[MD] Julian Baggini Interview with Pirsig

[David M]

Hi Matt

I understand your problems but think that there are problems
with the emphasis of your approach that are giving you these
problems. It is too embedded with traditional philosophy
problems & given a modern gloss. It has the feel of a
disembodied subject struggling with observational problems.
I think this can be shifted & the emphasis changed. Being
should not be seen as out there in the external world.
It also should not be seen as unknowable. As embodied
individual creatures we are simply a very small part of a
greater whole.We are out of touch with some abstract
Being but just another embodied part of the whole,we are
within Being and in a constant state of being either kicked and
kissed by the greater whole of Being. It is only because of this
primary kicking and kissing and kicking and kissing back that
we are able to move on to evolve the sort of secondary
forms of interactions that you want to call knowledge proper.
As for maps and landscapes, well the landscape is that with
which we interact, and its realist importance needs to be
squarely kept in contact with giving the unbelievable density
of our many many maps. For me the pluralism of the maps
is what makes us realise the plasticity of Being and that
(of course Pirsig says filters) each type of map conceals
many aspects of Being whilst revealing others that they
in turn conceal. Alongside a physicalist story of evolution
there is an experiental story of evolution and how ever
changing maps have dragged us up from single cell forms of
life.

DM




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Matt Kundert" <pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2006 12:33 AM
Subject: Re: [MD] Julian Baggini Interview with Pirsig


> 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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