[MD] FW: Dewey's Zen

[118]

Thanks guys,
That was an interesting exercise in decrypting one message using the algorithm of another.  I learned something.

Cheers,

Sent laboriously from an iPhone,
Mark

On Mar 27, 2012, at 2:39 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 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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