Matt said to Krimel: The biggest trouble I've had with Pirsig, and which DMB has had with me, is that, after saying that we are always directly connected to reality--to dispose of the realism/idealism debate and pernicious representationalism--Pirsig insists on using a direct/indirect distinction in talking about experience. I've always thought this weird, and many of the attempts to gloss Pirsig I've thought unsuccessful in allaying fears that we are regressing. However, there are ways to use the distinction, and I've read some interpretations of particularly Dewey (and, oddly enough, ancient Greek thought) that have begun to make sense of what they were trying to say.
dmb replies: I think you've raised a crucial point here. Its a good example of the sort of unwarranted charge that invariably comes up whenever the topic is somewhere near mysticism. It's pretty clear that Pirsig's distinction between direct and indirect comes only after he's rejected the representational theory of knowledge. The difference is between two categories of experience, neither of which is any less "real" than the other. If memory serves, Dewey made the distinction between "had" experience and later reflection. He insisted that cognitive knowledge was not more real than the initial experience. This would be more or less the same as the difference between dynamic and static or direct and indirect. As Pirsig points out, the German language has two words for "knowing" that reflect this same distinction. One refers to a basic familiarity, something you "know" from experience even never deliberately think about it, like riding a bike, your grandmother's face, walking through a doorway. And then there is cognitive knowledge, where you "know" the principles of geometry or law. I think these guys are emphasizing the non-cognitive, pre-reflective mode of experience not because they think it is more real but because it has traditionally been ignored and excluded by philosophy. Pirsig traces it back to the Platonic demand for intelligibility, the one that tried to turn truth into a fixed, rigid thing. So I see Pirsig's distinction between static and dynamic as a move against Platonism and a rehabilitation of the non-conceptual "knowledge" he denigrated at every opportunity. _________________________________________________________________ Make every e-mail and IM count. Join the i’m Initiative from Microsoft. http://im.live.com/Messenger/IM/Join/Default.aspx?source=EML_WL_ MakeCount 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/
