[MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[david buchanan]

Matt and all MOQers:

Here's another answer to your question...

Matt asked dmb:
What I can't figure out is how you _know_ that "it" is unknowable?  Simply 
throwing up your hands and declaring something unknowable is clearly a case 
of violating...

dmb says:
I wasn't looking for anything relating to your questions about the 
ineffable, but found the following in a thing called "MEANING: Robert 
Pirsig, Emotions, and Radical Feminism". I'm not saying that I'd stand 
behind every word, but in terms of getting at a pre-intellectual, 
pre-linguistic experience it offers a good measure of clarity and detail. I 
think the author should be using words like value and quality where she is 
using terms like feelings and emotions. Apparently it was pre-LILA, so this 
is forgivable and its otherwise nice and clear. The rest of this post is one 
huge quote...

Thanks,
dmb

"I have found, in the theory-laden fiction of Robert Pirsig, an excellent 
and detailed explication of epistemological processes that pick up where 
Taylor leaves off, and which fits the radical feminist paradigm like the 
proverbial glove.

Like Husserl, Pirsig grants that when the measure of an object is reduced to 
the sensory impression of it, socially maintained concepts (and possible 
ideological distortions) do not play a role, and there is a sense in which 
one is making a clean, new "back to the things" assessment. Unlike Husserl, 
Pirsig does not claim that a deliberate and rare process of "bracketing" is 
necessary; instead, one is inevitably "back to the things" on a constant 
basis. Using the example of seeing a tree, Pirsig notes that

At the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there 
must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness, called awareness of Quality. 
You can't be aware that you've seen a tree until after you've seen the tree, 
and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a 
time lag...Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and 
forms is to intellectualize.
(Pirsig 1974, pp. 221, 224)


In contrast with the Husserl model, Pirsig is saying there is nothing 
compellingly meaningful about those visual sensory impressions that 
automatically tells the person that its source is a tree. If you have seen 
trees before, you have past experiences with similar visual sensory 
impressions which are cross-indexed with other experiences, sensory 
impressions, concepts, social attitudes, and so forth, all of which taken 
together represent "treeness" to you. But before these sensory impressions 
can be cross-referenced and interpreted, they have to be felt. This 
experience, which is nonverbal, nonanalytical, nonconceptual, is entirely 
located in the present moment, and consciousness consists of "feelings" in 
both senses of the word-sensation (in this case, visual sensations) and 
emotion. Pirsig refers to this mode of knowing as the "romantic" mode. 
McMillan (1982) notes that rationalists who try to put a wedge between 
reason and emotions and assign validity only to the former "fail to see that 
what makes bodily states and sensations emotional is the presence of 
evaluations or cognitions. Although feelings involve bodily processes, they 
are nevertheless distinguishable from them" (p. 28). This experiencing of 
self-in-relation-to-tree, which is the romantic mode of knowing as opposed 
to the classical mode, is also preverbal and preanalytical. A classical 
analytical response, in its simplest form, is necessary to distinguish 
between self and tree. Analytical categorization identifies the tree as a 
tree and assigns objectivity to it, identifies the emotional-preverbal 
impressions as subjective reactions to the tree, makes separate observations 
about the appearance of the bark and the length of the branches and color of 
the leaves or needles, and given sufficient familiarity with trees perhaps 
makes the determination that the tree is a pine tree; or, for that matter, 
that it is a seventeen-to- eighteen-year-old Ponderosa pine with a mild case 
of tree blight.

The newborn infant would not only be incapable of identifying the object in 
her field of visions as a tree, she would be incapable of knowing 
immediately that these strange new sensory sensations have something to do 
with an object that she could touch if she could move in the direction her 
head is pointed, or even that visual impressions of a certain sort imply the 
existence of an object in her line of vision.

It seems compellingly obvious to anyone who has been around a baby for a 
couple of months that an infant's mind is filing sensations and emotions and 
noticing patterns with startling rapidity. The patterns formed, which allow 
for the infant to predict occurrences based on previously connected patterns 
and so forth, constitute what Pirsig calls "analogues of reality". Prior to 
language acquisition (which itself depends on a preverbal ability to notice 
patterns), the process of recognition and the fitting of feelings into 
existing patterns is a limited one, and the patterns are limited patterns. 
The process at this point is entirely intuitive. Intuition, therefore, is 
the simplest, most basic form of comparative analysis, a feeling for and 
recognition of pattern that forms a bridge between the totally nonanalytical 
split-second here-and-now "romantic" experience and the classical analysis 
which uses language-based categorical systems.

Actually, the process of analysis always requires a level of emotional 
involvement. The process of fitting a new experience into preexisting 
analogues of reality involves a consideration for the elegance and beauty of 
its fit, a consideration that is made manifest through feeling:

[Jules Henrí Poincaré used to say that]...Mathematics isn't merely a 
question of applying rules, any more than science. It doesn't merely make 
the most combinations possible according to certain fixed laws. The 
combinations so obtained would be exceedingly numerous, useless and 
cumbersomethe subliminal self, Poincaré said, looks at a large number of 
solutions to a problem, but only the interesting ones break into the domain 
of consciousness. Mathematical solutions are selected by the subliminal self 
on the basis of "mathematical beauty", of the harmony of numbers and forms, 
of geometrical elegance...Poincaré made it clear that he was not speaking of 
romantic beauty, the beauty of appearances which strikes the senses. He 
means classic beauty, which comes from the harmonious order of the parts. It 
is the quest of this special classic beauty, the sense of harmony of the 
cosmos, which makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this 
harmony...It is this harmony, this quality, if you will, that is the sole 
basis for the only reality we can ever know.
(Pirsig 1974, pp. 240-241)


Once our hypothetical infant becomes verbal, language makes complex 
communication and comparison of analogues with those of other people 
possible. The analogues of reality which are formed and modified by this 
process become extremely complex, as do her mind's analytical processes 
themselves. Analogues rendered in words are shared and are expected to be 
shared with other people experiencing the same world (Newcomb, Turner and 
Converse 1965), and we depend on consultation with other people to 
double-check our comprehension of the universe we live in:

What guarantees the objectivity of the world in which we live is that this 
world is common to us with other thinking beings. Through the communications 
that we have with other men we receive from them ready-made harmonious 
reasonings.
(Pirsig 1974, p. 241)


The complex patterns of verbally coded analogues of reality are social 
analogues, and now we are speaking of a level of interaction that includes 
the elements of individual, external reality, cognition, and society and 
socialization. Now it is possible of conceptualize a discrepancy between 
reality perceptions of the individual and social analogues of reality 
utilized by the surrounding culture, and to account for both awareness and 
lack of awareness of oppression, if it were to exist, is an easy matter.

Pirsig mentions in his introduction of the concepts of classical and 
romantic esthetic that the classical mode of understanding (analytical and 
reductionistic) tends to be associated with masculinity and the romantic 
esthetic (intuitive and holistic) with femininity. Although he deemphasizes 
the gender connection, the thesis of his book concerns the degree to which 
Quality has been disregarded, both in the romantic and the classical mode, 
and that the world has for a long time operated on the erroneous premise 
that analysis and rationality can be detached from subjectivity and emotion, 
that science can be separated from art."

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