From: David M (davidint@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Sun Oct 16 2005 - 21:47:20 BST
DMB/Matt
sounds fair to me, I think the thing here
is that we should recognise that Rorty does
help undermine SOM and looks more
acceptable to academic philosophy than Pirsig,
but the reason for that is not Pirsig's mistakes but
the fact that Pirsig is going even further than Rorty.
Matt does not seem able to join us on this.
DM
----- Original Message -----
From: "david buchanan" <dmbuchanan@hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 16, 2005 1:09 AM
Subject: RE: MD Rhetoric
> Fellow Rhetoricians:
>
> DMB said:
> This is why I think Pirsig and Hayes ARE saying the same thing. They're
> both talking about an experience in which judgement is absent.
>
> Matt replied:
> I'm actually very surprised by this. ...Why did Pirsig call the ultimate
> reality Quality (which he uses interchangeably with Value) if what you say
> is true? It boggles my mind to think that one can have value at the heart
> of it all without valuing. Touching the stove is not a neutral
> impression, as you would have it, its a negative experience, a low-Quality
> situation, as Pirsig says in the very passage in
> question.
>
> dmb explains:
> Well, it all started back in Montana when Sarah Vinkie asked him if he was
> teaching "Quality". There followed many questions about whether quality
> resides in the composition papers or in the eye of the readers, in the
> object or the subject. Then came a Copernican solution; neither. The
> revolutionary move was to assert that Quality creates subjects and
> objects. And now, many years later, you seem to be insisting that quality
> is in the subject, in the valuing. Let's take another look at the hot
> stove example...
>
> "This value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any "self' or any
> "object" to which it might be later assigned. It is more real than the
> stove. Whether the stove is the cause of the low quality or whether
> possibly something else is the cause is not yet absolutely certain. But
> that the quality is low is absolutely certain. It is the primary empirical
> reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are
> later intellectually constructed." (Lila, 5)
>
> dmb continues:
> As I understand it, this paragraph is CONTRASTING "pure sensation" or
> "immeditate experience" with the intellectual constructs or "creative
> judgements" that quickly follow. This is an explanation of what it means
> to say that Qualtiy creates subjects and objects, to say that the stove
> and the self come after that immediate value. It seems you want to put the
> self into the pre-intellectual experience despite the fact that this self
> is a construct that comes later. This is also why I object to the "brain
> states" description of the mystical experience, by the way. Perhaps I'm
> reading too much into things here, but it seems to me that we can't
> rightly talk about immediate experience in terms of subjects and objects,
> in terms of judgements and physiological causes because that kind of
> language brings the subjective self back into it.
>
> Matt said:
> ...Pure sensations, in one form or another, were very fashionable after
> Locke, particularly at the beginning of this century. I don't know if
> they're "in" now, but I don't think they're as rare as you seem to think.
>
> dmb says:
> I wonder if Locke or any other enlightenment philosopher thought about
> "pure sensations" in terms of anything other that sensory data, which
> assumes a subject and object as starting points. I seriously doubt it.
>
> Matt said:
> Thing is, I'm not dismissing mystic enlightenment at all "as some kind of
> brain fart or crazy platypus." I am saying that _one_ way to describe it
> is as a neuron firing (if you're saying it _can't_ be so described, then
> you are committing the mistake of "insisting on a particular description"
> that you denied you were doing earlier).
>
> dmb says:
> I think there's a HUGE difference between "insisting on a particular
> description" and objecting to some particular descriptions such as this
> one. To describe the mystical experience in terms of brain states is
> classic SOM reductionism. Its the classic case of scientific objectivity
> trying to provide physical and anatomical explanations for mental events.
> And it seems to me that the DQ/sq distinction is meant to prevent this
> sort of reduction. It seems to me that this is a classic case of trying to
> get at the reality (neurons) behind the appearance (enlightenment).
>
> Matt continued:
> What I'm saying is that "pure sensation" is not a good description for
> epistemological purposes. You appear to be saying that we _need_ to keep
> it no matter what, otherwise we'll be excluding "mysticism the way SOM
> does." You say, "The distinction [between divided and undivided reality]
> is made to include a category of experiences that were previously
> excluded, to bring in a whole range of human experiences and put them on
> the philosophical table for
> consideration." You are saying that these experiences were there, but
> Western philosophy was just rejecting them, ignoring them. But how can
> you say that without the word "adequacy"? You think Pirsig is better
> because he more _adequately_ describes our experience, he describes the
> _whole_ range rather than just part, he doesn't ignore certain sections of
> it. You don't want to say that, as when you say, "I don't think I'm
> talking about 'adequacy' because I'm not trying to 'represent' something
> already there," but you _are_ trying to represent something "already
> there"---the range of human experiences that the West leaves off the
> philosophical table. So as far as I can see you haven't yet given me a
> replacement purpose for "adequate" that keeps you well away from
> epistemology and the appearance/reality distinction, the need to answer
> the skeptic.
>
> dmb replies:
> How can we talk about two categories of experience in terms of reality and
> appearances? If the static/Dynamic split is understood covering all of
> reality and they are two kinds of experience, then there is no distinction
> between appearance and reality. It makes no sense to talk about the
> distinction except if one first assumes something like objective realtiy
> as the cause of subjective appearances. As my trusty Oxford Companion
> says, 'Rorty's central idea, in its main outlines, repeats the objection
> of the 19th century idealists to the correspondence theory of truth, that
> there is no access, except through other beliefs, to the fact in
> correspondence to which the truth of our beliefs is supposed to consist."
> And under the heading "physicalsim in the philosophy of mind" we are told
> that "Non-reductive physicalism, arguably the current orthodoxy on the
> mind-body problem, holds that although all concrete objects and events in
> the world are physical, some of them can have higer-level attributes, in
> particular psychological properties, irreducible to their lower-level
> physical characteristics. Most non-reductive physicalists, however,
> acknowledge the priority of physical properties and physical laws, ..."
> When these two are added together, one gets the impression that Rorty is a
> SOMer whose critique of philosophy consists largely in rejecting the idea
> that there is an epistemically accessable reality beyond the appearances.
> He's rejecting the correspondence theory because there is no way for the
> pre-existing subject to correspond with this pre-existing physical
> reality. And yet he seems to be working within the belief that we are
> psychological creatures in a physical world. As I understand it, Rorty has
> decided to simply declare that philosophy is impossible because of this
> unbridgable gap.
>
> But Pirsig rejects the correspondence theory, not because the gap is too
> wide, but because it is a product of mistaken assumptions, metaphysical
> assuptions about subjects in an objective reality. In the hot stove
> example, when he says that the low quality itself is more real that the
> self and the stove that come later, he's not saying the low quality
> corresponds to reality better than selves and stoves do. He's saying that
> the low quality experience can be followed by more than one description.
> The static explanations that follow will depend a huge matrix of pervious
> explanations, will depend on the personal and cultural patterns used in
> that explanation, but the low quality experience itself depends on nothing
> of the sort. Its a low quality experience no matter what we say about it
> later. See, I think your "skeptic" is barking up the wrong tree. You're
> interpreting Pirsig's claims as if he were still operating with SOM
> assumptions, like your man Rorty. But these are the very assumptions that
> he is attacking.
>
> More later.
>
> Thanks.
>
> dmb
>
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