Ian said to dmb, Matt, etc:
...I'm trying to (help) answer a question like - so what is this primary
empirical reality like then? So let's riff on my DQ as "pure-potential"
suggestion - imagine what it's like to experiencing the world as everything it
could be, rather than as pre-conceived by any number of existing static
patterns. ...The blank sheet is a bit static, I'll grant you, but it's been
used by the poets since time immemorial, to contrast with the static belief
that "It is written".
dmb says:
Yea, the white paper analogy construes DQ as the unwritten, as the larger
reality upon which we write. Anything that can be written will be written on
the basis of DQ. In that sense, pure potential is not a bad way to characterize
it. In the same way, we could say that the endless landscape is the larger
reality from which we draw a handful of sand. In terms of evolutionary growth,
DQ is characterized as the ongoing stimulus which causes us to create the
world, and by this we mean the world of static analogies. Every last bit of it,
he says. Man is the measure of all things, a participant in the creation of all
things, he says. Similarly, James says, "We carve out everything". It sounds
like madness to say the world as we know it is just pile of analogies or just a
handful of sand, but that's what he's saying. The primary empirical reality is
not just a handful of sand and it can't be sorted like sand. It's not the
analogies we create in response to the ongoing stimulus. That's why Quality
can't be defined, why it's the unwritten potential of all that is written or
will be written.
Pirsig says, "Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and
include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why
Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less
than Quality itself." (ZAMM, chapter 20) This is another way of saying that
concepts are always secondary and derived, as opposed to being the primary
empirical reality. I think this is what Granger is saying in his "nutshell"
description of radical empiricism, which I posted yesterday. Granger says,
"sense-making in experience is a function of discrimination made WITHIN the
'primary integrity' of this temporally moving qualitative whole" and "meaning
emerges" as we organize, control, and direct "the various existential relations
that exist WITHIN the unanalyzed totality of experience". (Granger p28) In
other words, the totality of experience is an endless landscape and all of our
concepts come from there and work or function within it. The white page analogy
expresses this relation too. It's always bigger and contains the concepts that
are written on it - in pencil.
What is this primary empirical reality like, then? He says he has to hammer on
this point because of our cultural immune system, but it's not complicated.
It's hard to see because it's so simple, immediate and direct. It's what you
know before you know it. It's always already right under your nose. I think
this only means that the primary empirical reality is just experience as it's
felt and lived, in all it's totality before its selected for attention or
sorted into concepts. Man is the measure because he is "inseparable" from the
landscape awareness and he does the selecting and the sorting.
"We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us
and call that handful of sand the world.
...What has become an urgent
necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of
these two kinds of understanding [classic and romantic] and unites them into
one. Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of
unsorted sand for its own sake. Such an understanding will instead seek to
DIRECT ATTENTION TO THE ENDLESS LANDSCAPE from which the sand is taken. That is
what Phædrus, the poor surgeon, was trying to do.
To understand what he was
trying to do it’s necessary to see that part of the landscape, inseparable from
it, which must be understood, is a figure in the middle of it, sorting sand
into piles. To see the landscape without seeing this figure is not to see the
landscape at all."
dmb resumes:
This helps to reinforce the idea of man being a participant in the creation of
all things, the measure of all things, and it helps to put the landscape
analogy back in it's original context. But I also think this helps to push back
against Matt's contention that we have limited access to DQ, that it can only
be seen through a crack in the glasses or by jumping off the train and into
death and chaos. I think the idea here is that DQ is the endless landscape of
OUR awareness. We not only have access, we are inseparable from it. It is in
that sense that Quality has us, rather than the other way around. It's not that
reality is behind appearances but rather that reality is totally apparent,
entirely pervious. Thou art that, as they say back East.
There is discrepancy between concepts and reality, Pirsig and James both say,
but that's not at all the same as the distinction appearance and reality.
Despite the discrepancy between concepts and reality, but neither of them is
outside of our experience and they are supposed to cooperate in experience. The
sorting figure is inseparable from the whole scene and sorting occurs WITHIN
the scene. The discrepancy is pushes back against the tendency to reify our
concepts of the world, the tendency to believe that there is only one right way
to sort sand but both are part of OUR experience. The radical empiricist limits
reality to whatever it is that can actually be experienced so that experience
and reality amount to same thing. Man is the measure and the Buddha fixes bikes.
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