Hey Craig,
Matt said:
I have _never_ been comfortable with Pirsig's "more
empirical" claim. If everything is experience, what could
it possibly mean for something to be "more empirical"?
How can we drive a metaphysical wedge between the
experience of low quality associated with the hot stove
and the hot stove itself (a distinction you need in order
to say the former is "more empirical") when the "hot
stove itself" is nothing more or less than a set of static
patterns of quality, meaning that "the experience of low
quality" is not _associated_ with the stove, but rather _is
the stove itself_. Right?
Craig said:
The distinction is between the UN conceptualized
experience & the conceptualized experience. The
UNconceptualized response is to the low quality, not to
the stove or even to the heat. (Our response might have
been the same to a sharp edge on the counter .) After
the "more empirical", UNconceptualized experience, we
might recognize/conceptualize that the response was to
heat & that the heat was (from) the stove.
Matt:
Right, that's the most common explanation. The trouble
is explaining just how exactly "low quality response"
differs from "that stove is hot" considering that both
quotations are made up of words (which are often
considered to be low-rent concepts). How does one
know that you're responding, first, to "low quality" and
only later to "a hot stove," and not the other way around?
What tells you which is "more empirical" than which?
Philosophical tradition tells us that experience precedes
concepts. That makes Pirsig distinctly _un_radical as a
philosopher. More radical is when he says Quality is
reality is experience. That makes concepts experiential,
empirical. Now, you can grant that, but want to make a
distinction between conceptualized and unconceptualized.
Okay--but how do we know we have an unconceptualized
experience? When all the concepts are gone, right?
Well, why is "low quality" not a concept you place over
the experience?
It seems like the most one could say is that "low quality"
is a simpler, initial concept to apply to an experience,
and that more complicated ones, like "stove," come later.
(Though I have to say, whatever philosophers say is
"primary" to our experience always seems more difficult
to understand than the stuff they say comes later, which
seems a little odd.) It doesn't seem, however, that you
can do anything to the "unconceptualized experience"
other than call it "unconceptualized," though even then,
you've just conceptualized the experience as
"unconceptualized."
The problem is that Pirsig on the one hand analyzes the
stove itself into a static pattern of quality, and then on
the other hand says that there is something "more
empirical," more experiential than something else.
What is that thing? The _low quality_ of a situation
before the _naming_ of a situation? That makes sense
out of "low quality" over "hot stove" (except for the
problem of "low quality" being a name). So we have an
experience, and then we name the experience. But if
we analyze what "naming" is in Pirsig's terms, things
turn sour again. "Naming," I would think, is a social
and/or intellectual static pattern of quality (I would like
to avoid the exact nature in addition to the attendant
problems of distinguishing the two). This seems to
suggest that what is more empirical are inorganic and
biological static patterns, since it's the naming, or
social/intellectual pattern, that needs to be teased out.
Or, in Pirsig's reframed senses of the terms,
"objective" (inorganic/biological) static patterns of
quality are more empirical than "subjective"
(social/intellectual) static patterns of quality. And tell
me how _that_ is not backsliding into the S/O Dilemma.
Why is Dynamic Quality both "non-static" value _and_
"unconceptualized" value? "Non-static" gets us to
"cutting edge," but "unconceptualized" gets us to
"pre-intellectual," and it isn't clear why we need the
latter if we have the former. If we have the former,
"non-static," we get to say that DQ comes first, and its
unpatterned nature takes care of any problems
associated with all my distinguishing problems
above--by definition there's no _thing_ there, and so
no problems in what goes where: it's just one massive,
undifferentiated blob of newness. No static patterns
means _no_ static patterns. But then, in addition, we
get "pre-intellectual," which singles out just one strand
of static patterns, intellectual, and says that _they_
aren't "there," implying the other ones are--like a
stove to cause the burn. And that's what gives us the
trouble. If there are no static patterns "there" (where?
don't ask) at all, then why also say there are no
intellectual static patterns there? You just got done
saying there aren't _any_ static patterns of _any_ kind.
So, the simpler statement of the problem again: how
can something be "more empirical" than something
else when everything is an experience? How can "low
quality" be _different_ than the stove, when all the
stove _is_ (in Pirsig's special sense of being, in which
DQ "is not") is patterns of quality (and the "hot"
pattern giving it a "low quality," as it were)?
Do you really want to say, which is where this line
seems to go, that non-being is more empirical?
Matt
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