Hello Andrea, all,
Sparse? Trivial? I don't think so. It's good to have someone with your
breadth of reading on, and it is immediately apparent when someone is really
thinking about that reading, and not just acquiring ammunition. I like the
practical examples of the conflict between continuity and discreteness in
the decisions we have to take, and I'd like to add one of my own, to see
what you think. The points you raise about Wittgenstein's attitude to the
mystic reality of value are serious ones that the most admirable of
philosophers have wrestled with, by which I mean Iris Murdoch. I'd like to
say something about that too, and to tie it all into a Pirsigian defence of
a Metaphysics of Quality.
ANDREA WROTE:
> What consequences stem from the discrete vs continuous issue in everyday life?
> Here is a situation that I think most of us experienced:
>
> a). I am struck in a situation where I should take a decision, but cannot. I
> spend days and nights reasoning about what to do, but reasoning does not solve
> the problem - no matter how carefully and logically I consider the situation.
> Then - out of this confusion, maybe desperation - *intuition* comes to me and
> reveals that I must do X. I suddendly realize that of course X is the True
> Good for me - as soon as I take this decision, I feel *happy* within all the
> troubles. Nothing rational could help me or can support me in accepting this -
> but I *know* its true. So I take the path X, and while I do, I think to myself
> "there is not a single way I could explain why this is the good thing to do,
> but I am as sure of this as I am sure to be alive". I somehow swear to myself
> to be faithful to this decision. I also get the feeling that doing X somehow
> takes me "over my boundaries", that in doing so, I am crossing Zarathustra's
> river, and becoming a better "myrself".
>
> b). Time passes. My original problem has gone, but decision X still influences
> my life. I remember that I saw it as the perfect choice, and feel grateful to
> have chosen to do it, but then, one day, I also feel that I have to change
> that decision. I feel it just as strongly as I felt about choosing path X.
> Again, no rational reason. Now the feeling I have is that holding onto X would
> be to behave in a way that is "worse" than I really am (more limited, more
> mediocre, more immature).
>
> - What happens? You have a glimpse of DQ - and it's your intuition, it's a
> feeling beyond language and beyond rational support. It points to a certain
> decision. As soon as you get aware of it, you have translated the "message"
> coming from the continuum into a discrete form. The translation comprises both
> something really "new" to you and, although you cannot see it, a lot of the
> "old you", a lot of what you aren't even aware of thinking/saying, the overall
> framework of your language. You have changed that unspeakable "idea", coming
> from DQ: you have restricted it, adding some of your personal limits (which of
> course, you can't see). Sooner or later, you cross more boundaries. Your
> language subtly changes in meaning, your map of the world changes, your idea
> of yourself changes. Decision X, taken literally, becomes a relic, a cage. It
> was good for you 4 years ago, but then, that was another person. From your
> current, extended perspective, you can still be able to see that "for that
> person" it was the better choice, but not for you now. You may feel affection
> for it (if it was a decision that drastically improved your situation), but
> you realize that, however good it was in the beginning, right now it has
> become a source of pain, or otherwise something "bad". You leave it behind.
>
> While these dynamics are trivial and almost anyone could agree that they're
> common, just a few people realize that their source is in the gap between
> language and reality. I think some could possibly feel very bad - get a
> nervous breakdown? - seeing that they don't agree any more with what used to
> be "certain". They will feel that if this is the case, then how could they
> feel "certain" again about anything? Truth is - the good part of the
> certainty, you are keeping with yourself. It's the bad part you are living
> behind. These ppl would need a meta-certainty such as the MOQ and Taoism and
> similar thought systems are trying to provide.
ELEPHANT:
Interesting thought. I've heard of various forms of existential psychology
which apply some Sartrean meta-certainties about Freedom and Authenticity in
a similar fashion, with success, apparently. In fact your examples have a
slightly Sartrean ring about them. Have you read him (in
italian/french/english etc)?
ANDREA WROTE:
> Also, I think that any means that help us leave language behind to see "what
> is Good", here and now, for Me, should be widely taught, because unhappiness
> is never caused by the world around you, only by your opinion about the world
> itself.
ELELPHANT:
The world of the unhappy is not the world of the happy. But the change that
is required is not simply a matter of deciding to take a different attitude
on objects out there. The objects inhabit our attitudes: value comes first.
And realising your freedom cannot take some purely intellectual form: there
has to some connection with action. Perhaps the realisation of your freedom
in that situation, and your decision to abandon decision X and leave that
situation, are one and the same thing. Just as in Sartre's example, for the
woman at the resturaunt table who lets her admirers hand rest in hers
without acknowledging it, the inaction is all one with her refusal to
recognise her freedom and power to decide in this situation.
I'd like to offer my own example of the discrete/continuous issue at work in
everyday life, to counteract the impression that this freedom we have is
some rapturous enjoyment of control. It can just as often be experienced as
tragic, comic, worrying, or just plain annoying. I want to play up the role
of what Satre calls facticity (and we might call fortune), and to give this
as unromantic and unglamourous an angle as possible.
It's mid-winter and you head for the bus-stop where the timetable says there
will be a bus into town at 10. By your watch, you arrive at three minutes
before 10. Excellent, you think, not long to wait. At 10 minutes past 10
you begin to get a bit restless. You wonder if your watch is wrong and the
bus left just before you got there. You inspect the timetable, and it turns
out that there's a bus about every half hour. It's a cold wind from the
east, so you think about walking the five minutes or so home, sitting down
for five minutes with a cup of coffee, and then walking back to the stop in
time for the next bus. But what if all the busses are running a few minutes
late? And how much? If at 10:15 you decide to head home to unfreeze your
fingers and grab an extra layer of clothing that might be just the moment
that the 10 o'clock bus chooses to head through, and then you'll have to
start waiting in the cold all over again, maybe for another half an hour,
with the only difference being that you are now going to be late for your
appointment - an hour late maybe. So here is a situationn in which you have
complete freedom about how to turn the continuous progression of time into
discrete phases of actions, and it's completely up to you to decide. But
the way we might experience this freedom and meta-certainty is that we can't
take our eyes off the road in case the bus does come, but are driven to head
home by the intense wind, and at that precise moment at which we have walked
away from the road with the bus stop on it, with anxious glances in case the
bus does come, well at that precise moment the bus does come! We turn and
run to catch it, but are too late. The way we might experience out complete
freedom to decide on our strategy at discrete points in this continous and
freezing experience of waiting for the bus might be very well expressed in
this un-word: "AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!"
-------------
OK Wittgenstein (title of forthcoming album from Radiohead):
ANDREA WROTE:
> I subscribed to MOQ-discussion, when I found it, because ZAMM, and even more
> so Lila, were probably the two books that started me thinking. Unfortunately,
> I read them quite a long time ago, and in the while, I got lots of other
> related ideas elsewhere (say, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Taoism, and so on).
> Thus, I am a bit afraid of mixing up terminology as well as incurring in some
> big mistake as for what Pirsig's stated. Also, I could be expressing obvious
> concepts in what follows. Please forgive me if this happens... but even
> better, if you can help me see my mistakes, you can help me get in pace with
> the MOQ-discuss, which I would be very happy about. Also, forgive my english -
> I am italian, and really do my best to be understandable at all.
>
> I have read this from elephant:
>
>> On the one hand there is mystic reality: northrop's aesthetic continuum that
>> Phaedrus speaks of, all undivided and
>> dynamic and infinte and real. On the other hand we have language, a clumsy
>> dichotomising dividing thing that cuts the world up and gives names to all
>> the
>> parts... the two can never really meet head on
>
> This touches issues that are quintessential to my interests. Most of my
> current ideas stem from the discrete-language vs continuous-reality mismatch.
> Taoists of course begin with this, as "The Tao that can be spoken about is not
> the True Tao", and Wittgenstein also more or less agreed: besides more famous
> quotes, there is one where he states that "aestethics is the limit of
> language" (or it was, maybe, ethics, but are they different after all?).
>
> Witt's "limit" concept is interesting, because it extends the
> discrete/continuous mathematical metaphor, and the extension seems to work: as
> we (our culture, science, language) evolve, our "language" becomes a
> progressively "better" approximation of reality. At the same time, the
> distance between our linguistic representation of reality and reality itself
> is still, in another sense, infinite: any sentence in an improved language is
> still subject to cause errors without end if applied literally to reality. The
> gap between our (linguistic/rational/...) representation of reality and
> reality itself can only be bridged by "intuition", meditation, and other more
> or less mystical tools that, in the first place, suppress our rationalizing,
> linguistic, logical mind (together with the notion of "self", newtonian
> space/time, and other accessories of rationality itself - see also
> Schopenhauer).
ELEPHANT:
Where Wittgenstein and Pirsig agree, and Plato too, is in saying that
ordinary language is not a *report* of objects (particular or universal) in
the flux. Wittgenstein says red is not a report. Plato talks about the
impossibility of ascribing whiteness to the flux. Pirsig rightly notes that
objects are a category of being that are added after the primary reality of
dynamic value.
After this common agreement a parting of the ways comes, in my opinion.
Wittgenstein thinks that value is the limit of language in the sense that it
is something we cannot talk about. Not a Pirsigian or a Platonic point of
view.
It's been argued that Wittgenstein was much influenced by Schopenhauer, and
certainly Schopenhauer was one of the few philosophers that Wittgenstein
even read, besides philosophers of mathematics like Frege and the Logical
Positivists of the Vienna Circle in which Wittgenstein played a significant
part (he never bothered with Plato, and only read James under the influence
of Frank Ramsey, when he was already famous for writing the Tractatus). But
I've become convinced that Wittgenstein only steals the clothes of
Schopenhauer and James, as little more than ornament. Wittgenstein can look
like a mystic in a certain light, but even in the later work I think he's a
logical positivist in drag, if you get my meaning. It sound's like good
moral advice to say: don't talk about the good all the time. But in fact
the instruction: 'don't talk about the good at all' is really the end of
morality. In a similar way Wittgenstein can sometimes look like a
pragmatist, but ultimately I think no two philosophical concepts could be
further apart than the Wittgensteinian idea of a 'criterion' of meaning and
the Jamesian concept of the difference it makes. For the Wittgensteinian
concept is about public objects (facts such as 'use'), and the Jamesian
concept is about the stream of consciousness. Murdoch argues that
Wittgenstein is "embarrased" by the whole idea of our dynamic continuous
experience of the Good, and that he makes the mistake of thinking that
because synthetic language does not relate to the continuous world as a
report, that individual experience of continuous reality plays no part in
the meanings of my words. We cannot *report* sensations in the sense of a
one-to-one correspondance between the words and the experience, because
there isn't any discrete 'one' on the experience side until language comes
along. Agreed. But that is not to say that we cannot *describe*
experience, where this description is the rich deployment of metaphor and
similie derived from that experience. Immediate experience is *like* a
river. True enjoyment is *like* the unexpected rose. Thinking is *like*
looking into clouds and trying to make out the shapes (I quess this would
apply particularly to any attempt to rationalise the intuitive decision X
you speak of).
Wittgenstein famously said once: "that whereof we cannot speak, thereof we
must remain silent". I think this is a rare case of a law that breaks
itself. It *is* saying something about a thing to say that we cannot speak
of it, except that *what* it is saying is at present unclear and apparently
quite self-contradictory. Wittgenstein became infatuated with such short
(indeed glib) ways of expressing himself, but I would think that it would be
a great mistake to take such an outward show of mysticism for the thing
itself. We have to think through what it is that we cannot say about
Dynamic Quality until we have an intelligiable and coherent account of what
we can say, and the name for this thinking-through is 'metaphysics'.
ANDREA WROTE:
> The purpose of metaphysics (which is a rational, logical device) is thus that
> of providing better approximations. It does so by taking our view of reality
> and revealing where it comes short (it necessarily does come short somewhere,
> due to the mismatch mentioned above). Hopefully, the better our philosophy,
> the smaller the gap that our mind (heart?) has to get over to "see" the truth
> - the Tao, DQ.
ELEPHANT:
I like the idea that the mark of a bad philosophy is that it makes it
impossible to see DQ, and this makes it a very low quality device. But
about 'approximations' I am less sure. I think that the way you make room
for the truth is to destroy falsehoods. And in this case we are not
thinking of a scientific truth, Peirce's long-run end of enquiry. A
metaphysical statement cannot approximate to the truth in the way that a
count of heads can be more or less accurate. A metaphysical statement is
simply false, or true: that's the way it looks to me. It's more like
geometry in that way. But even geometry can improve and extend itself,
where bits of our knowledge can used to show that others don't belong in any
coherent system - so there is room for progress. If we can call that
progress of geometry approximation, then metaphysics can be an
approximation, if not, not.
I take the veiw that since language cannot become true by corresponding to
supposed facts *in* experience, the truth of a metaphysics must be a matter
of coherrence of some kind. Not just any kind, for one can imagine a
coherently told lie. But a coherrence in which the basic facts *of*
experience figure properly: a body of thought coherring around the
distinction between dynamic and static Quality - such a coherent picture
might, like geometry, progress towards truth.
But is such truth the same thing as the Tao or DQ? I guess not. But it is
a truth that allows us to acknowledge and pay proper attention to such a
reality. This is why I have thought of a good true metaphysics as being, in
words, what a statue of the Buddha might be in brass. An icon, a sign, a
door that can be opened. Is that what the job of the philosopher comes
down to: oiling the hinges?
Well, that's what he does when he isn't waiting for a bus.
All the best to all the best,
Elephant
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