[MD] Un-Pure Experience

[david buchanan]

dmb said to D. Thomas said:

Red-baiting? Really? You're like the Joseph McCarthy of mysticism here, bud. It's ugly, low and it's also a very bad reading of the content. He's [Mao] obviouslydeclaring his loyalty to SOM and it's quite clear that the "direct experience" he's talking about is just the common sense notion of first-hand experience, as opposed to second-hand news. For both reasons, leaving aside the silly McCarthyism, the quote is in no way relevant to Pirsig's DQ or James's pure experience. 



D. Thomas replied:
...From the way that Pirsig uses "direct experience" in his axiom; How can you be sure which way he is using it? Is it internal observation of one's own mind and body or is it Mao's external observation of one's environment, or both ? How do you know? I surely can't make the distinction.


dmb says:
 Like I just said, Mao is obviously a SOMer and Pirsig's "direct experience" is what you get after you've rejected SOM. Their meanings are not just distinguishable from each other, they are features of two completely different metaphysics. Further, we can get a fix on how Pirsig is using phrases like "direct experience" by comparing all the other phrases and terms for DQ. We can compare it with the way other philosophers use their terms too, especially the ones that Pirsig himself has already acknowledged, like Northrop and James. He tells us that James even uses the same exact terms; static and dynamic. 

I'm sorry, but if you can't compare terms and ideas, then you just can't discuss philosophy of any kind. 

Pirsig wants his central term to do a hell of a lot of work and he says many things about it, usually what it is NOT. It's ground zero of the MOQ. It's the mystic reality, the primary empirical reality, the immediate flux of life, direct experience and one of the things that it is NOT is the subject's perception of an objective reality. And it only makes sense that the "direct experience" that mystics talk about is going to differ from the common sense, journalistic, legal, or scientific uses of the term. So, you add up the relevant quotes from Pirsig, and maybe from James, Northrop, Buddhism, Taoism, or whatever else can be found. You add them up in a way that isn't contradictory or confusing and then you know you're on your way to understanding. Each description clarifies, qualifies and illuminates all the other descriptions. This kind of comparative analysis eliminates the misinterpretations. 

Sadly, the people who need this the most will dismiss the presentation of parallel pieces of evidence as mere cutting and pasting. I mean that literally. It's very depressing to still be stuck on the basic terms of the MOQ after so many years of presenting this textual evidence. And now you've added some rather hair-brained red-baiting too. 


Dave Thomas said:

"Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions." 
Pirsig uses the term "abstraction" with a the qualifier "intellectual." Why? One of the definitions of "abstraction" is: "the process of formulating generalized ideas or concepts by extracting common qualities from specific examples." So why not just use "abstraction?"

dmb says:

There are other kinds of abstraction so that it doesn't always refer to ideas or concepts. One can "abstract" water from a well, for example, and there is "abstract" art. Pirsig is clearly talking about "abstractions" in the conceptual sense and this comports well with the fact that he describes this same direct experience as "pre-conceptual" experience and "preintellectual" experience. Like I said, it all adds up in a way that isn't confusing or contradictory.  



Dave Thomas said:

Which leads right into the whole mythos, everything is an "analogy" business.
Then you say, "The four levels of static patterns are just a way to sort the mythos, right? All of that sits in contrast to DQ, the generator of the mythos." What this does is reduce all human knowledge to the status of myth, "a collection of gossip and intuitions about man." ... So all human knowledge is initially relegated to "social level" where fairy tales, Bible stories, and Newton's theories are all of equal value. No, no you say, What about the intellectual level?


dmb says:

This seems to be quite deliberately stupid. Are just pulling my leg or what? Look at what transpired here...


I had said that everything is an "analogy" -every last bit, as Pirsig says, and then I said, "The four levels of static patterns are just a way to sort the mythos, right? All of that sits in contrast to DQ, the generator of the mythos." Just to be absolutely clear, I was talking about everything, the whole mythos, all four levels of the static patterns, but you said,...

"What this does is reduce all human knowledge to the status of myth, 'a collection of gossip and intuitions about man.' ... So all human knowledge is initially relegated to "social level" where fairy tales, Bible stories, and Newton's theories are all of equal value. No, no you say, What about the intellectual level?"

If I'm including every last bit of everything, the whole mythos, and all four static levels, then obviously this charge of reductionism makes no sense at all. This little bit of nonsense is predicated on nothing except your own perverted definition of "mythos" and, even further, you are clearly just ignoring what I actually said. You reduced and distorted "mythos" to mean gossip and fairy tales. 

So we have your hair-brained red-baiting, your apparent inability to compare the key terms and concepts, and we have this mythic kind of deliberate distortion. That pretty much kills it, don't you think? I do.