From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Sep 23 2005 - 16:54:26 BST
Hello Rebecca,
Rebecca said:
Because if he did, in fact, equate experience with reality then I'm going to
have to disagree with him but I'm not sure that's what he's doing. And is
that experience a physical experience or could it be a mental conception,
like a fantasy world created in fiction? When we stop reading, does that
fantasy world cease to exist? Does it exist even when we ARE reading?
Matt:
I think Pirsig is making experience synonymous with reality, but he does so
to dissolve typical philosophical contrasts, like between physical
experience and mental conception (as you noted earlier that the rejection of
the mind/matter duality is one of Pirsig's essential points). The contrast
has usually been the experiencer (the Subject) and the experienced (the
Object) and this is Pirsig's enemy in the Subject-Object Metaphysics (SOM).
By erasing the constrast, though, he doesn't necessarily become an idealist,
which I suspect is what you might have a problem with. As you said, "I do,
however, disagree that the existence of physical objects depends on our
experience of them." You fear that, by saying experience is synonymous with
reality, we are forced to say that rocks depend on our seeing them to exist.
While Pirsig has flirted with idealism in a number of places throughout
his writings (from ZMM all the way to Copleston Annotations), most of what
he has set up in his philosophy doesn't require it. All that is required to
statify our realistic intuitions, our suspicion that rocks are still going
to be there after humans have blown themselves off the planet, is the
acknowledgement that some things, like rocks, our causally independent of
us. Some things, like dreams, are not.
Pirsig integrates this acknowledgement through his system of static levels.
Because Quality=Reality=Experience, when we talk about static patterns of
Quality, we are talking about patterns of experience, be they inorganic,
bio, social, or intellectual (as Pirsig set them out). When Pirsig says
that experience is reality, he basically uncouples the idea of experiencing
something from an exclusively human activity, so that, roughly, rocks
experience other rocks. Inorganic patterns will persist after humanity's
light has been snuffed because inorganic patterns only experience other
inorganic patterns--and there will be plenty of those around until the Big
Crunch.
By the by, I think your assertion earlier that in Pirsig's philosophy "it's
the Existence/non-Existence divide that is primary" might be the first time
I've really seen that emphasized. It should prove to be fairly
controversial given predominate interpretations of Pirsig, but I think it
points in a direction that needs to be traveled down.
Matt
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