[Matt] 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." [Krimel] The term philosopher has different meanings. As some here use it, it is almost an insult to be called one. But I will take yours as a complement. You are probably giving good advice here. But I am not sure I can take it. I find it incomprehensible that anyone finds ambivalence or offense in the term. I think you are right about Pirsig's use of terms in Lila. I thought taking his new terms out for a spin, was exactly what he was doing. It is not as though his analysis of the mid-20th century has rocked the world of political and historical analysis. [Matt] 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). [Krimel] I have been trying to point out that emotions have been shoved under that rug for centuries. Work during the past 30 years has uncovered them and revealed a great deal, much of it highly relevant to the MoQ. I don't think some folks here are capable discriminating between shades of SOM. It tends to be all black or white. [Matt] 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). [Krimel] I started using the percept/concept distinction because I thought it made crystal clear the distinction between our interface with the physical world (perception) and our interface with the intellectual level (conception). I thought James was pretty clear on this that perception is more or less equal to empiricism and conception is the domain of rationalism. It also make their priority ranking intelligible as well. [Matt] 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). [Krimel] Actually I think emotion not only tie us back to our animal roots but reveals some of the qualities that make humans unique. But let me illustrate with some MoQ relevant history. Darwin, late in his career took up the issue of emotion and showed the similarity of emotional express across species. He tied them directly to Nature. But in the early 20th century the social science didn't want to hear that. Anthropology in particular during the period the Pirsig talks about was almost completely in the thrall of Culture/nurture being the determining factor in our understanding of just about everything. I remember taking an anthropology course in the early 70s and being told in no uncertain terms that man did not have any instincts; that everything we did was learned and learned through our culture. It wasn't philosophers or mystics that over turned this view. More and more researchers took up the subject. I thought Paul Ekman would be a good example because his life and work are now being fictionalized in the Fox show "Lie to Me". Ekman showed that both the expression and recognition of emotions in universal across cultures. This is an extraordinary claim. There is a "lingua franca," the Tower of Babel did not fall. If emotions are universal, that suggests to me that they are genetically determined. In fact this is just the sort of genetically determined behavior that Wilson uses to construction his argument for sociobiology. [Matt] 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). [Krimel] I am not sure I see that clouding. It seem to me that both senses work. [Matt} 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). [Krimel] Thanks Matt, since I am so often painted as anti-Pirsigian, against my better judgment, I sometimes think perhaps I am. But my intent has always been to move the MoQ into a broader more relevant context; to use it to guide us into a complex and dynamic future. I think many want to use it to hide from the future behind a façade of bogus moralizing. 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/
