dmb said to Matt:
Matt, you could barely stand to acknowledge the role of DQ, describing it as a
"blank page".
Matt replied:
... I was sincere in saying that I couldn't see how I was exposing myself to
your critical point of view. We disagree, clearly, but I still have to confess
that I don't understand what your criticism was/is. It's a form of "leaving
out DQ," but I don't understand your criticisms of my attempts to include it.
(I wish I could think that it was more than just not saying "DQ" enough, but
sometimes that's all that it looks like.) I picked up the "blank page,"
albeit, from Dave Thomas, but it does seem like a perfectly fine version of the
SODV picture (or, at least, I don't understand your attempts to criticize it).
Ian added:
I like it too. I hadn't realized the blank page idea had come from Third Wave
Dave. I like it as an expression of DQ - I have tended to refer to it as "pure
potential" - in the blank-slate / tabula-rasa sense (an old idea I picked up
from Pinker). I think it's a magnificent role for DQ, the leading edge of pure
experience is pure potential, minimally constrained by static patterns in any
level.
dmb says:
Well, the blank slate is, among other things, a Lockean idea about the way
subjects passively receive sense data from the objective world. That's very
likely where Steven Pinker got the idea, although that's just my hunch. I'm
pretty sure Matt has no intention of returning to old school sensory empiricism
in pressing the idea of DQ as a blank page and I'm not objecting on those
grounds, at least not exactly. The criticism I have in mind, however, is
definitely based on the assertion that DQ is best understood as the primary
empirical reality.
The problem is not your failure to mention DQ often enough, of course. The
problem is characterizing DQ in such a way that it becomes trivial, inert or
relatively meaningless factor. That's pretty much the meaning of the word
"blank". To paraphrase my dictionary, it means "bare, empty, or plain", like a
blank sheet of paper or an audio tape with nothing recorded on it. In terms of
characterizing DQ, a blank mind is even worse, as in the phrase "we were met by
blank looks" or "her mind went blank". So I'm saying that this characterization
is approximately the opposite of DQ as the primary empirical reality, which is
anything but blank. To put it in Dewey's terms, this primary empirical reality
is the "infinitely complex situational whole". The whole complex situation is
comparable to Pirsig's "endless landscape of awareness".
"Dewey's conception of experience is directly contingent upon the idea of
quality. In Experience and Nature, he tells us that 'quality' constitutes the
'brute and unconditioned isness' of empirical events. As Pirsig likewise
suggests, qualities are much more that mere states of conscousness. Rather, the
establish the primary field and horizons of everyday experience, the immediate,
concrete conditions of human life and activity. Immediate sense qualities are
what we live in and for. 'The world in which we immediately live, that in which
we strive, succeed, and are defeated,' Dewey argues, 'is preeminently a
qualitative world'. This means that 'all direct experience is qualitative, and
qualities are what make life-experience itself directly precious." (David
Granger 27)
"In a nutshell, radical empiricism postulates that sense-making in experience
is a function of discrimination made within the 'primary integrity' of this
temporally moving qualitative whole. The principle agency of these
discriminations is a purposive human organism. Meaning emerges as this organism
organizes, controls, and directs the various existential relations that exist
with the unanalyzed totality of experience. The thoughtful reconstruction of
experience, which shapes and guides it toward desirable ends through
intelligent action in the world, is thus perceived as the quintessential human
project. Importantly, this is in direct contradiction to conventional Lockean
empiricism." (Granger 28)
I think it would be helpful to set Granger's descriptions next to Pirsig's hot
stove example wherein DQ is what gets you off the stove immediately, before you
can sort the experience into analyzable concepts like "heat" and "stove" and
"self", etc. The experience is very far from being blank in the sense that it
is a highly charged negative aesthetic, a definitely felt negative quality. The
idea here is that DQ is pre-reflective, pre-intellectual, prior to definitions
and conceptual analysis but this absence of concepts doesn't mean the landscape
of awareness is blank or empty. Quite the opposite. As in the hot stove
example, we act upon it and follow it and let it lead us and the subsequent
analysis and reflection we might preform after the fact is always secondary and
thin and partial compared to the richness and fullness of the immediately felt
event.
Now, let's turn back to the topic of creative excellence as a matter of "fresh
seeing". Does it make sense to say that the dull student was tricked into
seeing "a blank page" with her own eyes or that the trick was to get her stare
at a static brick? I think not. The exercise worked because it forced her to
look for herself with the "dilated eye" of the poet, as Emerson puts it. It
worked because of the way it shut down her tendency to imitate, to follow
instructions, to adhere to the abstract rules and the like. It forced her to
lose her mind and return to her senses, as Alan Watts liked to put it. And the
senses are not at all blank. Indeed, that way of taking experience is far
richer than abstract thought.
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