[MD] Reifying carrots

[david buchanan]

Marsha said to Andre:
...I am not against reification; it is the way the mind works.  I am for keeping primary in the mind that while it is convenient to analyze and manipulate conceptual objects, they are _mere_ conceptually constructed patterns of ever-changing, interdependent, relative, impermanent value.  Ultimately there are no divisions, everything-is-connected-to-everything. .. I care as much about the MoQ as anyone on this MD list, and that I offer a different perspective should be seen as perfectly acceptable.  ...To me the MoQ is about awakening.


dmb says:

Leaving aside the extremely objectionable assertion that SOM and reification is just how the mind works, I want to address another extremely objectionable assertion. By describing conceptual patterns as ever-changing, you are blurring the line between static and dynamic. This is the first and most basic distinction in the MOQ and so when you confuse or conflate the two, the result is going to be a mess. The suggestion that this extremely objectionable move should be seen as a perfectly acceptable alternative is outrageous. Instead of dealing with the actual objection, the suggestion is just an attack on the objectors. It suggests that anyone who disagrees is somehow trying to shut down alternative views just because they are alternative views. But that's not it at all. Nobody is against alternatives so long as they're good. Any MOQer worth his salt knows that there is more than one way to be right but that doesn't mean we should just accept any view, no matter how confusing, paralyzing, or mixed-up it is. 


Asking amateur philosophers to make sense is not a form of oppression. These are just the most basic rules of conversation. 


How much sense does it make to say that intellectual static patterns are ever-changing and ultimately there are no divisions? Pirsig says, "a metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable or there isn't any metaphysics." There he is talking about intellectual static patterns. The fact that they are divisible, definable and knowable is what makes them valuable, what makes them work AS static patterns. This is contrasted with the dynamic, the mystical. "The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had called 'Quality' in his first book", Pirsig says, "is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions. Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable or there isn't any metaphysics". This is what a metaphysics must be even if we're talking about the metaphysics of Quality. 

As a practical matter, this means that direct experience is something you know when you've shut your computer off and are not talking to other MOQers about philosophy. It means that when you are here talking to other MOQers, you must trade in the divisible, definable and knowable concepts that the rest of us are using or there isn't any conversation. Replying to everything with "not this, not that" does not constitute a conversation. It's just an evasion of intellectual responsibility and the effect is to shut down every exchange before it even begins. That's why people get frustrated. That's why your view is anti-intellectual and that's another way it undermines the MOQ. You really shouldn't be surprised when MOQers object or otherwise say they have a problem with that view.









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