[MD] Food for Thought

[David M]

Ham

Can you define sensibility and how it relates to
consciousness and what consciousness is conscious of (i.e. things)?
(Beware this question is loaded).

David M

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ham Priday" <hampday1 at verizon.net>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Monday, January 01, 2007 10:54 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] Food for Thought


>
> 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
>
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