[MD] Taking Words Seriously

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Matt:
Matt, you could barely stand to acknowledge the role of DQ, describing it as a "blank page".



Matt replied:
... I was sincere in saying that I couldn't see how I was exposing myself to your critical point of view.  We disagree, clearly, but I still have to confess that I don't understand what your criticism was/is.  It's a form of "leaving out DQ," but I don't understand your criticisms of my attempts to include it.  (I wish I could think that it was more than just not saying "DQ" enough, but sometimes that's all that it looks like.)  I picked up the "blank page," albeit, from Dave Thomas, but it does seem like a perfectly fine version of the SODV picture (or, at least, I don't understand your attempts to criticize it).

Ian added:
 I like it too. I hadn't realized the blank page idea had come from Third Wave Dave. I like it as an expression of DQ - I have tended to refer to it as "pure potential" - in the blank-slate / tabula-rasa sense (an old idea I picked up from Pinker). I think it's a magnificent role for DQ, the leading edge of pure experience is pure potential, minimally constrained by static patterns in any level.



dmb says:
Well, the blank slate is, among other things, a Lockean idea about the way subjects passively receive sense data from the objective world. That's very likely where Steven Pinker got the idea, although that's just my hunch. I'm pretty sure Matt has no intention of returning to old school sensory empiricism in pressing the idea of DQ as a blank page and I'm not objecting on those grounds, at least not exactly. The criticism I have in mind, however, is definitely based on the assertion that DQ is best understood as the primary empirical reality. 

The problem is not your failure to mention DQ often enough, of course. The problem is characterizing DQ in such a way that it becomes trivial, inert or relatively meaningless factor. That's pretty much the meaning of the word "blank". To paraphrase my dictionary, it means "bare, empty, or plain", like a blank sheet of paper or an audio tape with nothing recorded on it. In terms of characterizing DQ, a blank mind is even worse, as in the phrase "we were met by blank looks" or "her mind went blank". So I'm saying that this characterization is approximately the opposite of DQ as the primary empirical reality, which is anything but blank. To put it in Dewey's terms, this primary empirical reality is the "infinitely complex situational whole". The whole complex situation is comparable to Pirsig's "endless landscape of awareness".

"Dewey's conception of experience is directly contingent upon the idea of quality. In Experience and Nature, he tells us that 'quality' constitutes the 'brute and unconditioned isness' of empirical events. As Pirsig likewise suggests, qualities are much more that mere states of conscousness. Rather, the establish the primary field and horizons of everyday experience, the immediate, concrete conditions of human life and activity. Immediate sense qualities are what we live in and for. 'The world in which we immediately live, that in which we strive, succeed, and are defeated,' Dewey argues, 'is preeminently a qualitative world'. This means that 'all direct experience is qualitative, and qualities are what make life-experience itself directly precious." (David Granger 27)

"In a nutshell, radical empiricism postulates that sense-making in experience is a function of discrimination made within the 'primary integrity' of this temporally moving qualitative whole. The principle agency of these discriminations is a purposive human organism. Meaning emerges as this organism organizes, controls, and directs the various existential relations that exist with the unanalyzed totality of experience. The thoughtful reconstruction of experience, which shapes and guides it toward desirable ends through intelligent action in the world, is thus perceived as the quintessential human project.   Importantly, this is in direct contradiction to conventional Lockean empiricism." (Granger 28)

I think it would be helpful to set Granger's descriptions next to Pirsig's hot stove example wherein DQ is what gets you off the stove immediately, before you can sort the experience into analyzable concepts like "heat" and "stove" and "self", etc. The experience is very far from being blank in the sense that it is a highly charged negative aesthetic, a definitely felt negative quality. The idea here is that DQ is pre-reflective, pre-intellectual, prior to definitions and conceptual analysis but this absence of concepts doesn't mean the landscape of awareness is blank or empty. Quite the opposite. As in the hot stove example, we act upon it and follow it and let it lead us and the subsequent analysis and reflection we might preform after the fact is always secondary and thin and partial compared to the richness and fullness of the immediately felt event.

Now, let's turn back to the topic of creative excellence as a matter of "fresh seeing". Does it make sense to say that the dull student was tricked into seeing "a blank page" with her own eyes or that the trick was to get her stare at a static brick? I think not. The exercise worked because it forced her to look for herself with the "dilated eye" of the poet, as Emerson puts it. It worked because of the way it shut down her tendency to imitate, to follow instructions, to adhere to the abstract rules and the like. It forced her to lose her mind and return to her senses, as Alan Watts liked to put it. And the senses are not at all blank. Indeed, that way of taking experience is far richer than abstract thought.