Scott.
You wrote:
> [Bo:]"Feeling" is a terrible imprecise term and
> occurs in all Indo-European languages it seems.
> Sensation and emotion should be held separate. As I
> see it the former is the biological "expression"
> while the latter is the social one. ('Interaction'
> and 'reason' the inorganic and intellectual)
> [Scott:]Yes, it is imprecise, but there are difficulties with
> "emotion" as well. Fear, it seems to me, can be biological or social.
> (I suspect this is an old topic on this forum, so bear with me.)
I shouldn't mar our basic agreement, but my point is that life started very
simple yet able to sense its environment (specialized organs are some later
refinement) A low-value environment hardly evokes "fear" at the single cell
plane yet we must not infer that the multi-cell organisms evolved beyond
sensing, the very rise into the realm of emotions IS the social development!.
As biology we humans do no more that sense, it is our social component
that becomes "afraid". Thus seen the social roots are deep in the biological
level, but that is not counter to Pirsig's thesis that the human society is the
spring-board to intellect.
An aside. In French sense is "sentir" and emotion is "resentir", this catches
my point beautifully: Emotions are senses re-fined to a new value where (for
instance) the unpleasantness of being bitten is abstracted into fear
(someone watching knows what it means) I fact the whole static range can
be seen in this light: Sensing is re-fining a particular inorganic signal into
unpleasantness while emotion is (as said) the unpleasantness refined into
fear of same, and reason is fear objectivized and thus different from the
subjective experience.
> [Scott:]This doesn't seem right to me. I agree about the VALUE, but
> not that a "eureka" experience is social (it may be partially on
> occasion, as in "Wait'll I tell so-and-so what I just figured out",
> but there is more to it than that.) Same problem with aesthetic
> delight, so again I suspect this is an oft-discussed problem. Perhaps
> we need a new word? Or can we just use "aesthetic", ignoring its
> etymology?
An intellectual emotion is contradictory. Aesthetic delight? OK but then AD
is the very thing that has brought about it all ....and a "Metaphysics of
Aesthetic Delight" could be coined.
> [Scott:] I noticed in my last reading of LILA that Pirsig brings up
> several platypi, including mind/matter, but doesn't bring up the One
> and the Many, and so doesn't explicitly dissolve it. He does
> (implicitly) rename it, however, as DQ/sq. So what I see as lacking is
> to show how SOM beliefs keep us from understanding their proper
> relationship. Coleridge and others make the important point that we
> must distinguish without dividing, and I think this is the way
> forward. If we stop at just dividing DQ from sq, the mind/matter
> platypus is still around, asking how does the Many become One (in
> perception and cognition -- or is it a case of the One becoming
> Many?). Perhaps we have to come to understand that this is the wrong
> question to ask, or maybe we are reduced to waiting for transcendence
> for the Answer. Which may be the case. On the other hand, I think I
> would like to look deeper into James' radical empiricism to see how he
> deals with it, if he does.
This brings the very foundations up again,so let's leave it alone for now, the
differences with Gary are most pressing.
Bo
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