From: MarshaV (marshalz@charter.net)
Date: Wed Nov 23 2005 - 09:22:16 GMT
At 01:17 PM 11/20/2005, Matt 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.
Your post feels like being asked to sort a huge
pile of mixed seeds. I don't feel up to the
task, but I will give it a try. I'd like to know
where my contradictions might be. But, in the
end, I've long ago accepted living with contradictions.
------------
I'll start by describing my conception of the <I>
who is experiencing. I am a pattern of events; a
pattern of events within a pattern of events
within a pattern of events..., that in turn is
influenced by other pattern of events. Many,
many of these events are of the static quality
variety. I assume I share most of these static
qualities with other human beings, but there are also differences.
>01
>Matt: 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.
Marsha:
I don't believe that the direct experience can't
be expressed. It can never be accurately
expressed. The two events are very
different. It's important to realize
this. Thoughts (words) modify direct experience.
>02
>Matt:
> 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?
Marsha:
I think both lens and filter are good analogies
because they both indicate the interference
between ourselves and what we are
experiencing. But the idea of a grid is also
accurate because it indicates multiple events
manipulating from different directions.
You are having a direct experience when you are
just doing, seeing, accepting, reacting to the
experience. You are not analyzing or
comparing. There's no manipulation by thoughts.
Thinking is what humans do most of the
time. It's a valuable tool, but it's best to
know that it is full of confusion. It IS the
filtering process. The problem is when we think
that the thoughts we are having represent the
external, eternal feature of reality.
I may never be able to think without the
filtering process. I can understand how it
works. Sometimes it works to help me. Sometimes it works hurt me.
Oh well, I'll try to give you one awkward
example. I was brought up being told that the
Communist Manifesto was a document of real
evil. One day someone suggested I read it. It
took all the courage I could muster to buy it. I
read it and it turned out to be an economic
treatise. Poof!!! The evil filter was no
more. It was what it was, some thoughts on the
subject of economics. That experience unlensed
fear from the concept of communism.
>03
>Matt:
>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?
Marsha:
Maybe the analogy that Pirsig writes is a higher
quality lens, filtering grid, or SQ. I have found that to be the case.
I am a bundle of static quality events (lens,
grid of filters), some are helpful, some are
not. I have had a few out of the ordinary
experiences. For me they were direct and
dynamic. Within the social level I participate,
describing them would not be acceptable. The
language would be awkward, and most people would
think I was out of my mind. Being out of my mind
is not a socially acceptable place to be.
>04
>Matt:
>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.
Marsha:
This talk of purity/impurity is too black and white.
Yes, the baby is very close to DQ. We all were
when we were babies, but we've be socialized into
forgetting that experience. The mystic was close
to DQ when he was a baby, he was socialized into
forgetting just like the rest of us. But he
later was again able to experience/realize that
DQ state. The mystic is not in that baby state
because he has both the experience of being
socialized and the experience of DQ
available. That, indeed, must be a very broad perspective.
>05
>Matt:
>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).
Marsha:
There are only events. DQ represents all events
without limitation. In a limited sense SQ is
dynamic because it can be restructured. DQ
cannot be known in total. It is ALL. I don't
believe one is better than the other. They both represent what is available.
The pre-intellectual experience has some
betterness because it points to some of the
limitations of the intellectual experience. The
non-linguistic experience is private. The moment
I want to share it, the linguistic experience is
better for that purpose. But it has a limiting function.
It's not either/or. It's ALL, all we can have at our disposal.
>06A
>Matt:
>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?
Marsha:
Both have there application. The MOQ offers a
better way to construct an interpretation of
experience. It is more inclusive.
>06B
>Matt:
>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?
Magic. By being open. Does that sound like I'm out of my mind?
>06C
>Matt:
>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.
I cannot know Pirsig's experience. One could
argue and suggest forever. For the moment I find
Pirsig's ideas a great way to view
experience. An undefined, undivided DQ allows
for great openness. Every one of us will
interpret and reinterpret within our comfort
level based on our experiences. That's what we
do. Maybe dividing DQ would be helpful for
you. It would add confusion for me.
>07
>Matt:
>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?
Stubbing your toe is a magnificent
experience. So is losing your mind for a moment or two.
>08
>Matt:
>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.
Problems? Where do they come from?
Matt,
I've numbered the paragraphs to assist my seed sorting.
Marsha
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