[MD] Fwd: Re: Static Patterns Rock!

[david buchanan]

Horse said to DM:

...What I don't get is why you are trying to impose an idea onto the MoQ that has been shown not to be part of the MoQ. There are static patterns of value and dynamic quality - that's it.  Nothing else. DQ is unpatterned. SQ is patterned. There is no such thing, in Robert Pirsig's MoQ, as patterned DQ. It doesn't exist. What you are suggesting is not Pirsig's MoQ.



dmb says:
Exactly. Thank you.

In order to answer the question of WHY he wants to assert a fictional and contradictory thing like "unpatterned patterns" or "pre-conceptual concepts" one must read between the lines and otherwise make inferences. It's never explicitly stated and yet it can, more or less, be discerned. DM objects to this as just making stuff up and Marsha calls it mind-reading but it's neither. It's just a matter of seeing what's implicit. If you see a kid getting frustrated with the square peg because it won't fit into the round hole, you can pretty much see what he's not grasping about the situation. It's like that with ideas too. 

As Eugene Taylor & Robert Wozniak tell the story, "The documents of radical empiricism ...provide a case study in misinterpretation and distortion". It continues to baffle people to this day. To so many academic philosophers, non-dual consciousness just isn't on their radar. The chances of impressing an Analytic philosopher with descriptions of satori or nirvana are not good. 

In DM's case, I think he's trying to understand this non-duality in terms of dualism - and of course that's not going to work out very well. Taylor and Wozniak describe this particular kind of critic. Maybe the following quotes from them will shed some light on DM's imposition of "pre-conceptual patterns" and WHY he might be doing that. Like DM, these critics were "chastising even to the point of condescension. Many imagined when they wrote that they had dealt sufficiently with aspects of radical empiricism to discount it. In reality they often had little grasp of James's views".

"Most objections were of two broad types, reflecting either an inability to shed the presuppositions of dualism or an inability to come to terms with the non-rational. Those for whom dualism was an article of faith had difficulty, for example, with the suggestion that there is no world of objects that is independent of consciousness or they foundered on the problem of representation, the implicit assumption in much of Western philosophy and psychology that external objects are grasped by the senses and then duplicated, or represented, in the interior domain of the mind. ..."

[This "inability to shed the presuppositions of dualism" is implied, I think, in all of Morey's objections to "pure experience".]


Taylor and Wozniak cite a particular example of this type of uncomprehending critic. 

"Boyd Henry Bode attacked James's concept of 'pure experience' from a dualistic, representationalist perspective. ...Radical empiricism fails for Bode because it cannot adequately account for an external world common to a multiplicity of individuals. ...James is faulted, in other words, for failing to account for that which he has explicitly set out to deny."

[For those following the debate, that should sound quite familar.]

Taylor and Wozniak name others "who critiqued James from the position of dualism", including the psychologists George Malcolm Stratton, Charles Hubbard Judd, and Wilhelm Wundt, but, they say...


"Perhaps the most egregious philosophical misinterpreter of James was Bertrand Russell. Although Russell thought James "profoundly original" and "profoundly interesting," he nevertheless believed that James had failed, because his theory was incapable of providing grounds for the analysis of experience (an oxymoron for a radical empiricist) and because he found it impossible to "believe that empiricism, however radical, requires that we should deny the difference between mind and matter...."

This is what I'm reading between the lines. DM is freaked out about "undifferentiated" experience because those who take dualism as an article of faith have "difficulty, for example, with the suggestion that there is no world of objects that is independent of consciousness" or they're stuck on   "the implicit assumption in much of Western philosophy and psychology that external objects are grasped by the senses and then duplicated, or represented, in the interior domain of the mind". By holding to these dualistic assumptions, "James's concept of 'pure experience' from a dualistic, representationalist perspective ...cannot adequately account for an external world common to a multiplicity of individuals". Thus Pirsig, James and I are faulted for failing to account for that which has explicitly been denied already. He's offering SOM as an alternative to the MOQ; offering the sickness as an alternative to the cure for that very same sickness. 

Not to pick nits.