dmb said to Andre:
...There's always something low and slimy about her [Marsha's] escape, as your
list of 10 slithers amply showed. Instead of responding legitimately, her
tactic is to cite some bogus reason why she doesn't have to respond. These
bogus "reasons" are always vague and they're often insulting. One of my
favorites is often repeated. She never literally said "you're not the boss of
me" (like a child would) but that's what many of her "reasons" amount to....
Marsha replied:
A MoQ is the sum of all the readings of the texts; there is no one, correct
reading. There is no priest required to explain THE MoQ. Your complaints are
hilarious.
dmb says:
Thanks for providing a fresh example of this particular way to slither away.
To say "there is no priest required" is just another way to say "you're not the
boss of me". It's an illegitimate response for several reasons, the most
obvious being that nobody claimed to be a priest nor claimed that one was
required. It disputes an assertion made by no one - and leaves the actual
assertions untouched. A related error is the implication that, since there can
be more than one correct reading, your reading can't be wrong. It simply
doesn't follow and, again, it's an evasion of the actual criticisms wherein I
carefully explain how you are wrong.
Also, you've asked about radical empiricism a couple of times but you asked the
question directly AFTER you were already given the answer and dismissed without
any engagement, as is your standard procedure.
How are you not ashamed of yourself? What the heck is wrong with you? Don't you
care that this behavior makes you look like an empty-headed troll?
Anyway, here's the answer you're pretending to seek. Notice how James, Pirsig
and Buddhism are all saying the same thing here? Radical empiricism is found in
the MOQ and in Buddhism so that they all illuminate each other. If you don't
get what Pirsig is saying about James, then you are never going to get Buddhism
either - you pretentious poser.
While subject-object science can rightly be identified with the "disease", the
"cure" is NOT to "study only meditative mysticism". The cure is the MOQ, a
philosophy that incorporates and acknowledges the empirical validity of mystic
meditation. It's a philosophy that's far more empirical than subject-object
science and including these kinds of experiences is an example of the MOQ's
radical empiricism. So I take the quote to mean that the purpose of meditation
is to improve the quality of thought by bringing it closer to actual
experience, not to eliminate thought. This expanded empiricism is precisely
what eliminates SOM and the reification problem, just as in Buddhism.
"In order to understand what is being said here, one should try and imagine all
things, objects of experience and oneself, the one who is experiencing, as just
a flow of perceptions. We do not know that there is something "out there". We
have only experiences of colours, shapes, tactile data, and so on. We also
don't know that we ourselves are anything than a further series of experiences.
Taken together, there is only an ever-changing flow of perceptions
(vijnaptimatra)... Due to our beginningless ignorance we construct these
perceptions into enduring subjects and objects confronting each other. This is
irrational, things are not really like that, and it leads to suffering and
frustration. The constructed objects are the conceptualised aspect. The flow of
perceptions which forms the basis for our mistaken constructions is the
dependent aspect." (Paul Williams, "Mahayana Buddhism", Routledge, 1989,
p.83/84).
And what would that do to the quality of one's life, anyway? We can't go
through life without thinking the only issue is whether we do it badly or not.
In any case, the quote should be continued because Pirsig goes on to say
something about SOM as a stale, confusing attachment of the past and about the
MOQ as an improved way of thinking....
"In a subject object metaphysics morals and art are worlds apart... But in the
Metaphysics of Quality that division doesn't exist. They're the same. They both
become much more intelligible when references to what is subject and objective
are completely thrown away and references to what is static and what is Dynamic
are taken up instead."
"The second of James' two main systems of philosophy ...was his radical
empiricism. By this he meant that 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
we make them. ...James had condensed this description to a single sentence:
There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the
former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing.'
Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic
subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality." (364-5)
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