Hey Krimel, Years ago, at an American Philosophical Association meeting, Rorty was up on the dais during a symposium on truth and realism, or something of the sort, and he suggested to the assembled philosophers that for the next year they call a moratorium on the word "truth," and see how their discussions get on in talking about the issue of realism and such.
His point was that, from his perspective, talking about truth simply muddied and clouded the issue of realism, and stipulatively abjuring the term might help focus the one issue, and therefore in the end help focus the other. Krimel, I think you might be on one of those rare "viewpoint staking" endeavors that happens every once in a while here (or anywhere), whereby a philosopher develops the vocabulary he wishes to illuminate his topic. This is the stage the philosopher is at their most creative and frenetic. This was ZMM for Pirsig. Lila, on the other hand, was the productive stage, in which the vocabulary is displayed in different contexts to show off its capabilities. For instance, in my case, I haven't had a real new idea about Pirsig in...five years, maybe. I've simply been working out the consequences of basically the same vocabulary I began stamping out in the unfortunately-titled 2003 post "Confessions of a Fallen Priest" (unfortunate because I don't think I really started _becoming_ a true Pirsigian until that moment). I have a suggestion for this creative phase of your exploration of Pirsig's text: abjure the term "emotion." The slogan "value is perceived" is terribly important and under-developed (because typically still misunderstood with the shades of SOM, which is to say, you can't deploy the subjective/objective vocabulary until a significant re-interpretation of what either means), but to quickly say following it "Emotion is the value," I think, is too narrow, though I see you following up on a holistic re-introduction of a concept that has been de-valued since the rise of Greek rationalism (the Dark Horse of Plato's Allegory of the Charioteer being emblematic). The notion of a percept/concept distinction is one that Northrop plays with, and likewise he too produces something like a reduction of value to emotion in his notion of the aesthetic continuum. Pirsig learns from Northrop, but I think his dropping of some of the terminology, in favor of a much broader and vaguer term "Quality/Value," is significant and deliberate (and I think right, though getting Pirsig right and being right are too different topics--also often confused). My practical suggestion (try formulating your thoughts at this stage without the term "emotion" and see what happens) is based on my theoretical understanding that Pirsig was right to develop the notion of static levels, that it is important to distinguish between different _kinds_ of value (the big, vague enveloping term), such as inorganic response (like the mercury rising in a thermostat because the room is getting warmer), biological emotion (like mother wolf growling at the approach of others to her cubs), and social- linguistic questions (like the interlocuter who doesn't know what you said and asks, "What?"). Emotion, and biological valuing generally, _are_ an important piece to understanding humanity's distinctive being-in-the-world, and this because, though it does not distinguish us from the animal, it is by virtue of its link that it must not be forgotten and recovered in the face of those (mainly philosophers) who forget it, usually actively (if unconsciously) in order to focus what is different about humanity. But try holding emotion to one side for a time and focus on the consequences of saying "value is perceived" in the face of those who, on the one hand, want to reduce value to subjectivity (making values an unconversable topic) and, on the other, those who want to reduce value to objects (thus making values universally commensurable). By first understanding what it means for an agent to be both perspective-relative _and_ universally _conversable_, I think the re-introduction of how emotion figures into our differential responses to the world might become more illumitory of our day-to-day life of living (like in your statement that concepts allow "us to compare the present circumstances to past events and use those encoded experiences of the past to assess the probability of the success or failure of our responses"), rather than clouding it (by shading it with the Greek rationalist sense that "the real function of conceptualization or rationality is to provide a check on our emotions"--the white horse pulling against the dark). I think your bearings are in the right direction, and are indeed Pirsigian, with the larger point of "conceptual systems are communal." But I think meditating longer (and isolatedly) on that larger point might produce (what I take to be) a better stance for re-introducing biology, and the rest of the understandings of science (physics, neuroscience, etc.). Because if I read you right, you're laying the groundwork (if perhaps unconsciously) for a better understanding of what Pirsig meant by the relationship between "levels" and "Dynamic Quality," so that we avoid the overly reductionistic vocabulary induced by the apotheosis of babies (in which we mistakenly think that we could, or even would want to, free ourselves of concepts and remain distinctively human). Matt _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_BR_life_in_synch_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/
