Hi Rob,
I'm just buying in on your debate because I liked your analogy with
sculpting marble.
When you say "Nobody can ever truely experience the marble though", I
suspect you are muddying the water. Pirsig's argument would be that
experiencing the marble is what comes first. When I sit on a hot stove there
is no doubt about the experience. How it is described may be an issue. The
nature of pain derived from such contact can only approximately be captured
in words.
Hameed Ali has a chapter in one of his books entitled 'Bare Bottoms
on Ice', a somewhat similar example of the immediacy of experience. In it he
says "To penetrate to reality involves a process of unlearning, a shedding
or a dropping-away of mind, getting rid of all we know." He goes on "It is
possible to be aware of reality before having words of any sort, before the
dawn of cognition, before the beginning of thinking and conceptualization.
Everything else is a repetition of the past, of ideas, images, and feelings
from the past."
So I would argue that it is our mental input, subsequent to the event, that
creates the worldview. We only make sense of experience through the complex
filters of language based on boundaries created by culture. But the
experience itself is primal.
Having said that, I would also argue that much of our experience is censored
or tainted by our own projections and fantasies. So the path to purifying
experience is the recognition of the extent of our own mediation of
experience in our day to day worlds. This I see as the main function of such
practices as meditation. It is also closely linked to therapy.
So the 'marble' is a mental construct insofar as it is a derivative of
experience. The pain in 'my' bottom is also a derivative of the actual
sensation of sitting on the hot stove. Pirsig argues that subjects and
objects are constructs derived from experience, shaped by culture and
language, but if the reality of experience is challenged, I can only respond
that there is nothing of which I can be more certain. This is not to say
that the marble does not exist, nor that I do not exist, but our existence
is a second order truth, derived from the immediate truth of experience.
John B
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
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 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:01:43 BST