[MD] Quick one: causation

[MarshaV]

At 04:36 PM 1/17/2009, you wrote:
>[Marsha]
>"In the MOQ there are no things in themselves."    (Copleston)
>
>http://robertpirsig.org/Copleston.htm
>
>[Krimel]
>This is a statement in reference to Copelston not to Kant. It reads in
>context as follows:
>
>[Copelston}
>In the second half of the nineteenth century idealism became the dominant
>philosophical movement in the British universities. It was not, of course, a
>question of subjective idealism. If this was anywhere to be found, it was a
>logical consequence of the phenomenalism associated with the names of Hume
>in the eighteenth century and J. S. Mill in the nineteenth century. For the
>empiricists who embraced phenomenalism tended to reduce both physical
>objects and minds to impressions or sensations, and then to reconstruct them
>with the aid of the principle of the association of ideas. They implied
>that, basically, we know only phenomena, in the sense of impressions, and
>that, if there are metaphenomenal realities, we cannot know them...
>
>[Pirsig]
>This is what the MOQ states. Right away it diverges from the absolute
>idealism that follows. Quality is a phenomenal reality.
>
>[Copelston]
>...The nineteenth-century idealists, however, were convinced that
>things-in-themselves, being expressions of the one spiritual reality which
>manifests itself in and through the human mind, are essentially
>intelligible, knowable...
>
>[Pirsig]
>In the MOQ there are no things in themselves.
>
>[Krimel]
>I see no refutation here just a statement on the par with, "gosh it's ugly."
>
>I agree that many in the MoQ perhaps even Pirsig especially, treat it as
>though it were pure phenomenology. Or to say it another way is it purely an
>examination of internal subjective states. But if we regard "reality" as a
>process, then this seems to me that to focus all of the attention on a
>particular part of the process, the perceiver, and to claim that the
>perceived is a phantom that doesn't exist at all. What Kant says of TiTs is
>that they are unknowable as such. But this is not to say that what is known
>is not derived from them or is not a reflection of them. In his account of
>Kant's position Pirsig points out how the "idea" or phenomenon of motorcycle
>is a process of perception that comes into "being" as the interaction
>between something external and the observer. Claiming that there is nothing
>external is not that same thing as claiming that the external can not in
>principle be fully known. I would see Kant as saying the later and I do not
>see Pirsig as abolishing this. That would be abolute idealism even solipsism
>and as you can see above Pirsig says, "This is what the MOQ states. Right
>away it diverges from the absolute idealism that follows. Quality is a
>phenomenal reality."


Krimel,

I have read too many Buddhist text to supply you with the type of 
answer you might require.  There is the Mahayana Middleway between 
absolutism and solipsism.  It is very much based on 
logic.  Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika would be my recommendation 
if you were interested..

http://www.amazon.com/Fundamental-Wisdom-Middle-Way-Mulamadhyamakakarika/dp/0195093364/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1232230635&sr=1-1 



Marsha







.
.
The Universe is uncaused, like a net of jewels in which each is a 
reflection of all the others in a fantastic, interrelated harmony without end.
.
.