Redsky said: ...In claiming to remove "Quality" from the world, he isn't removing Quality per se, but rather removing differences between objects. By removing the distinction between fine art and a blank wall, he isn't removing a definitive aesthetic judgment, but rather our ability to perceive a difference between two scenarios.
dmb says: As we saw in the quote Bo posted, the thought experiment, removing Quality to see how the world would be effected, results in the loss of the fine arts. We'd still be able to distinquish a wall from a painting, but not a good wall from a bad wall or a good painting from a bad one. In such a world we'd probably still have walls but the loss of quality would make the arts into a pointless exercise in changing a thing's shape for no reason at all. Walls function as a barrier to the outside but art's function is predicated on a sense of quality such that they couldn't function without it. Without quality in the world, there'd be no reason NOT to eat the same dry, tasteless food pellets at every meal - like a dog. Poor dogs. Matt replied to Redsky: ...I think it is important to emphasize it: in Pirsig's philosophy, Quality is synonymous with the making of distinctions, in any kind of distinguishing. In other words, the functioning of the "analytic knife" from the beginning of ZMM is a direct function of there actually existing Quality. (He brings up this point again in Lila when he talks about babies and differentiation.) ...Pirsig's just trying to point out how commonsensical the existence of what he's talking about is. It's a beginning point. His more controversial points require different arguments. That argument is a softening up move before the more interesting stuff about Plato. ...Pirsig's softening up move is to make us realize that Quality is basically the same thing as differentiation, but there is more to it. I have a lot of difficulty also with Pirsig's assertion that we already know what Quality is, but I'm not sure if he isn't saying that we already know how to identify Quality, we already know how t o distinguish higher from lower value because doing so is _the_ basic feature of living life. dmb says: Quality is synonymous with make distinctions and is basically the same thing as differentiation? Pirsig says that Quality is ahead of definitions. That's why, he says, the metaphyics of Quality is a contradiction in terms. This is the same reason that we already know what Quality is. These are all just other ways of getting at the HAD experience as opposed to the KNOWN experience, the precognitive and cognitive, as I've been saying. The way his writing students "knew" a good essay when they read one, even if they couldn't say why, illustrates how this works in everyday experience just as well as the thought experiment. Or the idea that a guy went mad trying to find a way to define it. That's a pretty dramatic illustration too. My point, obviously, is that your assertion (that Quality is equal to distinctions and differentiations) is the opposite of what Pirsig says about it. Thanks. _________________________________________________________________ Share life as it happens with the new Windows Live.Download today it's FREE! http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_Wave2_sharelife_112007 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/
