Dan said to Krimel:
..Using the term 'experience' in that manner indicates there are patterns
waiting to be experienced. But according to the MOQ, experience is primary
while patterns are secondary. They arise from experience. I explained this in a
prior email to you but reading your reply it seemed pretty obvious I was
wasting my time.
Krimel replied:
The statement "Biological patterns are experienced irrationally. They are
unnamed" contains no reference to temporal order. ...Any sort of patterning is
experienced irrationally but only becomes objectionable in the MoQ sense when
named. I thought that was clear in what I said. It seems that you are making a
big deal out of the naming problem which is part of what I have been trying to
address here of late.
dmb says:
I understand Dan's criticism. If memory serves, such statements (from Krimel)
are what prompted the same criticism from me. It's also clear to me that Krimel
does not understand this criticism. That's why Dan feels that he's been wasting
his time, I think, because Krimel doesn't even see what the problem is. On one
level the problem is just a matter of misusing Pirsig's terms but the
particular way Krimel misuses them has the effect of converting the MOQ back
into SOM. The logical error is just a matter of using Pirsig's term is a
contradictory way but these contractions are a result of Krimel trying to
understand the MOQ in term of SOM's basic metaphysical assumptions. Dan's
complaint - that Krimel's use of the terms indicates that patterns are waiting
to be experienced - points at that retention of SOM. Those assumptions are not
explicitly stated in Krimel's problematic sentence but that's what we mean by
basic "assumptions". They are just assumed and otherwise go without s
aying. In this kind of situation, of course, this is definitely important
stuff that should not go without saying.
Pirsig does make it all quite explicit, of course, precisely because the
examination of these assumptions is so central in the shift from SOM to the
MOQ. The MOQ's key terms cannot rightly be understood if they are conceived in
terms of SOM and that's exactly where Krimel goes wrong here: "Biological
patterns are experienced irrationally. They are unnamed." This statement uses
the MOQ's terms but it turns their meaning upside down. Krimel says that
patterns are experienced before they are named but Pirsig is saying that
patterns ARE names and names ARE patterns and they are CONTRASTED with
pre-conceptual experience or pre-intellectual experience (or what Krimel is
calling "irrational" experience, I guess).
To support that contention, dmb quotes Pirsig:
"Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to
intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms. The
names, the shapes and forms we give Quality depend only partly on the Quality.
They also depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated in our
memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues to our
previous experiences. If we didn't we'd be unable to act. We build up our
language in terms of these analogues. We build up our whole culture in terms of
these analogues. . ."
"The MOQ says that Quality comes first, which produces ideas, which produce
what we know as matter. The scientific community that has produced
Complementarity almost invariably presumes that matter comes first and produces
ideas. However, as if to further the confusion, the MOQ says that the idea
that matter comes first is a high quality idea!" [LILA'S CHILD, Annotation 67]
"The Metaphysics of Quality itself is static and should be separated from the
Dynamic Quality it talks about. Like the rest of the printed philosophic
tradition it doesn't change from day to day, although the world it talks about
does."
This is what James's radical empiricism and we can see this even if we stick to
the primary texts, in this case the end of chapter 29 in Lila.
"The second of James' two main systems of philosophy, which he said was
independent of pragmatism, was his radical empiricism. By this he meant that
subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and
objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more
fundamental which he described as "the immediate flux of life which furnishes
the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories." In this
basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those
between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have
not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be
called either physical or psychical: it logically precedes this distinction."
As Krimel's sentence construes it, biological patterns are conceived as a some
kind of living object about which we don't yet have any names or ideas. But
James and Pirsig are not only saying something very different from that, they
are explicitly rejecting that idea. They are rejecting the idea that such
objects and the subjects who can perceive and then conceptualize them are the
starting points of reality. Instead, these radical empiricists are saying that
subject and objects are the forms or patterns we derive from experience, they
are just the basic conceptual categories into which we sort our experience.
These are not just made up categories. They are derived from experience and are
analogous to and agree with that primary empirical experience in the sense that
they really are powerful and useful categories but they are still among the
world of analogies, are still secondary concepts, not the "things" experienced.
Pirsig and James are showing us that all so-called objec
ts are actually just concepts but Krimel's sentence turns those concept back
into an objects. That's how it converts the MOQ back into SOM.
Krimel said to Dan:
Is the problem that is doesn't match your preconception of DQ and thus must
have no bearing on the subject? Or is it that I have characterized experience
in an unorthodox way? Have you defined DQ so rigidly that you are certain what
is and what is not the proper way to speak of it? The MoQ seems shot through
with language problems if the reading and writing of every sentence requires
some specialized translation and negation of impure thoughts and words. It also
seems strange that someone on a forum that espouses to be open to discussion of
Pirsig's work; a place that Pirsig has invited people to join in; where Pirsig
himself says in the introduction to your book, "But if dissenters didn't exist
we would have to invent them because no set of philosophic ideas is worth much
until it is tested by dialectical opposition." In such a place as this you feel
comfortable saying that any problem will cease to exist," if we adhere to the
tenets of the MOQ." It sounds like you oppose t
esting "by dialectical opposition."
dmb says:
This is a pretty good example of the kind of swooping savior response. The
criticism is directed at your misunderstanding of the MOQ's basic terms and
concepts. The first few sentences, which are questions, show quite clearly that
you don't see what the problem is, that you don't understand what the objection
is all about. And yet you are willing to claim that the MOQ is the one "shot
through with language problems" and Dan is the one who is too rigid in his
views. You haven't been able to answer for these basic mistakes but you imagine
yourself a persecuted dissenter and a dialectical opposer of this thing you do
not understand. From my perspective that is an absurd position, maybe even
slightly delusional. Even if you weren't being criticized from several
directions, each telling you that you haven't yet grasped the meaning of core
concepts, how do you figure that you get to skip to the head of the class? As I
see it, you're simply not qualified to be a dissenter unless and
until you understand what you're supposedly rejecting. How would it be
possible for anyone to oppose anything that they don't comprehend? Maybe you
don't see it or believe it but that's what Dan, Arlo and I have been trying to
tell you. Don't you want to know what these criticisms mean? Do they really
have no effect on your sense of certainty? Dude, who is being too rigid here? I
really don't that's Dan's problem here. Like me, I suppose, he's just
frustrated because you're not getting it no matter what anyone says.
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