[MD] Julian Baggini Interview with Pirsig

[Matt Kundert]

DMB,

DMB said:
I'm sure there is more than one way to read this [passage from Lila], but I 
think its safe to say that DQ and sq are better understood in 
epistemological terms than in ontological terms.

Matt:
I'm glad to see that we can learn to agree on something when its there to be 
agreed on.  We both agree that trying to formulate DQ and static patterns 
into ontological terms can be confusing and probably a little misleading 
(though I'm still not quite sure how that squares with saying that they are 
"better concieved as categories of experience, kinds of consciousness or 
ways of being" because those look like ontological terms to me).  We do, 
however, maybe still disagree on them being formulated in epistemological 
terms (if at the least, "epistemological" is understood as making 
distinctions between primary and secondary experience, and those 
distinctions are understood in more than a temporal way).

One way of isolating what makes me feel queasy about it is this statement: 
"Objects are derived from primary experience, but these 'objects' aren't 
things or beings so much as deductions, interpretations, ideas."  What I'm 
not sure about is why we have to handle "objects" with scare quotes.  Is it 
in the same way that I might handle "absolute truth"?  Because that would 
imply that objects are, more or less, not as real as primary experience.  
But I don't think that's what you want to say.  Is it then the same way I 
might handle "objectivity"?  That would mean that your handling of 
"objects," like my handling of "objectivity," is an attempt to redescribe 
the usual meaning of the term.  That makes more sense, but I still don't 
quite feel right about making "deductions, interpretations, ideas" 
secondary, except possibly in a temporal sense.  This temporal sense is the 
sense in which metaphors are primary to literal meanings, which is what 
Pirsig was arguing for in ZMM when he said that rhetoric was primary to 
dialectic.  We have to have root metaphors for literalness to arise, we have 
to have rhetorical place-setting for dialectical argumentation to arise.

So, say I take up the primary/secondary distinction in the temporal sense.  
It would seem that what I want to say (in going back to our squabble over 
knowledge a month ago) is that primary comes before secondary, but knowledge 
is internal to secondary.  And you want to say that we can have knowledge of 
both.  I'm still not sure what sense to attach to "knowledge of primary 
experience."  The way I would explicate what I'm trying to say is to recur 
to Pirsig's "the Metaphysics of Quality is a contradiction in terms" and the 
map analogy.  The "Metaphysics" half is the secondary part and the map part. 
  The "Quality" half is the primary part and the landscape.  So the 
landscape is primary, it comes first before you build the map.  But the 
reason Pirsig says the Metaphysics of Quality is a contradiction is because 
a metaphysics is definition, that's what it does, and Quality is undefined.  
Knowledge, in this sense, is metaphysics, is definition and the push and 
pull of definitions.  I see Pirsig as saying that we can't have _knowledge_ 
of Quality, of primary experience--but knowledge, secondary experience, the 
map, nevertheless helps us.  We are never cut off from Quality, primary 
experience, the landscape.  Even if our nose is stuck in the map, we 
couldn't be cut off from Quality because we're still stumbling around the 
landscape (like the SODV paper's illustration, static patterns floating in a 
sea of DQ).  What happened was that we (we earlier philosophers) thought 
that we were going to find out more about the landscape by sticking our 
noses into the map.  That didn't pan out at all.  I take Pirsig's criticism 
of this tendency to be that we need a map that has a little note at the 
bottom that says, "If you stare too long at the map, your vision will get 
blurry."

So I take Pirsig's map analogy as suggesting that it just doesn't make sense 
to say that we have primary knowledge of the landscape and secondary 
knowledge of the map.  I take it, linking it to the last post, to be 
suggesting that we only have knowledge of "things," and that "things" only 
arise on the map, but not the landscape because the landscape is no-thing.  
The only way I can make sense of having two kinds of knowledge (much like I 
couldn't make sense of "interaction" or "relationship" to Quality, 
no-thingness) is if there are two different senses given to the term 
"knowledge," senses that aren't really analogous (and to which we could just 
as easily use two different words).  The knowledge of the landscape is the 
stubborness of sensation, its the kicking of a stone, the low value of pain, 
the primary experience before the secondary curses.  Now, I wouldn't call 
that _knowledge_.  I would just call that sensation (or something).  It's 
confusing knowledge with sensation that caused some of the SOMist's mistakes 
(truth based on the analogy of sensory experience; as you once put it, "the 
very idea of sensory data is itself an assumption, an anatomical explanation 
of experience that rests on the very assumption of subjects responding to an 
objective reality" (the post you said it in is actually missing, disappeared 
from the archives, but it was in one of the early posts in the "Rhetoric" 
thread and chopped up pieces of the post appear in my response to the 
missing post on Sept 15)).

You've made that same sort of distinction when you've said that we can't 
have _intellectual_ knowledge of primary experience.  But I wanted to 
express what my qualms are about saying its knowledge we have of primary 
experience.  As I see it, if we have a relationship to primary experience, 
its something that _breaks up_ knowledge, the Dynamic breaking of old static 
patterns, but its not something we have a different kind of knowledge of.  
And this is partly why I still don't like to formulate the distinction 
between DQ and static patterns into epistemological terms.

Matt

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