Preintellectual reality
In his book Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig argues that what he calls quality is preintellectual reality. He states that there is a time gap between subjective perception and conception of reality, and because of that time gap, our conception can never be real.
You can't be aware that you've seen a tree until after you've seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag.
The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This preintellectual reality is what Phaedrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects.
Throughout the book, this preintellectual reality is referred to as Quality.
He comes to the conclusion that:
Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects.
Two notes related to this:
- Elisa Gabbert’s Time is memory from hew book The Unreality of Memory.
- The condition of looking at something and not seeing it
+
I am watching Jim Al-Khalili on The Big Think YouTube channel, and he just named this phenomenon as “perceptual latency” and argued about the concept of now from this perspective. When is “now”? When something happened, or my perception of it, which apparently can happen up to one third of a second later?
Here is the specific moment in the video where he talks about this:
