Marsha, Platt, DMB [David Swift mentioned) --
On Wed, 04 Mar 2009 Marsha said (to David Swift):
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. ...'Feeling' like all
sq is sometimes conventionally useful and has a
beauty of its own.
This led David into a query about the existence of 'TiTs' which has little,
if any, relevance to Marsha's statement. However, DMB chimed in with a
comment that does:
I think that's right. Feelings and instincts would probably be a static
biological response to DQ. Hume was an empiricist and so is Pirsig
but there is an important distinction between the traditional forms of
empiricism and the radical empiricism of the MOQ. The former is
also called sensory empiricism because it holds that the external
objective world comes to us through the senses, through the sense
organs, and it does so from within the assumptions of subject-object
metaphysics. The radical empiricism of William James, which is
adopted by the MOQ, differs from this by both rejecting the
metaphysical assumptions and by expanding the notion of what
counts as empirical evidence. In traditional empiricism we experience
reality through the senses but in radical empiricism experience is
reality.
Thomas Hobbes was not only an empiricist but a "monarchist" who advocated
total submission of the individual to the authority of the state. Since his
writing is formidable, I've quoted this paragraph from SparkNotes to
summarize his mechanistic philosophy:
"Hobbes believed that all phenomena in the universe, without exception, can
be explained in terms of the motions and interactions of material bodies.
He did not believe in the soul, or in the mind as separate from the body, or
in any of the other incorporeal and metaphysical entities in which other
writers have believed. Instead, he saw human beings as essentially
machines, with even their thoughts and emotions operating according to
physical laws and chains of cause and effect, action and reaction. As
machines, human beings pursue their own self-interest relentlessly,
mechanically avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure. Hobbes saw the
commonwealth, or society, as a similar machine, larger than the human body
and artificial but nevertheless operating according to the laws governing
motion and collision."
The statement that caught my attention in the MercuryNews.com review of
Denis Dutton's "The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution" is
this one which quotes the author:
"'A lot of what counts as philosophy is explaining and justifying
fundamental human intuitions', including 'intuitions about the beautiful and
the ugly.' The problem has been that philosophy 'doesn't ask where the
intuitions come from.'"
I don't particularly like the term "intuitive" in reference to esthetic
realization, as it conveys the idea that "feelings" are intellectually
conceived formulations, whereas they are emotional in nature and
"intellectual feeling" is an oxymoron. The feeling of pain, as described in
Pirsig's legendary "hot stove" analogy, for example, is anything but an
intellectual experience.
Platt, who has actually read Dutton's book, was a bit lukewarm in his
appraisal of it:
Interesting if somewhat pedantic. To a Darwinian everything is
explained by evolution, just as to an MOQian everything is
explained by Quality. But, I think anyone interested in the arts
will find the book worthwhile
The point I'd like to make is that the emotional response we call "feeling"
is not in any way deterministic or "programmed into" sensory perception.
Rather than a reflex action, emotional feeling is the value-sensibility of
proprietary (individual) awareness itself. DMB's suggestion that "feelings
and instincts would probably be a static biological response to DQ" does not
do justice to value, while "instinct" is the wrong connotation for
value-sensibility which, above all human attributes, is what makes value
appreciation free of biological and social influences.
Again, this epistemology is foreign to MoQists who refuse to accept the
integrity of the individual subject. Instead, they continue to think of
"subjects" as interacting patterns, "feelings" being among them. As a
consequence, although the fact that we are all value-sensible agents is
self-evident to the rest of mankind, the absurdity of "unrealized value" is
lost on the Pirsigians. Perhaps someone will be bold enough to address this
issue which strangely runs counter to the Quality thesis.
Essentially speaking,
Ham
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