From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Mon Aug 09 2004 - 17:10:58 BST
Hi Ham,
Herewith a few comments on the first part of your chapter entitled "The
Mechanical Garden," with the caveat that my understanding or lack of it my
change as I read more of your philosophy.
The part I refer to has the subhead, ""Reality' is what we experience." As
I went through it I was struck by its similarity to Kant's assertion that
we can never know a "thing in itself," evidenced by your statement, "We
have contact only with the boundaries and surfaces of things, never with
being itself."
Many of your other statements led me to conclude that you are a firm
believer in the philosophy of Idealism, statements such as:
--What we are actually sensing are the responses of our own cerebro-
nervous system.
--The bottom line is we can only know what we experience.
--I do not even know for a certainty that what I have called a rose has a
being of its own distinct from my cognizance of it
The inclusion of "I," "my," "we" and "our" in such statements presumes a
human subject conscious of an object, or simply, no objects without human
experience. Not only is this anthropocentrism, but a major premise of
Subject/Object Metaphysics (SOM) which, as you know, Pirsig rails against
in his Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ).
Given an Idealist view of reality, it's not much of a jump from "Reality
is essentially subjective" to "Reality is just an opinion" to "My opinion
is just as good as yours." Reality then degenerates quickly to the
postmodernist view that "It's a fact there are no facts" or my personal
favorite, "Events believed to be real are really not real but we believe
them to be real because we believe everyone else believes they are real."
Pirsig attempts to escape from all this by putting experience prior to any
subject or object, and making experience (pure awareness) synonymous with
Dynamic Quality. In other words, reality doesn't require the presence of
someone observing something. Reality is the awareness itself, not the
awareness of anything in particular like a mental thing or a material
thing ,or a subject or an object. According to Pirsig, no distinctions,
no differentiations, no dualities are needed to for reality to exist. All
that's needed is Quality, Morality, Value.
Personally I'm of two minds about this. It's hard for me to get over the
hurdles of on the one hand, the tautological nature of the Idealist's
position (If something is just a thought, whoever thinks is just a
thought)), and on the other hand the claim that Quality comes prior to
subjects and objects, a claim being asserted by a subject who must of
necessity come first to make such a claim.
Anyway, it all gets confusing, at least to me, for two reasons: 1) the
built in bias of our language to the subject/object interpretation of
experience (the word "quality" presupposes a quality "of" something) and
2) the violation of common sense of the Idealist view (We cannot eat
oysters as they are in themselves.)
Finally, I'm also somewhat puzzled by your use of the term "value" as it
doesn't seem to connote in your contexts any sense of "goodness" or
"betterness." But, I should reserve judgment until I've read more.
Best,
Platt
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