From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sat Jan 22 2005 - 23:10:17 GMT
Matt and all MOQers:
Matt said:
I understand Pirsig's attack on SOM looks very much like the attack on the
appearance/reality distinction. I understand that the MoQ is supposed to
take the place of SOM. But in Pirsig's explication of the MoQ, using the
distinctions he does, such as that between mediated and unmediated
experience, he very often seems to fall into traditional problems, problems
he's supposedly already gotten rid of. This is the heart and soul of what
I've been saying, really all I've ever said. There seems to be a tension in
Pirsig's writings.
dmb replies:
Hmm. I already tried to explain why I think you are incorrect on this point.
I tried several times, but you have simply re-asserted your original points
without really addressing what I've said. It might not have been in the form
you would have liked. I'm not even going to try to give it to you in
philosophoslephaleaugical terms, but those were sincere attempts to grapple
with the issues you've raised. If there is something you find disagreeable,
unacceptable, incomprehensible or laughable in my answers, I should hope you
would ask about it or something. What can I do with that? Again, I think you
are incorrectly treating Pirsig's mediated/unmediated distinction AS IF it
were an appearance/reality distinction and this is why it SEEMS to fall into
those traditional problems. Mistaking Pirsig's DQ for Kant's
things-in-themselves, for example, is just such a case. It seems pretty
clear to me that the pesky skeptic is asking Pirsig how he can be certain of
a claim he did not make. That pesky skeptic thinks Pirsig is making a claim
about access to the real reality, but the mediated/unmediated distinction
draws a line between two kinds of experience, not experience and reality.
For Pirsig, quite simply, experience is reality. I get the impression that
you'd really rather not discuss any of the points I made and yet you persist
in asking those impossible questions....
Matt said:
What's more, why don't you ever answer some of the difficult (I would say,
impossible) questions I leave scattered in my posts, questions it would seem
you'd need to be able to answer if you were going to field a
mediated/unmediated distinction? ...Some Questions: "How do we know when we
are being Dynamic? How do we know when we are following Dynamic Quality and
not static patterns? How do we verify it?"
dmb replies:
Apparently we agree that this is an impossible question, but I'd bet that we
think so for different reasons. As I understand it, the mediated/unmediated
distinction is a distinction between two kinds of experience. The experience
came first and the descripton came later. Pirsig is not speculating about
some theorectial state, he's reporting his experience. This might seem
painfully obvious, but the trick is that Pirsig had some unusual experiences
involving study in the East, insanity, electro-shock therapy, peyote and
such. Kant once licked a car battery, but he's no mystic. But Pirsig is and
his static/Dynamic split was made to accommodate that view. Its not that
Pirsig has created the MOQ to refer to just his own experience, of course,
but the reports of many others as well. Take a look at what Pirsig is saying
in LILA just as he's leading up to making that first slice...
"When an American Indian goes into isolation and fasts in order to achieve a
vision, the vision he seeks in not a romantic understanding of the surface
beauty of the world. (Its not seen with the eye of flesh.) Neither is it a
vision of the world's classic intellectual form. (Its not seen with the eye
of the mind.) It is something else. Since this whole metaphysics had started
with an attempt to explain Indian mysticism (Seen with the eye of
contemplation.) Phaedrus finally abandoned this classic-romatic split as a
choice for the primary division of the MOQ. The division he finally setttled
was one he didn't really choose..."
dmb continues:
This echoes a passage from ZAMM where he explains that physical quiet is
fairly easy to achieve, mental quiet is much harder and there is a very,
very difficult form of quiet beyond that. This is where the "vision" comes
in. This is where unmediated experience comes in, in the quiet. How do you
know? Get quiet, that's how. I don't mean to be flippant here. That's the
real answer. Ken Wilber is helpful...
"As G. Spencer Brown said, its very like baking a pie; you follow the recipe
(the injunction), you bake the pie, and then you actually taste it. To the
question, 'What does pie taste like", we can only give the recipe to those
who inquire and let them taste it for themselves.
Likewise with the existence of Spirit: we CANNOT theoretically or verbally
or philosophicall or rationally or mentally describe the answer in any other
ultimately satisfactory fashion except to say; ENGAGE THE INJUNCTION. If you
want to KNOW this, you must DO this. Any other appraoch and we would be
trying to use the eye of the mind to see or state that which can be seen
only with the eye of contemplation, and thus we would have nothing but
metaphysics in the very worst sense - statements without evidence."
dmb continues:
You may recall Pirsig's assertion that "mind and matter, subject and object,
form and substance...are just dialectical inventions". These are the static
interpretions through which we percieve reality and so the idea of making
the mind quiet through meditation and such is to remove those habitual
concepts and thereby get at the experience that originally gave rise to all
those interpretations. This is not a perfect view of the actual scene, it is
simply experience without thses conceptual interpretations. How do you know?
You do what it take to have such an experience. And if Wilber is right, to a
limited extent we can check this experience against the reports of others to
get something like verification...
".....take up the injunction or paradigm of meditation; polish and practice
that cognitive tool until awareness learns to discern the incredibly subtle
phenomena of spiritual data; check your observations with others who have
done so, much as mathematicians will check their interior proofs with others
who have completed the injunctions; and thus confirm or reject your
results."
dmb continues:
I suppose Zen monks have been gathering this kind of "spiritual data" for a
long time even if they wouldn't put it that way. We in the West have that
blindspot, however, and so discussions of experience have always overlooked
or dismissed these kinds of experiences. Our metaphysical assumptions make
it nearly inconcieveable. Wilber wraps it up his pie baking lesson...
"In the West, since Kant - and since the differentiations of modernity -
religion (and metaphysics in general) has fallen on hard times. I maintain
that it has done so precisely because it attempted to do with the eye of the
mind that which can only be done with the eye of contemplation. Because the
mind could not actually deliver the metaphysical goods, and yet kept loudly
claiming that it could, somebody was bound to blow the whistle and demand
real evidence. Kant made the demand, and metaphysics collasped - and rightly
so, in its typical form."
Matt said:
Okay, so I ask myself, "Am I on a Quality path? Is my cross-examination of
Pirsig's philosophy going in the right direction? Am I really detecting an
appearance/reality distinction unbeknownst to Pirsig or his mainline
interpreters?" Answer: "Oh yeah, absolutely." How does one respond to that?"
dmb replies:
Your cross-examination deals with static intellectual forms and its
intellectual quality can be assessed in those terms, but as both Wilber and
Pirsig point out, its a mistake to think intellect can go there. The
unmediated experience is had by getting the intellect to shut the hell up
for a while. The mind's eye can't see DQ any more than eyeballs can register
pi.
I think Paul's analogy worked pretty well. Its like you have a whole set of
fancy tools with which to disassemble philosophies and are frustrated that
these tools don't seem to work on the MOQ. As you see it, there is no escape
and no philosophy is immune. As you see it, I'm just too ignorant, stupid or
stubborn to admit that your tool box is full of lethal magic. And this is
why you've refused to take my explanations seriously, or take them any way
at all.
Intellectual history was my thing in college, and I'm here to tell you there
is more than one way to skin a cat. Pirsig does some pretty serious
deconstruction when it comes to substance and works the history of idea
pretty well. But it seems you've trapped yourself in a particular narrative
that I can hardly relate to. I think Pirsig's story is that philosophy went
wrong long ago in treating Quality as if it were something static, which is
what you seem to be doing in demanding certainty, in confusing it with
Kant's thing-in-themselves, in asserting that a philosophical
cross-examination can be a "Quality path".
I know its a hard pill to swallow, but I think you have to consider the
possibility that you have the wrong idea about Pirsig. Maybe he really
doesn't fall into that old trap. I thought my explanations might show you
how that is, but your responses give the impression that I said nothing at
all. I wonder why. Blindspot?
Pirsig in ZAMM:
What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no
such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those
divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later. The modern mind
sometimes tends to balk at the thought of these dichotomies being inventions
and says, "Well, the divisions were there for the Greeks to discover," and
you have to say, "Where were they? Point to them!" And the modern mind gets
a little confused and wonders what this is all about anyway, and still
believes the divisions were there.
But they weren't, as Phaedrus said. They are just ghosts, immortal gods of
the modern mythos which appear to us to be real because we are in that
mythos. But in reality they are just as much an artistic creation as the
anthropomorphic Gods they replaced."
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