[MD] Pirsig/James connection

[MarshaV]

Dave,

I see this Pirsig/James discussion lifting James and doing nothing for the
MoQ or RMP.  Explain to my why you think this Pirsig/James connection has
value?  


Marsha
 
 






-----Original Message-----
From: moq_discuss-bounces at lists.moqtalk.org
[mailto:moq_discuss-bounces at lists.moqtalk.org] On Behalf Of David Thomas
Sent: Saturday, September 12, 2009 12:21 PM
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Subject: [Bulk] Re: [MD] Loneliness

Bo,

On with the Pirsig/James connexion.

I left off with comparison of Pirsig's DQ>SQ being similar to James:
flux>concepts. As you pointed out else where ZMM Quality turns up as Lila's
Dynamic Quality but the "undefined Quality" migrates to be superimposed
above it. Here's RMP's dilemma if he leaves DQ-SQ he has a dualism just like
the S-0 he is railing against. But uniting the two into a monism means
introducing an extra undefined term. But if RMP was to reach his goal of
uniting MoQ with the "one" of Zen he seems to have had little choice.

As I posted elsewhere James was highly critical of monist philosophies. He
thought they led to highly static Absolutist positions and interpretations.

As a pluralist James could have helped. In MoQ terms he was not only
interested in the patterns of value but the relationships between. His short
1909 version of Radical Empiricism states:

"Radical empiricism consists first of a postulate,next of a statement of
fact, and finally of a generalized conclusion."

"The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among
philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience.
[Things of an unexperienceable nature may exist ad libitum, but they form no
part of the material for philosophical debate]"

"The statement of fact is that the relations between things,conjunctive as
well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular
experience, neither more or less so, than the things themselves."

"The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience hold
together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of
experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous
trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a
concatenated or continuous structure."

Under James way of thinking rather that Q (an undefined given) being split
into DQ and SQ (which would make them subsets of Q) the relationship could
be described as DQ is the sum off all "conjunctions and disjunctions" of
individual DO/SQs hanging together to make up a single "concatenated or
continuous" Q. The many, the parts hang together to make up the one; rather
than the undefined one subdivided into the parts.

This helps in several ways. First my DQ does not equal your DQ. They're
similar but different not just because you are in Norway and I'm in
Arkansas. I experience my thoughts, ideas, aches and pains but you do not.
(Lucky you!) My flux of sensations are not just of the external but also my
internal world. And I try to order stable patterns out of both. So do you.
Then we come together in groups and try to make a good, agreeable order of
all those different experiences into a whole. The stable level called
intellect evolved out of the social thus it is both an individual and
community endeavor.

Second we all have a creative relationship with Quality, the whole, the one.
We constantly rearrange it. RMP dynamically rearranged a portion of the
physical, biology, social and intellectual patterns of value to created the
stable patterns called ZMM and Lila. You do the same every time you pick up
a brush. We all do in some way or another.

Now that I've screwed off Saturday morning, I need to get the chainsaw
working on the huge piles of limbs still left over from the spring ice
storm. Chainsawing is not really a Zen thing, The ever present danger focus
the attention, but the noise messes with the ONE and the all.

Dave



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