[MD] Taking words Seriously

[david buchanan]

Ian said to dmb, Matt, etc:
...I'm trying to (help) answer a question like - so what is this primary empirical reality like then? So let's riff on my DQ as "pure-potential" suggestion - imagine what it's like to experiencing the world as everything it could be, rather than as pre-conceived by any number of existing static patterns. ...The blank sheet is a bit static, I'll grant you, but it's been used by the poets since time immemorial, to contrast with the static belief that "It is written".


dmb says:
Yea, the white paper analogy construes DQ as the unwritten, as the larger reality upon which we write. Anything that can be written will be written on the basis of DQ. In that sense, pure potential is not a bad way to characterize it. In the same way, we could say that the endless landscape is the larger reality from which we draw a handful of sand. In terms of evolutionary growth, DQ is characterized as the ongoing stimulus which causes us to create the world, and by this we mean the world of static analogies. Every last bit of it, he says. Man is the measure of all things, a participant in the creation of all things, he says. Similarly, James says, "We carve out everything". It sounds like madness to say the world as we know it is just pile of analogies or just a handful of sand, but that's what he's saying. The primary empirical reality is not just a handful of sand and it can't be sorted like sand. It's not the analogies we create in response to the ongoing stimulus. That's why Quality can't be defined, why it's the unwritten potential of all that is written or will be written. 

Pirsig says, "Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself." (ZAMM, chapter 20) This is another way of saying that concepts are always secondary and derived, as opposed to being the primary empirical reality. I think this is what Granger is saying in his "nutshell" description of radical empiricism, which I posted yesterday. Granger says, "sense-making in experience is a function of discrimination made WITHIN the 'primary integrity' of this temporally moving qualitative whole" and "meaning emerges" as we organize, control, and direct "the various existential relations that exist WITHIN the unanalyzed totality of experience". (Granger p28) In other words, the totality of experience is an endless landscape and all of our concepts come from there and work or function within it. The white page analogy expresses this relation too. It's always bigger and contains the concepts that are written on it - in pencil. 

What is this primary empirical reality like, then? He says he has to hammer on this point because of our cultural immune system, but it's not complicated. It's hard to see because it's so simple, immediate and direct. It's what you know before you know it. It's always already right under your nose. I think this only means that the primary empirical reality is just experience as it's felt and lived, in all it's totality before its selected for attention or sorted into concepts. Man is the measure because he is "inseparable" from the landscape awareness and he does the selecting and the sorting. 

"We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

  ...What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding [classic and romantic] and unites them into one. Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of unsorted sand for its own sake. Such an understanding will instead seek to DIRECT ATTENTION TO THE ENDLESS LANDSCAPE from which the sand is taken. That is what Phædrus, the poor surgeon, was trying to do.

  To understand what he was trying to do it’s necessary to see that part of the landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, is a figure in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape without seeing this figure is not to see the landscape at all." 

dmb resumes:
This helps to reinforce the idea of man being a participant in the creation of all things, the measure of all things, and it helps to put the landscape analogy back in it's original context. But I also think this helps to push back against Matt's contention that we have limited access to DQ, that it can only be seen through a crack in the glasses or by jumping off the train and into death and chaos. I think the idea here is that DQ is the endless landscape of OUR awareness. We not only have access, we are inseparable from it. It is in that sense that Quality has us, rather than the other way around. It's not that reality is behind appearances but rather that reality is totally apparent, entirely pervious. Thou art that, as they say back East.

There is discrepancy between concepts and reality, Pirsig and James both say, but that's not at all the same as the distinction appearance and reality. Despite the discrepancy between concepts and reality, but neither of them is outside of our experience and they are supposed to cooperate in experience. The sorting figure is inseparable from the whole scene and sorting occurs WITHIN the scene. The discrepancy is pushes back against the tendency to reify our concepts of the world, the tendency to believe that there is only one right way to sort sand but both are part of OUR experience. The radical empiricist limits reality to whatever it is that can actually be experienced so that experience and reality amount to same thing. Man is the measure and the Buddha fixes bikes.