From: Sam Norton (elizaphanian@kohath.wanadoo.co.uk)
Date: Mon Feb 21 2005 - 13:08:19 GMT
Hi all,
Serendipitously, I came across this:
http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/oct1977/v34-3-article2.htm
Interesting quotation below.
Sam
The author says this:
"As a young scientist, Phaedrus discovered that he could invent an infinite
number of hypotheses to explain any set of data. That struck him as a good
joke until he realized that it implied that any scientific theory apparently
rests on an arbitrary choice of one of those hypotheses. Yet our society
treats science as the model of objective knowledge. Phaedrus found another
model for knowledge while teaching freshman composition. His students didn't
know the "rules of good writing," he found, but, when he read their papers
aloud in class, they could all pick out the best essays, even though they
couldn't explain the reasons for their choices. Somehow, they could
intuitively recognize "Quality":
At the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there
must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness, which he 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 the instant of awareness
there must be a time lag. . . Any intellectually conceived object is always
in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision
before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.
At this point theologians may recall Schleiermacher's remarkably similar
account of the process of knowing:
You become sense and the Whole becomes object. Sense and object mingle and
unite, then each returns to its place, and the object rent from sense is a
perception, and you rent from the object are for yourselves, a feeling. It
is this earlier moment I mean, which you always experience yet never
experience. The phenomenon of your life is just the result of its constant
departure and return. It is scarcely in time at all, so swiftly it passes;
it can scarcely be described, so little does it properly exist . It is
immediate, raised above all error and misunderstanding. You lie directly on
the bosom of the infinite world.
Like Pirsig, Schleiermacher was trying to break down distinctions between
objective science and subjective matters of value. Ethical and aesthetic
judgments don't merely offer interpretations of a reality which science
accurately describes; rather, both scientific theories and value responses
point to a common source which neither can ever fully capture. For Pirsig
(and in a different way for Schleiermacher) the answer to a technology gone
amok and values that fail to touch reality is to probe that common source,
prior to all our conceptual thinking.
Pirsig believes that this vision of Quality was Phaedrus' greatest insight,
yet it may also have been a step on his road to madness. "There is no other
reality" than Quality; Phaedrus took that seriously enough to deny the
reality of either our feelings or the objects we think we recognize in the
world. A philosophy that began with caring about friends and red wing
blackbirds and motorcycle gearshifts in all their concreteness and
particularity ended by concluding that all attempts to distinguish this from
that, better from worse, introduce distortion and illusion. As Hegel said
about Romantics like Schleiermacher, an exclusive emphasis on the
preconceptual leaves only the night in which all cows are black. And
Phaedrus ended up in a mental hospital when, for him, nothing mattered at
all.
<snip>
Should we try to follow Phaedrus to his mountaintop? I think not, for he
seems to have taken a wrong turn. It's hard to quarrel with his diagnosis.
Something is amiss when value judgments are relegated to a purely subjective
realm of "just what you like." Technology does seem to be out of control,
partly because of this lack of any clear standards for deciding which of its
uses are good ones. Serious questions have arisen about the foundations of
science. And nothing short of serious metaphysical thinking can really deal
with such issues.
The problem lies, not with Phaedrus' questions, but with his answers. Most
of the students whose enthusiasm led me to this book read it as a Romantic
anti-technological tract. At first that infuriated me, for Pirsig's goal is
clearly a synthesis between technology and value, Classic and Romantic. Yet
I wonder if their interpretation is not finally correct. Quality ends up as
something purely intuitive, which we know only through a kind of awareness
dangerously close to "groovy feelings alone," just as the whole book ends
with a thoroughly Romantic sentence: "You can sort of tell these things."
Can one bring technology and value together by appeal to an ultimate
metaphysical principle in which all distinctions are destroyed? The
criticisms Hegel raised against Romantics like Schleiermacher seem to apply
to Pirsig too: an exclusive emphasis on preconceptual, intuitive awareness
loses sight of the concrete and the particular which are the concern, not
only of science, but also of ethics and indeed all of ordinary life."
~~~
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