Hi Matt K Matt: I've discussed with you before my problems with your suggestion, but probably the shortest summation of why I've never sought to pick up your revision of Pirsig's philosophy is this: I think you make the same mistake on a systematic scale what some others make on a rhetorical scale--you conflate SOM with thinking. In Pirsig's language, you conflate the Subject/Object dualism with the analytic knife. As far as I can tell, in Pirsig--and this is the better part of wisdom--there is a difference between SOM and our ability to distinguish, to make distinctions, etc. At the very root of the Quality thesis, waiting there implicitly, lies our ability to distinguish between X and Y, using the analytic knife, because if we didn't first have that power, then we wouldn't be able to value one more than the other. In fact, Pirsig's very important point is that the analytic knife, our distinguishing ability, is the same thing as our process of valuing, that each movement of the analytic knife is a function of our evaluative relationship with the two that fall out of the cloven one.
Rorty once defended Derrida from his interpreters on this very same point by pointing out that there is a difference between Derrida's logocentrism and binary oppositions generally. Distinctions aren't bad _inherently_. A distinction is only as bad as the use to which it is put. One of the things philosophers have been doing since Plato, to borrow the way Putnam once put the point, is turning ad hoc distinctions into universal dualisms. They did so because they thought eternity was better than ephemerality. They did so because they thought eternity was a live option. But it isn't, and neither is the analytic knife or binary oppositions inherently bad. It is thinking so that makes me suspicious of people because it reminds me of another philosophical quest, the Route Back to Eden. This quest takes it that Man is a Fallen Being and that one of its traits of fallenness is that it must distinguish, cleaving into two, four, eight, sixteen, and on, instead of being able to coalesce with the One. A variation: if it weren't for language/concepts, we'd be able to get at what the essence of the object was. DM: I think this is pretty much right. SOM is tied up with essentialism, de-valuing contingency and our actual world, quest for certainty & control, etc. Our basic abilities to think and make distinctions and become more individual, democratic, free, naturalistic are not SOM, or not necessarily SOM, despite some links and associations. Matt is also right to question the use of the term 'pure' in case it is some kind or primitivism or attempt to reject intellect or modernism. But that said I think we can use the term 'pure' and make sense of it. We need to understand out culture in terms of it being an art, a way to cut up experience, something open. For me the word pure does two things. 1 It says lets sweep away the existing culture (SOM or whatever) and take a blank sheet of paper and start again. 2 'Pure' experience says that there is a ground level of differentiations/qualities that make up the base of our experience, before the culture and its art get to work. At this core we may find certain divisions that it is hard to see how we could do without them. Pirsig suggests one such key division: DQ/SQ. Until you divide experience between the patterned and the non-patterned how can you get any culture going? On the other hand, and for the worse, SOM ignores DQ and is overly focused on SQ. And worst still it takes some SQ (objective) as essential and other SQ (subjective) as somehow less real and ignores and dismisses it. So MOQ argues that if you get SOM out of your head (get 'pure') you can see how it fails to take account of key aspects of experience. If it is language all the way down you fail to be able to claim that MOQ has advantages over SOM in terms of doing more justice to the full range of qualities we experience. This is not to ignore the fact that language does allow us to enhance and change our experiences. But languages can be compared and seen as being more or less enriching and expressing of what we notice and feel about experience. It is a dissatisfaction with SOM that led Pirsig to suggest MOQ. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
