John said:If by "general tendency toward an undefined betterness" you mean "good" and by "sort of sixth sense that tells us about the quality" you mean conscience or judgement, then I can understand you perfectly in a fairly conventional framework. However, this seems to me to lean your thinking toward the Roycean edge of dialogue with Absolute Thought providing a context for reality and puts you in a basically theistic camp.
dmb says:This thinking puts me in a theistic camp? Some of the long-term participants are probably chuckling over that one. Theists find me quite abrasive or even offensive. As I see it, the MOQ does not posit any such thing and is in some sense even anti-theistic. As gav pointed out the other day, however, we are talking about a non-theistic form of mysticism. The MOQ is a form of philosophical mysticism. (It also happens to be a form of pragmatism and empiricism at the same time, which is quite a trick. It's like having sunshine and rain at the same time, which happened in my back yard yesterday afternoon.) What I mean to say is that this explanation probably shouldn't be understood in "fairly conventional terms". Most people would scratch their heads at this and even people interested in philosophy have trouble with it. As far as I know Pirsig hasn't been asked to confront Royce directly but he does deny any equivalence between Quality and any kind of Hegelian Absolute. His negative comments about Bradley, the quasi-theological British Idealist, would also indicate disagreement with Royce on that point. John said:If this is not true, then how are you explaining "undefined betterness" and "sixth sense" in a more meaningful and empirically supported fashion to someone like Krimel for instance? dmb says:This is exactly where "radical empiricism" becomes so important. (I've been trying to get this idea across to Krimel for a year, by the way, so we'll say this explanation is for him too. The phrase come from William James but Dewey and Pirsig share the same view. There is a quote from the end of Lila's chapter 29 that I've posted many times. Like I said, it's an important idea that gives lots of people trouble. "The second of James' two main systems of philosophy ...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 mater, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical of psychical; it logically precedes this distinction. In his last unfinished work, SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY, James had condensed this description to a single sentence: 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the later is dynamic an d flowing'. Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic subdivision the the MOQ. ...The MOQ is a continuation of the mainstream of 20th century American philosophy. It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism, which says the test of the true is the good. It adds that this good is not a social code or some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute. It is direct everyday experience. Through this identification of pure value with pure experience, the MOQ paves the way for an enlarged way of looking at experience which can resolve all sorts of anomalies that traditional empiricism has not been able to cope with." dmb continues:For our purposes here, I suppose there are two main things to notice here. The first one is that William James's phrases "pure experience" and "the immediate flux of experience" refer to the same thing as Northrop's "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum" and Pirsig's "Dynamic Quality". They all refer to the cutting edge of experience prior to the differentiations of consciousness. Pirsig also refers to this as the "primary empirical reality" and "pre-intellectual experience". It can also be called "pre-conceptual experience" or "pre-verbal experience". Hopefully, you can see how all these various terms convey the same basic idea. This basic idea expresses the reason why DQ can't be defined. We're talking about what we "know" prior to any kind of definition. "When the person who sits on the stove first discovers his low-Quality situation, the front edge of his experience is Dynamic. He does not think, 'This stove is hot,' and then make a rational decision to get off. A 'dim perception of he knows not what' gets him off Dynamically. Later he generates static patterns of thought to explain the situation." "If you had asked the Brujo what ethical principles he was following he probably wouldn't have been able to tell you. He wouldn't have understood what you were talking about. He was just following some vague sense of 'betterness' that he couldn't have defined if he had wanted to." That's what I mean by following an unwritten law, by equating DQ with dharma. The second thing to notice (or maybe it should have been first) is that radical empiricism differs from traditional empiricism in a pretty big way. It doesn't reject the traditional idea of sensory experience but rather criticizes it for being too limited and for being predicated on the assumptions of subject-object metaphysics. As you saw in the quote, the radical empiricist says "subjects and objects are secondary" in the sense that they are concepts derived from experience, conceptual interpretations of experience handed to us by language and culture. Traditional empiricism, by contrast, says subjects and objects are primary. It says that a pre-existing external and objective reality and the subjective experiencer are the conditions that make experience possible. And I think radical empiricism confuses people because they tend to think of "pure experience" as the initial experience of a subject. In other words, people like Krimel tend to understand radical empiricism while retaining this rejected premise. Radical empiricism is also radically empirical because it says that our philosophical accounts must include every kind of experience, not just what the senses experience, and that our philosophical accounts should not assert anything that can't be known in experience. You could say it begins and ends with experience. This is the premise which allows it to accept mystical experience while still rejecting theism or any kind of supernaturalism. Religious experience, dreams, visions, and the like are all real in the sense that they are actually endured, enjoyed or otherwise experienced by actual people. They are psychological facts, if you will, and yet the traditional empiricist dismisses all this stuff as merely "subjective". This is what breeds attitudes of objectivity and that's the whole problem with SOM rationality. As you probably recall, the main mission is ZAMM is to present a new, spiritual rationality wherein cold, calculating reason would be shown to be irrational. Or, as Nietzsche puts it, to eliminate affect (feeling) from rationality is to castrate the intellect. I mean, you could even say that Pirsig isn't presenting mysticism so much as he's using it to improve and reform intellectual quality. You could say his emphasis on DQ is for the sake of static goods. Thanks for asking. _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® has ever-growing storage! Don’t worry about storage limits. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/Storage?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_Storage_062009 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/
