From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Mar 07 2004 - 23:07:40 GMT
Chris, Paul, Matt and all:
Paul said:
Kant saw his categories as necessary and universal *conditions for*
objective experience although they didn't *arise from* experience and
therefore must exist *prior to* and *independently of* experience itself.
...I think Kant arrived at his conclusion because, in his metaphysics,
experience is something a subject does to an object and subjects and objects
are all there is. Therefore, as the source of experience is objects (or
things-in-themselves), and as objects don't contain conceptual frameworks
themselves, the frameworks (or at least some fundamental aspects of them
such as space and time) must already exist in the subject or a
"transcendental ego."
dmb says:
Exactly. Kant stands at the cusp between modernity and postmodernity.
Although his work represents a breakthrough and a transition, he was still
working with SOM. In fact, "substance" and "causation" are both among Kant's
universal categories. But as Wilber describes it, he was also asserting that
the mind shapes the world as much as the world shapes the mind and to
thereby reject the representation paradigm.
Ken Wilber said:
"The fundamental Enlightenment (modern) paradigm is known as the
representation paradigm. This is the idea that you have the self or the
subject, on the one hand, and the empirical or sensory world, on the other,
the single and simple 'pregiven' world. And if the map is accurate, if it
correctly represents, or corresponds with, the empirical world, then that is
'truth'."
"Beginning especially with Kant, and running through Hegel, Schopenhauer,
Nietzche, Dilthey, Heidegger, Foucalt, Derrid --all the great 'postmodern'
theorists --in all of them we find a powerful attack on the mapping
paradigm, because it fails to take into account the self that is making the
maps in the first place. This self did not just parachute to earth. It has
its own characteristics, its own structures, its own development, its own
history - and all of those influence and govern what it will see, and what
it can see, in that supposedly 'single' world just lying around. The
parachute is up to its neck in contexts and backgrounds that determine just
what it can see in the first place! So the great postmodern discovery was
that neither the self nor the world is simply pregiven, but rather they
exist in contexts and backgrounds that have a history, a development."
Paul said:
By contrast, the MOQ holds that experience (i.e. value) is fundamentally
prior to intellectual concepts, yet is the starting point and ongoing source
of reality and is therefore the starting point and ongoing source of any
"categories" that are invented by the intellect. In the MOQ, nothing exists
prior to or independently of experience. ..In the MOQ, pre-intellectual
value is the source of both the subject and the objects. The
conceptualisation of experience is neither universal nor final, but cultural
and evolutionary. That is a big difference. ...I find that an eagerness to
jump from similarity to identity often hinders understanding - just because
the MOQ "categorises" static patterns into levels it doesn't mean that they
are "categories" in the Kantian (which is a very specific and unusual)sense.
dmb says:
Exactly. You rock. It seems to me that Matt has somehow been excluding
Pirsig from the postmodern paradigm and attacks him as if he had written
Lila in 1691 instead of 1991. And now Chris is misinterpreting Pirsig that
way too. As I keep trying to explain to Matt, the postmodern critiques of
modernity simply don't make any sense when applied to Pirsig. Pirsig's work
is about correcting the problems of SOM, just as any postmodern thinker
does. He's also writing about the problems with 20th century intellectuals
and thereby correcting postmodernism too. I mean, he is our contemporary.
Its hard to imagine that Pirsig doesn't know a great deal about
postmodernism already, you know?
Chris said:
Do you really think when somebody says 'contingent (static) levels' that
that makes any sense at all?
Paul:
Yes. What is wrong with that?
dmb says:
I'm stumped too. Since Pirsig's MOQ is an evolutionary and Dynamic
philosophical system, we can safely assume that "static" does not mean
"eternal" or anything else that would preclude contingent patterns. The MOQ
is all about historical development, change, growth and evolution. That's
what the levels are; stages in evolution. Contingent static levels? I
imagine Pirsig wouldn't have it any other way.
Thanks.
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