Andrea, Marco, all,
Some thought-provoking observations Andrea.
ANDREA WROTE:
>I should also point out that I did not receive a regular
> education in philosophy, so my interpretation of various philosophers' thought
> might be somewhat non conventional, or downright wrong, and anyhow it will, no
> doubt, include some of my own vision.
ELEPHANT:
And that tends to be the problem with many people who receive a regular
education in philosophy: their inability to include some of their own
vision. Maybe you had an education in something more useful instead.
ANDREA WROTE:
> Nevertheless, if I am allowed a brief
> aside consideration (but not so much aside after all), I think one good thing
> about Logical Positivism is that it "has shown" that this is actually the case
> for any metaphysical discussion: you can't be absolutely objective, simply
> because most of the words you use are at least under-defined. Unless you use
> language for stating "scientific facts" (restricting yourself to some
> positivist domain of language), each sentence has infinitely many meanings,
> and a different one for each listener/reader (the positivists would say it
> really has no meaning for anyone, but they would be talking about positivistic
> meaning, while I am talking of something else). I think this opinion is worth
> making clear if I am to engage into a discussion with anyone. I see a
> discussion on metaphysical subjects as a "dance", so to speak, much more than
> a logical, semantically-sound exchange. I also think this is why, for example,
> Pirsig choose to write *art* instead of a tractatus, and why eastern
> philosophies dropped logical reasoning from the start - not that logics were
> *harmful* for their goals, it was simply not necessary.
ELEPHANT:
I like "dance". But I don't like the idea that there is this other,
"semantically sound" thing we could be doing instead: even the most
rigourous kind of science is a "dance" in just the way that you have been
talking about, albeit one in 4/4 time: it is an artful dance because it is
creating the pattern in the world through one's own actions, and not because
it is anything less than logical. What could be more mathematical than a
gigue? And the idea that all eastern Philosophies dropped logical reasoning
*from the start*sounds to me like a bit of a myth. Ultimate reality is
beyond language, sure, but that's not dropping reasoning "from the start".
Quite the reverse: it is using reasoning to arrive at, or atleast specify in
argument, the reason why and the exact point where reason should be
dispensed with in pursuit of the real (think of Wittgenstein's metaphor of
the ladder discarded on reaching the height). In point of fact there exists
in Buddhist literature a great sophistication of philosophical and
cosmological discussion employing logical reasoning quite similar to that of
the greeks with quite similar results. A big theme of Buddhism, for
instance, is presentness. But behind this idea is a huge body of discussion
about what a moment is (eg the Abhidhamma theory), and these substantially
parallel some of the ideas involved in Zeno's paradoxes. Indeed one could
go further and say that the rejection of the everyday notion of change
exactly parallels Plato's thought about flux. Nowhere in these discussions
can we do without logic. Logic is what tells us that 'change' cannot be a
description of something continuous, because change requires the stable
identity, however fleeting, of the 'that' which changes. True logic is
useful, then, in showing us some limits to some supposedly logical
*pictures* of the world, and the abandonment of such approaches is not the
abandonment of *logic*. But I think you may be saying this when you say
that logic is not harmful to reaching our goals, just not necessary. I
would merely add that it only becomes superfluous when it has really done
it's job properly in discarding false pictures - and we need to remain
vigilant about such a task.
ANDREA WROTE:
> The mystic does not state that logics is bad in itself, but that it won't get
> to the Truth (and maybe hide it). After that, and given that *no* language can
> actually get to the Truth, it is perfectly coherent to decide to use logical
> language all the same to speak of the Truth *to the extent possible, with all
> the limitations this entails*. Zen masters don't use logics, MOQers do, but
> after all, we do so because that fits better with our culture, because it is
> easier, not because in logics and metaphysics we trust as legitimate means to
> get to the "Truth" (like, Pirsig compared metaphysics to smoking cigarettes or
> rushing to the refrigerator in the middle of the night).
>
> Given these premises...
>
> 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.
>>
ANDREA WROTE:
> Of course, I agree that there's no "me vs the world out there" (otherwise I
> would not post here). In fact, I was using SOM language as it came from my
> fingertips, without translating it in a more proper MOQish form. I agree to
> the specific point, and especially with the concept that "freedom cannot take
> some purely intellectual form". This may help clarify what I had in mind. My
> point is that when you let yourself flow with your basic, daily, built-in SOM
> vision (the same mistake I did when choosing the words above), you try to
> judge on what is Good based on two maps you have in your mind: the map of the
> world out there, and the map of yourself. To decide if choice X is good, you
> actually evaluate whether this is good for the guy "me" you have in your mind,
> in the context of the "world" you have in your mind. None of the maps, of
> course, are the actual territory. This can lead you to a stall, as in my
> example. In a worst case, it may lead you to take the wrong decision, and
> hence to unhappiness. Note that I do not mean unhappiness that stems from any
> practical consequences of the mistake (for example, you choose the wrong job,
> and then suffer because this job doesn't fit you), rather I am talking of the
> instantly-perceived unhappiness that your soul feels as soon as you are
> committed to something that is not Good for you. (There is a suspiciously
> strong analogy, here, with freudian psychopathologies). So I agree that
> freedom is a matter of action; actually, in a non-SOM approach, it becomes
> evident (or at least more clear) that you *are* what you do (another taoist
> statement), and a very common source of suffering is that you have rationally
> decided to do something that your intuition perceives as bad. It seems to be
> possible only as long as the perception of "true" Good reaches your conscious
> thought: there's no consciously seeing what is Good w/out committing to it (we
> should really have a single word expressing both things). And most of the
> happy/unhappy balance lies in your *behavior* (that is what I really meant
> with "attitude").
ELEPHANT:
Yes, it is like you say. Very much so. Unhappiness often is this mismatch
between intuited and rational goods. Often the unhappiness is the intuition
that there is *no* good option open to us. But then again, we might wonder
whether we should say that the intuition of no-good is the cause of the
unhappiness, or the unhappiness the intuition of no-good. In realitity
neither causation applies, because they are all one. But it is as valid to
say that my unhappiness clouds my intuition as it is to say that my
intuition colours my unhappiness. Maybe reason has a role here, and the
ennacted sovereign rule of reason might be that situation where we remember
that intuition fades and returns, that perhaps all we need to do is wait.
To have patience, and not despair.
The freudian analogy might not be a bad one. When you bring Freud into the
picture, you are listening to an interpreter of Plato. Freud thinks that
his account of the psyche and libido is just Plato's account of the soul and
Eros, which is it's orientation towards the good. It is Eros which
undergoes the philosophical training in the Republic, and in this training
Plato talks about the Philosopher Kings as doctors of the soul. There are
dissonances between the ideas of therapy and spiritual training, but there
are harmonies also.
ANDREA WROTE:
> More to this point, to explain the "world out there" reference, let's assume
> you-think-you-feel-unhappy because you don't *own* something (eg, a big sum of
> money). *This* unhappiness is of course but a delusion. I say that unhappiness
> is not something due to the "world outside" meaning exactly that the very idea
> of the world outside is misleading. It is based on the idea of self, on a
> rational projection, and it simply has *nothing* to do with You, which is, and
> will always be, *You here and now*, or should I say, "Me here and now", or you
> "seen from within", you that is not "part" of the world (SOM), but that *is*
> the world, and that is a pattern of values if you will. Options for this me
> are not "to have" or "have not", but rather to "be" or "be not", or even more
> precisely to "act" and "act not". My concern here was that as I look around
> myself, I can't but think this would be a most valuable and useful idea for
> most of the people out there, and am sorry that it has been so powerfully
> concealed by our philosophy and language.
ELEPHANT:
It is not concealed in your philosophy or your language, and I'm very
grateful for such a strona plain statement of a difficult truth. But I
still don't want us to forget that, although in an important sense a
'delusion', in practical terms our attachment to such pictures of the self
and the unhappinesses they bring in their wake is very strong. We do not
break such bonds by declaring them broken, and we do not escape such
illusions by declaring them illusory. The problem here is not merely a
concealment effected by language, although, yes, that is a big part of the
problem - the bit where Philosophy can help. But the other, bigger, part of
the problem is not merely seeing and expressing the truth, but living it.
To experience revelation of divine love is not to experience beatitude. The
former is like a momentary insight, a beautiful calm moment of truth, but
just a moment. The challenge then is to make that moment of truth into a
life of truth. Anyone with a momentary insight can write a book of
philosophy, but the goal of a true mystic isn't to express the truth (which
cannot, anyway, be expressed in full) but to live the truth. That is a more
difficult task. Which brings us to one of God's little tests, designed to
sort the monks from the philosophers: busses.
>> ELEPHANT: 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 our 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!!!!!"
>>
ANDREA WROTE:
> While the (emotional) context of your example is quite different, I may give
> you my interpretation of it. You are waiting for the bus, and can do one of
> two things: first, use your image of yourself and your little mind-contained
> world to choose what is good. You will probably call statistics and other
> logical tools at your support. Ultimately, the best you can get from this is
> that a certain choice is better because it is less likely to lead to the
> unhappy ending. And of course, there is still a chance that the unhappy ending
> actually comes, and then you are left with frustration and your "unword".
>
> Otherwise, you can be the chinese sage (admittedly, it is overkill to be a
> chinese sage to decide about behavior at a bus stop, but let's play the game).
> The chinese sage does not make calculations, or possibly he makes them, but
> ultimately tries to get in intuitive, non-rational, non-linguistic contact
> with his true "self" (forgive this: with the World if you prefer) and "see"
> what he Wants to do. And seeing it and doing it is one. His subsequent peace
> of mind comes from the fact that he took the decision he Wanted to take, and
> it has nothing to do with what happens next. (Think of martyrs here - possibly
> feeling the pain, but surely not unhappy). The chinese sage looks at the bus
> coming, immediately feels that he won't run to catch it, and smiles. *This*
> freedom - freedom from misleading, "extraneous" pre-judgements based on the
> puppet "self" in your world map - is not an enjoyment of control - neither it
> is, "AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH".
ELEPHANT:
Very well put. And it is useful to express it in that way, because to see
what both "enjoyment of control" and "AARGHHH[snip]" have in common is to
see *precisely* how this "freedom" we are talking about differs from both.
But the worry, if there is one, remains with the comic-book question: 'why
did the sage want to catch the bus?' Because we have to rid the answer to
such a question of all reference to a puppet self in any world map, we have
to say: 'There wasn't anything in particular that "the sage" wanted at all -
it just seemed right in the world to stand there and turn away just before
the bus came, smiling'. Now at first glance that doesn't seem a convincing
answer. Why not? I suppose we might say that we are culturally addicted to
mechanistic explanations, and mistakenly insist on extending our talk of
'causes' to the stream of consciousness. That's one line of thought. But
someone might also say that after all waiting for a bus is a telelogical
activity, and that if the Sage was standing at the bus stop like that, then
he must have had a world map in which his self, and his ideas about bus
timetables, both figured. Actually I don't think even the Dalai Lama is
going to deny this, jetsetting around the world as he does. The point then
becomes one about our *attachment* to such pictures, and not about the
existence or non-existence of those pictures. Freedom here is something
harder to attest to: what constitutes attachment to a picture, if standing
at the bus-stop doesn't? It seems that the little smile you mention, while
he turns away from what otherwise seems a minor disaster, looks like our
best, and only, proof of the sage's sageness.
>From Kipling, 'If-'
"If you can dream - and not make dreams your master
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same...
[snip]
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!"
.....And a Sage too.
>> ELEPHANT: 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. 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).
ANDREA WROTE:
> Here I would like to elaborate on "talk about" (possibly repeating myself?
> forgive me then). One thing is to say that value is something that cannot be
> defined - one of Pirsig's foundations. Another thing is to say that this
> implies that it is useless to speak about value. That was my "approximation"
> point. Anything you say about value is a non-sentence in positivistic terms.
> What then? It is more like art. Art "suggests", does not define nor
> povistically "say", but we need it. Pirsig's approach is that of speaking
> about it using metaphysics. After all, we already had mystics using poetry or
> music or other more or less artistic means to speak about value, so it's
> pretty interesting see how close we can get from the metaphysics platform. But
> nevertheless, this metaphysics is a dance, a game, and not formal logics (of
> course), for what concerns its ultimate goal, if this is "speaking about
> value". It is perfectly valid, and possibly "formal logics", if it aims at
> something less, such as, revealing falsehoods. Or...
>
>> ELEPHANT: 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'.
>
> Call me a positivist, maybe, but again, I think your opinion somehow alludes
> to the fact that the MOQ, once completely formulated, maybe something that
> (completely) describes some things, and not others, while my opinion is that
> it will never completely/exactly describe *anything* (and also, on the other
> hand, that it will never come to an end). I am not stating that language
> cannot capture reality because a part of it will escape. I am stating that
> language can only capture positivistic reality (the "syntax" of reality,
> physics), and will never be able to "capture" (refer exactly to) anything
> beyond that. That does not preclude its use for "alluding" to something beyond
> words.
ELEPHANT:
You see, I think I agree with you, but I also think that my agreeing does
not in anyway conflict with my earlier statement about metaphysics as a
thinking through of what we can say. Because in point of fact I don't think
of the MOQ, or aleast my MOQ (I take the levels rather less seriously as a
final game than do some MOQers), as "describing" anything in the world about
us. The point is: language can be true and good and useful and constitute a
metaphysics even where it isn't a "description". There is also analysis.
And what are our discussions of the continuity v. discreteness distinction
if not analysis?
ANDREA WROTE:
> In afterthought, I agree that Wittgenstein's "that whereof we cannot speak,
> thereof we must remain silent" literally states that any discussion on value
> is useless (or bad). ("We must remain silent" is what makes it different from
> Tao Te Ching's incipit). Nevertheless, as I mentioned, I have read another
> sentence (I'll try to remember which book) where he claimed that value (to use
> our word) is the "limit" of language, not in the sense of a boundary, but in
> the mathematical analysis sense, something that is infinitely approached and
> never reached (sorry but I lack the correct english words here). This latter
> concept is quite different from the "that whereof..." in that it at least
> concedes that discussion about value may "progress", and I think this is
> basically what Pirsig's work builds on (I see no stronger assumption anywhere
> in Pirsig, and much evidence that neverending progress is the *best* we can
> achieve in metaphysics).
ELEPHANT:
I have also heard the quotation you refer to somewhere.
But I disagree with the claim that comparing value to the infinite allows
for a notion of progress towards it. We do not progress towards the
infinte. The infinite is categorically different from the merely
indefinitely large. An infinite distance is not a distance, and an infinite
number is not a number. 'Infinitely large' is an oxymoron. Something with
a size has a beginning and an end. I recognise that it is an essential part
of some useful mathematics to regard certain kinds of series as approaching
infinity. But nothing that this logical argument can say will make me
abandon my intuition that a value, or indeed anthing at all, that is
infinitely far off, cannot be reached or progressed towards. We are very
much back in the territory of Zeno's paradoxes here (again). Of course
Achilles will catch the tortoise. But this is because the distance between
Achilles and the tortoise does not consist of the mathematical infinity of
infintely reducing distances with which it is described: the reality is
continuous, the description is discrete. Incompletablilty is *the very
definition of* the infinte. If one cannot ever reach the infinite, how can
one be said to be nearer to it?
>
>> 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.
>>
ANDREA:
> Sorry, I miss the term "flux" in context, and possibly "report". Can you
> elaborate/explain?
ELEPHANT:
'Flux' is the Heractitean and Platonic (metaphorical: using the metaphor of
the river) way of describing the continuity that we have been talking about.
A "report" is a statement that describes a reality which pre-exists the
statement. A newspaper article is thus a report, we hope.
>> ELEPHANT: 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.
>>
ANDREA:
> As I said, I may be heretic in my interpretation of philosophers (nor do I
> care for their actual thoughts, except than for purposes of communication with
> others). > I think Wittgenstein used "meaning" in a positivistic sense because
> he was working within the positivistic language. Meaning as you and I and
> James understand it is something(s) different, so it is unfair, in my humble
> uneducated opinion, to compare their opinions based on this omonimity.
ELEPHANT:
Accepted. (Much enthusiasm and admiration for your use of other philosophers
to communicate, rather than obfuscate)
>> ELEPHANT: 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).
>>
ANDREA:
> In this last point you may seem to agree with me above. Metaphor. Dance.
> Alluding to. Agreed. I'm not sure Wittgenstein would disagree, either (if you
> don't stick to the "that whereof" motto).
ELEPHANT:
That's an interesting point, and of course we may never know exactly what
Wittgenstein's thoughts are on this one. But I'd recommend Murdoch's
discussion of him in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. She takes the veiw
that even in the later work Wittgenstein is cutting out the fluid stream of
experience upon which our metaphors dance (or in which they swim... ).
>> ELEPHANT: 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.
>>
ANDREA:
> To me, as I said, a metaphysical statement looks as something that is not true
> nor false, but has some value...
ELEPHANT:
Hm. Well I'm not departing from the Jamesian idea of truth as a variety of
the good here, I don't think. It's just that I happen to believe that in
this contect the good has an absolutely universal face: the form of the
good. So what I would argue is that a metaphysical statement is one that
either has value or does not.
ANDREA:
> ...More specifically, as it relates to the
> intellectual level, and this is where the "individual" comes into scene, it
> has some value to me now and to you now. With that, I paradoxically (?) agree
> with both the positivist and the mystic.
ELEPHANT:
Well yes, absolutely, it has to come back to individuals: it has to have
value for me. But it happens that I think the reason why a really good
metaphysics (such as might lie in the common ground between Tao and Pirsig)
would be good for me, and for others, is that it appeals to an entirely
universal notion of the Good which transcends and pre-exists those illusory
puppets of the self we were talking about, and so can't be relative to them
in any way. It's a theory. Actually it's Plato's theory of forms.
All the best
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