Hi dmb, (Ron, Andre)
You've just responded to my post with accusations of having ignored
your post while ignoring my post! I DID read what you wrote, and now
that you re-posted it, I've read it it again, and I came to the same
conclusion that I related to you before (the conclusion you ignored).
What you are describing as your suggestion for what Pirsig means by
taking of the glasses (while having the virtue of avoiding the
appearance-reality problem) does not have anything to do with context
of Pirsig's remarks about taking off the glasses. It doesn't fit what
Pirsig said. Here is the quote again:
"If someone sees things through a somewhat different set of glasses
or, God help him, takes his glasses off, the natural tendency of those
who still have their glasses on is to regard his statements as
somewhat weird, if not actually crazy. But he isn't."
You said that reality with the glasses off is uninterpreted
experience. Ok, then certainly the SOMer and the MOQer are both
subject to uninterpreted experience which then gets interpreted
through one lens or the other. What we have is a comparison between...
(1) the common sense things that someone says who is interpreting
experience through the lens of SOM
(2) the weird sounding things that someone says who is interpreting
his experience through the lens of the MOQ
(3) versus what? The crazy sounding things someone says who is not
interpreting his experience through any lens at all??? What could that
even mean?
That's the very idea that Pirsig criticized in the Descartes passage.
The great Rene didn't successfully step out of his own skin as he
thought he had done. ("If Descartes had said, "The seventeenth century
French culture exists, therefore I think, therefore I am," he would
have been correct.") No one's intellectual patterns get around their
social patterns. No one's statements are "pure" in the sense of a
clear vision of uninterpreted reality without seeing it through some
lens of pre-existing intellectual and social patterns. "The culture in
which we live hands us a set of intellectual glasses to interpret
experience with" and that is how we can make sense of intellect as the
process of interpreting experience. There is no interpretation that is
not based on some set of such intellectual glasses whether they are
the ones handed to us at birth or a newly fashioned pair. There is no
interpretation of experience that corresponds with "taking the glasses
off." Only putting on a different pair.
I take Ron and Andre to be saying that what is important here is the
insight that we are wearing such glasses rather than to imagine what
it is like to go without them (one hand clapping, anyone?), and I
agree with that,
Best,
Steve
On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 3:32 PM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> dmb said to Steve and Matt:
>
> Since the glasses are intellectual and represent a way to interpret
> experience, then taking the glasses off leaves you with DQ, with
> pre-intellectual, uninterpreted experience. ..The MOQ's distinction between
> concepts and reality (sq&DQ) shows up here again and so Steve and Matt are
> going to be confounded. ...It will continue to cause trouble everywhere you
> go, no matter what facet or feature you try to explore.
>
>
>
> Steve replied:
> I don't think this unpacking works even a little since we _aren't_ talking
> about one's uninterpreted experience as being regarded as crazy. ...We can
> compare the statements of someone wearing the MOQ glasses to someone wearing
> the SOM glasses for sure, but presumably we are also to be able to compare
> these to what it's like without any glasses, and I don't know what that means.
>
>
>
> dmb says:
>
> You deleted everything I said about uninterpreted experience. You can't
> delete my answer and then say you still don't know what it means. You can't
> erase the bulk of my answer and then complain that the paltry remains didn't
> work. As you so often like to do, you have responded to the answer by posing
> the question. Not only was I talking about what it means to take the glasses
> off, I was talking about what that means IN CONTRAST with your reading of it
> as a Platonist claim involving the appearance/reality distinction. That was
> the unpacking job. It was two thirds of the post and it was aimed directly at
> you and yet it all disappeared and it went entirely unmentioned.
>
>
> This is the part you deleted from the post to which you're allegedly
> responding:
>
>
>
> Please notice what they are saying about "reality" with the glasses off. The
> pre-intellectual reality is what James calls feeling, sensation, a collective
> name for all these sensible natures, just what appears. It makes sense that
> Suzuki would this pre-conceptual experience 'no-mind'. Now compare this
> sensory flux as reality with the basic problem of appearance and reality. An
> encyclopedia article begins by saying "the chief question raised by the
> distinction is epistemological: How can people know the nature of reality
> when all that people have immediate access to are appearances?"
>
>
> The MOQ does not fall into this trap because, as you just saw, the reality
> described by Pirisg, James and Buddhism is the appearances to which we have
> immediate access. From this point of view, there is no "reality" more real
> than "just what appears". The encyclopedia says "responses to the question
> fall into one of three classes: Those that argue that observers are
> unavoidably "cut off" from reality, those that argue that there is some way
> of "getting at" reality through the appearances, and those that reject the
> distinction." The MOQ takes the latter view; it rejects the distinction. The
> MOQ makes a different distinction, a distinction between concepts and
> empirical reality not between appearance and reality.
>
>
> Think of it this way. The traditional distinction between appearance and
> reality is a distinction between empirical or phenomenal reality and that
> world of experience is contrasted with some kind of trans-experiential
> reality, a reality beyond what we can experience. For Plato this would be the
> world of Forms, for Kant this would be the world of things-in-themselves, for
> scientific materialism this would be "objective" reality. But the radical
> empiricist does not allow any such extra-empirical realities. Reality is
> limited to that which can be known in experience so that, in effect,
> appearance IS reality.
>
>
> That is why we can NOT rightly take the MOQ to be making any claims about
> that one true account of The-Way-Things-Really-Are. The appearance-reality
> distinction presupposes an objective Way-Things-Really-Are to which
> subjective philosophical systems should try to conform. But the MOQ's central
> distinction does NOT make that pre-supposition. In fact, Pirsig and James
> both explicitly attack and reject SOM as their starting point and their
> distinction between concepts and reality is built on the lot where SOM used
> to stand before they knocked it down.
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