From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sat Jan 15 2005 - 22:19:22 GMT
Howdy MOQers:
Last Monday Matt asked dmb:
If you do this, (deny the existence of an appearance/reality distinction in
Pirsig) the question that I then want answered is: Why do we need a
mediated/unmediated distinction? What part does it play, what work does it
do? ...But what I want to know is: _why doesn't this create an
appearance/reality distinction?_
dmb replies:
I think I understand your question here. If I may rephrase, you're asking if
we deny SOM in Pirsig (the A/R distinction), why do we need the
static/Dynamic split (mediated and unmediated experience)? You're saying
that if we view Pirsig's split as if it were the same as Kant's, then we
have really just created the same problem. Is that about right? The thing
is, I already tried to explain that the problem is in treating Pirsig as if
he resembles Kant in this way. Paul is much more polite about it, but
basically I just think you have the wrong idea. They can't rightly be
compared no matter how much homework you've done. Sorry. He's the crucial
error in your own words...
Matt said:
...The distinction between unmediated and mediated experience is Pirsig's
distinction between Dynamic and static Quality and it is also the
distinction that has traditionally been used to describe the
appearance/reality distinction.
Paul replied:
I said in the last (very long) post that I thought this was, in the case
of Kant, incorrect. ...reality, to Kant, was not something we experience.
Pirsig, on the other hand, equates reality with experience. Thus, in
Pirsig's scheme, there is no noumenal realm, and insofar as it is the
delineation of its counterpart, there is no phenomenal realm either.
There is no distinction. This is a fundamental difference which you
cannot gloss over with any amount of hypothetical absorption of ideas
from a conceptual milieu.
dmb adds:
Exactly. It might be worth reminding you that Pirsig's attack on SOM is an
attack on the A/R distinction. Clearly, appearances are the subjective part
and reality is the objective part. And maybe its too obvious and should go
without saying, but the point of the MOQ is to replace SOM. So I'm not
really sure what game you are playing when you ask if I'm denying the
appearance/Reality distinction in Pirsig. (To which the answer is a
resounding HELL YES I deny it and so does he.) This is not just the mainline
traditional Pirsigian line (A tradtion since 1976?) it is, perhaps, the
heart and soul of everything he's saying. I realize that my attempts to
correct you on this point may come across as a scolding, as an accusation
that you have not yet comprehended the most basic ideas of the MOQ. But
really I think its more complicated than that and we are dealing with a
cultural blindspot that is pretty difficult to overcome. Blindspot. I've
been using that word a lot in the "mysticism 101" thread, in case you're
interested.
Let me try a different approach. How about if we pause and think about the
unmediated experience in a little more detail. I think this is where the
blindspot tends to get us in trouble and it seems to me that this same
obstacle is behind the mistaken conclusion that Kant and Pirsig can be
compared in the way you want to. I think the tricky part is in trying to
imagine this unmediated experience because we just can't help but think of
it except in terms of subjects and objects. This causes confusion. When we
Westerners hear phrases like unmediated experience, direct experince,
undivided experience, pure experience, etc., we tend to imagine it in terms
of some clear-eyed subject getting an accurate picture of the objective
world. We're all tempted to imagine a perfect view of the actual scene. And
when we imagine it in those terms, we have not denied the distinction
between appearance and Reality. Instead, this would be a claim that there is
a gap between them and that we have somehow managed to cross that gap. If we
imagine it in terms of subjects and objects, then Kant and Pirsig would look
the same except that Pirsig would seem to be saying that the unmediated
experience is one where we, the subject, really CAN have knowledge of the
things-in-themselves. But that's not what Pirsig is saying at all. That is
just the mistaken conclusion one reaches when one tries to understand Pirsig
in terms of what he's rejected. And this is a blindspot because we think in
terms of subjects and objects automatically, even if we've never thought
about those terms of so much as opened a philosophy book. See, its not like
philsophers suffer from this alone. Learning to see the world that way is
just part of the maturation process in our culture. We learn it growing up
just as we learned the ABCs. As adults we don't have to sound out any words
or memorize definitions, we just read. All of the stuff we learned as kids
is done automatically so that we don't even know we're doing it. Same with
worldviews. Its so internalized, ingrained in the languange and our
conceptual inheritance that we forget. We forget so thoroughly that trying
to imagine reality without subjects and objects seems a little crazy and
absurd. I mean, stop reading for just a moment and look around the room.
What do you see? An undivided reality? Not likely. You see a bunch of
things, objects. And more than likely there is also a sense that you are
looking at those things from somewhere behind your eyes. As an amatuer
photographer I just can't help but think of human perception in terms of
light bouncing off objects and into my eyes, just as light bounces off the
centerfold and into the camera. But this is the problem. (SOM, not porn.)
Like Buddhism, Pirsig is saying that these kinds of experiences are not
strictly empirical, they are conceptual. SOM is a set a metaphysical
assumption with which we habitually interpret experience, not experience
itself. This is how Pirsig can deny the appearance/reality distinction. The
blindspot makes it tough to imagine, but he's simply saying that experience
is reality. And since experience is basically just appearance without all
the metaphysical baggage, appearance is reality.
Paul continued:
Another point I wish to make is that I fail to see why setting forth an
epistemological proposition necessitates the ad infinitum answering of
the skeptic. You lay down your principles and that's that. If the
skeptic fails to find a satisfactory answer in your principles there is
no Transcendental Court of Acceptable Philosophy waiting to dismiss your
theory. Who is this skeptic? Why should we worry about her?
dmb adds:
Right. The skeptic might just take it as an insult, but I think that we
can't answer to skeptic because his questions are meaningless. He's asking
how we can get the perfect view of the actual scene, but Pirsig is saying
there is no actual scence. The questions are based on a misconception of
what Pirsig is saying. Remove the misconception, replace it with a proper
understanding of Pirsig's split, and the questions will disappear.
Paul said:
Finally, as I understand it, the MOQ epistemology is simple. Truth is
defined as a set of high quality intellectual patterns. What is a high
quality intellectual pattern? Generally speaking, it is a theory which
displays logical coherence, brevity, parsimony, breadth of explanation
and/or precision of prediction. The MOQ epistemology rejects the
correspondence theory of truth because it rejects the metaphysical
assumption that there is something objective to correspond to.
dmb says:
Right. We can't think of verifying ideas in terms of how well they
correspond to objective reality. That's SOM and we're right back in the soup
again. In the MOQ ideas do not correspond to things-in-themselves or any
kind of material reality, they correspond to experience, which is reality.
And you can see how absurd it would be to say that reality corresponds to
reality.
"But we know from Phædrus' metaphysics that the harmony Poincaré talked
about is not subjective. It is the source of subjects and objects and
exists in an anterior relationship to them. It is not capricious, it is
the force that opposes capriciousness; the ordering principle of all
scientific and mathematical thought which destroys capriciousness, and
without which no scientific thought can proceed." [ZMM Ch22]
Thanks,
dmb
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