From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Mar 31 2003 - 00:26:23 BST
DMB,
I was going to pass on commenting on your last response on the evidence for
Pirsig's appearance/reality distinction because I think you are so
completely wrong (as I would guess you think of me) that it is difficult
for me to even know where to begin. But I thought of a beginning, so I'll
just start there:
DMB said:
Pirsig is only making a distinction about two kinds of
experience, mediated and unmediated, static and Dynamic. Pirsig's expanded
empiricism says both kinds of experience are valid and verifiable. The
distinction between these two kinds of experience does not does not "dip
into the appearance/reality distinction" because experiences ARE appearences
and in the MOQ that IS reality. Distinct? Heck, in the MOQ appearance and
reality are indentical. Experience is all you get.
Matt:
This is why I think Pirsig is totally ambivalent on the subject. The
concept of "mediated experience" doesn't make any sense to me except to say
that something is getting in the way of experience. Something is
distorting it, like, say, green glasses. If we can shed the distortion,
the green glasses, we will have unmediated experience, something
undistorted, something pure. Pirsig does get rid of the mystic concept of
maya in the way that no longer are we to think of mediated experience as an
illusion. It's real, too. However, Pirsig wants to say that the stripping
away of static patterns is more moral than adhering to them. He privileges
Dynamic Quality over static patterns by saying that DQ is more moral than
static Quality. I see this as the same effect as the privileging of
reality over appearance.
DMB said about interpretive glasses:
[Pirsig's] acknowledging the important postmodern insight that
our values and beliefs are determined by a particular cultural context.
Unlike the extreme pomos, however, he does not take that to mean that values
and beliefs are arbitrary or meaningless.
Matt:
Yes, Pirsig is acknowledging that our values and beliefs are determined by
a particular cultural and historical context. But what do you think he
means when he says we can take our glasses off? The only thing I can make
him out to be saying is that we can strip away our historical, cultural
context. But where do we go if we are not in an historical context? My
guess is an ahistorical context, which is the type of thing I've been
railing against.
So, you're right, unlike so-called extreme or "half-baked" post-moderns
(whoever they may be), Pirsig does not think values and beliefs are
arbitrary. But I think he derives this non-arbitrariness from the
ahistorical context, which is Dynamic Quality, rather than from particular
historical and cultural contexts which is what fully cooked post-moderns do.
Matt
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Mar 31 2003 - 00:27:44 BST