From: Erin (macavity11@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Nov 21 2005 - 16:57:42 GMT
Hey Matt,
Quality post!
I enjoyed reading this.
When you ask this:
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?
Yes it was dynamic activity.
In this question it seems like you are suggesting
dynamic should not be approached as "not static" but
"better static"??
I get a clear sense of how you disagree with the
standard approach to DQ but could you expand more on
how you do approach DQ.
Thanks,
Erin
--- Matt Kundert <pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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
=== message truncated ===
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