[MD] Misunderstandings are driven by what we value not by the logic we use.

[david buchanan]

D. Harding said to All:
Why does Dan not see what I'm saying? ...We have had an ongoing discussion about the MOQ for a long time now and our differences *appear* to have come down to what 'experience' is.  Dan insists that 'experience' is DQ and everything else after that - is not 'experience'.    I have said to him time and again that experience includes *both* DQ and sq.   ...But the trouble is - if all you're interested in talking about is DQ - then why are you on a philosophical discussion board?  Like Marsha, the place for Dan isn't a philosophical discussion group.  It's a Zen retreat…Zen Master Dan wrote: "You say we experience static quality. NO!!!! Not in the MOQ!"



dmb says:
I haven't really followed the Harding-Glover debates -  but I don't see how this particular point is even debatable. It must be that you have different ideas about what the operative terms mean, exactly.

If static quality is conceptual, to say that we don't experience static quality is to say that we don't experience concepts. But that's absurd because one cannot say anything without experiencing concepts, without using words and ideas. It's a performative contradiction wherein you're indeed doing the very thing you are denying. It would be like saying, "we do not experience words or concepts." I seriously doubt that Dan means to say anything so absurd. 

 What we want to agree about is the difference between concepts (sq) and immediate, preconceptual experience (DQ). Yes, of course, in the usual sense of the word concepts (static pattens) are known in "experience". That's what we are exchanging and dealing with right now, obviously. But concepts (sq) are not the same as preconceptual experience (DQ). That's exactly WHY it makes sense to call it "PRE-conceptual"; to distinguish it from concepts and conceptual understanding. This is not just true in Pirsig's view, but also with the other radical empiricists like James and Dewey. 

“In beginning to understand his view, it cannot be overemphasized that Dewey is not using the word ‘experience’ in its conventional sense," John Stuhr explains. "For Dewey, experience is not to be understood in terms of the experiencing subject, or as the interaction of a subject and object that exist separate from their interaction. Instead, Dewey’s view is radically empirical” wherein “experience is an activity in which subject and object are unified and constituted as partial features and relations within this ongoing, unanalyzed unity” (PCAP 437). 

This is a nice parallel to Pirsig's warnings about being careful with the term "experience" because it's almost always conceived in terms of subjects and objects. Stuhr is warning the reader that Dewey is using the term quite differently. Where Pirsig talks about the cutting edge of undivided, pre-intellectual experience, Dewey is talking about the "ongoing, unanalyzed unity". This is what James calls the immediate flux of life, pure experience, a dynamic continuity, which sounds very much like Northrop's undifferentiated continuum. See a common concept behind all these various terms? That's the kind of experience we're talking about, a unconventional use of the term used to distinguish a pre-verbal immediacy from reflective thought. 

And this is important for overcoming SOM precisely because it takes subjects and objects as the cause of experience rather than a product of reflection, rather than concepts which has been derived from experience. Our radical empiricist are correcting a conceptual error, one known as "reification" As Stuhr puts it, “the error of materialists and idealists alike” is “the error of conferring existential status upon the products of reflection” This is a matter of treating our “products of reflection” as if they were ontological realities instead of parts of a man-made conceptual scheme.

This attack on subjects and objects is really why we want clarify the distinction between concepts (sq) and pre-intellectual experience (DQ). The point is to show how subjects and objects are just static concepts rather than the basic starting points of reality, to distinguish the primary empirical reality from the ways we conceptualize it. And BOTH of these elements are necessary....


“The Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all LEGITIMATE KNOWLEDGE arises from the senses or by THINKING about what the senses provided. Most empiricists deny that validity of any knowledge gained through imagination, authority tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable. The Metaphysics of Quality varies from this by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons. They have been excluded because of the metaphysical assumption that all THE UNIVERSE IS COMPOSED OF SUBJECTS AND OBJECTS and anything that can’t be classified as a subject or an object isn’t real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. Its just an assumption” (LILA 99).