[MD] Where does DQ end and SQ begin and SQ end and DQ begin? It's all bananas isn't it?

[david buchanan]

Jan Anders said: 
Cogito, we think, therefore we are...


Marsha said to Jan-Anders:
It seems to me it represents a naive realism in the psychological sense, even to many among us who need certainty and think they own truth. I do not relate it to Descartes. But if you do, well, then you do.


Ant replied to Marsha:
Well, Descartes didn't have Northrop at hand to sharpen up his thinking.  If he did, old Rene might have corrected what he said (about what can be considered certain ontologically) and said instead: "Something thinks therefore something is"! The "I" and "we" are all concepts by postulation (and, therefore, strictly speaking, not ontologically certain).



dmb says:
Right, Descartes' logic was sound insofar as doubting or thinking of any kind does entail existence. His mistake was to posit the thinker, to posit the existence of a thing that does the thinking. The trick is to deny this entity without also denying thought or existence. Instead of the subject being an ontological reality, a primary starting point of reality, Pirsig and James both say the subject is derived from experience, is a secondary concept. 


"For twenty years past I have mistrusted 'consciousness' as an entity; for seven or eight years past I have suggested its non-existence to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience.  It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded." -- William James, "Does Consciousness Exist?"


The Cartesian subjective self is ditched by radical empiricism, which instead provides us with "its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience". Pirsig does correct Descartes in a very interesting way. He says Descartes was right to begin with the self but he imagined it badly, as an autonomous entity, but in fact Descartes was able to doubt and think because 17th century French culture existed and without that nobody would be listening to his doubts anyway.


This folds quite neatly into Pirsig's description of the self as a complex forest of static patterns. They include all four levels, hopefully, so that thinking totally not autonomous. Thinking is always embodied, always embedded in a language and culture, always situated in a public discourse and so is not the exclusive task of some metaphysical entity. As James would put it, consciousness is just a name for the fact that the content of experience is known. Experience is the primary reality and the subject and object are posited to explain that, after the fact. 

I think Marsha is pretty careless about what's being rejected here. I mean, there are philosophical reasons for rejecting the "Cognito" and for wanting to de-reify the self but wholesale rejection of everything? I think the baby is laying out there in the street with the bathwater, you know?