[MD] What does Pirsig mean by metaphysics?

[John Carl]

Ho Dave, Welcome back to the fray.  Hope you're feeling refreshed and
unaffrayed.

dmb says:
> Predictably, I'm going to suggest that the best way to understand the
> difference between dynamic and static is through radical empiricism. Dynamic
> experience is unpatterned in the sense that it is prior to
> conceptualizations or static patterns. You can think of DQ as unpatterned
> value.


Predictably, I'm gonna disagree.  How does it help my existence to think of
"unpatterned value"?   It's a term that has no intrinsic value (by
definition) and therefore cannot do me any good (by definition).

Where's the good in it?  Answer me that, and I'll consider it, otherwise, it
makes no sense.

Hey!  Pragmatism can be fun.


 Pirsig's remark about things not existing until they are valued refers to
> static valuations. But the hot stove example shows how we experience the
> negative value of the situation and respond to it even before we think of
> the situation in terms of concepts like stoves and heat.



So here we are  again, playing around with the ambiguity in our discussion
of value.  What's the negative of neutral?  If value is the axis, and not a
direction, then it doesn't have negative or positive.  It's all randomness,
Dave.  Weren't you paying attention to the MD all those years?

There's more than one way to sit on a hot stove.



> Northrop, James, and Dewey all have their own terms for this distinction
> but the idea is the basically the same as Pirsig's. Such a variety of terms
> really helps you see what they're getting at. The unpatterned experience,
> for example, can be called the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum, the
> pre-conceptual reality, the primary empirical reality, pure experience,
> pre-reflective experience, immediate experience, noncognitive experience,
> pre-verbal experience, the immediate flux of life and the cutting edge of
> experience.



Or you could call it , phlogoston, the aether, magic-time, nibbana... so
many terms, so little meaning.  All of them logical equivalents to "we need
something to postulate our experience from so let's make up this
neat-sounding idea".

Once again, it makes no sense to postulate something that makes no sense,
unless you just wanna worship randomness, chaos, nothingness.  But what's
the point?

And I don't think you are a moronist, Dave.  Heck, Krimel's the head of that
clan, and I remember you and him wrangling bunches and bunches.

  Since we are pretty much stuck with words, logic, intellection and
philosophy, why not just stick with what we can do, rather than messin'
around with magic fairy dust?

Don't *you* think Pragmatism is fun?



> All these terms are contrasted with experience that is static, conceptual,
> verbal, cognitive, reflective, intelligible and differentiated. The idea is
> that we operate with both ways of knowing, even though most of us are barely
> aware of our preconceptual awareness. It's been denigrated and pushed into
> the background as part of "just" what you like. We've been taught not to do
> just what we like, which results in a kind of numbing and deadening of this
> noncognitive category of experience. It's been dismissed as unimportant for
> historical reasons. I mean, radical empiricism serves as a basis for the
> reintegration of the affective domain into our rationality and into our
> philosophies.
>

I'm still waiting for some concrete, me.

I mean, if you're gonna float unprovable postulates, they oughta at least be
fun and positive postulates.  For instance, Dynamic Quality is definable in
experience and it's always good to believe in Good.

Where's the fun in radical empiricism?


> "In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of
> escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It's
> been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the
> emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of
> nature's order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an
> understanding of nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were
> originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of
> man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The central part."
>  (ZAMM p. 294)
>
>
Now you're talking sense.



> “Certainly, to my personal knowledge, all Hegelians are not prigs, but I
> somehow feel as if all prigs ought to end, if developed, by becoming
> Hegelians. …The ‘through-and-through’ philosophy …seems too buttoned-up and
> white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing
> unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.…Their
> persistence in telling me that feeling has nothing to do with the question,
> that it is a pure matter of absolute reason, keeps me for ever out of the
> pale.  …To speak more seriously, the one fundamental quarrel Empiricism has
> with Absolutism is over this repudiation by Absolutism of the personal and
> aesthetic factor in the construction of philosophy. That we all of us have
> feelings, Empiricism feels quite sure. That they may be as prophetic and
> anticipatory as anything else we have, and some of them more so than others,
> can not possibly be denied. But what hope is there of squaring and settling
> opinions unless Absolutism will hold parley on this common ground; and will
> admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties,
> emotional as well as logical help us, and the truest of which will at the
> final integration of things be found in possession of the men whose
> faculties on the whole had the best diving power?" (William James in
> ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM, p.96)



Well we won't say anything about that old bugaboo, Hegel.  He's been done
away.  I will quote you some Kuklick on Royce's side of this debate, but I'm
gonna freely interject and emendify, so don't go all philosopholigist on me
but pay attention to the real issues at hand.

We got a reply for you and Willie...

We may interpret James as arguing that we justify religious doctrines
because they explain otherwise inexplicable personal needs and feelings.
 For Royce this view made religion nonrational, and watered down doctrine to
vague emotions whose foundation was individual intuition.  In part, the *Source
of Religious Insight* (Royces response to Jame's Varieties...) attempts to
salvage a religion based on reason and metaphysical truth.  Of course, James
feels that the alternative to his approach is the "abstract" theorizing he
associates with Royce, and the "abstraction" James has in mind is Royce's
Absolute.  The block universe of Royce's divine, James holds, is not
adequate for capturing our religious experience.  When Royce delivered the
Bross Lectures, published as The Sources of Religious Insight, he posed
another alternative:

Must one chose between inarticulate faith and barren abstractions?  Must one
face either alternative alone?  Intuition without reason or fruitless
analysis without feelings?

Perhaps there is a another possibility.  Perhaps one may use one's process
as a preparation for noble and articulate intuitions and feelings that
cannot be approached, by our human consciousness through any other way.

Analysis is not the whole enchilada, my friend.  Synthesis - the viewing of
many facts or principles or relations, as a unity, as a whole - this leads
to novel insights, the growth in being that Krimel ignores, different than
the size of his bum, which he cannot.

Inarticulate intuitions vs barren abstraction are not the only choices we
have.  Sure, Willie J. deems it so, describes it so, but his is only one
view in our world-model of a realizable Absolute - a Quality you experience
empirically every moment of your being, and thus so open-ended it defies
definition.

 empirically real.

Let's bring it down to a known parable.  I'm sure you've heard of the blind
men and the elephant.  To my view, Willie J, in order to decrease
controversy, lets each blind man keep his conception of reality.  Since that
is the empirical reality of their lives, they needn't pay too much attention
to any absolute reality beyond their sensory input.  Their reality is fine,
why not stick with what "pragmatically works" -  keeping conflict and
fighting to a minimum by asserting nothing beyond the sensory.

Royce says there is an elephant.  He says the elephant is realizable in
interpretation of differing minds.  He has a deep and profound logic for
doing so, and I don't mean he's got logical reasonings for doing so, I mean
he has a huge logical tool set for realization of unity in interpreting
subjective experience.

I agree.

You can't define Quality, except in comparative experience.

Too bad James had no response to Royce's refutation, you'll be on your own
for that.   He who dies last gets the last word.



 It's GOOD to have you back Dave