It's been a while since I read Lila, so I didn't grasp the term "Cleveland
Harbor Effect" when you used it. I did a search on it, and came up with:
http://www.quantonics.com/Pirsigs_Lila_Quotes_on_Insanity.html
This essay addresses many parts of this message. I'm going to have to read
it a couple of times to come to some kind of understanding about it, but I
think it's well worth the effort.
Carl
----- Original Message -----
From: "david buchanan" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2012 4:39 PM
Subject: [MD] FW: Dewey's Zen
Thanks for playing along, gents. Just about everyone seems to be reading
it the same way I do. Ant totally nailed it, of course, and it seems safe
to consider my hunch pretty well confirmed. I was fairly confident already
but we always gotta watch out for the Cleveland Harbor Effect and other
kinds of confirmation bias. I'll take a turn playing the game too. My
additions are bracketed in the passages below:
...experiences come whole [undivided or undifferentiated], pervaded by
unifying qualities [Quality as an aesthetic continuum] that demarcate them
within the flux of our lives [what James and Pirsig call "the immediate
flux of life"]. If we want to find meaning [intellectual quality], or the
basis for meaning, we must therefore start with the qualitative unity
[undivided Quality or Dynamic Quality] that Dewey describes. The
demarcating pervasive quality is, at first, unanalyzed [Quality is
pre-intellectual experience], but it is the basis for subsequent analysis,
thought, and development. Thought [intellectual experience] starts from
this experienced whole [begins with DQ], and only then does it introduce
distinctions [static concepts and definitions] that carry it forward as
inquiry.
It is not wrong to say that we experience objects, properties,
and relations, but it is wrong to say that these are primary in experience
["subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from
something more fundamental" (Lila 364)]. What are primary are pervasive
qualities of situations ["the immediate flux of life which furnishes the
material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories" (Lila
365)], within which we subsequently discriminate objects, properties, and
relations.
Dewey took great pains to remind us that the primary locus of human
experience is not atomistic sense impressions, but rather what he called a
"situation," by which he meant, not just our physical setting, but the
whole complex of physical, biological, social, and cultural conditions
that constitute any given experience—experience taken in its fullest,
deepest, richest, broadest sense.
[Compare that whole sentence (above) to Pirsig's: "If you compare the
levels of static patterns that compose a human being to the ecology of a
forest, and if you see the different patterns sometimes in competition
with each other, sometimes in symbiotic support of each other, but always
in a kind of tension that will shift one way or the other, depending on
evolving circumstances, then you can also see that evolution doesn't take
place only within societies, it takes place within individuals too. Lila
then becomes a complex ecology of patterns moving toward Dynamic Quality."
(Lila 360)]
Mind, on this view, is neither a willful creator of experience [subjective
idealism], nor is it a mere window to objective mind-independent reality
[scientific objectivity]. Mind is a functional aspect of experience [mind
is a process, not a thing] that emerges when it becomes possible for us to
share meanings [evolved as language], to inquire into the meaning of a
situation, and to initiate action that transforms, or remakes, that
situation [betterness is the purpose of social and intellectual static
quality].
The pervasive quality of a situation is not limited merely to sensible
perception or motor interactions [pre-intellectual experience is not
merely raw sense data]. Thinking is action, and so "acts of thought" also
constitute situations [there is a dynamic cutting edge of experience even
within the static conceptual world] that must have pervasive qualities.
Even our best scientific thinking stems from the grasp of qualities ["the
MOQ also says that DQ [is] the value force that chooses an elegant
mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant experiment over a
confusing, inconclusive one.. It is the cutting edge of scientific
progress itself." (Lila 365-6)]
[And finally, my favorite....]
The crux of Dewey's entire argument is that what we call
thinking, or reasoning, or logical inference could not even exist without
the felt qualities of situations: "The underlying unity of qualitativeness
regulates pertinence or relevancy and force of every distinction and
relation; it guides selection and rejection and the manner of utilization
of all explicit terms."
["The preselection of facts is not based on subjective, capricious
"whatever you like" but on Quality, which is reality itself. ... It is the
source of subjects and objects and exists in an anterior relationship to
them. It is not capricious, it is the force that opposes capriciousness;
THE ORDERING PRINCIPLE OF ALL SCIENTIFIC AND RATIONAL THOUGHT which
destroys capriciousness, and without which no scientific thought can
proceed." (Pirsig in ZAMM)]
Now I'm hoping this forms the basis of some good discussion. It offers a
fresh terms and a new look at the MOQ's central terms and distinctions.
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