[MD] Selective interest

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Steve:
You seem to be saying .. that it's not possible for any menu to keep you from the food. But what if you're reading a menu that insists that there is no such thing as food and reality is just menus all the way down? Wouldn't that be a very bad menu? It's a menu that fools you into thinking you've already got the food and it says don't pay any attention to those crazy folks who talk about the scents coming from the kitchen, who insist that there is something beyond the menu.


Steve replied:
The menu-food analogy completely falls flat in the above when the food is supposed to stand in for the whole of reality rather than something behind the curtain or in the kitchen. There is no possibility for being outside the kitchen when the kitchen is all of reality.

dmb says:
It occurs to me that your reading of this analogy falls flat because you think of "reality" in terms of SOM, as if it were some kind of place or space or some ontological substance. In this analogy the food is direct experience or the immediate flux of life and the menu is full of concepts. This analogy is about the priority of experience as it's lived and the secondary role of concepts as servants of life. 
But you are taking "reality" to mean something like the known universe so that the problem of being out of touch comes to mean that we've somehow found the exit and stepped outside of time and space. I'd bet big bucks that this is another symptom of trying to understand Pirsig in terms of Rorty. He's the one who thinks, "that our relation with the environment is purely causal" and "once we are causally prompted to form a belief, justification may take place in a social world ". Our relation to reality is causal, not epistemological, according to Rorty. He thinks, "one is always in touch with reality as a language user" because "we humans use language to engage the environment". 
Compare that view with the view held by James and Pirsig; there must always a discrepancy between concepts and reality or, as the mystics say, reality is outside of language. The reality James and Pirsig are talking about is not a causal environment in which experience takes place. It is just experience itself, the immediate flux of life. It's what you know before you have a chance to think about it. And no, I do not mean "you" as a subjective self in an external reality. Those are the metaphysical concepts that tend to conceal the direct reality that James and Pirsig are talking about. They are talking about food that does not appear on the SOM menu. And it's not on Rorty's menu either. There are scholars who both reject SOM's menu and who have something like DQ on their menu but, as far as I can tell, Rorty's not one of them.   


Steve said:
.. As far as I know "out of touch with reality" is YOUR phrase rather than Pirsig's. My point was that Pirsig's philosophy (specifically his formula, experience=reality) makes your phrase, "out of touch with reality," incoherent. But you have explained it as meaning that we can have bad ideas. Of course, I agree with that. It just seems like a strange phrase for an anti-Platonist to use to make the point that we can have bad ideas.


dmb says:
I thought "out of touch" was your phrase. Whatever. It works well enough, I suppose, because Pirsig does talk about mystics and hot stoves in terms of direct "contact" with basic reality. I think the "incoherence" problem you see is easily explained, as long as you don't take "reality" to mean a place or space or universe of things. The formula that equates experience and reality says that reality is limited to experience, to that which can be known in experience. It thereby excludes all metaphysical fictions and it demands that anything known within experience has to be accounted for in our philosophies. In other words, we are no longer allowed to ignore or dismiss any part of empirical reality. It seems you are taking the formula (experience = reality) to mean that error about reality is impossible. Ironically, the formula is meant to correct just such an error. And it's not just that we can have bad ideas. As I've explained, the problem is presented specifically in Pirsig's books and in the thinking of other philosophers, all of whom say that we have inherited an entire system of rationality and a world view that tends to conceal, ignore or denigrate the primary empirical reality. You know, because Quality was made subservient back in Ancient Greece, because of an Apollonian imbalance in our culture, because of an otherworldly Platonism that has infected our religions and our philosophies. We're talking about a radical reconstruction of philosophy, a Copernican revolution in our metaphysical assumptions and an expansion of rationality even while rationality is knocked off it's lofty throne. It's about intellectual and cultural evolution.
If experience and reality amount to the same thing, then being out of touch with reality means being out of touch with experience. One doesn't have to be a Freudian to believe there is such a thing as insensitivity, repression, delusion, or subliminal levels of awareness. Being out of touch is more or less Pirsig's definition of "squareness" and to claim that our culture has a blind spot with respect to DQ is simply to say that squareness is a cultural disease too. This is about the relation between concepts and experience, not about the ontological structure of the universe. 




Steve said:
Here you seem to have come around to my point of view: we ARE in touch with reality, and our ideas could only ever conceal that fact from us rather than take us out of reality.


dmb says:
By that logic, a blind person is not just unable to see he has been flown in a magic space ship to a reality without light or visible things. Do you "keep in touch" with your family and friends by literally holding their hands 24 hours a day? You ride around on their backs, perhaps? I mean, how could you ever take "being out of touch" so literally? That's fantastically silly. If I claimed that our advanced technological culture was out of touch with nature would you assume that I was claiming we were all floating above the surface of the earth and then argue against this floating as impossible? Be serious. 



dmb said:
...we can have a mystical experience AND we can have concepts that acknowledge this pre-conceptual experience or acknowledge the fact that people can have a mystical experience. In other words, there is no contradiction. We can posit the concept that there is more to reality than concepts. The menu can warn you about it's own limited function ...


Steve:
Here again, you are supporting my point that if you follow the primary/secondary experience distinction, then "in touch with reality" as a primary matter of mysticism ("taking off the glasses") is not the same thing as "in touch with reality" as a secondary matter of having good ideas. You have been conflating two separate ideas.

dmb says:
No, I'm not conflating the two ideas. I'm saying that the two ideas go together. The phrases "philosophical mysticism" and "metaphysics of Quality" both show how the pre-conceptual experience (glasses off) can be included and accounted for within a conceptual system (better glasses). SOM shows you how there can be system that doesn't account for any such thing (blind spot to mystic reality), or accounts for it badly, as some rare and fringe thing that can be dismissed and ignored. Dismissing this was exactly what prompted Pirsig's complaint about traditional empiricism. Their prohibition of metaphysics was pure metaphysics, he thought, and as a result their empiricism wasn't nearly empirical enough. This is the kind of thing we're talking about. It's a matter of dismissing empirical realities for metaphysical reasons, of ignoring the terrain and trusting the map, as in the Cleveland Harbor effect. 

I guess that's an apt analogy for way you and Matt read the MOQ (and my explanations of it). You've got a map drawn by Rorty and so you can't locate anything like DQ or the primary empirical reality. There is some overlap but when you try to align his map with Pirsig's on this particular point, it doesn't work at all. The mystic reality does not appear on Rorty's map at all but Pirsig's map was drawn specifically to put the primary empirical reality at the very center so that everything on the map relates to it. Thus you and Matt are forever getting lost and constantly crashing into things. I know for a fact that you misread my statements all the time and it almost always means that you're adding some metaphysical assumptions, even if I explicitly say otherwise. I've watched you and Matt do the same thing to Pirsig over and over again for years. I've already dished up a mountain of evidence but the explanations get misinterpreted in the exact same way. I guess it's pretty hopeless.