggest is that in the case of the first question, you can't justify for everyone that sunsets are better than poems of sunsets without violating the Quality thesis, "Quality is what you like." In the case of the second question, I would suggest that DQ-as-innovation should be pulled apart from DQ as non-linguistic. DQ-as-innovation cuts across the divide between linguistic and non-linguistic. Sometimes you're caused to break some patterns by something non-linguistic, sometimes by toiling around in the linguistic patterns you're given reason to break them apart (which is why Donald Davidson argues that reasons can be causes, though causes can't be reasons).
The last sense I want to turn to is "pre-" as just different than intellectual experience. Paul Turner once took this line in dialogue with me at the MD. But if one makes knowledge internal to language, trade inexpressible for difficult-to-express, eschew lenses and filtering, and make DQ cut across non-linguistic/linguistic, then you've already gone a long ways to the sense in which I would like to use "non-intellectual." At this point, the two will look indistinguishable. The only sense of "pre-" (as opposed to "non-") that makes any sense at this point is the sense that you stub your toe before you say "Ow." But aside from that commonsensical point, there isn't any further philosophical utility as far as I can see. And at this point it becomes cogent to ask in what sense the intellectual is a barrier to the non-? That’s what this whole discussion revolves around, that Pirsig thinks that the intellectual--language--is blocking something. But what is the intellectual a barrier to at this point? To you stubbing your toe?
In the end, I would suggest three different senses of DQ. The first is DQ-as-non-intellectual-experience. This is the DQ of stubbing your toe, watching a sunset, and shrooming. In this sense, DQ causes you to shift your static patterns of belief in some way (though it doesn't offer you any reasons to do so). The second sense is DQ-as-pre-reflective. This is the DQ of offering off the cuff answers to questions like "Is that sunset beautiful?" or "Which student paper was better?" or "Does Lila have quality?" The third sense is DQ-as-innovation. This is the DQ of your static patterns being shifted to the point of breaking. This can happen when a non-intellectual experience shifts them or when you shift them yourself by reflection. All three of these senses can be seen to have links to the others, but I think all three need to be distinguished and that its when you conflate them that problems start to emerge. All three of these senses are commonsensical and there may be good, practical wisdom to be drawn from them, but I think problems will also emerge when you start to push them into philosophical service.
As a postscript, I want to say something more about the baptism of problems. Sometimes philosophers are wont to say that this or that paradox (like free will/determinism) or facet of reality (like consciousness) is simply eternal and will repel every effort to get a handle on it. Oftentimes they will call such things ineffable. Generally in philosophy, you don't get to leave acknowledged paradoxes and ineffable depths lying around without taking a hit for it. This is obviously a point of contention with some philosophers. Why can't we leave them around? Well, comes the responding question, why would you want to? The answer at some point has to be, "Because they're unresolvable." But all that means is that you've changed yourself into a dogmatist, baptizing whatever problem or paradox you're facing. You've made it into a feature of reality and as an eternal feature, you've determined ahead of time that it can never be solved or explained. But if there is no way that reality is in itself, as all post-Kantian philosophers have to agree, then all features of reality are features we've played a part in putting there. Reality can't tell us when something is unresolvable. The answer we don't get to have after Kant when asked, "Why would you leave a paradox?" is "Because its an unresolvable feature of reality that we have to deal with." After getting past Kant, we realize that the way we deal with paradoxes is by making distinctions and as many linguistic innovations until the paradoxical air is cleaned up.
If you leave a paradox, you don't get to baptize it. You don't get to say that that's just the way things are. You might say that leaving the paradox makes things more flavorful, like in poetry, but then you're not playing the game of philosophy anymore. Philosophers don't leave the playing field with unresolved paradoxes. That means they've failed in why they took to the field in the first place, to see how things hang together. (One should note that in the above I've defined philosophy in a certain way, which I've before suggested one shoudn't do. What I don't think we should do is hypostatize any definition. We should, though, define it for particular purposes, like seeing whether two people are playing two different games, talking past each other. Another way of putting my above implicit definitions is to say that paradox-mongering is okay in the game of philosophy-as-poetry, but not okay in philosophy-as-hanging-things-together-coherently.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
