Ron said to Bo: This is what's confusing the shit outta me...the pre-conceptual/pre-intellectual distinction... I think I need some help in understanding.
dmb says: I can't help explain Bo's distinction (As I understand it, the terms are interchangable) but David Hildebrand's paper "The Linguistic Turn" contains a great explanation of the problem Pirsig presents in the quote above. I learned that Douglas Browning calls it "the phenomenological paradox". The paper quotes Browning. Here he is talking about Dewey's "pre-reflective experiences" but it could just as well be James's pure experience, Mead's primordial prereflective experience or Pirsig's quality.... "How can [Dewey] adequately describe our immediately lived, pre-reflective experiences without assuming a stance for surveying them which, being reflective and retrospective, cannot help but disclose them, not as they were experienced in the imtimacy of our living through them, but as 'objects' which we are viewing externally." In other words, how can you verbalize the pre-verbal without being verbal about it? Hildebrand puts it like this (the emphsis is his)... "Being itself a reflective (linguistic) act, description must color any pre-reflective subject matter it describes; since philosophy - pragmatism included - comments ONLY by means of reflective symbols it CANNOT illuminate this level of experience (if it can even be shown to exist). ...This accusation strikes at the core of Dewey's pragmatism and may be the most important issue to clarify and defend." Hildebrand even quotes Dewey acknowledging this predicament. The "incommunicability of the non-linguistic", as Dewey says,... "is inherent, according to genuine empiricism, in the derived relastionship of discourse to primary experience. Any one who refuses to go outside the universe of discourse ...has of course shut himself off from understanding what a 'situation', as directly experienced subject matter, is." [Ron] Dmb, I feel it is important to Establish just what is meant by : Pre-intellect in relation to: 1. Pure experience 2. Pre-conceptual 3. Pre-reflective 4. symbol creation (culture?) 5. Symbol recognition (culture/conceptual?) 6. symbol manipulation (culture/conceptual/intellectual?) Symbol and language can roughly be equated to mean the same thing, both are metaphors for immediate experience used for creating and understanding The world we live in. language being a more complex emergence of the former. When Pirsig termed Pre-intellect as symbol manipulation for purposes of economy of thought, he kind of confused the issue of SOM. Does he term SOM as an intellectual pattern or a logic pattern? Are the two terms synonymous in this description? I see SOM as a social/cultural pattern as well. understanding how culture influences/shapes perception it also colors The concepts of organic and inorganic. So culture can be said to Create the world we experience. This being said, just where the hell does SOM leave off and pure experience begin? I loved your assessment: DMB: Mead is saying that our "linguistic structures ..are not 'free floating' constructions" but rather that they are "ultimately rooted in the ..universe in which we are embedded". These structures grow out of the universe as an emergent property, one that can't be reduced to the structures from which they spring. And here Mead is parallel to Pirsig in asserting that there are levels of reality and that these levels exist together in an evolutionary relationship - and that we are all those levels at once. [Ron] It seems plain to me that SOM is a great deal more than an intellectual pattern in our present western culture it has fused with the culture. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
