dmb said:
... Ham's Essentialism seems to be a matter of moving a few pieces around on
some metaphysical chessboard and none of those pieces makes contact with actual
experience at any point. The game is confined to those 64 squares and none of
the moves makes a difference to anyone or anything. That's vicious
abstractionism. That's why reification is a real problem. This is an abuse of
concepts...
Ham replied:
That's an unfair criticism, David. Actual experience is the basis of empirical
knowledge, not metaphysical conceptualization, as you should know. Metaphysics
is always "abstraction". ...
dmb says:
Let me stop you right there because I can already see that you do not
understand this criticism. The idea here is not to oppose abstractions. The
idea is to stop abusing abstractions and instead use them properly. And what is
the "proper" use of abstract concepts according to the MOQ? They come from past
experience and their point and purpose is to guide future experience. When they
become detached and float free of this experiential reality, abstractions
become vicious. When they are used to denigrate the empirical reality from
which they are derived, abstractions become vicious. When they are taken to be
more real than the empirical reality to which they refer, this is an abuse of
abstractions. In the MOQ, metaphysics and truth and ideas are static
intellectual quality and these verbal and conceptual static patterns are always
secondary. They always exist in relation to experience or when they don't it is
like a broken circuit or a wrench in the gears. This is a form of pra
gmatism, which says true ideas are the ones that function in experience, the
concepts that lead you into harmonious relations, that you can smoothly ride
upon in experience. Bad ideas will lead you into confusion, isolation or even
danger. And then there are ideas that make no difference at all because they're
purely verbal, so abstract as to be unconnected to anything known in
experience.
This is what I'm saying about your key terms, especially "Essence". For James
and Pirsig, there is no such thing. As James famously said, the essence of a
thing is just whatever we find most important about it. It's not an actual
entity or an eternal principle. It's just an abstraction, something we carve
out of experience.
Ham said:
Pirsig had disdain for metaphysics, so he ridiculed it as "names about
reality", a "menu without food," etc. What he really wanted to do was reduce
metaphysics to the experiential level. ..Oh well, we'll just equate Quality to
Experience and avoid the need for definitions altogether. It's a nice
euphemism, but hardly a metaphysical thesis. For one thing, we don't "directly
experience Quality independent of intellectual abstractions." Quality is an
assessment of the aesthetic or moral value of a phenomenon relative to other
phenomena experienced or observed. That involves memory recall, intellectual
judgment, and sufficient experience with the type of phenomenon in question to
make such an assessment.
dmb says:
Disdain and ridicule? No. Again, the idea here is to stop the ABUSE of
concepts. In those quotes Pirsig is saying that metaphysical ideas ought not be
confused with reality. The idea is NOT to say that menus are bad, just that it
is a mistake to eat the menu. As in the explanation above, the menu is supposed
to guide you to the actual food. Eating the menu or thinking it more real than
the food is the mistake known as reification. The MOQ is not metaphysical in
that sense, in the sense of positing entities or principles that are outside of
experience, whether it's supposed to be the conditions behind experience, under
experience as a foundation or above experience as some divine principle. The
pragmatist will not rule out any idea in advance as long as we take such
notions as a working hypothesis and put it to work in experience. If your idea
can not be put to the test because, by definition, it represents something that
can't be known or tried out in experience, then the pra
gmatist will say it is an empty, useless idea.
The intellectual judgements and assessments we make make use of all kinds of
static quality but Dynamic Quality refers to something else. Pirsig uses many,
many examples of when and where it's likely to be noticeable in your own
experience so that you can realize for yourself what the term refers to. It's
not a crypto-religious metaphysical abstraction, he says, but an immediately
felt empirical event. There is book called "How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer that
popularizes the scientific findings that support this view. The overall
cognitive process totally breaks down without this ability to immediately
"feel" the situation. One man lost this capacity for medical reasons and
literally could not even choose a breakfast cereal. He'd stand in the grocery
store for hours because he could not make a choice, even though his ability to
reason logically was perfectly intact. In fact, that's how he'd get stuck on
the cereal isle. He'd try to decide on quantitative grounds, price, weigh
t, nutritional value statistics, etc.. He couldn't just says, hey, that looks
good.
Look it up. I'll bet you could read some reviews and get the basic idea in less
than an hour. I mean, it's not just a speculative idea. It's a pretty good
description of how feeling and thinking function together, are two aspects of
the overall cognitive process. William James was a psychologist before he
became a philosopher, you see, and even though he died over a hundred years ago
a heck of a lot of his work still holds up in this day of neuroscience and
sophisticated brain imaging.
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