[MD] Taking off the glasses?

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:

You said that reality with the glasses off is uninterpreted experience. Ok, then certainly the SOMer and the MOQer are both subject to uninterpreted experience which then gets interpreted through one lens or the other. What we have is a comparison between interpreting
experience through the lens of SOM, interpreting his experience through the lens of the MOQ and the crazy sounding things someone says who is not interpreting his experience through any lens at all??? What could that even mean? ..There is no interpretation that is not based on some set of such intellectual glasses whether they are the ones handed to us at birth or a newly fashioned pair. There is no interpretation of experience that corresponds with "taking the glasses off." Only putting on a different pair.

dmb says:

Right. That's what I said already. Twice. You want to see it for the third, your thickness? 


dmb said to Steve and Matt - at least three times:
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.


Again, this is the MOQ's distinction between concepts (interpretations) and reality, between static and Dynamic. 


Taking the glasses off gives you uninterpreted experience, but if one is making statements (crazy sounding or not), one is no longer working without the glasses. As soon as you start talking, you are interpreting and you've got some glasses on. 

Your question asks for an uninterpreted interpretation. You question is nonsense and it is nonsense because you keep converting the MOQ's primary empirical reality back into a an objective reality. Put another way, you are trying to understand Pirsig's statements in terms of the metaphysics he rejects, as if taking the glasses off would us direct access to an external reality as it really is. And then you deny something Pirsig simply isn't saying. 


You are literally hung up on a sentence fragment, Steve. And that fragment is beside the point he's making in that passage, which is only about the difference between SOM and the MOQ, between philosophical outlooks. 


What is it about uninterpreted reality that seems crazy?  Well, when it comes to the connection between DQ and insanity, Pirsig gives us a whole lot to think about. If you are sincerely interested in that part of the MOQ, there are a hundred passages to explore.


"The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neandertal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is."


"There is only one kind of person, Phædrus said, who accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phædrus said, is "insane." To go outside the mythos is to become insane."


"The relation of the mythos to insanity. That's a key fragment. I doubt whether anyone ever said that before. Insanity is the terra incognita surrounding the mythos. And he knew! He knew the Quality he talked about lay outside the mythos."


"Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side... that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That's why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen."


"The mythos. The mythos is insane. That's what he believed. The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane!"


Pirsig in Lila chapter 30: "The MOQ associates religious mysticism with Dynamic Quality but it would certainly be a mistake to think that the MOQ endorses the static beliefs of any particular religious sect. Phaedrus thought sectarian religion was a static social fallout of DQ and that while some sects had fallen less than others, none of them told the whole truth."


"He thought about how once this integration occurs and DQ is identified with religious mysticism it produces an avalanche of information as to what Dynamic Quality is. A lot of this relgious mysticism is just low-grade "yelping about God" of course, but if you search for the sources of it and don't take the yelps too literally a lot of interesting things turn up."