From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Fri Nov 15 2002 - 15:51:33 GMT
Hi Sam, Marco, Scott, Matt:
I nodded "Yes" again and again in Sam's post to Marco of 13 Nov. The
following passage especially caught my eye since I had just finished
reading Matt's post to Scott in which Matt again defends Rorty's idea
that a pre-linguistic reality doesn't exist:
>1.8 You (Marco) say: "The great artist, while following his own
>passions, is able
> to communicate "something" to the others. And actually he becomes "great"
> only when the others get "something"." That, in a different idiom, is a
> beautiful expression of what I am trying to articulate in my talk about
> 'tradition' - the tradition is the repository of the great communications
> of the past, and is (to a large but not exclusive degree) determinative of
> what counts as a 'great communication' now.
Yes. Marco's "something" and Sam's "tradition" are both things "sensed"
before being linguistically understood.
> The sense of self originates in a biologically generated mental construct,
> doubtless one that is shaped by the boundary of the skin (SOM thinking
> anyone?), and it is also - to my mind - undoubtedly something that is
> shared by other animals.
Yes. Again, a non-linguistic "sense" or preconceptual awareness is an
"apprehension" rather than a linguistic-based, symbolic-dependent
"comprehension." I would argue, as does Mortimer Adler and other
philosophers, that such sense is a "special kind of knowing that
eschews all conceptual, linguistic ingredients."
What Pirsig has revealed, unlike any previous philosopher, 18th century
or otherwise, is that this "special kind of knowing" is an intrinsic moral
sense of a moral universe--a sense exemplified by the intuition, "That's
a good dog" prior to thinking "That's a Basset Hound." That, my friends,
is the essence of the Pirsigian revolution.
Platt
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