[MD] What is Zen?

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
On top of the several named by Pirsig, I have posted quotes from a number of philosophers wherein they specifically reject SOM. 


Bo replied:

...Those rejections of SOM that you mention were failed attempts to escape SOM. Failed because it requires a metaphysics that has SOM as a sub-system and Phaedrus' breakthrough in ZAMM was that of seeing SOM as a fall-out of Quality  ..... and the S/O distinction called "intellect" FYI.


dmb says:

This is exactly why people get frustrated with you Bo. I have explained this to you already many times. For example, the following was addressed to you two and a half years ago. Not that it'll do any good, but here it is again. Please notice that I am quoting philosophers to make this point. What reason do you have for thinking you understand this stuff better than they do? You're smarter and better read than those hacks over at Stanford University, better than the scholars who've devoted their lives to studying this stuff? That is absurdly arrogant. 


Maybe you'd like to hear from some other pragmatists on the topic of SOM. John Stuhr is the Editor of "Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretive Essays. (Oxford University Press, 2000.) He says, “In beginning to understand his view, it cannot be overemphasized that Dewey is not using the word ‘experience’ in its conventional sense. For Dewey, experience is not to be understood in terms of the experiencing subject, or as the interaction of a subject and object that exist separate from their interaction. Instead, Dewey’s view is radically empirical” and “experience is an activity in which subject and object are unified and constituted as partial features and relations within this ingoing, unanalyzed unity” (PCAP 437). Or, as Dewey himself explains SOM in “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy”, “the characteristic feature of this prior notion is the assumption that experience centres in, or gathers about, or proceeds from a centre or subject which is outside the course of natural existence, and set over against it” (PCAP 449). This “prior notion” is what radical empiricism is rejecting. It is seen as a mistake and as the source of many fake problems in philosophy. As Stuhr puts it, “the error of materialists and idealists alike” is “the error of conferring existential status upon the products of reflection” (PCAP 437). This is a matter of treating our “products of reflection” as if they were ontological realities instead of parts of a conceptual scheme. In this case, subjects and objects are our primary example. When these abstractions are taken from the realm of practical doings and then asked to do work metaphysics or epistemology, it creates many problems and questions. Most of these have to do with how subjects and objects relate, how the former can know what the latter "really" is, for example. “The problem of knowledge as conceived in the industry of epistemology is the problem of knowledge in general – of the possibility, extent, and validity of knowledge in general” but, Dewey says in “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy”, this problem only “exists because it is assumed that there is a knower in general, who is outside of the world to be known, and who is defined in terms antithetical to the traits of the world” (PCAP 449). Or, as William James puts it in “A World of Pure Experience”, “the first great pitfall from which a radical standing by experience will save us is an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known. Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities” and their relations have “assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome” (PCAP 184). I think all this fits quite neatly with Pirsig's attack on SOM. Not only does he explicitly align the MOQ with James's radical empiricism, he attacks SOM for the same reasons. He calls it a "metaphysical assumption" or "concepts derived from experience" instead of the "products of reflection" but the complaint is about mistaking intellectual abstractions for existential realities. And I suppose one of the reasons the abstraction seems so hard to shake is that we can't shake the practical doings of life from which they are drawn. The experience from which they are abstracted remains even when the abstractions are seen as such.
“The Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all legitimate knowledge arises from the sense or by thinking about what the sense provided. Most empiricists deny that validity of any knowledge gained through imagination, authority tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable. The Metaphysics of Quality varies from this by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons. They have been excluded because of the metaphysical assumption that all the universe is composed of subjects and objects and anything that can’t be classified as a subject or an object isn’t real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. Its just an assumption” (LILA 99).
“The second of James’ two main systems of philosophy …was his radical empiricism. By this he meant that subject 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 of psychical: it logically precedes this distinction” (LILA 365). 


If you can see your way through these ideas, Bo, then I just can't help you. That goes double for the English speaking defenders of Bo's equation. You guys are at odds with everyone who knows what they're talking about. You do not understand the meaning of the central terms in Bo's equation. Nobody has to take my word for it. Look it up. Go find out for yourself. The Stanford encyclopedia is free for everyone. That'd be a good place to start. 



 		 	   		  
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