Hi John, John said: My first and only philosophy teacher, George Sessions, talked about the trouble he had with doing the dishes in that zen way of just doing them and not trying to get through doing them. I can see the difficulty, but at the same time, with enough interesting stuff going on in your head...
Matt: A former roommate and I used to only be able to do the dishes when we were drunk. We'd get ripped, and she'd go, "Hey! Let's do the dishes!" And being drunk, what was I gonna' say--everything sounds like a good idea when you're hammered. It got to the point where we'd have a pile of dishes and we'd go, "Oh, god--gotta' get down to the liquor store." I don't ponder very well while doing the dishes for some reason, so being blitzed always worked as a kinda' zen thing. John said: Of course! That's why you do the pondering while doing the dishes and the writing soon after so you don't forget what you pondered. I like to do my pondering while digging ditches. Matt: Absolutely. For me, it's always been driving. (Though, on reflection, perhaps dishes never worked as a philosophical precursor _because_ I was blitzed--writing while drunk has never quite worked for me.) Up until recently, since I was 16 I'd almost always had a job which included long bouts of driving (and one as a building security guard with long bouts of standing and looking friendly--I hated those people, but you had to at least look friendly). You can mull over a lot of things, and any time you hit on something cool, you pull out some paper and write it down. Perhaps this is simply a problem for me, because of the peculiar way in which I do philosophy, which involves a lot reading and especially writing. It's hard to tell what others do with their time, so I can only look at my own experience, and the experience of those I'm familiar with, like Pirsig, who neglected his family in isolation, hunting down the metaphysical basis of existence. But typically--you can't do two activities at once. If you've ever gotten in trouble for thinking about something else while you're significant other was trying to talk to you, I think you might understand what I mean about the distinction between the activity of philosophy, and other activities. I mean--people, following Pirsig, have always pounded the pavement in front of me about how _language_ takes us out of direct experience, and how this is bad and blah, blah, blah. When now, finally, I'm talking about actual, pinpointable, practical evasions of experience--most of the time it is difficult to combine the activity of philosophy with other activities. That's what Dewey, at least, meant when he said that reflection--the generalized form of philosophy--was indirect experience: he meant that, though it was its own direct experience, it was a meta-experience, it was _about_ other experiences, and when you're having a meta-experience, you're not having the experience the meta-experience is about. Or, if you are--if you're thinking about driving while driving--then its a shadowy version of the other experience, because you're doing two things at once. Have you ever gotten off the highway and had no memory the detailed things you did to get to that point because you were thinking of something else? That's why I've found asking me for examples that gunk up the system of the MoQ so absurd--in that kind of way, I'm talking _about_ system, not talking within any particular system. The MoQ may certainly be able to house within itself my meta-talk about the metaphor of system (it doesn't take a lot of ingenuity for that), but that's all from _within the MoQ_, and so not apropos or relevant to why we're using the metaphor of system in the first place. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Get back to school stuff for them and cashback for you. http://www.bing.com/cashback?form=MSHYCB&publ=WLHMTAG&crea=TEXT_MSHYCB_BackToSchool_Cashback_BTSCashback_1x1 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/
