Steve said to dmb:
Why do you always take me to be not understanding when I am disagreeing?
dmb says:
I can tell that you're not seeing it by the way you disagree. For example, the
following demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding.
Steve said:
Yep, I understand all that to be what Pirsig is saying. Now, how exactly is it
possible to be unenlightened in the sense of being out of touch with reality if
reality is experience itself? What in this simple experience=reality picture
needs to be transcended? Since we can never be out of touch with reality, then
our only philosphical problem is a need for better descriptions. All
transcendence in terms of language can mean is to bring some new good
description into the world, and all that enlightenment can mean is the state of
having really good interpretations that can easily be dropped when better ones
become available.
dmb says:
Our descriptions and interpretations are static and conceptual, right? These
are the patterns that are derived from experience and handed to us by the
culture, right? The main philosophical problem that concerns Pirsig, however,
is the exclusion of the non-conceptual, non-linguistic experience, right? He's
saying that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language, that the
primary empirical reality is felt and known and experienced, despite the fact
that it defies our descriptions and conceptualizations. He's saying there's
more to life than language, that language is secondary and derived from this
basic flux of life.
To say that our only philosophical problem is a need for better descriptions is
just an expression of Rortyism and has nothing to do with the problem as Pirsig
sees it. In fact, they are saying very opposite things on this point. The
problem with Platonism, for Pirsig, is that the Good was made subservient to
the True. This kind of Platonism says that if it can't be fitted into
dialectical words traps, if one can't "give an account" or offer a description,
then it's dismissed as untrue, unreal or unimportant. That's exactly what
you're doing, Steve, You're denying that there is anything beyond intellectual
truths, nothing beyond really good interpretations. This defies Pirsig's
version of the copernican revolution, where subject and objects and all
concepts are derived from Quality, where truth is just a species of the Good
and not the other way around. Where Pirsig ramps up empiricism and puts it
front and center, Rortyism rejects it entirely and moves everything over the la
nguage. From the perspective of the MOQ, Rorty merely repeats and perpetuates
the original philosophical sin.
In this important sense, Plato's dialectical truth and Rorty's position on
intersubjective agreement are about an inch apart.
Here's another demonstration of your misunderstanding...
Steve said:
So instead of outside/inside you are now preferring a distinction between the
past and the present. And the SOM glasses are part of the present. Everything
happens in the present--even refection on the past. You say that "In this
immediate flux of life there are as yet no differentiations." Well then when do
differentiations occur if not in some later Now? Nothing ever happens that
doesn't happen in the immediate flux of life.
dmb says:
Well, yes, you can think of it in terms of a sequence of events. That's why
Pirsig refers to the primary empirical reality as "the cutting edge of
experience" and "the flux of life". The train analogy suggests this continuous
movement too. Likewise, James used the image of fire moving across a grassy
field or, more famously, he depicted consciousness as a stream. Life is in the
transitions, he said. Unlike the continuous flow of experience,
conceptualizations are discontinuous. They are taken from the stream. Concepts
are in the buckets, which can never exhaust the stream nor can they capture its
motion. Our descriptions are always relatively stable and fixed. The mistake is
thinking there is no stream, that all we can do is better arrangements the
buckets or that buckets only ever come from other buckets. Being cut off from
the stream of life, drinking life through a straw, is what you get when all you
have are buckets. Pirsig's root expansion of rationality is all about get
ting the stream to count, to be recognized in our philosophies and in our own
experience. But Rortyism leaves all this out of the picture entirely. On this
matter, Rortyism offers nothing at all.
Steve said:
I don't know what to make of these [Jill Bolte Taylor's] "tears of joy." You've
sketched enlightenment as a form of brain damage here. You talk of fully
realizing the lack of all distinctions as though that's how things REALLY are
and all dictinctions are illusion--that this primary reality is what is really
real. You know James studies this kind of stuff in detail (if you've read
Varieties) and never jumped to these sorts of metaphysical conclusions.
dmb says:
You're missing the point entirely and nobody is talking about the way things
REALLY are. Taylor's experience simply shows that undivided, non-conceptual
experience is normal and natural and tied to the very structure of our brains
in big way. She was using one of two hemispheres. By my reckoning that means
where talking about 50% of human consciousness, the half that has been ignored.
This notion of preconceptual awareness is being substantiated by science more
and more every day. I just picked up a popular book called "How We Decide" by
Jonah Lehrer. James shows up in the first few pages because his view is being
validated by what's happening in cutting edge science. Antonio Damasio at
Princeton and Eugene Taylor at Harvard are saying the same thing about James
these days. This is not about how reality really is, but it is about how
experience really is. It's empiricism, not ontology. Radical empiricism is so
radical that experience is reality. There is no ontology here. The
re is a very important distinction between dynamic experience and static
experience, but together that is all the reality there is. There is no third
thing.
dmb said:
The primary empirical reality is undifferentiated awareness, it's the reality
you experience before you have a chance to think about it.
Steve replied:
You've just excluded thinking from emprical reality.
dmb says:
No, I've made a distinction between primary and secondary. C'mon Steve.
"Primary" is not opposed to or distinct from "reality". It just means "basic"
or "first". To say that concepts are derived from this primary experience is
not to say that are outside of experience. They follow from and guide us
through. Concepts are true, remember, to the extent that they function within
the ongoing process of experience. I have to say, Steve, that your questions
almost seem to be intentionally tedious. I mean, no reasonable person could
think "I've excluded thinking from empirical reality". That's nonsense and you
know it.
Here is yet another example where you demonstrate a fundamental lack of
understanding.
Steve said:
Pirsig says it can't be done because language is not adequate to representing
reality. That is an SOM notion that ought to be discarded. Language doesn't
fail to represent reality when language doesn't represent at all--when all we
have are static patterns of value and dynamic change. We have interpretations
(static patterns) and the ability to create new and better descriptions (DQ).
We can say what we ought to say about language using such notions of static and
dynamic quality without positing some mystical realm or state that language
keeps us from accessing.
dmb says:
That's a very bad interpretation of Pirsig. You've wildly misconstrued his
mystical claim about the fundamental nature of reality as being outside
language. You've also reduced his central term to the latching of static
patterns, converting the dynamic into the static. And, again, you're mistaking
an empirical claim as an ontological claim. I mean, nobody is positing the
existence of a "mystical realm". Nobody is saying that concepts represent
reality. Pirsig's claim is simply that you can't fit the stream in a bucket.
That's why the fundamental reality is outside language.
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