[MD] DMB and Me

[skutvik at online.no]

DMB, Steve, All.

16 March u wrote:

Steve to Matt:
> > I'm wonderring right now whether Pirsig ended up enforcing a dichotomy
> > of his own. Or was he just making a useful distinction between
> > primary/secondary experience and static/dynamic quality? I'd like to
> > read him as suggesting a useful distinction (within metaphysics taken
> > like Kuhnian science as philosophical problem solving) rather than
> > enforcing a dichotomy (traditional metaphysics).

I have commented Steve's, but over to you.

> DQ and sq are ways to divide experience, not ontological distinctions.
> I mean, that distinction does not entail any claims about the inherent
> structure of reality or the kinds of substances there are. 

An "experience" outside of - or before - divisions is SOM. You will not 
find any culture outside of the Western - or before Aristotle - that 
speaks about an  experience as different from a metaphysical ordering 
of it. The old mythologies - the Greek one for example - did not regard 
the "Immortal god/mortal humans" dichotomy  a pragmatic division of 
a direct experience, rather as EXISTENCE. Full stop! 

The MOQ is supposed to be a return to metaphysics in this original - 
as existence itself - fashion, before SOM split existence's along its 
Truth/Appearance line  (see Matt Kundert's essay) that has evolved 
into the modern "experience itself (slash)  divisions thereof" where the 
former is a reverberation of Truth, and the latter ditto of what just 
Appears.       

> As categories of experience however, this distinction does refer to
> empirical realities, to experiences we actually have rather than
> something hypothetically possible or inferred. 

Plato was well aware that sense impressions were "empirical realities", 
but nevertheless regarded them as secondary compared to the Ideas 
which was the real thing.. Our SOM has evolved into more refined 
versions among them "empirical/hypothetical"  yet it is the Greek S/O 
reverberating down through history. 

> It it just a useful idea, like all ideas,

In our variety of SOM "ideas" have become subjective and deceptive, 
a 180 degree turn from Plato (it happened already with Aristotle) but 
nevertheless SOM prevails.  

> but in this case its utility is first and foremost as a working concept
> within the MOQ, as Pirsig's first slice with the analytic knife. 

Right,t Phaedrus made an heroic effort to bring existence out of SOM 
but he over-strained himself in the process and the RMP who wrote 
LILA backed down from ZAMM's "Pre-intellectual/Intellectual" 
arrangement where intellectual=SOM  and made the intellectual level 
into something nobody to this day knows what is. 

> The importance and centrality of this distinction can hardly be
> overstated. 

The DQ/SQ distinction? Wish you would, but the Quality/MOQ over-
rules it and DQ/SQ will always be the "illusory" (secondary) part.  

> If I defend it vigorously, it's not because I think it's metaphysically
> or ontologically true but because I think it is conceptually mandatory.

Wonder why you don't identify Pirsig's as the culprit who messed up 
Phaedrus great job. Because this won't do the Quality/MOQ will 
forever frustrate all efforts. 

dmb:
> Well, no. I think one of Bo's central misconceptions is that he thinks
> metaphysics is reality rather than a set of concepts about reality,

Sic!!

And that's all I can manage for now. 

Bodvar