Hi Marsha (attention Akshay and Khoo)
28 Nov. you wrote:
> At 01:39 AM 11/28/2007, Bo wrote:
> >Another thing is that P himself went and undermined the MOQ by
> >turning idealist himself, but that's another story.
> Greetings Bo,
> You've eluded to this many times. Why don't you tell this part of the
> story? You may be wrong, but heroic.
Well, let me have a go at the said issue. Early in LILA Pirsig
speaks about metaphysics-writing.
It was fascinating to watch this thing grow. No one that
he knew had ever written a whole metaphysics before and
there were no rules for doing it and no way of predicting
how it would progress. (Page 16 digital LILA)
And this is just right. No one has ever written a metaphysics in
the MOQ sense.
But even then the assertion that metaphysics is
meaningless sounded false to him. As long as you're
inside a logical, coherent universe of thought you can't
escape metaphysics.
This is also correct, meaning that no human being is/can be
outside a "metaphysics". The most remote tribes will have
explanations of reality, we call these mythologies, but are
metaphysics in this all-embracing sense.
When an anthropologist studies "primitive" metaphysics he is at a
higher metaphysical ground relative to these, namely the SOM
(intellect in our book) that has risen above these (social level in
our book). Till now Pirsig had been spot on, but then he suddenly
deviated and turned "mystics".
To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of
intellectual relationships.
Here the notion of metaphysics as "intellect", i.e. that any
"explanation of experience" is intellect emerges, and the ensuing
trouble starts.
And when you do that you destroy real understanding.
The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phædrus
had called "Quality" in his first book, is not a metaphysical
chess piece. Quality doesn't have to be defined. You
understand it without definition, ahead of definition.
This is not right. Understanding - real or not - requires a context,
a system. Even a grand epiphany isn't much until it is made into
a system and conveyed to other.
Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to
intellectual abstractions. Quality is indivisible, undefinable
and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a
known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A
metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable,
or there isn't any metaphysics. Since a metaphysics is
essentially a kind of dialectical definition and since
Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that a
"Metaphysics of Quality" is essentially a contradiction in
terms, a logical absurdity.
Regardless how much he wants to keep Quality outside
everything it is part and parcel of the MOQ, and - heck - Quality
can be inside the MOQ and still outside definition. Anyway, by
this he shifted from the initial notion of metaphysics as a totality
to the Aristotelian type of an ineffable reality that metaphysics are
more or less correct maps of.
Aristotle is SOM so you see the connection: The ineffable reality
is the real OBJECTIVE part while a metaphysics is the
SUBJECTIVE theory. Thus "Quality as Reality" and MOQ as a
mere theory is SOM in a thin Quality guise.
The true MOQ looks like thisis this:
DYNAMIC QUALITY/STATIC QUALITY.
My guess is that "mysticism" is a SOM (Western) name for the
Eastern metaphysics and that the Orientals don't regard
themselves to be mystics. I hope Akshay Peshwe (the hindu)
would put in a word here, that goes for Khoo Hock Aun too who I
believe is a Buddhist.
Bo
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