From: david buchanan (dmbuchanan@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Oct 16 2005 - 19:26:01 BST
Howdy MOQers:
David M said:
is not valuing-in-itself as you say not another word for causality, I am
starting to think that is the case and is what we are talking about
regarding undifferentiated quality....
dmb says:
I don't know what "valuing-in-itself" is, but I would say that the MOQ
replaces causality with value so that we say "B values pre-condition A"
rather than saying "A causes B." Some have suggested that this is merely a
linguistic shift designed to make values applicable at the inorganic level,
which is brimming over with casual laws and causal relations. But I think
there's more to it than that. These laws are usually construed in such a way
that we get the impression of a physical universe that's utterly brain-dead
and deterministic. By contrast, formulations such as "B values pre-condition
A" gives the impression of a universe driven by desire, a universe that
yearns rather than obeys, one that evolves rather than merely unfolds
according to unbreakable laws. And of course this alternative picture of the
physical universe goes along quite nicely with human experience, where we
are not caused to behave or believe things so much as we are led forward by
dim apprehensions of we know not what - as my anthropomorphization so
clearly indicates.
Matt replied to David M:
Yeah, that's the way it appears to be working to a certain extent, but the
problem I have with saying that is that I don't think we can call it
"valuing" without mucking around with the problems I've been trying to
illustrate, or at least making a distinction between the two types of
valuing seems to reinstitue the problems the introduction of "valuing" as
the master concept was supposed to avoid. For instance, you reference
Passmore's book in the other post, how "traditional empiricism assumes that
we can make a clear distinction between what we experience and the value or
importance of that experience" and Heidegger, Pirsig, and DMB are trying to
challenge that distinction. This is exactly the problem. I've been arguing
that Pirsig's introduction of Quality is designed to eliminate that
distinction, but his reliance on the distinction between pre- and
post-intellectual experience resurrects that distinction and that DMB's
recent formulation of that distinction (with the use of "pure sensation")
brings out that resurrection explicitly.
dmb says:
I'm confused. Its seems that I have been "trying to challange that
distinction" and "resurrect that distinction" at the same time. Maybe I
wouldn't be so full of contradictions if I understood what the traditional
empiricists meant by it and why Heidegger was in the mood to eliminate it.
Despite my ignorance on this point, it seems reasonable to assume that the
traditional empiricists were operating within a SOM framework while Pirsig
isn't. So even without knowing what this distinction is supposed to do, it
still seems pretty unlikely that this SOM distinction can be directly
translated into the MOQ context or otherwise equated with the DQ/sq
distinction. I suspect that this traditional distinction is rendered
irrelevant or otherwise dissolved in the MOQ, but its only a guess at this
point. And if I had to venture a guess at this point...
To say that "creative judgements" and "static patterns" of interpretation
are absent in the "pre-intellectual experience" is NOT to say that value or
quality is absent in that "primary empirical reality". In the hot stove
example we see that the direct experience of low quality is quite real and
quite compelling even before the creative judgements about stoves and rump
roasts can even begin. We love that new song before we can give any kind of
reason or assign any kind of merit. So the distnction between DQ and sq in
these cases is between an experience in which value is sensed directly and
an experience mediated by the conceptual forms of one's culture and life. So
it seems that there is no place in the MOQ for a value-free experience. Its
an impossibility in the MOQ. But there is a distinction between direct and
mediated experience, between Dynamic and static reality.
I don't see how that fits into the traditional empiricists' distinction,
which presumably refers to the conscious and deliberate evaluations and
assessments of subjective experience in an objective reality, rather than
the unconscious and habitual static interpretations that we automatically
preform all day long. Presumably, they were operating with metaphysical
assumptions.
Thanks.
dmb
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