[MD] A fly in the MOQ ointment

[david buchanan]

Ham said to Horse:
My question concerns the reference by you and others in this forum to the "metaphysical position" of the subject/object relationship.  Specifically, what is metaphysical about it? I'd still appreciate your slant on why Pirsig chose to posit objective reality (experienced subjectively) as a metaphysical concept.



dmb says:

Pirsig did not choose to posit SOM as a metaphysical concept. He's talking about the basic assumptions of all Modern philosophers since Descartes. That's a big part of the reason it doesn't seem like a metaphysical position. It has become our common sense understanding. So much so, that most people find it very difficult to accept or even comprehend any alternative even when it is carefully explained. There are thousands and thousands of posts in the archives of this forum that testify to this difficulty. But at least you're actually starting to ask questions.

Positivism, which is one of the purest forms of traditional empiricism is one of the most clear cut cases of subject-object dualism. At the beginning of chapter eight in Lila, Pirsig distinguishes traditional empiricism with his own.

"The MOQ  subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about what the senses provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge gained trough imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning. [because valid empirical evidence is limited to sensory experience] They regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable. The MOQ varies from this by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons. They have been excluded because of the METAPHYSICAL ASSUMPTIONS that all the universe is composed of subjects and objects and anything that can't be classified as a subject or an object isn't real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It is just an assumption. ... If subjects and objects are held to be the ultimate reality then we're permitted only one construction of things - that which corresponds to the 'objective' world - and all other constructions are unreal."

There is a similar explanation in chapter 5:

"Positivism is a philosophy that emphasizes science as the only source of knowledge. It sharply distinguishes between fact and value, and is hostile to religion and traditional metaphysics. It is an outgrowth of empiricism, the idea that knowledge must come from experience, and is suspicious of any thought, even a scientific statement, that is incapable of being reduced to direct observation. [because of the limits of sensory empiricism again.] Philosophy, as far as positivism is concerned, is limited to the analysis of scientific language. ... But even then the assertion that metaphysics is meaningless sounded false to him [Phaedrus] As long as you're inside a logical, coherent universe of thought you can't escape metaphysics. Logical positivism's criteria for 'meaningfulness' were pure metaphysics, he thought."


One thing worth noticing about Pirsig's criticism of the positivists is that they were hostile to metaphysics for metaphysical reasons. He's talking about a certain kind of blindness on the part of the positivists with respect to their own basic assumptions. They were so busy asking questions about how to get our subjective ideas to correspond with the objective reality, they forgot to ask questions about those questionable questions. Finally, at the end of chapter 29, Pirsig identifies his own empiricism with James's radical empiricism, wherein, "subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he [James] described as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories'. In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure Experience [DQ] cannot be called either physical or psychical: it logically precedes this distinction."

This is how subjects and objects are demoted from being the two basic metaphysical categories that make experience possible to secondary concepts which derived from a more primary experience. 


There are lots of reasons to attack these metaphysical assumptions. Pirsig talks a lot about the cultural problems that grow out of attitudes of objectivity and attitudes that denigrate subjectivity. In his essays on radical empiricism, James explains how SOM has been a source of many fake problems throughout the history of philosophy. But the basic idea here is that subjects and object are just abstractions, not the actual shape of the universe. We believe in them like the ancients believed in the gods. It's practically unthinkable to question them at first. But then you get used to the idea. And then you start to see why SOM is such a problem and then you start to see why it's a good idea to say they're just ideas and demote them to that secondary rank.


Don't get me wrong. They (subjects and objects) are ideas derived from experience and function pretty well in experience most of the time. But when you're asking certain philosophical questions, that is not one of those times. This is not one of those times.



 		 	   		  
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