[MD] FW: Dewey's Zen

[Carl Thames]

It's been a while since I read Lila, so I didn't grasp the term "Cleveland 
Harbor Effect" when you used it.  I did a search on it, and came up with:

http://www.quantonics.com/Pirsigs_Lila_Quotes_on_Insanity.html

This essay addresses many parts of this message.  I'm going to have to read 
it a couple of times to come to some kind of understanding about it, but I 
think it's well worth the effort.

Carl

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "david buchanan" <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2012 4:39 PM
Subject: [MD] FW: Dewey's Zen


>
> Thanks for playing along, gents. Just about everyone seems to be reading 
> it the same way I do. Ant totally nailed it, of course, and it seems safe 
> to consider my hunch pretty well confirmed. I was fairly confident already 
> but we always gotta watch out for the Cleveland Harbor Effect and other 
> kinds of confirmation bias. I'll take a turn playing the game too. My 
> additions are bracketed in the passages below:
>
>
>
> ...experiences come whole [undivided or undifferentiated], pervaded by 
> unifying qualities [Quality as an aesthetic continuum] that demarcate them 
> within the flux of our lives [what James and Pirsig call "the immediate 
> flux of life"]. If we want to find meaning [intellectual quality], or the 
> basis for meaning, we must therefore start with the qualitative unity 
> [undivided Quality or Dynamic Quality] that Dewey describes. The 
> demarcating pervasive quality is, at first, unanalyzed [Quality is 
> pre-intellectual experience], but it is the basis for subsequent analysis, 
> thought, and development. Thought [intellectual experience] starts from 
> this experienced whole [begins with DQ], and only then does it introduce 
> distinctions [static concepts and definitions] that carry it forward as 
> inquiry.
>            It is not wrong to say that we experience objects, properties, 
> and relations, but it is wrong to say that these are primary in experience 
> ["subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from 
> something more fundamental" (Lila 364)]. What are primary are pervasive 
> qualities of situations ["the immediate flux of life which furnishes the 
> material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories" (Lila 
> 365)], within which we subsequently discriminate objects, properties, and 
> relations.
>
> Dewey took great pains to remind us that the primary locus of human 
> experience is not atomistic sense impressions, but rather what he called a 
> "situation," by which he meant, not just our physical setting, but the 
> whole complex of physical, biological, social, and cultural conditions 
> that constitute any given experience—experience taken in its fullest, 
> deepest, richest, broadest sense.
> [Compare that whole sentence (above) to Pirsig's: "If you compare the 
> levels of static patterns that compose a human being to the ecology of a 
> forest, and if you see the different patterns sometimes in competition 
> with each other, sometimes in symbiotic support of each other, but always 
> in a kind of tension that will shift one way or the other, depending on 
> evolving circumstances, then you can also see that evolution doesn't take 
> place only within societies, it takes place within individuals too. Lila 
> then becomes a complex ecology of patterns moving toward Dynamic Quality." 
> (Lila 360)]
>
> Mind, on this view, is neither a willful creator of experience [subjective 
> idealism], nor is it a mere window to objective mind-independent reality 
> [scientific objectivity]. Mind is a functional aspect of experience [mind 
> is a process, not a thing] that emerges when it becomes possible for us to 
> share meanings [evolved as language], to inquire into the meaning of a 
> situation, and to initiate action that transforms, or remakes, that 
> situation [betterness is the purpose of social and intellectual static 
> quality].
>
>
> The pervasive quality of a situation is not limited merely to sensible 
> perception or motor interactions [pre-intellectual experience is not 
> merely raw sense data]. Thinking is action, and so "acts of thought" also 
> constitute situations [there is a dynamic cutting edge of experience even 
> within the static conceptual world] that must have pervasive qualities. 
> Even our best scientific thinking stems from the grasp of qualities ["the 
> MOQ also says that DQ [is] the value force that chooses an elegant 
> mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant experiment over a 
> confusing, inconclusive one..  It is the cutting edge of scientific 
> progress itself." (Lila 365-6)]
>
> [And finally, my favorite....]
>
>            The crux of Dewey's entire argument is that what we call 
> thinking, or reasoning, or logical inference could not even exist without 
> the felt qualities of situations: "The underlying unity of qualitativeness 
> regulates pertinence or relevancy and force of every distinction and 
> relation; it guides selection and rejection and the manner of utilization 
> of all explicit terms."
>
> ["The preselection of facts is not based on subjective, capricious 
> "whatever you like" but on Quality, which is reality itself. ... It is the 
> source of subjects and objects and exists in an anterior relationship to 
> them. It is not capricious, it is the force that opposes capriciousness; 
> THE ORDERING PRINCIPLE OF ALL SCIENTIFIC AND RATIONAL THOUGHT which 
> destroys capriciousness, and without which no scientific thought can 
> proceed." (Pirsig in ZAMM)]
>
>
> Now I'm hoping this forms the basis of some good discussion. It offers a 
> fresh terms and a new look at the MOQ's central terms and distinctions.
>
>
>
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