From: Sam Norton (elizaphanian@kohath.wanadoo.co.uk)
Date: Thu Feb 10 2005 - 12:10:48 GMT
Hi everyone,
My interest in posing this question is to try and find out what Pirsig means
when he talks about 'feeling'. I am very unclear on this, and given my
well-known suspicions about other aspects of the intellectual level, it has
set some alarm bells ringing. So what I want to do is set out my list of
questions. But first, the fuller context for the Pirsig quote (to avoid HTML
Pirsig's words are in double square brackets):
When, therefore, the Absolute is described as sentient experience, this term
is really being used analogically. [[The MOQ uses it literally.]] 'Feeling,
as we have seen, supplies us with a positive idea of nonrelational unity.
[[In the MOQ feeling corresponds to biological quality.]]
OK, my questions:
A: Is feeling "sensation" - and if so, is it therefore the empirical ground
for the MoQ? My impression is that it is. In support of that, see this quote
from the annotations:
"inasmuch as thought can recognize the 'contradictions' which emerge when
reality is conceived as a Many, as a multiplicity of related things, it can
see that the world of common sense and of science is appearance. And if we
ask, 'Appearance of what?', reference to the basic experience of a felt
totality enables us to have some inkling at any rate of what the Absolute,
ultimate reality, must be. We cannot attain a clear vision of it. To do so,
we should have to be the comprehensive unified experience which constitutes
the Absolute. We should have to get outside our own skins, so to speak. But
we can have a limited knowledge of the Absolute by conceiving it on an
analogy with the basic sentient experience which underlies the emergence of
distinctions between subject and object and between different objects. In
this sense the experience in question can be regarded as an obscure, virtual
knowledge of reality which is the 'presupposition' of metaphysics and which
the metaphysician tries to recapture at a higher level. [[This is really an
excellent statement of the MOQ position.]]
B: If feeling is sensation in this way, and feeling is biological quality,
does this skew the MoQ, ie does it make the biological level foundational??
C: In the context of the 19th Century Idealism which Copleston is
discussing, how is "feeling" related to the Romantic movement's conceptions,
especially Schleiermacher's understanding of it as the pre-rational
'immediate self-consciousness' and ground of religion. (I think that they
are the same thing, and that there is the direct descent from this to
Pirsig, but I accept that this is controversial. People might want to avoid
this element for a while).
D: How can we distinguish "feeling" from emotion? I have said before that I
think that the field of 'emotion' is a blind-spot in the MoQ, and Pirsig
often seems to have uncritically accepted an enlightenment bias against
emotion. But it seems to me fairly well-established now that emotions are,
at least in part, cognitive in character, so that enlightenment bias is
unsustainable. If so, in what way are "feelings" - understood as biological
Quality - to be distinguished from "emotions" - understood as, at least in
part, a pattern which operates on the intellectual level?
That's probably enough for now.
Sam
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