Magnus,
> Hi Elephant
>
> First of all, his name is Pirsig, not Prisig.
>
I've been asked how I can type so fast. Now you know.
> Second, I don't agree at all that the MoQ's, nor the levels', only purpose
> is to have something informative to say about 20th century America. I think
> they are relevant for all thinkable, plus the non-thinkable, stages of the
> universe. But this is only to be expected from a metaphysics worth discussing.
> That's what I've been trying to say in my last two posts, that if you can
> prove anything really contradictory within the MoQ, I'd leave the squad in
> a jiffy and start driving trucks.
>
One philosophy lecturer I know made just the opposite move, so I guess truck
driving isn't so great. Nor do I think I'm going to prove something
'contradictory' within MOQ. What I think is that in so far as MOQ extends
outside the recognition that mystic reality (dynamic quality) is a radically
different sort of thing than any linguistic representation of it (the point
of ZMM), and tries to reconnect that observation with the world of our
representations (what Lila aims at), it can never be successful in an
absolute once and for all way: simply because that world is a moveable
mirror, different at different times and for different indiviuals, cultures.
What would Pirsig's story be about cultures where the concept 'inorganic
object' just doesn't exist (eg aboriginal australia)? Given his excellent
understanding of the point about the natives who couldn't see Cooks ships, I
think it would be a sympathetic and constructive one. I don't think that he
could say that because the natives didn't even have one of the concepts that
are included in his development of MOQ their world veiw was somehow
inaccurate in a hard and fast metaphysical way. Instead he might talk about
how some of the concepts which the natives actually do have would relate to
his Dynamic Quality, and set about producing a descriptive MOQ that would
apply to them. Think about his approach to the 'insane'. I've said this
several times now and I'll say it again: I don't think R.M.P. is saying that
his levels schema in lila represents any eternal truth. I can repeat my
references if you like. Check p457 for a start. What I'm suggesting is
that the MOQ in Lila exists mostly where it starts: with philosophical
antropology. The four levels that he comes up with are the four levels that
happen to apply in Western soceity. There could be other levels - Pirsig
accepts this over and over again - but he doesn't think of it as his role to
go around inventing levels: he's cateloguing the ones that there are.
Particularly the ones down the east coast, contrasting them with the mid
west. Particularly the ones in Lila herself. The attraction of having Lila
on the boat. I could pepper this exegesis with a hundred references, I
could cite the whole damm book. What Pirsig is trying to show is how his
big Dynamic Quality concept might relate to the lives people actually lead:
well that's an anthropological project. It's no accident that he talks
about anthropology *all the time*. What I'm saying is that MOQ isn't just
the levels: the levels are an *application* of the MOQ to a particular
situation, the situation that Pirsig and the rest of us emailers happen to
live in. But the situation could be different, and if it was, so to would
be any appropriate application of MOQ. Change the problem, change the
solution. Because despite is basic empiricism, Pirsig does regard those
multi-level patterns as the problem: the veil that hides the mystically real
from us.
I guess I take the idea that Pirsig is a Buddhist much more seriously than
you do, Magnus. The Zen stuff isn't just a 'connection' - it is, in my
opinion, centre stage. At the end, Pirsig abandons the anthropological
viewpoint in his relations with Lila, and adopts the viewpoint of someone
endevouring to find some practical way of ennacting his concern for her
spiritual health. In the end that's what his anthropological approach has
aimed at: you have to know what you are dealing with to stand a chance of
helping. This applies to Lila and to his wider audience. I do hope you
don't consider these remarks the ravings of a fool, but I am used to being
thought a bit of a Dumbo.
>> This is one I get all the time (outside MOQ) so I ought to be (a) getting
>> better at answering it or (b) acknowledging the error of my ways. Sadly
>> neither seems to happen, as I remain convinced that it is a non-question,
>> and tend to say so, at length. "If there were no intellectual beings
>> around, who was there to intellectually perceive all the inorganic,
>> biological and social patterns out there?" Well, no-one. And your point
>> is? And your point is that this means that I am denying the existence of
>> the universe before the appearance of man, and re-inventing some creation
>> story in denial of all the geological and evolutionary facts? Well of
>> course I'm not.
>
> No, but you are making the same mistake Poincaré did, "I think, therefore
> I am". Try dropping an iron on your toe and see if that feels real. There's
> no need to think, the iron feels *really* real anyway.
>
Sure it does. Look, Johnson kicks stones, you drop Irons. But this is an
argument, right? - so we want to know *exactly* what all this
toe-flagelation proves. Pirsig focuses right in on this issue when he talks
about hot stoves. What he says is that the dynamic quality situation
precedes 'hot' and 'stove' and 'get up off'. You just get off the hot
stove: talking about hot stoves comes after. In just the same way, you just
try to avoid stubbing your big toe on a rock: linguistic entities like 'big
toe' and 'rock' and even 'it hurts' come *after* this dynamic quality
arrangement and are super-imposed onto it. So it really doesn't prove
anything to say "hey, there are hot stoves out there: try sitting on one and
see if that feels real". Sure it feels real, but the sentence "it feels
real" and the particularising "hot stove" are not like the pain in your
Backside you get from sitting on one. The pain in your backside is (lack
of) Dynamic quality. The dynamic quality comes first and is the *real*
reality, not 'stove!'. Nobody reasons thus: hot stoves are painful, this is
a hot stove, i am sitting on it, therefore i am in pain. That would be
absurd, and typical proceedure for a disturbed aristotelian.
So when it comes to toe flagellation, the same applies: what the experience
of dropping irons on your toe proves is that you shouldn't drop irons on
your toe. It does nothing to establish that the primary reality is 'toe' or
'iron' or even johnsons 'rock' for that matter. Quite the reverse. What it
establishes is that some experiences are intrinsically painful however we
happen to cut them up conceptually.
Applying that lesson to paleontology we are reminded that the only thing in
itself, the only intrinsic reality, is the beautiful smooth feeling of the
fossilised shell in our hands. Whatever comes afterwards is a conceptual
elaboration. Useful mind you, damm useful, and don't get the impression I
mean to demote usefulness, but a conceptual elaboration nonetheless.
Pragmatism is all very well, but it would be a poor beast without radical
empiricism to remind us what's boss, ontologically speaking.
>> Intellectual patterns just aren't what fossilise, so the
>> argument is entirely fatuous. Investigating a strata of fossilised shells
>> in Lyme Regis Bay, I won't ever come accros an intellectual pattern and cry
>> out to my colleague: 'hey, look, I found an intellectual pattern and it's
>> over a hundred million years old!'.
>
> Perhaps not a hundred million years old, but several thousand years ago, some
> cavemen carved their thoughts about their latest successful hunt on the wall
> of their cave. Not many, but perhaps you?, would deny that such carvings was
> inspired by someone quite capable of intellectual patterns.
Only the conceptual reality of a work of art is an intellectual pattern. A
747 is not just an intellectual patttern, or it wouldn't keep you in the
air.
On the second point: no - why would I want to deny that cavemen had
intellectual patterns? I don't get it.
>
>> No intellectual pattern sits in the
>> dark for a hundred million years waiting for an observant beachcomber. What
>> sits inside that rock for millions of years waiting to fall out is not an
>> intellectual pattern but something to which we *apply* intellectual
>> patterns. I do feel like I'm stating the obvious here.
>
> No, there's nothing obvious about it, quite the contrary. May I ask you what
> you think about your own memory about things that happened a minute ago? An
> hour ago? Ten years ago? If I read you correctly, are these memories also
> just something to which you apply your intellectual patterns when you're
> remembering them?
Quite. Everything is constantly being reinterpreted, and it is an
interpretation that you 'remember'. Memories are not reliable for that very
reason. Witnesses contradict each other. Under certain lines of
questioning people actually invent things while attempting perfect
truthfulness. We are all open to suggestion, and while we must rely on
memory we must be careful not to rely on it too much.
That's too quick an answer for the importance of the question, but it's a
starting point. Memory is a fascinating philosophical nexus because so may
arguments meet here all at one: what is time? what is an idea? where does
our knowledge come from? etc. I'd go on to say that the essential
continuity of experienced time means that there's no sharp cut-off point
were something ceases to be present and becomes a 'memory'. In a sense,
it's all present. I can 'remember' what happened to me a second ago in just
the same way that I can 'see' what is going on in that crowd 600 yards away:
by interpreting a dynamic quality that is present to me in conceptual terms.
Does it make a difference if the event was a minute back - does my
conceptualisation get called 'memory' then? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
But memory isn't a clear cut or coherrent concept. If it was then *every*
statement/conceptualisation/picture we ever form would be called 'memory':
since *all* such conceptualisations always take place after the event they
'describe'.
To write "I think that memory is a fascinating philosophical nexus": is this
a statement of my memory? Well, hell no. The reason it's not memory is
that I *assert* this: this is what I think. This is connected with the way
a witness objects if prosecution says "that's just what you remember": they
want to say: "no, that's what really happened - like I can see it with my
own eyes, sure as you're standing in front of me right now". So whether we
think of something as just a memory, and even (in the case of my statement
about fascinating philosophy) whether we think of something as a memory at
all, is related somehow towards our attitude to the experience: how disposed
we are to treating it as a basis for future action. So when I open this
sentence with the capital "S" this is because I am damm sure that I have
just concluded my last sentence and am onto the next. I am so damm sure
that it isn't even a memory: it's just present to me in my compositional
thinking in just the same way that a hot stove is present to a cook.
People who fail to 'deal with their memories': for these people there is a
sense in which the past hasn't even become the past. There are Serbs for
whom massacres of the 14th Century are as present to them as my deployment
of the last full-stop is to me. That isn't a 'memory' on any empiricist
picture of impressions made into wax. Nobody 'remembers' the 14th Century.
It's survival as a 'folk-memory' is totally bound up with the survival of an
interpretation: indeed the memory is just that interpretation. To an extent
all memory, even living memory, is like this. There are people who actually
lived through the second world war, interveiwed for 'oral history', who turn
out to have memories that have been totally overlaid by the newsreels and
the warfilms that were made after the event. They 'remember' things as
actually experienced first hand which it turns out to be impossible for them
to have encountered except through newspapers. They 'remember' things as
true which were downright lies at the time. Memory lies in the most
sophisticated kinds of ways. You can 'remember' things for longer if you
think about them often, and yet if you think about them all the time they
become nolonger memories but the present. There are some people who only
remember the good - others who only remember the bad. How can all this be
accounted for except through memory being an interpretation?
Surely you don't imagine that there is some direct route from the eye to a
'memory department' where the past is laid down for future reference like a
hard disk?
>
>
>> I'm not a dualist about substance, in just the same way that Prisig isn't a
>> Dualist about substance. He is a kind of dualist, as am I, because we both
>> divide the world into static patterns (my all embracing level of
>> intellectual stuff) and dynamic quality. But this is no mind/matter
>> dualism, because the mind/matter dualism is a dualism of substance. As I am
>> at a loss to understand your point, it is probably better if I shut up and
>> invite you to explain yourself.
>
> It's not your static/dynamic split that's the problem, it's your division
> of the static side into intellectual/non-intellectual that resembles the
> mind/matter split.
We are not making much progress here. You can talk about my dualism
'resembling' the mind/matter split all you like, without engaging with my
exegetical proposal at all. Everything resembles everything else, so it is
no surprise that one dualism resembles another. Sure, they resemble, but
they are not the same, as I have explained in the clearest possible terms.
Because these two ways of dividing up the world are not the same an
objection to one is not an objection to the other. Period.
I can't imagine anything I am more likely to find infuriating and bizare
than being called a mind/matter dualist, and I am quite sure that if Struan
reads this he will take full advantage and repeat the name-calling at every
opportunity. Still, such an approach would not be an argument: it would
merely be bad tempered. Please meet me half way by acknowledging that an
intellectual/non intellectual dualism is an intellectual/non intellectual
dualism, and not something else. That is all I ask.
Matter is put forward as a substance, and it is the supposed substantiveness
which is the problem, as Pirsig rightly avows. 'Substance' is perhaps a
glancingly technical term in Philosophy, but the point is not obstruse, and
is explained by RMP in an excellent way in ZMM in connection, if I remember,
with Aristotle. If you prompt me I will go and find the relevant passage.
By 'substance' both R.M. and I mean something that has to do with your
attitude to grammar: and not to do with whether you can hurt your toe. The
idea of metaphysical substance is the idea that reality resembles the
intellectual structure of grammar, in that it consists of objects
(substance) and predicates (attributes of substance). The idea that matter
is a substance is the idea that our material concepts described in english
grammar (tables, chairs etc) map onto an underlying reality which is of the
same general grammatical arrangement (electrons, atoms etc). Electrons and
atoms are treated in grammar as objects to which attributes can be
predicated, just like tables and chairs only smaller. That is the concept
of material substance.
It is because substance (a philoso-grammatical concept) got applied to the
world in two halves: mind/matter, that the mind/matter dualism was so
invidious. There was no way that the objects of one kind could have
attributes of the other kind, and no way that the two kinds of objects could
be sucessfully related in the same sentence. It was if the two realms spoke
in two untranslateable languages. Hence the mind-body problem.
As you will note I am repeating myself.
Now the situation I have described with respect to mind/matter simply does
not exist with respect to intellectual/non intellectual. Because the
non-intellectual is precisely the abscence of substance: it is that reality
onto which I pointedly refuse to super-impose grammar. Dynamic quality is
neither object nor attribute. Pirsig says this.
Again I repeat myself. Enough.
>
>> I wonder whether your point is that I attribute some real and fundamental
>> existence to consciousness, the creator-intellect, and that Prisig doesn't
>> do this? So that whereas Prisig has a two-way division, I break things up
>> three ways - Is that your point? Well if that is your veiw of Prisig, I
>> think it is wrong. The static/dynamic division is intended as a division of
>> the *experienced* world, and the Subject-Object metaphysics he opposes is
>> also a metaphysics of the experienced word: paradigmatically of the world
>> availiable to scientific study. It was quite apparent in my reading of both
>> books that Prisig attributes important being and agency to the
>> *experiencer*
>
> No! Now, you're back into experiencer=mind vs. experienced world=matter.
So you keep saying. I fail to understand why.
> In the MoQ, both sides of each experience are experiencers. Or, as I put it
> in my last post, The subject side is only the subject side from the
> subjects' point of view, it's the object side from the other side's point of
> view.
Now that is an interesting assertion. So we now discover that the reason
you object to my intellect/non intellect dualism is that you think there is
no such thing as non-intellect?
I think the claim that this is an MOQ assertion is a surprising one, and
could do with elaboration. You might like, in particular, to tell me how
dynamic quality constitutes an intellect. For it is Dynamic Quality, and
dynamic quality alone, that I have been placing in the non-intellect
category.
I think you misinterpret my intellect non-intellect dichotomy as the
subject-object dichotomy.
Pirsigian and Prisigian greetings,
to honourable thinking typos everywhere,
EKEPHAMT
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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