Re: MD Experience before intellect

From: David M (davidint@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Sat Oct 01 2005 - 19:32:04 BST

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    Pirsig write in Lila:

    Quality doesn't have to be defined. You understand it without definition,

    ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior
    to intellectual abstractions.

    Let me interpret. Experience is not voluntary. We cannot avoid being aware
    of the experience that is ours.

    Our awareness of it takes the form of quality, this quality always has a
    value, either good or bad. You cannot

    choose to value it as either good or bad, it is already valued (you could
    see this as a causal relationship) .

     Trying to make sense of these experiences

    of what is good and bad (pleasure and pain -in all its forms, eg the
    pleasure of 'yellow', the anxiety of 'black')

    is undertaken by forming concepts. Pirsig here introduces the term
    intellectual. Intellectually we have a choice

    about how to take things. Prior to reaching this human realm of experience
    the cosmos has already made

    many choices about what is good and bad and what should endure. This of
    course determines what us human

    beings find to be good and bad in our experience (our bodies em-body all
    this knowledge and choice already),

    to this extent, as Scott points out, their is something active-intelligent
    about all the SQ created proir to the

    human moment. Pirsig simply calls this activity DQ and reserves the term
    intelligent for human activity.

    This seems a worthy choice to me because to confuse the human form of
    activity with the activity priorto

    humans would be lisleading. But as Scott argues it is equally misleading to
    see these activities as unrelated

    and fundamentally rhe same. It is only because of DQ that it is possible for
    humans to be intelligent and active.

    Agree/disagree?

    DM

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