the individual is borne of the intellectual level - it is an idea.
the idea of oneself as an autonomous agent evolves from and opposes the
purely social (bicameral?) level of consciousness....which operates by
the
control of the collective via a deity, king etc.
--- On Mon, 7/7/08, david buchanan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> From: david buchanan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: [MD] Static Self
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Received: Monday, 7 July, 2008, 5:46 AM
> Ham said to Craig and Marsha:
> Pirsig...has put man in a cosmic "vat" by denying
> him the autonomy of free choice and self-determination.
> ...the MoQist view of what man is -- not an entity, not a
> self, not even a proprietary subject, but patterns of value
> in a field of quality. There is no "free agency"
> in such a construct because the "field" itself is
> the operand of the patterns. The static patterns, in other
> words, are programmed by DQ.
>
> "To the extent that one's behavior is controlled
> by static patterns of quality it is without choice. But to
> the extent that one follows Dynamic Quality, which is
> undefinable, one's behavior is free." (Robert
> Pirsig in Lila)
>
> Ham continued:
> I've been unable to find any references to
> individuality, individualism, individual freedom,
> self-determination, proprietary awareness, or personal
> autonomy. Instead, in all these quotes citing
> "subjects", "mind", "life",
> and "free", there is the presumption of a
> collective consciousness being dominated or controlled by
> DQ.
> Unless you can provide a statement by the author supporting
> the individual as the conscious locus of existential reality
> or the agent of value in the world, I don't see how you
> can refute my "self in a vat" characterization of
> his philosophy
>
> dmb says:
> There are no supporting references to individualism and
> there is no self in a vat either. As I've tried to
> explain once or twice already, the MOQ rejects some basic
> metaphysical assumptions but you're reading the MOQ as
> if those assumptions still figured into what Pirsig is
> saying. Like many philosophers over the last century or so,
> he rejects the assumptions of subject-object metaphysics,
> which is known around here as "SOM". Your
> questions clearly emphasize the individual's awareness,
> personal autonomy and the like. There is a common sense
> level in which these concepts make a great deal of sense,
> but here we are talking about a philosophy that rejects a
> lot of the traditional ideas about subjectivity and
> objectivity. Listening to you and Marsha discuss the matter
> is like listening to Ayn Rand trying to convince a Buddhist
> monk to be more selfish. But the difference is not really
> that stark. We don't need to go East to see what this
> rejection looks like or what it means. Pirs
> ig's pragmatism and radical empiricism are enough. In
> fact, you could go back 100 years and find it in the work
> of Dewey and James. They rejected SOM, adopted radical
> empiricism and did so in plain english. John Stuhr explains
> it pretty well in his introduction to Dewey. Stuhr is the
> editor of an anthology that was assigned reading in a grad
> school course on pragmatism. As I understand it, every
> thing he says here about Dewey could also be said of
> Pirsig, James and other classical pragmatists. He says,...
>
> "At the outset, it is vital to distinguish Dewey's
> theory of experience and his 'empiricism' from the
> philosophical traditions and theories which he seeks to
> overcome and abandon. Dewey's major criticisms of
> traditional empiricism are neatly summarized in 'The
> Need for a Recovery of Philosophy". Here Dewey rejects
> the traditional view of experience as something subjective
> and psychical, as 'particularistic' or composed of
> discrete sense data assembled by the understanding, as
> primarily an affair of knowing, as directed primarily at
> the past, and as something separate from and opposed to
> thought.
> How, then, does Dewey positively characterize experience?
> In the beginning to understand his view, it cannot be
> overemphasized that Dewey is not using the word
> 'experience' in its conventional sense. For Dewey,
> experience is not to be understood in terms of the
> experiencING subject, or as the interaction of a subject
> and object that exist separate from the interaction.
> Instead, Dewey's view is radically empirical:
> experience is an activity in which subject and object are
> unified and CONSTITUTED as partial features and relations
> within this ongoing, unanalyzed unity. Dewey warns us not
> to misconstrue aspects of this unified experience-activity:
> distinctions made in reflection. If we don confuse them, we
> invent the philosophical problem of how to get them
> together.
> The error of materialists and idealists alike - the error
> of conferring existential status upon the products of
> reflection - is the result of neglect of the context of
> reflection on experience."
>
> dmb continues:
> In addition to those passages where Pirsig simply declares
> his MOQ to be a form of pragmatism and radical empiricism,
> there is also this explanation about the limits of
> traditional empiricism, which assumes SOM and limits
> experience to what can be known through the five sense
> organs and which is known as sensory empiricism.
>
> "The MOQ RESTATES the empirical basis of logical
> positivism with more precision, more inclusiveness, more
> explanatory power than it has previously had. It says that
> values are not outside of the experience that logical
> positivism limits itself to. They are the ESSENCE of this
> experience. Values are MORE empirical, in fact, than
> subjects and objects. (Hot stove example is here) ...This
> value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any
> 'self' or any 'object' to which it might
> later be assigned. ..It is the primary empirical reality
> from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and
> self are latter intellectually constructed. Onces this
> primary relationship is cleared up an awful lot of
> mysteries get solved. The reason values seem so
> woolly-headed to empiricists is that empiricists keep
> trying to assign them to subjects or objects. You can't
> do it. You get all mixed up because values don't belong
> to either group. They are a separate category all their own
> ..but showing
> that, of course, is a very big job..." (Lila 66-7,
> near the end of chapter 5)
>
> dmb continues"
> Compare Dewey's phrases "distinctions made in
> reflection" and "products of reflection"
> with Pirsig's notion of things as "intellectually
> constructed". Compare Dewey's "unanalyzed
> unity" with Pirsigian notions like "indefinable
> quality", "pre-intellectual experience" or
> "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum". These are
> ways of talking about the static/dynamic split, where the
> distinctions, reflections and intellectual constructions
> are all static while the primary reality is dynamic and
> prior to all that. More to the point for our purposes here,
> both of them are trying to explain how the individual
> subject is derived from experience rather than the locus of
> experience. They both insist than this is a case of giving
> existential status to an idea, of treating a concept about
> or interpretation of experience as if it were the cause of
> experience, the pre-requisites of experience. It is in this
> sense that they reject the the subjective self and objective
> reality. Like I said, these
> are perfectly fine AS CONCEPTS. But when we take them as
> metaphysical assumptions, we can get very confused,
> especially if we read Dewey, James or Pirsig as if they
> hadn't abandoned those assumptions.
>
> I sincerely hope that helps.
> dmb
>
>
>
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