Michael and Marsha too: Michael Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:48 you posted:
> DS wrote: > I see no reason to believe that Pirsig and Whitehead are pointing to > anything different than Hobbes et al. They are all pointing to the feelings > that come before words, feelings that are the meaning of words. MP: David, I am on board with you about the relationship of Hobbes, Locke to RMP's MoQ. But would note that RMP [MoQers, correct me if I'm wrong please] also ascribes Quality as relevant to non-biological value patterns. A rock is [albeit simply] a Quality driven static value pattern. How does a rock have a Hobbesian "experience" of Quality? Hobbes approach remains within an SOM context and can only be so. This to me is the beauty of RMP's Quality; its like Hobbes on crack. While Hobbes' empiricism certainly relates to RMP's MoQ on the biological static value pattern level, it is meaningless to those lesser patterns which RMP's MoQ manages to incorporate in its reductive simplicity. Hobbes' is in that sense an entirely subjective understanding of reality, where RMP's translates the same approach into an objective frame of reference. Every"thing" is related to Quality, cannot be what it is *but* for it. That goes way past Hobbes, Locke et al. but with complete consistency to the notions of such of philosophical predecessors. (IMO of course) Marsha you posted: Philosophizing indeed, and with such a distinguished list as Hobbes, Hume, Locke and Kant. It's hard to believe there would be exact agreement between these philosophers, especially in regards to a word like 'feeling' with its many definitions and multiple layers of connotation. Maybe you can offer some quotes as evidence to establish their agreement of usage and definition. Which came first the chicken or the egg? Words, including 'feeling' and excluding poetry, are secondhand and not the experience. Science offers only generalized analogy and says very little about direct experience. In my experience: not this, not that. 'Feeling' like all sq is sometimes conventionally useful and has a beauty of its own. My response to both of you is this: I'm suggesting that Pirsig isn't the first to ponder the pre-intellectual, pre-conscious, pre-verbal experience we all have. Others including Whitehead, Plato and the four cited above have parsed this experience differently. I don't see them as disagreeing as much as focusing on different parts of the experience and adding to our understanding of the whole thing. I agree that Pirsig is the first to take what is normally philosophy of mind and use their method to build a metaphysics. "Man is the measure of all things." What? But Pirsig isn't basing his MoQ as it relates to inorganic SQ on his experience of DQ, it just fits kind of neatly in with the other three levels that he can experience directly. And that's what I find so exciting about Lila and the whole MoQ group; we either have a metaphysics for an explanation of mind or we can connect the two disciplines: metaphysics and phil of mind. Yes Marsha words are secondhand. This just came to me as I was thinking about your post, but would I be far from the mark if I said that Hobbes et al, including Pirsig and every decent poet who ever lived, were really looking for a grammar of feelings? All seem to be searching for words and concepts that will describe their feelings while trying to construct a theory of what remains unconscious? I suppose we could add Freud to the growing list of feeling grammarians. Michael, I agree that Pirsig doesn't contradict his predecessors in any substantial way but rather adds to them and then drops this consistent bomb of a MoQ which tastes like the kind of objective metaphysics that could underpin science and all empiricism.-david swift 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/
