Ron said to dmb: I thought this quote also addressed Bo's critique of your assertion on concepts being distinct from the experience they represent. Particularly this snip: "The problem is that once the parts or facts are made to appear, they seem to possess an independence, and it is (literally) tempting to rest in them and to believe that they are the foundation of things. (In theology this mistake is called idolatry.) “The division of the world into parts,” says Pirsig, “is something everyone does,” but in doing it, “something is always killed” — and what is killed is an awareness of and contact with the world before analytic thought has done its (necessarily) reductive work." I would say this goes for any sort of parsing up of experience. DQ/SQ included. dmb says:I'd say that "an awareness of the world before analytic thought" is what James calls pure experience, what Northrop calls the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum and what Pirsig calls the pre-intellectual reality. It is a description of radical empiricism before Pirsig discovered it in James. But I thinK Bo rejects the idea of any such discrepancy between concepts and reality because he takes it to mean a discrepancy between subjective experiencer and the objective reality that is experienced. But that's a mistake. The discrepancy is between undifferentiated experience and the concepts which are derived from it. This primary empirical reality has no "parts". That's what undifferentiated means. Also, I'd point out that when the parts so derived "seem to possess an independence", the derived concepts are reified or made into metaphysical realities that we believe to be the foundation of things. This is what Krimel does when he refutes the idea of a primary empirical reality with an explanation of those secondary concepts. He keeps insisting that experience is the transduction of energy of the objective reality by the subjective experiencer. In other words, subjects and objects are rendered primary, the structure of reality which makes experience possible. And yes, the concepts of DQ and sq are not an exception to this. Those concepts are derived from experience too. That what Pirsig means when he says a metaphysics of Quality is a contradiction in terms. Metaphysics is conceptual and, paradoxically, Quality is a concept that refers to what is pre-conceptual.
Ron said:Also I found it interesting that Crawford would classify Ham's notion of the lone individual as a form of "liberalism". dmb says:Hmmm. It could just be that he's using the term broadly or perhaps he's English. In Europe "liberalism" refers to the advocacy of free market economics. This difference goes back to classical liberalism, back to John Locke and guys like that. The contemporary versions of American conservatism and liberalism can both trace their origins to this classical liberalism. The discrepancy between what "liberal" means here and across the Atlantic stems from this common origin. Since the advent of the cold war, however, the anti-communist right has stressed individuality in order to oppose what it views as "collectivism". Ayn Rand and F.A. Hayek would be examples of this cold-war shift. _________________________________________________________________ Insert movie times and more without leaving Hotmail®. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/QuickAdd?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_QuickAdd_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/
