Hi Matt, thanks for answering my call)
I read you admonishing but feel we are reasonably open to
arguments and polite.
> Bo wants to eliminate a pernicious distinction (that I would suggest is
> inherited from Lockean/Humean empiricism, only updated after Kant) that
> the "analytic knife" section in ZMM can be taken to illustrate: there
> is a pre-existing reality (the sand) that our concepts can divide up as
> we want. This section can breed a philosophical position that
> perceives the sand as real, and the divisions we make as arbitrary
> add-ons. This leads to regrettable statements like,
> "value is more
> immediate, more directly sensed than any 'self' or any 'object' to
> which it might be later assigned. It is more real than the stove."
> (Lila, 76) We just should not use "more real" rhetoric to make our
> point.
Agree, only that the "pernicious distinction" is an offshoot of SOM's
notion of an objective reality (the sand) that we draw subjective
theories in. Locke, Hume marked the start of the doubt in SOM,
but Kant cemented it and after him no one dared touch the issue
... until now.
> Pirsig wants to avoid the same thing, and spends much of his time
> fighting these distinctions.
Phaedrus yes, but Pirsig seems to have given up on SOM. It's
hardly mentioned in LILA and alternates between regarding it as a
pollution of the intellectual level and (correctly) seen as the 4th.
level itself (the SOL)
NB Phaedrus indicates ZAMM, Pirsig indicates LILA.
> DMB registers the same rejection of this distinction, which Bo
> formuated as the real/theoretical distinction, when he forwards the
> pragmatist slogan common to James, Dewey and Pirsig--experience is
> reality.
I'm not very versed on pragmatism, I only register that Pirsig says
that James postulated an "immediate flux" ahead of the S/O this
Pirsig agrees with. However, one thing must be noted here. Pirsig
says (that James says) that "subjects and objects are concepts",
but in his own deliberations on this in ZAMM there is nothing about
objects being concepts or verbal
He'd been speculating about the relationship of Quality to
mind and matter and had identified Quality as the parent of
mind and matter, that event which gives birth to mind and
matter [....] He simply meant that at the cutting edge of
time, before an object can be distinguished, there must be
a kind of nonintellectual awareness, which he called
awareness of Quality. You can't be aware that you've seen
a tree until after you've seen the
Non- (or pre-intellectual) yes, but nothing about the following
"intellectual" (the subject becoming aware of a world of objects)
being mere concepts.
> This is what I call panrelationalism--not only are relations between
> objects as real as the objects, there is nothing more to any object
> than a series of relations. (What are these relations? _Value_
> relations.)
Er ...? Anyway, Phaedrus called James' "immediate flux"
QUALITY. This is an axiom or postulate, but never mind
Bo before:
> > Again, the radical empiricism postulate a something ahead of S and O.
Matt:
> Not really, at least not a good formulation of it. It is radical
> exactly because everything is now real--relations, concepts, and
> objects--unlike before where something was only real if it could
> stretch back to some strange thing called an "empirical object" which
> philosophers had a tough time explicating.
Lets forget what the pragmatists themselves said and concentrate
on Phaedrus who saw his coalescing into a new metaphysics:.
Dynamic Quality - spawning - Static Quality
(at this point the static part were just the S/O, in the final MOQ it
had grown to the known 4 leves where intellect's S/O comes last).
But now to my "bone". From this Phaedrus went on to draw
diagrams, first of SOM where he draws a reality "box" above the
Subject/Object dualism, which is wrong, SOM presents us with the
proverbial objective sand in which we draw subjective (theoretical)
figures.
Then the MOQ where he draws a Reality-Quality "box" on top and
below it the said DQ/SQ dualism This is just as wrong, DQ directly
spawns the SQ. Full stop! The fallacy of a Quality spawning
another DQ that - along with DQ - constitutes the MOQ have
persisted and makes for the Quality/MOQ metaphysics that
overrides the MOQ. This is really another twist of SOM, now a
"dynamic" sand that MOQ is static figures in.
Hope you stick with the MD until this is settled.
Bo
For reference I attach Pirsig's on James
The second of James' two main systems of philosophy,
which he said was independent of pragmatism, was his
radical empiricism. By this he meant that subjects and
objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects
and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived
from something more fundamental which he described as
"the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to
our later reflection with its conceptual categories." In this
basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective
thought, such as those between consciousness and
content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet
emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure
experience cannot be called either physical or psychical: it
logically precedes this distinction.
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/
