[MD] The Word is Not the Thing

[Ham Priday]

John --


> Ok Ham,
>
> I came across something that seemed relevant to the discussion,
> so I typed it out.  Royce's letter verbatim, but the poetic spacing
> is my own.
>
> -----------------
>
> To William James, Sept. 19, 1880
>
> Now here again I think that people are pursuing this study in too
> superficial a way.  Everywhere one meets the question thus put:
> What relation in the structure of knowledge, does thought-work
> bear to the contributions of experience?
>
> This is a great problem, but not the deepest one.  The deepest
> question was Kant's, how is experience possible? ...
>: How is a series of states to be known as a series?  Tell us this
> and you have a philosophy.  Leave this untold and you stop half way.
>
> How is experience possible as a series of states known to be a series?

It seems to me that the serial aspect of experience is a neuro-physiological 
problem, and much less significant for the philosopher than the question: 
What is the Knower, and how is Awareness derived?

I don't expect to find the answer to this question in Pirsig's philosophy 
because he was determined to do away with subjectivity.  And I submit that 
Descartes establishes the subject 'I' more adroitly and more empirically 
than did Kant:  "But I observed that, while I was thus resolved to feign 
that everything was false, I who thought must of necessity be somewhat; and 
remarking this truth--I think, therefore I am--was so firm and so assured 
that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were unable to 
shake it, I judged that I could unhesitatingly accept it as the first 
principle of the philosophy I was seeking. I could feign that there was no 
world, I could not feign that I did not exist."  -- [Descartes: Discourse on 
Method]

If the first principle is the Knowing Self, then the content of awareness 
starts with the subject.  Since that establishes a basis for experience, it 
would seem to be a logical approach to epistemology and the "appearance" of 
reality that follows from it.  Yet the Cogito has been rejected by the 
philosophical community because it is "solipsistic".  To me, this is like 
rejecting the primary source because it is "religious".  To the extent that 
we each create our own universe, our perception IS a solipsism.  All this 
means is that experiential awareness is propietary to the subject.  But it's 
also true that what we each perceive independently as 'the universe' has a 
common spacetime configuration that enables us to participate and 
communicate in the same objective reality.  Such is the universality of 
existence.

> If experience is possible only through this constructive process,
> then what is the ultimate datum?
> Not matter.
> Not mind.
> Not a series of experiences, not the distinction of object and
> subject, but just this:
> a moment of reception of some content, joined with a constructive
> act that postulates a world of other consciousness beyond the
> present data.
> Reception means a passive state of consciousness,
> construction an active state.
> And Union of passion and action in one moment only,
> Herein is contained all we can think about the universe.
>
> As biologists and a philosopher both admit, the only place we
> really find or experience mind is in biological creatures.  I think
> that's why the emphasis is upon *animal* perception rather than
> intellectual perception.
>
> A key difference metaphysically!  And what saves it, in my view
> from aspersions of anthropocentricism.

You can't have perception without consciousness, and I refuse to attribute 
intellect to non-human animals. I happen to believe that existence is 
anthropocentric.  But even if I'm wrong, your analysis of 
passive/constructive states of consciousness doesn't tell us what it is or 
where it comes from.

Whether momentary or serial, an active creator or a passive observer, a 
product of biological evolution or a spark of sensibility unique to living 
organisms -- Conscious awareness infers a source beyond existential 
beingness.  Pirsigians would simply say, it's "a pattern of Quality", except 
for Bodvar, who would call it the Intellectual Level.  As your friend Royce 
complained, such explanations, instead of explaining experience, "leave this 
untold and stop halfway."

Thanks for the Royce quotations, John.

--Ham