[MD] Food for Thought

[Ham Priday]

On 12/30 Case said:
> Lopping off the TITs is what makes the MOQ in essence
> wholly subjective.  It is resolving the duality by simply
> denying half of it.  If you shut one eye you get a different
> picture of reality and in the Land of the Blind you can
> still be King.

DMB says:
> The MOQ is "in essence wholly subjective"!?
> Okay, now I'm starting to think that you have not read
> Pirsig's books. In Lila you will find him referring to the
> subjective self as completely ridiculous, as a fictional entity.
> Likewise, William James (in his Essays on Radical
> Empiricism) humorously claims that the Kantian self built
> by philosophers is made of an essence called "breath".
> Using medical terms, he says this "breath" is the sort that
> comes out of one's nose.  He's saying the subjective self is
> a bunch of hot air. ...

> [Case]:
> While I may or may not understand Pirsig, you certainly
> do not understand James. Here is the passage you have
> miss-read as being "humorous".
>
> The ironic part you refer to starts after the "...but breath,
> which was ever..."  In this essay James denies the
> existence of consciousness as a substance or thing
> metaphysical or otherwise. He questions its usefulness
> as a concept at all.  But James is serious in his use of
> "I breath" as a substitute for "I think".

Whether Case fully understands Pirsig's ontology or not, he has the right
slant on William James, including the point that he was primarily a
psychologist.  James' use of the word "essence" in the statement "breath
...is the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity
known to them as consciousness" could just as well have been "basis",
"premise" or "canard".  It was not a metaphysical allusion.  That comes
later, when he says: "But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same
stuff as things are."

Case is also right in "lopping off the TIT's" of Kant's transcendental
idealism, whether Pirsig has effectively succeeded in doing this or not.
The bottom line is that the "stuff" of reality is sensibility, not the
essence of "things-in-themselves".  Reality is the sensibility of an
undivided essence.  The confusion lies in equating absolute sensibility with
(individuated) consciousness or experience, which is being-aware -- a
subject/object dichotomy.  Without a source of sensibility there can be
neither being nor awareness, subject nor object.  The primary source is the
non-contradictory identity of both contingents, i.e., the potentiality of
sensibility to actualize difference.

Happy New Year to you all!
Ham