[MD] Taking off the glasses?

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Steve and Matt:

Since the glasses are intellectual and represent a way to interpret experience, then taking the glasses off leaves you with DQ, with pre-intellectual, uninterpreted experience. ..The MOQ's distinction between concepts and reality (sq&DQ) shows up here again and so Steve and Matt are going to be confounded. ...It will continue to cause trouble everywhere you go, no matter what facet or feature you try to explore.



Steve replied:
I don't think this unpacking works even a little since we _aren't_ talking about one's uninterpreted experience as being regarded as crazy. ...We can compare the statements of someone wearing the MOQ glasses to someone wearing the SOM glasses for sure, but presumably we are also to be able to compare these to what it's like without any glasses, and I don't know what that means.



dmb says:

You deleted everything I said about uninterpreted experience. You can't delete my answer and then say you still don't know what it means. You can't erase the bulk of my answer and then complain that the paltry remains didn't work. As you so often like to do, you have responded to the answer by posing the question. Not only was I talking about what it means to take the glasses off, I was talking about what that means IN CONTRAST with your reading of it as a Platonist claim involving the appearance/reality distinction. That was the unpacking job. It was two thirds of the post and it was aimed directly at you and yet it all disappeared and it went entirely unmentioned.
 

This is the part you deleted from the post to which you're allegedly responding:



Please notice what they are saying about "reality" with the glasses off. The pre-intellectual reality is what James calls feeling, sensation, a collective name for all these sensible natures, just what appears. It makes sense that Suzuki would this pre-conceptual experience 'no-mind'. Now compare this sensory flux as reality with the basic problem of appearance and reality. An encyclopedia article begins by saying "the chief question raised by the distinction is epistemological: How can people know the nature of reality when all that people have immediate access to are appearances?"


The MOQ does not fall into this trap because, as you just saw, the reality described by Pirisg, James and Buddhism is the appearances to which we have immediate access. From this point of view, there is no "reality" more real than "just what appears". The encyclopedia says "responses to the question fall into one of three classes: Those that argue that observers are unavoidably "cut off" from reality, those that argue that there is some way of "getting at" reality through the appearances, and those that reject the distinction." The MOQ takes the latter view; it rejects the distinction. The MOQ makes a different distinction, a distinction between concepts and empirical reality not between appearance and reality.


Think of it this way. The traditional distinction between appearance and reality is a distinction between empirical or phenomenal reality and that world of experience is contrasted with some kind of trans-experiential reality, a reality beyond what we can experience. For Plato this would be the world of Forms, for Kant this would be the world of things-in-themselves, for scientific materialism this would be "objective" reality. But the radical empiricist does not allow any such extra-empirical realities. Reality is limited to that which can be known in experience so that, in effect, appearance IS reality.


That is why we can NOT rightly take the MOQ to be making any claims about that one true account of The-Way-Things-Really-Are. The appearance-reality distinction presupposes an objective Way-Things-Really-Are to which subjective philosophical systems should try to conform. But the MOQ's central distinction does NOT make that pre-supposition. In fact, Pirsig and James both explicitly attack and reject SOM as their starting point and their distinction between concepts and reality is built on the lot where SOM used to stand before they knocked it down.