Donald T Palmgren (lonewolf@utkux.utcc.utk.edu)
Thu, 3 Sep 1998 16:20:44 +0100
On Mon, 31 Aug 1998, Bodvar Skutvik wrote:
>
> Donny has delivered some hefty material lately, he soars high and I
> am not always sure where his flights will land,
Me neither. That's why they're so much fun.
Since this post is titled "On Heidegger" I'll bring up something
Heidegger once wrote about. He said that philosophy is like being on a
woodpath (*Holwege*) -- that is, a path through the woods that is used for
gathering kendelling but not used to get someplace. You don't use
philosophy if you want to get from point A to point B. You use it to take
a senic walk through the countreyside and collect some usefull bits of
firewood here and there.
Pirsig calls this "lateral thinking."
> I concentrate on
> these passage from the Heidegger post:
>
> > I think we can all imedeatly recognize something a ken to our
> > "SOM" in Heiddeger's "Metaphysics." Or (as Bodvar and I, w/ help from
> > some others, are pursuing) perhaps his "Metaphysics" is simply the same as
> > Intellectual values? Some helpful questions might be: Does the MoQ (the
> > philosophy in LILA) match the 4 traits Hiedegger named? Does the
> > philosophy outlined in ZMM? After all, the MoQ is still subject to
> > intellectual values ( it *is* intellectual values) -- but it's not a SOM.
> > That makes it a nice yard stick.
>
> Heidegger's four traits can possibly - with a little goodwill - be
> juggled into fitting MOQ's four levels,
???
I think the 4 traits of (Western) Metaphysics Hiedegger names are
a clue towards understanding "SOM" and "Q intelect" and are helpful
towards bridging the Eastern and Western branchest of thought (or at
least seeing where they stand and where they diverged); that's why I
brought it up. I'm afraid you might be trying to make more than that out
of it.
> yet he lacks the overall
> DQ-SQ picture so it is no exact match.
Exact match w/ what? Pirsig's term: "SOM"? "Q intelect"? As I
said, I think you might be trying to make too much out of the concept.
> > In case you're wondering (and you must be by now) where I think
> > I'm going w/ all this... What I'm heading towards is an answer to the
> > problem I brought up earlier about: If proto-social existance (primatives)
> > has more immedeate access to experiencing DQ (which I believe they do)
> > then why is IntPoVs a moral advancement? Quality is the *pre*-intelletual
> > experience, pre-subject/object. But intellect is based on the Analytic
> > knife and S-O logic. It takes us away from DQ. DQ from mythos is eassy;
> > DQ from logos may well be impossible.
> > At the end of LILA Pheadrus says that metaphysics (in the general,
> > not Heideggerian sense) is itself an immoral activity because it is an
> > static PoV trying to subsume DQ. He declires "you can't win 'em all" and
> > drops it.
>
> Well, ALL Q-levels are immoral dynamically and good statically.
I don'y think that's what he says. He spicifically says that
metaphysics is the attempt by IntpoVs (sq) to encompass DQ and so
Metaphysics itself is an immoral activity.
Actually what you said above sounds a lot like the "Fallen Earth"
view that Joseph Campbell contrasted to *lila*. (See my "Soc and Int
values" from the 20th for the quote from *Masks of God*) I don't think sq
is "bad" or immoral -- a fall from DQ. I think Quality "willingly" enters
(so to speak) the time-space world of things as *lila* -- as play, because
pure DQ can't know itself -- can't experience itself. It is, after-all,
the "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum." So it sets itself
over-against itself -- turns itself into (knowing)subject and
(known)object, I-This. It becomes "for itself." Actually, in ZMM, Pirsig
says that of the view towards the undifferentieated (experiencing pure DQ)
and the view towards the world of things (Kant's manifold -- or
"mannyness"), neither is more right than the other. They're booth good.
They are, he says, just totaly different and essentually incompatable.
It's just immoral when sq trys to shut-down and contain DQ --
which, he notes, is just what metaphysics attempts to do. It wants to put
the mystical, beyond-words undifferenteated, pre-intellectual Being into
words and concepts and catagories.
> Life is of higher value than Matter and so on upwards. If you say
> that the "proto-social" (level?) - of the primitives - had more
> easy access to DQ, then (primitive) Life were even better off - not
> to speak of Matter!!!
Sounds strange but that's the Eastern view that a lot of Pirsig's
ideas grow from. Taoism argues explicitly that the best world is low-tech,
"primative," ultra-simplifyed... And a rock is used by Laotzu as an
example of perfected *wu-wa* -- the "non-interfearing" state Taoist aim
for. If we could just be like that rock... we'd be perfect!
Take the Guarden of Eden Myth:
At first there is no seperation between man and beast (he runs
naked), preditor and prey, man and woman (theres no reproduction going on
here), man and God or Heven and earth (God talkes walks through the garden
in the evenings). But then man eats of the fruit of the tree of knowledge
-- knowledge of good and evil, and all other pairs of opposits too. Now
he's in trouble. And god has to throw him out and post some guards on the
gate for fear that he'll get back in and try the fruit of the tree of
eternity -- which of course would make man just like Him.
The same "mythogem" is found in Hinduism, where there is only One,
Vishnu, but he sleeps and dreams himself as manny. (This is what we all
do when we dream. We dream I-This, but of course it's all really I.) So
the universe is Vishnu's dream. Here we can see the *lila* -- the wiling
"play as if."
You can see the parallel. The fall from DQ, undiferentiated
bliss, into the world of divided things. But there is also the promise of
return (in the second Tree of Eden), of re-realizing the eternal in the
temporal moment. The re-appoch to DQ.
In (I think) a letter to Anthony, Pirsig puzzels over the idea of
evolution both out of and towards DQ. That's what all the mystics
describe. Hegel attempted to settle the same question by saying that it
ivolved out of implicit unity, into for-itself-ness, and back into unity
-- but a unity now explicit and fully aware, for it's had the benifet of
the journey. (One of the confusing aspects of Hegel is that he claims that
real philosophy begins w/ the possition reached at the end of his
*Phenominology*, but the *Phenominology* is circuler. It leaves us where
we came in.
> No, from the very first static fallout the DQ
> was "violated" and only through the break with each successive static
> rung was it justified - only to be made into a new static level
> again. So, honestly, I don't see that Q-Intellect is taking the
> evolution more away from DQ than any other level.
Realy? Pirsig does. the naraitor of ZMM speaks of an "uglyness"
about Classical thinking -- thinking w/ the Analytic knife, the
intellectual scalple. The uglyness is that it leads you away from
at-one-ment. You divide and sub-divide, cut and re-cut infiatly. "As you
try to move toward unchanging truth through the application of scientific
method, you actually move away from it!" (ZMM ch10) "All the philosophes
he was studying showed it. The whole university he was attending showed
the same uglieness... It was reason itself that was ugly." (ZMM ch11) So
he goes east, and there he finds only confusion and non-sense... because
he was trying to disect Eastern philosophy under the Western
"metaphysical" knife. "[E]verything you think you are and everything you
think you percieve are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division
is to become enlightend. Logic presumes a seperation of subject and
object; therefor logic is not final wisdom." (ch12)
But then he goes on: "Pheadrus never got involved in meditation
because it made no sense to him. In his entire time in India "sense" was
always logical consistancy and he couldn't find any honest way to abandon
this belief. That, I think, was creditable on his part." (ch12) So the S-O
divided logic is good, it makes "sense." But, it also hinges on divison
-- especially the S-O division. So how *can* it be moving us towards DQ?
And, as Pirsig says in LILA, whenever sq does "grasp" DQ that's immoral
anyway.
>
> > Well, I think I have the answer, because i think Heiddeger was
> > dead-wrong when he said their is no "Post-metaphysical." Because if their
> > is a post-metaphysical experience of DQ -- a way to use the intellect's
> > S-O logic and still get to DQ's at-one-ment -- that would be a higher
> > value experience of DQ than what the "Pre-Metaphysical" primatives and the
> > "Non-Metaphysicl" Taoists and Budhists do!
>
> Yes you have! That's what my SOTAQI is all about: Returning with
> the insight that one can use the S-O logic seen as the most valuable
> part of the Quality set-up yet subordinate to DQ. I think
> we have it settled Donny!
I hope not. The goal, here, is to keep thinking from
setteling. :)
Pirsig says, "Sometimes its better to travel than to arrive." I
think that it can be taken as axiomatic that in philosophy it's always
better to travel than arive.
Actually "the answer" doesn't stop w/ SOTAQI. It bairly even
begins there. Nope, the "answer" to "post-metaphysical" thinking, a logic
that would lead back into the Eastern "non-metaphysical" mode involves the
shift from 2nd Philosophy ("The skeptical deconstruction and
reconstruction of the correct picture of the world"... or, generaly
"science") to 1st philosophy (REAL Metaphysics). It's the shift from
answer-thinking to question-thinking. Science, logic, reason... *proof*
are methods for setteling an argument, like the rules of a game. So what
system of proof stands above proof? That's why philosophy -- metaphysics
-- doesn't seek to "prove" anything, or "hold a position on" anything.
But I don't want to get into that now.
The problem here is -- when you've been pursuing some "woodpath"
or another for several weeks, months or even years -- the sombody asks
"Where are you at?" or "What do you see?" --you describe your surrondings
but leave out the whole journy, and you ether confuse things or sound
completly nuts.
>
> Extracts from Ken's reply to Donny's Heidegger letter:
>
> > > Donny wrote:
> > > This rock doesn't exist "out there" in the world. It exists --
> > > it *really* exists as an abstraction, a token passed around in our
> > > conversation. The InOrgPoVs are *only* abstractions -- schema,
> > > part of the correct picture of the world (CPOW).
>
> > > > Clark wrote:
> > > > With Dr Johnson in mind, if I stub my abstracted toe on the
> > > > imaginary rock then I have to cut the toe our of my imaginary
> > > > shoe so that I can walk until my imaginary toenail comes off and
> > > > a new one replaces it.
KEN, you make my point for me. Like I said, it's so obvious you
don't see it. Did you REALLY stub your toe on a rock? Or is this rock
we're speaking of just that -- an object we're speaking of -- a token
passed along in our discourse? A great ontological tool is Goffman's
question, "What's going on here, now?"
If asked "Ken, What's going on here, now?" Would you say, "I just
banged my damn toe on a friggen rock!" No, you wouldn't. You might say,
"I'm discussing the ontological nature of 'the rock' -- a mannor of
speaking, sort of like when a medical textbook talks about 'the leg' --
over e-mail w/ the LS."
One way to define Metaphysics is to say it analyzes how we go
about, and are capable of, answering the question: What's going on here,
now?
I'll get into this more when I reply to Magnus.
>
> Ken. Relax. Don't be led astray here. I think Donny is just testing
> the various (SOM) alternatives to demonstrate their impossibility. The
> "really out there" and the "only in here" are the two dead ends of S-O
> M thinking. Not of the S-O logic ......seen as Q-Intellect! (SOTAQI).
I didn't say the rock was "only in here," either. It's neither
"really" out ther nor in here.
>
> > > Donny wrote:
> > > This schema is very practical. It has one big problem. It
> > > endorses the idea of the objective, "thing-itself" reality "out
> > > there" somewhere. Like: It explains (nicely so!) the existence of
> > > a rock as a set of InorgPoVs... but this picture leaves something
> > > out: US!! Us -- the subject, imaginatively projecting this object
> > > of the world. S and O arise together out of the Quality Event
>
> > > > Clark wrote:
> > > > Donny, US was not around when that rock was formed. You are
> > > > projecting the Quality idea from the standpoint of humanity.
> > > > Humanity is an eye blink in the history of the universe.
>
> Ken.You are right, but we have to make the obvious observation that
> Q_Intellect is a plane "conquered" only by the human race, so
> 'world-views' came with us. Donny has a point here ......had I
> only understood why he starts on 'subjects projecting objects'
> SOM sounding stuff. I hope he is just testing to see if reception is
> good :-).
The idea, Bo, is simpler, I think, than you're making it out to
be. If a group of people are talking about the law of gravity, then this
law is an object they know -- knowing subject/known object. If you ask
"How does this object exist?" then the answer is: "It exists as a token
being passed along (via moral guidlines) in our conversation." That's how
this rock exists. That's how Santa Clause exists, how these so-called
"InOrgPoVs" exist. Where were the InOrgpoVs before Pirsig came up w/ 'em.
Up in the Platonic Heavens w/ Newton's laws?
W/o humanity there is no law of gravity, there arn't any rocks,
birds, suns, or time, or whatever. There's only sand. That's it. Just
sand. (See my soon to come response to Magnus for clairification.)
I gotta' run.
TTFN
Donny
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