[MD] Julian Baggini Interview with Pirsig

[david buchanan]

Howdy MK, DM, KP and y'all:

Thanks for the Heidegger stuff, David.

Matt ended last Tuesday's post like this...

"When I think "interaction," I think of discernible relationships between 
two somethings. But we can't have a relationship with the possible, DQ, or 
Being because all three, under this reading, are synonymous with the 
Buddhist's Nothingness. They are no-thing, not a "something" at all, and so 
we shouldn't think of having relationships to them, at least not 
relationships or interactions that are at all analogous to the kinds of 
relationships we normally understand.  Because all those relationships and 
interactions are something, actual, static, beings, ontic, etc."

dmb says:
Right. I think DQ is synonymous with a Buddhist idea of no-thing-ness. I 
think that's what both UNDIFFERENTIATED and CONTINUUM means in the phrase 
"undifferentiated aesthetic continuum", which is an another name for DQ. And 
I'd agree that its not quite right to think of DQ and sq as two different 
realms or realities, one if objects and one without objects. As I understand 
it, the MOQ even says that static "things" aren't really objects. And these 
"objects" don't interact with DQ so much as they are produced by it. We're 
talking about a pretty heavy duty form of idealism here, no? Remember that 
it takes a few months for that little baby "to really understand enough 
about that enormously complex correlation of sensations and boundaries and 
desires called an object to be able to reach for one. This object will not 
be a primary experience. It will be a complex pattern of static values 
derived from primary experience." (LILA 118)

As I keep saying, DQ and sq are better concieved as categories of 
experience, kinds of consciousness or ways of being. Objects are devired 
from primary experience, but these "objects" aren't things or beings so much 
as deductions, interpretations, ideas. Northrop's phrase goes along quite 
nicely with the RADICAL EMPIRICISM he takes from William James. Pirsig 
explains that in this view, "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 or psychical; it 
logically precedes this distinction." (LILA 365)

I'm sure there is more than one way to read this, but I think its safe to 
say that DQ and sq are better understood in epistemological terms than in 
ontological terms. DQ is not a place or a thing. Its just the most basic 
kind of experience, one we've learned to ignore.

Thanks.

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