Mary said to Arlo:
... Remember, I am one who thinks the Intellectual Level is SOM all the way,
for all of us, all the time. I happen to think that anyone unwilling to admit
that is kidding themselves - and I see you, DMB, Andre, and Dan kidding
yourselves daily. Given that, you can see that I believe none of us can help
it. .. We had no choice until Mr. Pirsig came along and hinted that, hey, we
might all indeed be stuck in SOM for our lifetimes, but there is hope. ...my
gut feeling is that he [Bo] experienced the same profound world-view shift that
I did, was happy to attribute it to Pirsig's insights, but then later felt
betrayed by Pirsig's own denial of his own insight! I am honestly telling you
that from my (and Bo's) perspective, Pirsig seems to have sold out to the DMBs
of the world in a bid for American Academic Legitimacy at the expense of the
real, true, mystical nature of the original message he had in ZEN. So shoot
me. I am not trying to betray Pirsig, I believe Pirsig showed me something and
then reneged on his own insight and betrayed ME. Frankly, I'm a little bit
pissed and disappointed at Pirsig. However, this does not diminish the Quality
of his original message.
dmb says:
In ZAMM Pirsig says that in going between the horns of the subject-object
dilemma he had taken a path that to his knowledge had never been taken before.
In Lila Pirsig says that William James had already done exactly that with his
radical empiricism. He quotes James and together they say that subjects and
objects are not primary metaphysical entities but rather concepts derived from
experience. He quotes James and together they say that concepts are static
while reality is Dynamic.
The evidence AGAINST your interpretation is not obscure or complicated and it
has been presented many, many times. And for what reason? Because you feel
personally betrayed by the fact that somebody else had already rejected
subject-object dualism in favor of an experiential monism? John Dewey also
recognized this even before Pirsig was born. But why take it as a betrayal? Why
take it as selling out? Doesn't just support bolster Pirsig's original
rejection of SOM? Doesn't this just corroborate, clarify and lend authority to
Pirsig's position? Doesn't just make the point more intelligible to hear it
being elaborated upon by other comparable philosophers?
"The second of James' two main systems of philosophy, which he said was
independent of pragmatism, was his radical empiricism. By this he meant that
subjects and objects were not the starting point of experience. Subjects and
objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more
fundamental which he described as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes
the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories'. In this
basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those
between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have
not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be
either physical or psychical: It logically precedes this distinction." (Pirsig
1991, 364-5)
One year ago I posted an explanation for Bo, one that I had posted two and a
half years before that, and now I'm posting it again. This is evidence, textual
evidence that you are mistaken in your interpretation. Don't you think that
there is no such thing as a good interpretation that ignores the evidence? I
certainly do. Not only that, I'd say anyone who is willing to maintain an
opinion that defies the evidence is not a reasonable person and we have no
reason to take their opinion seriously.
This is exactly why people get frustrated with you Bo. I have explained this to
you already many times. For example, the following was addressed to you two and
a half years ago. Not that it'll do any good, but here it is again. Please
notice that I am quoting philosophers to make this point. What reason do you
have for thinking you understand this stuff better than they do? You're smarter
and better read than those hacks over at Stanford University, better than the
scholars who've devoted their lives to studying this stuff? That is absurdly
arrogant.
Maybe you'd like to hear from some other pragmatists on the topic of SOM. John
Stuhr is the Editor of "Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy: Essential
Readings and Interpretive Essays. (Oxford University Press, 2000.) He says, “In
beginning to understand his view, it cannot be overemphasized that Dewey is not
using the word ‘experience’ in its conventional sense. For Dewey, experience is
not to be understood in terms of the experiencing subject, or as the
interaction of a subject and object that exist separate from their interaction.
Instead, Dewey’s view is radically empirical” and “experience is an activity in
which subject and object are unified and constituted as partial features and
relations within this ingoing, unanalyzed unity” (PCAP 437). Or, as Dewey
himself explains SOM in “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy”, “the
characteristic feature of this prior notion is the assumption that experience
centres in, or gathers about, or proceeds from a centre or subject which is
outside the course of natural existence, and set over against it” (PCAP 449).
This “prior notion” is what radical empiricism is rejecting. It is seen as a
mistake and as the source of many fake problems in philosophy. As Stuhr puts
it, “the error of materialists and idealists alike” is “the error of conferring
existential status upon the products of reflection” (PCAP 437). This is a
matter of treating our “products of reflection” as if they were ontological
realities instead of parts of a conceptual scheme. In this case, subjects and
objects are our primary example. When these abstractions are taken from the
realm of practical doings and then asked to do work metaphysics or
epistemology, it creates many problems and questions. Most of these have to do
with how subjects and objects relate, how the former can know what the latter
"really" is, for example. “The problem of knowledge as conceived in the
industry of epistemology is the problem of knowledge in general – of the
possibility, extent, and validity of knowledge in general” but, Dewey says in
“The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy”, this problem only “exists because it
is assumed that there is a knower in general, who is outside of the world to be
known, and who is defined in terms antithetical to the traits of the world”
(PCAP 449). Or, as William James puts it in “A World of Pure Experience”, “the
first great pitfall from which a radical standing by experience will save us is
an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known. Throughout
the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as
absolutely discontinuous entities” and their relations have “assumed a
paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to
overcome” (PCAP 184). I think all this fits quite neatly with Pirsig's attack
on SOM. Not only does he explicitly align the MOQ with James's radical
empiricism, he attacks SOM for the same reasons. He calls it a "metaphysical
assumption" or "concepts derived from experience" instead of the "products of
reflection" but the complaint is about mistaking intellectual abstractions for
existential realities. And I suppose one of the reasons the abstraction seems
so hard to shake is that we can't shake the practical doings of life from which
they are drawn. The experience from which they are abstracted remains even when
the abstractions are seen as such. “The Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to
what is called empiricism. It claims that all legitimate knowledge arises from
the sense or by thinking about what the sense provided. Most empiricists deny
that validity of any knowledge gained through imagination, authority tradition,
or purely theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality,
religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable. The Metaphysics of Quality varies
from this by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious
mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for
metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons. They have been excluded because of
the metaphysical assumption that all the universe is composed of subjects and
objects and anything that can’t be classified as a subject or an object isn’t
real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. Its just an
assumption” (LILA 99).
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