From: Sam Norton (elizaphanian@kohath.wanadoo.co.uk)
Date: Mon Aug 22 2005 - 11:38:58 BST
Hi David (DMB),
Cutting to the crucial stuff.
> In Lila's Child Pirsig says, "in a subject-object metaphysics, this
> experience is between a pre-existing object and subject, but in the MOQ,
> there is no pre-existing subject and object." And likewise, in ZAMM he
> says, "Quality is not just the result of a collision between subject and
> object. The very existence of subjects and objects themselves is deduced
> from the Quality event.". Let's think about that for starters, eh? Both of
> Pirsig's sentences are expressing the same basic idea and I would guess
> this idea as at the heart of what it is you don't yet get. Both of them
> are denying the most basic assumption of SOM. Both of them are denying
> that subjects and objects come BEFORE experience.
Pirsig, from what I can see, moves from Quality coming before subjects and
objects, to (his word) the 'event' coming before, and he equates that with
'experience'. I understand that, but this is the step I have difficulty
with. Why does Quality = 'experience'?
> Experience in the MOQ is NOT the result of a collision between subjects
> and objects, but rather we interpret experience in those terms. <snip> But
> what he's saying is that it is just an assumption. Its not really an
> experience so much as a way we've been trained to habitually think about
> experience. We habitually and automatically interpret experience in terms
> of subjects and objects because of our language and culture, but Pirsig
> say, this is an assumption and not a direct experience.
OK, I *understand* this, but I question it. That is, why is the word
'experience' being moved from it's previous home in SOM to refer to Quality,
the source of the subjects and objects? What is being accomplished thereby?
What I don't understand is the transferral of the word from one context to
another. (This is, by the way, where I think the inheritance from James is
most clear. For it is James who developed 'radical empiricism' and used it
in - I allege - exactly the way Pirsig uses it. A way which, frankly, has
been shot to pieces in the academy, not least thanks to the influence of
Wittgenstein.)
I'm going to stop there in the interests of co-operation and clarity. (Most
of the rest of what you said followed logically from this, so there's little
to dispute)
Sam
"the philosophical, psychological, sociological and now... biological
criticisms of empiricist construals of the grammar
of 'experience' are, by now, cumulatively so devastating as to require, at
the very least, from those who wish to keep such usages alive, *arguments*
and not mere expressions of preference." (Nicholas Lash)
"'Experience' is, of all the words in the philosophic vocabulary,.... the
most difficult to manage; and it must be the ambition of every writer
reckless enough to use the word to escape the ambiguities it contains".
(Michael Oakeshott, 'Experience and its modes', quoted by Lash)
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