From: David M (davidint@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Mon Nov 21 2005 - 14:03:23 GMT
Matt
Do apples have a taste you can
get someone else to experience by
describing it?
David M
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt Kundert" <pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Sunday, November 20, 2005 6:17 PM
Subject: Re: MD Language, SOM, and the MoQ
Marsha,
The interpretation you gave of DQ and SQ I think are dead on the mark as far
as the standard interpretation, which we could also call the Pirsig
interpretation.
I'm suggesting a change in that interpretation, which is to say a shift in
our philosophies away from some of Pirsig's language, because I think that
interpretation hits philosophical snags. To illustrate some of the problems
I see with "pre-intellectual experience," and make my suggestion more
attractive, I want to run through a brief dialectical encounter. The
episodes will be loosely related and tied to the other uses of DQ.
I want to start with "pre-" in the sense of inexpressible again. The tough
question for inexpressibility is How do you know "pre-" is inexpressible?
Every time you try to enunciate why its inexpressible is a case of
expressibility. And, how do you know it is impossible to express the
pre-intellectual and not simply difficult? Marking off an entire area of
experience tout court as impossible to express before any attempt at
expression is what I elsewhere called baptizing a problem. Instead of
dealing with the practical difficulties of expression, you declare that area
as an eternal feature of reality.
Next I want turn to "pre-" in the sense of unlensed. In your description of
the relation between the two kinds of experience, you used the analogy of
intellectual static patterns _filtering_ our experience. This is an image
Pirsig uses and I want to focus on his glasses analogy from the beginning of
Ch. 8. Pirsig says, "The culture in which we live hands us a set of
intellectual glasses to interpret experience with.. If someone see things
through a somewhat different set of glasses or, God help him, _takes his
glass off_, the natural tendency . is to regard his statements as somewhat
weird.." The italicized part is Pirsig emphasizing the existence of going
"unlensed," which is pre-intellectual experience, seeing things with the
naked eye. The question I want to ask is simple: How do you know you've
become unlensed?
Ignoring the problems of inexpressibility, how do you become convinced that
what you experienced was unlensed experience? The ability to convince is
the ability to justify, to others or yourself. But say you justify to
someone else that the experience you just had was unlensed. Haven't you
just given them a new lens to filter their experience with, so now, with
your guidance, they'll be able to identify that kind of experience as
unlensed experience? More importantly, though, how do you know that _you_
weren't using that lens, which you just enunciated to another, unconsciously
in your original experience, the unconscious lens you were handed from your
education? And even more striking, how do you know that Pirsig hasn't just
given you a new lens to filter experience by making the distinction between
lensed/unlensed and showing you how to use it by examples? That when you
say, "It seems to me there are two realities experienced by humans," it
seems to be this way because of the lens you're seeing with?
This is the most important problem with using the glasses/filter analogy.
It relates to Pirsig's identification of DQ with the experience of babies.
At the end of Ch. 9, Pirsig equates the learning a baby goes through, making
"simple distinctions such as pressure and sound," as DQ. "From the baby's
point of view, something, he knows not what, compels attention." The effort
to become unlensed is the effort to be a baby again. But why do we want to
be babies again? Would babies have built the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of
Liberty? No, but the French, working this side of the course of Western
civilization, would have. So why are we so eager to toss aside what made
Shakespeare and Van Gogh and Lao-tzu possible? And more to the point, _we
can't actually ever be babies again_. In an earlier post I linked the
desire to be a baby again with the desire to be pure again, despite our
fallen nature. I didn't even realize when I wrote it that Pirsig himself
makes just that connection: "The only person who doesn't pollute the mystic
reality of the world with fixed metaphysical meanings is a person who hasn't
yet been born-and to whose birth no thought has been given. The rest of us
have to settle for being something less pure." (Ch. 5) This strikes me as a
passage indicating the impossibility of ever being pure, of having to simply
try and figure out how to deal with impurity. And if one goes that far, I
would think the first thing one would try and do is dissolve the distinction
between purity and impurity. We _are_ always lensed, and in fact becoming
unlensed doesn't even make any sense. And that should suggest that the lens
analogy isn't even very useful.
The next link I want to turn to is "pre-" in the sense of "betterness." I
don't just mean the sense of DQ-as-innovation, I mean the sense that, all
other things being equal, DQ is better in toto than SQ, pre-intellectual
experience better than intellectual experience. The question is again
simple, How do you know pre-intellectual is better than intellectual?
Ignoring the problems of inexpressibility and lensing, we can simply focus
on its non-linguistic nature. How would you know non-linguistic is better
than linguistic? My continual answer to "how would you know" has been,
"Well, you'd need to justify it and that's linguistic," but here that
question _can_ be answered because you _could_ justify the betterness of
watching a sunset to talking about a sunset without accidentally evacuating
the area where the justification is supposed to occur (unlike for
inexpressibility and lensing).
But now there're two different questions. The first is Why should
non-linguistic experience, all other things being equal, _always_ be better
than linguistic? Why should eating a hot dog always be better than reading
Proust? Or watching a sunset always be better than writing a poem about a
sunset? One could give justification for why they are always better _for
you_, i.e. justify it to yourself, but how do you justify it for everyone,
_whether they like it or not_, which is the force of the intended split?
The second question poses another problem: how does a non-linguistic
experience innovate on linguistic experience? Now I have gone back to the
other sense of DQ, as innovation, as the breaking of old static patterns,
and I want to know why _all_ innovation should be intrinsically
non-linguistic? Is it really the case that the only linguistic innovation,
the breaking of patterns, happens when you stub your toe, see a sunset, get
eaten by a tiger, or go shrooming? Was Pirsig doing nothing Dynamic when he
sat in his office or on his boat trying to work out the Metaphysics of
Quality by breaking its ties to SOM?
One could argue that Pirsig was simply working out the implications of his
original peyote experience, but are we really going to argue that? That
Pirsig didn't use any linguistic ingenuity of his own aside from the peyote
experience? What I would want to suggest is that in the case of the first
question, you can't justify for everyone that sunsets are better than poems
of sunsets without violating the Quality thesis, "Quality is what you like."
In the case of the second question, I would suggest that DQ-as-innovation
should be pulled apart from DQ as non-linguistic. DQ-as-innovation cuts
across the divide between linguistic and non-linguistic. Sometimes you're
caused to break some patterns by something non-linguistic, sometimes by
toiling around in the linguistic patterns you're given reason to break them
apart.
The last sense I want to turn to is "pre-" as just _different_ than
intellectual experience. Paul once took this line in dialogue with me. But
if you trade inexpressible for difficult-to-express, eschew lenses and
filtering, and make DQ cut across non-linguistic/linguistic, then you've
already gone a long ways to the sense in which I use "non-intellectual." At
this point, the two will look indistinguishable. The only sense of "pre-"
(as opposed to "non-") that makes any sense at this point, is the sense that
you stub your toe before you say "Ow." But aside from that commonsensical
point, there isn't any further philosophical utility as far as I can see.
And at this point it becomes cogent to ask in what sense the intellectual is
a barrier to the non-? That's what this whole discussion revolves around,
that Pirsig thinks that the intellectual--language--is blocking something.
But what is the intellectual a barrier to at this point? To you stubbing
your toe?
In the end, I would suggest three different senses of DQ. The first is
DQ-as-non-intellectual-experience. This is the DQ of stubbing your toe,
watching a sunset, and shrooming. In this sense, DQ causes you to shift
your static patterns of belief in some way (though it doesn't offer you any
reasons to do so). The second sense is DQ-as-pre-reflective. This is the
DQ of offering off the cuff answers to questions like "Is that sunset
beautiful?" or "Which student paper was better?" or "Does Lila have
quality?" The third sense is DQ-as-innovation. This is the DQ of your
static patterns being shifted to the point of breaking. This can happen
when a non-intellectual experience shifts them or when you shift them
yourself by reflection. All three of these senses can be seen to have links
to the others, but I think all three need to be distinguished and that its
when you conflate them that problems start to emerge. All three of these
senses are commonsensical and there may be good, practical wisdom to be
drawn from them, but I think problems will also emerge when you start to
push them into philosophical service.
Matt
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