John --
Ok Ham, I came across something that seemed relevant to the discussion, so I typed it out. Royce's letter verbatim, but the poetic spacing is my own. ----------------- To William James, Sept. 19, 1880 Now here again I think that people are pursuing this study in too superficial a way. Everywhere one meets the question thus put: What relation in the structure of knowledge, does thought-work bear to the contributions of experience? This is a great problem, but not the deepest one. The deepest question was Kant's, how is experience possible? ... : How is a series of states to be known as a series? Tell us this and you have a philosophy. Leave this untold and you stop half way. How is experience possible as a series of states known to be a series?
It seems to me that the serial aspect of experience is a neuro-physiological problem, and much less significant for the philosopher than the question: What is the Knower, and how is Awareness derived?
I don't expect to find the answer to this question in Pirsig's philosophy because he was determined to do away with subjectivity. And I submit that Descartes establishes the subject 'I' more adroitly and more empirically than did Kant: "But I observed that, while I was thus resolved to feign that everything was false, I who thought must of necessity be somewhat; and remarking this truth--I think, therefore I am--was so firm and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were unable to shake it, I judged that I could unhesitatingly accept it as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking. I could feign that there was no world, I could not feign that I did not exist." -- [Descartes: Discourse on Method]
If the first principle is the Knowing Self, then the content of awareness starts with the subject. Since that establishes a basis for experience, it would seem to be a logical approach to epistemology and the "appearance" of reality that follows from it. Yet the Cogito has been rejected by the philosophical community because it is "solipsistic". To me, this is like rejecting the primary source because it is "religious". To the extent that we each create our own universe, our perception IS a solipsism. All this means is that experiential awareness is propietary to the subject. But it's also true that what we each perceive independently as 'the universe' has a common spacetime configuration that enables us to participate and communicate in the same objective reality. Such is the universality of existence.
If experience is possible only through this constructive process, then what is the ultimate datum? Not matter. Not mind. Not a series of experiences, not the distinction of object and subject, but just this: a moment of reception of some content, joined with a constructive act that postulates a world of other consciousness beyond the present data. Reception means a passive state of consciousness, construction an active state. And Union of passion and action in one moment only, Herein is contained all we can think about the universe. As biologists and a philosopher both admit, the only place we really find or experience mind is in biological creatures. I think that's why the emphasis is upon *animal* perception rather than intellectual perception. A key difference metaphysically! And what saves it, in my view from aspersions of anthropocentricism.
You can't have perception without consciousness, and I refuse to attribute intellect to non-human animals. I happen to believe that existence is anthropocentric. But even if I'm wrong, your analysis of passive/constructive states of consciousness doesn't tell us what it is or where it comes from.
Whether momentary or serial, an active creator or a passive observer, a product of biological evolution or a spark of sensibility unique to living organisms -- Conscious awareness infers a source beyond existential beingness. Pirsigians would simply say, it's "a pattern of Quality", except for Bodvar, who would call it the Intellectual Level. As your friend Royce complained, such explanations, instead of explaining experience, "leave this untold and stop halfway."
Thanks for the Royce quotations, John. --Ham 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/
