[MD] Language

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
Why do you always take me to be not understanding when I am disagreeing? 


dmb says:

I can tell that you're not seeing it by the way you disagree. For example, the following demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding.

Steve said:
Yep, I understand all that to be what Pirsig is saying. Now, how exactly is it possible to be unenlightened in the sense of being out of touch with reality if reality is experience itself? What in this simple experience=reality picture needs to be transcended? Since we can never be out of touch with reality, then our only philosphical problem is a need for better descriptions. All transcendence in terms of language can mean is to bring some new good description into the world, and all that enlightenment can mean is the state of having really good interpretations that can easily be dropped when better ones become available.

dmb says:

Our descriptions and interpretations are static and conceptual, right? These are the patterns that are derived from experience and handed to us by the culture, right? The main philosophical problem that concerns Pirsig, however, is the exclusion of the non-conceptual, non-linguistic experience, right? He's saying that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language, that the primary empirical reality is felt and known and experienced, despite the fact that it defies our descriptions and conceptualizations. He's saying there's more to life than language, that language is secondary and derived from this basic flux of life.

To say that our only philosophical problem is a need for better descriptions is just an expression of Rortyism and has nothing to do with the problem as Pirsig sees it. In fact, they are saying very opposite things on this point. The problem with Platonism, for Pirsig, is that the Good was made subservient to the True. This kind of Platonism says that if it can't be fitted into dialectical words traps, if one can't "give an account" or offer a description, then it's dismissed as untrue, unreal or unimportant. That's exactly what you're doing, Steve, You're denying that there is anything beyond intellectual truths, nothing beyond really good interpretations. This defies Pirsig's version of the copernican revolution, where subject and objects and all concepts are derived from Quality, where truth is just a species of the Good and not the other way around. Where Pirsig ramps up empiricism and puts it front and center, Rortyism rejects it entirely and moves everything over the language. From the perspective of the MOQ, Rorty merely repeats and perpetuates the original philosophical sin.

In this important sense, Plato's dialectical truth and Rorty's position on intersubjective agreement are about an inch apart. 

Here's another demonstration of your misunderstanding...

Steve said:
So instead of outside/inside you are now preferring a distinction between the past and the present. And the SOM glasses are part of the present. Everything happens in the present--even refection on the past. You say that "In this immediate flux of life there are as yet no differentiations." Well then when do differentiations occur if not in some later Now?  Nothing ever happens that doesn't happen in the immediate flux of life.

dmb says:

Well, yes, you can think of it in terms of a sequence of events. That's why Pirsig refers to the primary empirical reality as "the cutting edge of experience" and "the flux of life". The train analogy suggests this continuous movement too. Likewise, James used the image of fire moving across a grassy field or, more famously, he depicted consciousness as a stream. Life is in the transitions, he said. Unlike the continuous flow of experience, conceptualizations are discontinuous. They are taken from the stream. Concepts are in the buckets, which can never exhaust the stream nor can they capture its motion. Our descriptions are always relatively stable and fixed. The mistake is thinking there is no stream, that all we can do is better arrangements the buckets or that buckets only ever come from other buckets. Being cut off from the stream of life, drinking life through a straw, is what you get when all you have are buckets. Pirsig's root expansion of rationality is all about getting the stream to count, to be recognized in our philosophies and in our own experience. But Rortyism leaves all this out of the picture entirely. On this matter, Rortyism offers nothing at all.

 
Steve said:
I don't know what to make of these [Jill Bolte Taylor's] "tears of joy." You've sketched enlightenment as a form of brain damage here. You talk of fully realizing the lack of all distinctions as though that's how things REALLY are and all dictinctions are illusion--that this primary reality is what is really real. You know James studies this kind of stuff in detail (if you've read Varieties) and never jumped to these sorts of metaphysical conclusions.


dmb says:

You're missing the point entirely and nobody is talking about the way things REALLY are. Taylor's experience simply shows that undivided, non-conceptual experience is normal and natural and tied to the very structure of our brains in big way. She was using one of two hemispheres. By my reckoning that means where talking about 50% of human consciousness, the half that has been ignored. This notion of preconceptual awareness is being substantiated by science more and more every day. I just picked up a popular book called "How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer. James shows up in the first few pages because his view is being validated by what's happening in cutting edge science. Antonio Damasio at Princeton and Eugene Taylor at Harvard are saying the same thing about James these days. This is not about how reality really is, but it is about how experience really is. It's empiricism, not ontology. Radical empiricism is so radical that experience is reality. There is no ontology here. There is a very important distinction between dynamic experience and static experience, but together that is all the reality there is. There is no third thing. 


dmb said:

The primary empirical reality is undifferentiated awareness, it's the reality you experience before you have a chance to think about it.



Steve replied:

You've just excluded thinking from emprical reality.


dmb says:

No, I've made a distinction between primary and secondary. C'mon Steve. "Primary" is not opposed to or distinct from "reality". It just means "basic" or "first". To say that concepts are derived from this primary experience is not to say that are outside of experience. They follow from and guide us through. Concepts are true, remember, to the extent that they function within the ongoing process of experience. I have to say, Steve, that your questions almost seem to be intentionally tedious. I mean, no reasonable person could think "I've excluded thinking from empirical reality". That's nonsense and you know it. 


Here is yet another example where you demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding.


Steve said:

Pirsig says it can't be done because language is not adequate to representing reality. That is an SOM notion that ought to be discarded. Language doesn't fail to represent reality when language doesn't represent at all--when all we have are static patterns of value and dynamic change. We have interpretations (static patterns) and the ability to create new and better descriptions (DQ). We can say what we ought to say about language using such notions of static and dynamic quality without positing some mystical realm or state that language keeps us from accessing.


dmb says:

That's a very bad interpretation of Pirsig. You've wildly misconstrued his mystical claim about the fundamental nature of reality as being outside language. You've also reduced his central term to the latching of static patterns, converting the dynamic into the static. And, again, you're mistaking an empirical claim as an ontological claim. I mean, nobody is positing the existence of a "mystical realm". Nobody is saying that concepts represent reality. Pirsig's claim is simply that you can't fit the stream in a bucket. That's why the fundamental reality is outside language.



 		 	   		  
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