From: Paul Turner (pauljturner@yahoo.co.uk)
Date: Mon May 12 2003 - 13:37:16 BST
Hi all
In my quest for clarity I've gone back to basics, I've
been re-reading ZMM and Lila together.
PIRSIG: ‘He simply meant that at the cutting edge of
time, before an object can be distinguished, there
must be a kind of non-intellectual awareness, which he
had called awareness of Quality. You can’t be aware
that you’ve seen a tree until after you’ve seen the
tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of
awareness there must be a time lag. We sometimes think
of that time-lag as unimportant, but there’s no
justification for thinking that the time lag is
unimportant – none whatsoever’ ZMM Ch 20
In ZMM, Pirsig spends a lot of time emphasising
‘non-intellectual awareness’, the time-lag. He also
makes an observation that intellectuals usually have
the greatest trouble ‘seeing’ Quality because they are
so ‘swift’ in snapping everything into intellectual
form.
I think the time-lag can be better understood as a
part of the whole Quality event. My understanding of
the 'anthropocentric' Quality event is this:
1. The Quality event creates a response
2. The response is to value by something with agency;
both are created by the Quality event
3. Action (or no action) is taken by the something
with agency
If we look back at the Quality event with the MoQ
terms created in Lila, the time-lag is magnified.
There is not just pre-intellectual awareness; there is
pre-social awareness, pre-biological awareness and
perhaps a pre-inorganic awareness.
The evolutionary hierarchy can be applied to the
Quality event. In this way we can consider the Quality
event as happening from the bottom up, in terms of the
hierarchy. To see how this works:
1. To all Quality events, the first response is
inorganic through an agency of pre-sensory perception.
2. The second response is biological through an agency
of sensory and emotional perception
3. The third response is social through an agency of
symbolic and cultural perception
4. The fourth response is intellectual through an
agency of aesthetic and rational perception
5. Each level of response filters the Quality that
makes its way up to the next level
Seen in this way, the movement off the hot stove can
happen at the inorganic and biological level – the
value which may be perceived at a pre-sensory level as
an atomic excitation is passed up to the biological
level, which perceives the value as low down in the
‘pain/pleasure’ scale of analogous sensations, which
creates a highly complex organic ‘move away’ response
and perhaps a release of energy in sound waves which
is perceived at the social level as ‘a scream of pain’
and finally is explained by the intellectual level as
‘PAUL sitting on a HOT STOVE’.
Taking this further, you can see how ‘agency’ may be
seen as ‘consciousness’ which exists at all levels,
the consciousness at the lower levels has become
largely the human subconscious but has not always been
that way.
This all happens so swiftly that the first ‘conscious
awareness’ for a human is generally of the
intellectual response, but it is the last level to
respond! If we could slow the Quality event down,
perhaps we could ‘experience’ the way that it works.
It’s like the whole of evolution recurring in every
Quality event! The human being pops up at the end.
In this way, 'thoughts' can only ever be 'about' what
has been filtered through all other levels and can
only reach other levels through the social level. They
cannot 'think' directly of Dynamic Quality. Only
analogues of analogues of analogues. That describes
what my thinking feels like most of the time :-)
Indeed, I feel that the analogues created at the
intellectual level have cut us off from almost all of
what was once a conscious holistic response to
Quality. (I have in mind something similar to
Barfield’s ‘original participation’ of phenomena) But
the MoQ provides us with a far better set of analogues
than SOM.
Anyway, is the Quality event seen in this way by
others? If not, tell me where I’ve gone wrong.
Cheers
Paul
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