Hey Ron,
Ron said:
First off I apologize for the descrepancy in communication,
I did take your tone to be rather dismissive and honostly I
was kinda hurt and offended.
Matt:
And I'm sorry to have contributed to the misunderstanding.
I don't mean to hurt or offend. I've been around the MD
long enough to have been all sides of experiences (dare I
say) like this and it's just one of those things. No harm,
no foul.
Ron said:
This goes some way in explaining what I mean in relation
to how I understand Pirsigs assertion of experience being
more empirical.
If you and I were having this conversation face to face
alot of the miscommunication we have been experiencing
would be reduced.
In fact it would have an entirely different tone and
therefore take on an entirely different meaning. If you
and I spent alot of time together and we knew
eachother, shared experiences together, we would
communicate even better.
The way combat veterens share a certain understanding
that can only be understood by someone who has
experienced actual combat.
Matt:
I think these are three excellent examples, but I think
they all require their own particular explanation. And in
putting the three particulars together to form a
generalization, my objection is simply that I think that
the Pirsig-like "experience is more empirical" doesn't work
very well. The first line of objection I always give is the
observation that "experience is more empirical" is a
tautology, and so doesn't really say anything at all.
Likewise in Pirsig's formulation, saying value is more
empirical is a tautology, because experience is value.
"Empirical" receives its impact from being opposed to
non-experiential things. So to use "empirical," what we
need is an understanding of what these non-experiential
things are. Which is why I then point out that for Pirsig
_everything_ is experience. What's left out after a
statement like that? And so, what could "empirical"
possibly mean, what could its force be in saying that
"values are _more_ empirical" (Lila, 75)?
And the second stage is to go to examples, which either
work as analogies or as literal instantiations of the
generalization. Those are two different modes of
explication. Often our way of understanding the hot
stove passage has been as an analogy. "Touch the hot
stove. First you feel the pain, then you emit curses.
Analogously, first we experience value, then we tag it
with concepts." The noticeable time lag between our
touching a hot stove and then cursing functions as a
_way of thinking about_ all of our experiences, despite
the fact that not all of them have any noticeable time lag.
If it were just analogy, however, all we would need to do
is redescribe the situation, give a different way of thinking
about language and concepts. For instance:
It seems to me that there isn't a direct experience that is
then
covered over in various ways depending on the kind
of concepts at your
disposal, but rather various kinds of
responses to experiences, or
rather--your experience is
the kind of response that your particular
collection of
static patterns is making, including linguistic, all of
which
are bound up with one another, none more direct or
impeding.
It's a holistic sense of experience. Pirsig's hot
stove example is a
good one for his purposes because
extreme pain is the experience which
tends to bring
about the most non-linguistic responses in humans. But
I don't think this is emblematic of experience in general,
as Pirsig
does, but is peculiar to pain because of its
ability to _destroy_ our
linguistic capability: this, again,
_by itself_, doesn't suggest
metaphors of distance ("pain
is more direct"). We can just as easily
say that pain
blots out a certain cross-section of static patterns,
reducing their participation in the whole of our experience.
Now, Pirsig doesn't just think that the hot stove is an
analogy. He also talks about a literal time lag, as
imperceptible as it is. The trouble is that there is no way
to verify this contention. All experimentation would likely
tell us is that non-linguistic biological patterns of value
happen before linguistic biological patterns of value
(because in Pirsig's philosophy, every level above is
rooted in something in the ones below)--but why would
that tell us about value _in general_, and not just
biological patterns? The only way to make the reach is
by analogy.
To take the other examples, with communication face to
face, you are absolutely right, and is why Plato favored
the oral over writing in the Phaedrus. But why does that
tell us something about experience _in general_, and not
just about the difference between two different kinds of
communication? The experience of the e-mail is an
experience, right? The difference is our ability to correct
interpretations of behavior (responsiveness to the
experience of e-mails is much lower than responsiveness
to spoken experience) and levels of expressiveness (the
written word has fewer rhetorical emissions, while the
spoken word has pitch, inflection, etc., plus body
language). Which is not at all to say that writing does
not have it's own advantages in communication--the
ability to revise, to ponder, to use the exact words you
want to use (_if_, of course, you have the capacity to
find them, about which more below).
The second example is if we knew each other personally
better. If we shared more experiences, we'd be able to
communicate better. Absolutely right. But why is it that
none of my oldest friends can talk about Aristotle with me,
whereas you and I have had much more significant
communication on the subject (even in the last week or
whatever when it was me mainly going, "I'm not exactly
sure what you mean here")? If you and I agreed on
three books on Aristotle to read, and read them
separately where ever the hell we are, I guarantee our
mutual linguistic experience of reading them would allow
us to communicate amazingly well.
The war example is a particularly important example on
the scale of sharing experiences. War, like pain, has a
way of destroying our linguistic capacity and there is very
little analogous to the experience of being about to die
and about to kill, all unpredictably. But like the
experience of pain, which is intensely private _because_
it destroys our public means of communication, we have
to think seriously--if we are going to make an analogy
with experience in general--about how we actually know
about the commonality of these intensely private
experiences. Some veterans stay away from other
veterans because they _don't_ feel there is commonality,
that their experience of war was vastly different than
their compatriots. And it's difficult to say whether one or
the other is true, commonality or vast difference--the
difficulty is the same, the intensely private nature of the
experience.
And the second part of difficult-to-convey experiences,
which seems to punch up the importance of _having_ the
experience to feel commonality, is exactly the ability to
articulate in language. War and pain are notoriously
difficult to articulate. My girlfriend has been working on
research for the use of art therapy as a tool for helping
people with PTSD. The use of art as a therapeutic
catalyst has immense advantages in being able to call
forth many emotions and ideas that otherwise lie behind
the difficulty in getting started, the initial mental block of
saying _anything_ because _everything_ seems to be in
the way, of getting the ball rolling because of the
immensity of the boulder.
To move to a different sector of the example, you mention
training for combat versus being in the shit. Reverse the
process, though: does having first-hand combat
experience automatically make you a good drill sergeant?
I'm guessing not. Articulation--linguistic experience--is
simply a different kind of experience, a different kind of
ability, not something that either gets in the way or is at
second remove from "real experience." Some people are
just good with words, and can articulate well the horror
of war, though we should feel no need to add, "But it can
never convey the actual experience of war." We
shouldn't ever feel the need to say that it _would_. They
are different experiences, even if Stephen Crane,
Hemingway and Tim O'Brien are said to be very good at
what they do.
So when you say, "Experience seems to be the
foundation of meaning whatever the hell experience is,"
I think that's exactly right, and we shouldn't be so picky
about whether it's the experience of a book,
conversation, a baseball game, or a hot stove. In broad,
general terms, they all--even, _all together_--provide
the foundation for the meaning we derive from
experience. I see no reason to give golden apples to
some experiences and not others, _not_ at the level of
generalities, as opposed to handing out the apples at
the level of particularity (for instance, we might give out
an apple to oral conversation for avoiding the kind of
misunderstanding of tone that occurred between us).
Ron said:
I can see with my original reluctance to make the
statement that "all is relative" you would think that I was
making a case for a type of universal foundationalism and
in a roundabout way perhaps I am in what I'm trying to
say about panrelationalism and the construction of
meaning from it. I'm pointing to a formless form a dynamic
quality and because of this, explaination is
understandably difficult if not impossible in the format we
are using to communicate.
Matt:
Well, it's not that I suspect a foundationalism, because
I've never really detected strong noises of it from you, but
rather, if one _isn't_ some sort of foundationalist, I
wonder what the motivation is for certain kinds of
philosophical formulations. For example, "experience is
more empirical"--if one is not going to outline what
"empirical" contrasts with, then I wonder why one is using
it. _Typically_, it is true, the contrast is used to relegate
the non-empirical category to second-grade status with
the empirical being a foundation for everything else. (E.g.,
concepts are secondary to experience, therefore we
should pay attention to experience to guide us in what
kind of concepts we use--that's a foundationalist move.)
However, first things first--why the initial contrast? More
empirical than what?
Another instance of wondering about motivation in
formulation: "explanation is understandably difficult if not
impossible in the format we are using to communicate."
If you are not prepared to suggest another format for
communication, it is unclear to me why one would flirt
with impossibility. Explanation and communication can
be difficult--conceded. But how does that suggest "if not
impossible"? We communicate well all the time, do we
not? If that's true, then _something unstated_ is
motivating the reach for the possibility of impossibility.
In my experience, oftentimes it is a backgrounding
metaphor for language that causes it: language as a
thing that gets between us and reality, our experience.
The initial "understandably difficult" registers the
optimistic outlook of the metaphor, that though
language is in between us and reality, we might be able
to make it a clear window. The subsequent "if not
impossible" registers the pessimistic outlook on the same
metaphor, that language will always be colored glass
between us and reality, if not red, then blue, but never
clear, always changing the appearance of what reality
really is.
Now--if you're not a foundationalist, and you don't have
that picture of language operating--then what is the
motivation for saying "more empirical" or "if not
impossible"? These are the kinds of considerations that
go into my attempt to understand the philosophical
position someone is trying to articulate. I lean hard on
phrases, some would say too hard, but the words we
use are important--it's all rhetoric, analogies all the way
down. We say some things rather than others--that's
how we generate our meaning. It is motivated out of a
context, an experience. Aside from phrases like the
above, which give me pause, I have no sense as to
whether you are a foundationalist or are participating
in distance metaphors in your implicit presentation of
how language works--so I lean on them in the hopes of
eliciting further evidence, one way or the other. The
only context I have is the one you create. (Which is
why sometimes small contexts can be impediments.
I'm not wordy because I like to confuse people, I'm
wordy because I would like people to understand by
my words just what I think they mean.)
Ron said:
I simply refered to Aristotle because you struck me as
having extensive knowledge in ancient Greek
philosophy, I puposly boned up on Plato and Aristotle
just so I could carry on a decent conversation with you
with a common frame of reference in relation
Pragmatism.
Matt:
Sorry about that. I know more than some do, but I
wouldn't say extensive. I spent some time with a
certain collection of books, but even now I'm becoming
removed from that period. I have lasting impressions,
and things I would say and not say, but no real deep
relationship.
Matt
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