From: Scott Roberts (jse885@cox.net)
Date: Sun Aug 21 2005 - 22:52:12 BST
Sam,
Of course, I'm not the person you want to answer this, but what the hell. It
gives me a chance to toot the contradictory identity horn.
Sam said:
I'm genuinely interested in having my lack of understanding corrected. I've
spent ages bashing my head against it, with various fruitful and
non-fruitful results. So I'm in a state of beginner's mind. Paul assures me
that Pirsig's explanation of 'experience' is not SOM (and as I think he is
generally very sound, I give his views a lot of respect). So how about you
let go of the karma dumping, and try to actually answer my concern?
What is the word 'experience' doing in the MoQ?
As I say, I know what it means in the standard Cartesian/Lockean/empirical
tradition - which is pretty much how James uses it - but Pirsig denies the
SOM, as demonstrated in the quotations you put in.
Scott:
Somewhere in ZAMM, Pirsig says that value lies between subject and object.
But later in the book, and in the whole of LILA, he changes that to saying
that value exists prior to the subject and object. The problem is made worse
in LILA by not distinguishing between two different meanings of subject and
object, which I have been calling S/O[1] (synonyms for mind and matter) and
S/O[2] (subject as whatever is aware of any object, mental or material). In
the MOQ, only S/O[1] is treated and overcome. S/O[2] is ignored, and it is
S/O[2] that, I think, is what is involved in your concern.
The only way the MOQ can say that value (aka, in the MOQ, experience) exists
prior to S/O[2], is by appealing to mystical revelation. But it turns out
that that appeal is to a particular interpretation of mystical revelation,
what Chi-tsang calls the stage 1 of understanding the "two truths" doctrine
in Buddhism (see the Snakes and Ladders thread). In that stage 1, there is
something undivided (called Emptiness, or in the MOQ, DQ) and any division
(e.g. into S/O[2]) is conventional truth. Hence the MOQ says that value is
prior to S/O[2]. But to move past the idolatrous stage 1, one must empty out
this "undivided Emptiness". That can be done by restoring the view that
value lies between subject[2] and object[2]. To put it another way, the
division into S/O[2] *is* the value -- which is what Bo has been saying,
though Bo, mistakenly IMO, restricts intellect to just the S/O[2] form. But
the point is that some form, some division is required for there to be
experience or value. One can see this in our own limited intellects. The
intellect does divide, but in the act of dividing it also undivides, in that
it is (with some effort) aware *that it is dividing*. The divided and the
undivided are in contradictory identity. Each constitutes the other as it
denies the other. One cannot say that experience comes first, nor can one
say that S/O comes first.
- Scott
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