"Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify
without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably
low-quality situation: that the _value_ of his predicament is negative."
I like to think that Pirsig's hot stove example was meant to be humorous. He's
saying that DQ is not some crypto-religious metaphysical abstraction. Instead,
in this analogy, DQ is just your own sweet ass. Things can't get much more down
to earth than that. In this case, there is nothing "dim" about apprehending
that situation. I don't know. Maybe it's just me, but I think it's funny. The
mystics will the the first ones off the stove because they are more sensitive
to the immediate empirical reality, because they are better at following DQ.
Few people seek enlightenment but everybody wants their own buns to remain
untoasted.
If DQ is the primary empirical reality or the immediate flux of life, as James
calls it, then DQ is going to be anything and everything, depending on the
concrete particulars of the situation. I mean, DQ is reality itself so the
notion that experience can be negative or positive and everything in between -
well, that just seems obvious to me. I don't the problem. The idea, I think, is
the empirical reality is aesthetically charged, and that this awareness is real
information, so speak. It's a feature of the overall cognitive process in the
sense that the static concepts and oaths about stoves and heat and ouch are all
about a real, concrete experience. It's the thing to be explained, the primary
data, so to speak.
Betterness is a relational term, right? It implies a comparison of at least two
choices. In that sense, I think the meaning is completely unaltered by the
terms we use. It doesn't matter if we say "movement toward the good" or
"movement away from the bad". Either way is fine. They're both aimed at
betterness in relation to something else. Again, I think the idea here is just
that we get real information from an immediate, non-thinking process. Of course
he's not saying that thinking is a bad thing or something we should turn off,
as if we could. I think this attunement to the dynamic is supposed to improve
our thinking, especially creative thinking.
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org/md/archives.html
