On 7/4/09 11:32 AM, "Matt Kundert" <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Matt! Wow!
I cringed a bit at: *abjure the term "emotion."* as I see emotion as DQ
social level.
Joe
>
> 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
>
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