[MD] Value and the Individual

[Ham Priday]

[Corrected typo in previous message]:

Hello SA --

 [Ham, on 4/2 to Ron]:

> Despite what James and Pirsig say, the term "primary
> experience" conflates epistemology.  Experience is
> always an intellectual distinction.  Localized
> "uninterpreted experience", such as the pain felt when
> nerve endings are traumatized by heat (Pirsig's famous
> hot stove analogy) becomes an experience only after
> one relates it to the stovetop and his butt.  It is
> impossible to describe an experience without
> distinguishing its relations.

[SA, on 4/8, presumably to me]:

> You see, as Arlo mentioned, we've all been here
> with Ham.  He tries to act as if he is learning
> something about the moq, then bam, he throws in the
> same old jargon about essence.

 SA, I did not mention Essence or Essentialism anywhere in that post.  So
 what is your beef?

> What experience are we talking about?  Ham,
> you limited experience up above here to the experience
> of pain.  Experience can be of many events, not just
> pain.

 I suspect you've forgotten the purpose of that quotation.

 It was Pirsig, not Ham, who came up with the hot stove analogy to 
illustrate
 "pre-intellectual experience" (as opposed to "experience of events").
 Personally, I think it's silly.  We don't have to intellectualize pain to
 feel it, any more than we have to "intellectualize" it as a "low quality
 experience".  Pain is simply a sensation, like an itch or hunger, that
 alerts us to some physiological distress or need.  Since Pirsig's point was
 that it doesn't need to be intellectualized, why does he intellectualize 
it?
 Sort of punctures his argument, doesn't it?

 Instead of pain, why not choose fear, joy, anger, or love as an example of
 pre-intellectual sensibility?  These are emotional values which require no
 intellection, and they are also more suggestive of the individual's state 
of
 being which may be said to "color" his experience of external phenomena.

 Note that I haven't mentioned the objectionable 'E' word in my reply. 
(Maybe
 it's time for another walk in the woods ;-).

 Cheers,
Ham