From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Jan 23 2005 - 21:54:27 GMT
Sam, Paul, Matt and all MOQers:
Welcome back, Sam. Have you sees what Matt, Paul and I wrote on this topic
while you were gone? Lots of it was aimed at your case and am curious to see
how you'll respond. Until then,...
Sam Norton said to Paul:
...the question I most want to ask is, when Pirsig says "The Metaphysics of
Quality subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all
legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about what
the senses provide" how does he avoid all the baggage that has historically
gone with use of language like 'empiricism', 'legitimate human knowledge',
'the senses'? The word "experience", in particular, is put to a very
specific philosophical use in the Western empirical tradition, and if Pirsig
is trying to do something _different_ with it, then he needs to be careful
about saying "The Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to what is called
empiricism." It just seems to me that there is a very strong _prima facie_
case to say that he's
doing exactly what William James was trying to do, just with more Zen (and
much better novels).
dmb replies:
I'd say Pirsig was MORE careful in talking about empiricism than Sam was in
quoting him. If we look at the whole paragraph there is more than enough
context to see that Pirsig's empiricism goes beyond the usual limits of
Western empiricism, beyond the mind and the senses, AND that it proceeds
without SOM's assumptions...
"The Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to what is called empiricism. It
claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by
thinking what the senses provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any
knowledge gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely
theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion,
and metaphysics as unverifiable. The Metaphysics of Quality varies from this
by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism
are verifiable and that in the past have been excluded for metaphysical
reasons, not empirical reasons. They have been excluded because of the
metaphysical assumption that all the universe is composed of subjects and
objects and anything that can't be classified as a subject or an object
isn't real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It is
just an assumption."
dmb continues:
The entire chapter is devoted to attacking the main ideas behind the
assumptions of SOM such as subjectivity, causation, the mind-in-the-brain
thing and even substance itself. Its like a reader's digest version of the
deconstruction work he did in ZAMM. On the same page (Near the opening of
chapter 8) Pirsig points out that value is at the front edge of experience
and that this value precedes subjects and objects, which are presumed to be
empirical in Western philosophy but which are exposed as assumptions, as
conceptual interpretions of a more primary experience. And so we find that
Pirsig actually makes a radical departure from that kind of empiricism...
"When it is seen that value is the front edge of experience, there is no
problem for empiricist here. It simply restates the empiricists' belief that
experience is the starting point of all reality. The only problem is for a
subject-object metaphysics that calls itself empiricism."
Or, as he more simply put it in his SODV paper...
"The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects, which are then
mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Quality!"
Thanks,
dmb
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Jan 23 2005 - 22:57:27 GMT