From: Scott R (jse885@spinn.net)
Date: Fri Sep 26 2003 - 19:57:34 BST
Bo, Sam, Platt, all,
It's looking to me like I am going to have to back out of this debate. I am
in agreement with Bo that the MOQ's handling of the intellectual level is
inadequate, but my solution takes me out of the MOQ entirely -- that is, I
don't think the MOQ can be fixed (some details below). And so, I don't think
it appropriate to continue to defend my position on this forum. I will hang
around, in part to answer questions if any, but also because I think the
discussions here are, for the most part, interesting. For what it's worth,
while I don't think the MOQ as a metaphysics has a future, I continue to
think that ZAMM and Lila are great books: Pirsig's discussion of topics from
motorcycle maintenance to the brujo incident to why the hippies went wrong
to celebrity and the Giant are all on the money.
In tracing the argumentation of the MOQ, I see the fundamental error to be
one that is shared with SOM, and that is nominalism. (As an aside, I agree
with Sam that SOM is a late bloomer. The Greeks and the medievals were not
SOMists, for they were not nominalists.) Nominalism is the position that
what there is are things and events, or particulars (if one is William of
Ockham, the first major nominalist, one will add God to what exists). Words
and concepts are considered to be more particulars that "stand for" other
particulars.
This position only became possible with the loss of original participation
(as described by Barfield in Saving the Appearances). Participation is an
extra-sensory link between subject and object. In original participation,
that link was experienced as something "on the other side" of the
phenomenon, what we might call the spirit of the thing, if we experienced
it. (Note, where something like this still occurs, I think, is in listening
to music.). With the loss of original participation, objects became objects,
that is "just there". With original participation, the perceived object was
experienced as a representation of the spirit "behind" it. Note the word
"representation". This means that the things perceived were perceived as
representing something else.
With a little thought, we can recover that notion that the thing perceived
is a representation, in that we know through physics that what is "really
there" are a bunch of subatomic particles -- that a visual object has been
put together by our "organization". What we do, though, is forget that fact
when we talk about anything else, and hence we assume that all that we
experience -- or could experience (like the subatomic particles) are just
more things and events. Hence Kant. While he recognized that we put together
the perceived object, he could only conceive that what might lie behind it
(the thing-in-itself) was, well, another thing.
There is another reason for the hold nominalism has on us, and that is that
our words and concepts can be wrong, that we can debate over which concepts
are "correct" or "most useful", that words change meaning, and so on. I will
return to this later.
The non-nominalist (back in the 14th century they were called "realists",
but since then that word has come to mean something completely different) is
one who understands the "stands for" relation differently. Pirsig uses it in
the nominalist way, as in:
"For purposes of MOQ precision, let's say that the intellectual
level is the same as mind. It is the collection and manipulation of
symbols, created in the brain, that stand for patterns of experience."
Here a word (or more generally, symbol) stands for patterns of experience.
While superficially true, this hides something, namely that "patterns of
experience" is not experience. Experience is always experience of
particulars, but a pattern of experience is a concept. For the
non-nominalist, a particular, like a word, stands for the concept. Without
the concept there can be no particular, for without a concept (a system, a
pattern, a language in a more general sense than English) the particular
cannot be picked out of chaos.
The nominalist, especially after the nineteenth century, would have us
believe that concepts got tacked on to a world of particulars, a world that
had no concepts, for the simple reason that there is physical evidence of a
world without humans prior to a world with humans, and that concepts happen
in human brains. If this were the case, then we also should not talk of
patterns of experience before there were physical humans. The non-nominalist
view is that what we call laws of nature, and instinct, are concepts, not
just in our thinking about them, but as they are actually lived by inorganic
and biological beings. Concepts, then, existed before humans walked in the
world, and human learning is the recovery of those concepts.
Well, arguments can go on and on, so let me stop here and just summarize a
non-nominalist metaphysics as it compares to the MOQ. In brief, instead of
placing Quality as the first principle, I would place Intellect there
instead. (Or the word Reason, as Coleridge did, or the word Logos as John
the Evangelist did). Instead of SQ, there are SP: static patterns. To be a
pattern, there has to be a change, or a differentiation (feel pain...jump
off stove), and in combining these pieces into an entity, one has a concept.
Also, to be static, it is repeatable, and that too is a property of
concepts, and not of particulars. Hence all SP are concepts, and hence what
the MOQ calls the intellectual level is actually all levels. But there are
also new SP, so there is also the Dynamic, but a perhaps less confusing word
is Creativity.
To return now to problem of "wrong" words and concepts. This I would ascribe
to the fact that human intellects are still in their infancy, and will be
until we move to final participation. We operate on two levels, the
perceptual and the conceptual, but we do so because we have lost access to
the conceptual in the perceptual (what Barfield calls figuration). It is
there, though, or we wouldn't perceive anything, but it is unconscious in
us. To bring that into consciousness is what Barfield calls final
participation (not that it is final in an eschatological sense). Meanwhile,
we create theories and hypotheses, but these are at best partially correct.
Because we have to revise these as new particulars come into view, we assume
that we are trying to correspond to some independently existing reality. But
this is also a nominalist assumption. The non-nominalist view is more like
the pragmatists', that we are only shifting language games. But different
from the materialist pragmatist is that the non-nominalist sees the
particulars (the new data) as being part of a greater language game, one
between Intelligence as a whole, and us. We learn from particulars, in much
the sense as Plato (and David M) have it: they lead us to re-cognize the
underlying concepts that they represent.
Mathematics, by the way, is a case of working solely with concepts, though
we still learn mathematics with the help of particulars (e.g., the line on a
chalkboard represents the conceptual line of geometry). Similarly, the
entire physical universe can be looked on as such a chalkboard, a vast
representation of a conceptual/mathematical immaterial universe. (This is
not dualism, since the physical universe, recall, is created by our
figuration. It does sound a lot like idealism, though. My only defense,
assuming it needs defending, is that the particulars are not seen as
inferior to the conceptual. They need each other, just as subject needs
object, and vice versa.)
If anyone wants to explore this in more detail (there are way too many loose
ends in the above to be covered here), I would point them to Rudolf
Steiner's book "The Philosophy of Freedom". Barfield's book adds a
historical perspective, providing the evidence, mainly through the history
of word meanings, for the gradual loss of original participation, and hence
the rise of nominalism and SOM. Georg Kuhlewind's books (especially "Stages
of Consciousness" and "The Logos-Structure of the World") are especially
valuable for showing how one might move to final participation. As mentioned
at the top, though I doubt that this is the last I will have to say on all
this in this forum, I don't want to continue explicitly arguing for it,
other than to clear up misconceptions, and perhaps even not that. Like
Pirsig said about SOM, I see the nominalist barrier to be a "cultural immune
system", even stronger than that of SOM, since it caught Pirsig as well.
Note to Platt:
First, I agree about the existence of wordless thinking. However, I see that
as something that fits into a non-nominalist metaphysics much better than
the MOQ. It is where one sees concepts being born in human intellect
(whether they are completely new, or just being discovered, I won't get
into). It is pure thinking, or on its way there, a concept central to
Steiner and Kuhlewind.
On Pirsig's objections to SOLAQI, that there are non-S/O examples of
intellect, I responded to that at length to DMB a week or so ago. In brief,
the objections are valid if one adopts Pirsig's restriction of "object" to
the inorganic and biological levels, but I consider that restriction to do
more harm than good. Rather, I would say that Bo is correct to see the value
in thinking to lie in the distinction between subjective and objective.
Further, though it starts with objective as the sensorily perceived, one of
the advances thinking makes is to learn to treat social and intellectual SQ
(to revert to MOQ) as objects as well.
- Scott
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