From: Ian Glendinning (ian@psybertron.org)
Date: Wed Feb 16 2005 - 18:18:00 GMT
Arlo,
You know, that knife metaphor made a big impression on me too, I twist
versions of it into many of my posts as you may have spotted.
I wish I had time for deeper review, cos so many things ring bells here.
Pre-lingual, pre-semiotic knowledge is for me what quality is about.
I was much impressed by Eco when I read Kant and the Platypus for exactly
the reasons you cite here, and crucial in pointing out to me that MoQ could
indeed be interpreted in the light of more "serious" philosophy.
I've been doubly impressed recently in reading various neuroscience texts
recently in recognising that there is real physiological evidence for this
pre-semiotic (pre-linguistic-token) kind of experience, being "felt" and
decisions made / acted upon before or without any linguistic interpretation
(eg in split-brain subjects, or others with "word-blindness" (using words in
the most general sense as tokens to represent something in the
consciousness.)
Not sure whether that adds anything except encouragement.
Ian
----- Original Message -----
From: "Arlo Bensinger" <ajb102@psu.edu>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 9:42 PM
Subject: RE: ID/Ling, again (was Re: MD Pure experience and the Kantian
problematic)
> Scott/Paul,
>
> Just to chime in quick...
>
> I am currently working on a paper that links pre-semiosis with Dynamic
> Quality. Pirsig began in ZMM:
>
> The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and
> the building of this structure [semiosis], is something everybody does.
> All the time we are aware of millions of things around us- these changing
> shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine [clip]- aware of
> these things but not really conscious of them [presemiosis] unless there
> is something unusual or unless the reflect something we are predisposed to
> see [based on our cultural-historical semiotic mediation]. [clip] From all
> this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness
> is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection
> mutates it [Quality can never be captured in a semiotic system of this
> distortive process]. [big clip]. To understand what he was trying to do
> it's necessary to see that part of the landscape, inseparable from it,
> which must be understood, is a figure in the middle of it, sorting sand
> into piles.
>
> Pirsig uses the amoeba and heat example, in that the response to heat is
> presemiotic (Dynamic) first, as in "this is poor Quality", and
> semiotically-mediated (in humans) later with the conscious understanding
> of "heat". An infant would respond like the amoeba by having only the
> awareness of low Quality. Eventually, as the infant ages, he/she will be
> able to formulate this experience into a semiotic system to symbollically
> re-experience the experience culturally, but always after the primary DQ
> experience.
>
> Umberto Eco calls the presemiotic experience that prompts semiotic
> response the "Dynamical Object" (the use of Dynamic is coincidental). In
> Kant and the Platypus, Eco says, mirroring Pirsig:
>
> But there is a phenomenon we must understand as presemiotic, or
> protosemiotic (in the sense that it constitutes the signal that gets the
> semiosic process underway), which we will call primary indexicality
> [clip]. Primary indexicality occurs when, amid the thick stuff of
> sensations that bombard us, we suddenly select something that we set
> against the general background and decide we want to speak about it (when,
> in other words, while we live surrounded by luminous, thermile, tactic,
> and interoceptive sensations, only one of these attracts our attention,
> and only afterward we say that it is cold, or we have a sore foot).
>
> Before language, before semiosis, there is only uncategorized,
> unconceptualized, unmediated "experience". Eastern mysticism, in it many
> guises, has an ubiquitous element of "escaping words" either through
> meditation, live burial, paradoxes, koans, etc. This desire to return to
> presemiotic experience, Pirsig links up with "experiencing Dynamic
> Quality". Platt refers to it very eloquently in his writings on art.
>
> With infants, I think their prelingual, presemiotic experience is very
> much pure Dynamic Quality. With adults, the "key" is to return to a state
> of semiosis (language) with some insight or improvement based on your
> journey into presemiosis. Infants are, of course, unable to do this as
> they have not appropriated any semiotic system.
>
> In this sense, language is a form of symbolic violence (to paraphrase
> Bourdieu), in that though it is vital for our survival, and our ability to
> construct static, social-cultural-historical edifices, it does, in effect,
> rip us out of primary, direct experience of the world, and creates the
> false illusion of SOM. A double-edged sword, if you will.
>
> Arlo
>
>
>
>
> At 02:40 PM 2/15/2005, you wrote:
>>Scott
>>
>>Scott said:
>>Hence the gist of my metaphysics: to reject the
>>language/world-without-language distinction.
>>
>>Paul:
>>What about the pre-lingual experience of infants?
>>
>>Regards
>>
>>Paul
>
>
>
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