[MD] Taking Words Seriously

[david buchanan]

"Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the _value_ of his predicament is negative."



I like to think that Pirsig's hot stove example was meant to be humorous. He's saying that DQ is not some crypto-religious metaphysical abstraction. Instead, in this analogy, DQ is just your own sweet ass. Things can't get much more down to earth than that. In this case, there is nothing "dim" about apprehending that situation. I don't know. Maybe it's just me, but I think it's funny. The mystics will the the first ones off the stove because they are more sensitive to the immediate empirical reality, because they are better at following DQ. Few people seek enlightenment but everybody wants their own buns to remain untoasted. 

If DQ is the primary empirical reality or the immediate flux of life, as James calls it, then DQ is going to be anything and everything, depending on the concrete particulars of the situation. I mean, DQ is reality itself so the notion that experience can be negative or positive and everything in between - well, that just seems obvious to me. I don't the problem. The idea, I think, is the empirical reality is aesthetically charged, and that this awareness is real information, so speak. It's a feature of the overall cognitive process in the sense that the static concepts and oaths about stoves and heat and ouch are all about a real, concrete experience. It's the thing to be explained, the primary data, so to speak. 

Betterness is a relational term, right? It implies a comparison of at least two choices. In that sense, I think the meaning is completely unaltered by the terms we use. It doesn't matter if we say "movement toward the good" or "movement away from the bad". Either way is fine. They're both aimed at betterness in relation to something else. Again, I think the idea here is just that we get real information from an immediate, non-thinking process. Of course he's not saying that thinking is a bad thing or something we should turn off, as if we could. I think this attunement to the dynamic is supposed to improve our thinking, especially creative thinking.