MOQ Discuss.
This began as a reply to Joe but grew into an essay and will be a
"swan song" for me because am to withdraw for an indeterminable
time (did I hear a sigh of relief)
On 13 May Joseph Maurer wrote:
> A discussion among friends! I like that. Yes, Bo, I lived before
> Pirsig wrote ZAMM or LILA. I had an education and I approach MOQ
> with respect, but it is not all that I think about. My
> understanding of your concern is that we should not discuss
> evolution from any other viewpoint than MOQ. You understand Pirsig
> as saying that the highest level he discusses is SOL. ....
SOL (the 4th. level=S/O) has implications for the MOQ but doesn't
question its basic tenet (so it's no sectarian) namely that reality's
deepest split isn't S/O but DQ/SQ consequently the SOM was and
remains MOQ's antagonist and most telling, nowhere in the history of
philosophy do I find anyone identifying a SOM, perhaps because it's
SOM's history (the wood and the trees metaphor) Like all levels it was
progress at first, only much later - as its complexity grew - did it start to
spawn "platypus" and around young Phaedrus' time they had become
acute, hence ZAMM's crusade against SOM, and perhaps why LILA
doesn't mentiones it, Phaedrus had been "killed" by intellect's (SOM's)
immune system) and the emerging Pirsig had forgotten his earlier
ideas.
There seemingly were earlier efforts to tackle the S/O enigma, Hegel's
metaphysics began as an alternative to Immanuel Kant (who was
SOM' final word) but it didn't succeed, his (Hegel's) saying that "the
thing in itself" is even more ineffable than Kant postulated it just
cements it further. And his saying that there is nothing outside
"thinking" does not remove what thinking is about. No, the S/O is
ineradicable, Phaedrus stroke of genius was to postulate another
metaphysic that integrates SOM. This last point is crucial and where
Pirsig betrays Phaedrus original MOQ. At this site we see that no one
ever applies the MOQ to anything *) without such an integration (the
SOL) the MOQ has zero point zero explanatory power.
*) An exception for Platt and Chris.
As we know ZAMM points to ancient Greece as SOM's birthplace and
that it went into hibernation during the Middle Ages. Most telling
because the S/O split seems not to have concerned the Medieval
thinkers, to them everything was about religion and if God was a spirit
(S) or flesh (O) was no issue. This fits because the Middle Ages was a
retreat to the social-mythological level where the non-S/O is absent.
With the Renaissance (intellect rebounding) the SOM gradually re-
emerged, Descartes is a name here, not that he addressed the S/O as
a problem (at this stage it was entirely a progress) he merely stated
the fact that man was a (thinking) subject entirely distanced from the
material world.
With Spinoza however the S/O starts to be a topic for philosophical
discourse and with the empiricists it became a real headache
climaxing with Berkeley who demonstrates without a hitch that there is
nothing "out there" all qualities are created by our senses (subjective).
This sounds much like Phaedrus of ZAMM addressing the objective
horn of the S/O dilemma, but these philosophers differ from him by
NOT identifying the S/O as a metaphysics, they took it for God-given.
Even Berkeley who refuted a material world postulates that it existed in
God's "mind"
As said Immanuel Kant came to represent SOM's final word. Not only
are the sense qualities (taste, smell, sound, colors) subjective, time,
space and causation are also man-made "filters" that reality is strained
through before it reaches consciousness. What the said reality is
before being filtered (the thing in itself) is completely and utterly
ineffable. He called his own ideas a "Copernican Revolution". Earlier
philosophy believed that nature showed us its laws, rules and
relationships etc. but it was the other way: these originated in (our)
mind.
And thus things stood when Pirsig arrived, Kant had closed the case
on SOM, he dominated western philosophy so completely that no
thinkers after him raised the S/O issue. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marx,
all took up some other aspect of existence, so did Heidegger, Husserl
and Sartre. Even Pirsig in ZAMM began by applying Kant to his
motorcycle discourse so also he saw this as our time's premises. And
young Phaedrus' dropping out of school was after encountering the
S/O- generated paradoxes (that the number of hypothesis to explain
any phenomenon is infinite) but at that point he saw it as a flaw in
reality's fabric, only much later he had Quality epiphany and the
realization that the S/O was a metaphysics that had entered history at
a particular time.
The rest we know. He presented the first alternative to SOM by
postulating that subjects and objects were a product of Quality and
that the metaphysics based on them (SOM) had arrived with the
ancient Greeks. In ZAMM only subjects and objects were the first
Romantic/Classic MOQ's (classic=static) subset and - most telling -
called "intellect". In LILA the static range had grown to four levels, but
the intellectual was no longer S/O, but something that resembled
SOM's mind. Later he tried to mend it (the Turner letter) but the
"symbol manipulation" was even worse than the mindish one.
I don't know if this has brought the SOL point across to you (Joe) I
have the impression that most people believe that Pirsig's message is
that everything is theories and that reality (now called Quality) is as
much beyond our grasp as it was to Kant. And no wonder after all he
says that the MOQ is just a theory about Quality. But this is the wrong,
the real Quality message is:
1) "There's no reality beyond a metaphysics (no one can avoid
metaphysics).
2) MOQ's metaphysical split is along the DQ/SQ axis.
3) The highest static stage is the S/O (now no longer a metaphysics
but a value)
Only this way the SOM is safely assimilated, any other arrangement
makes the MOQ a SOM subsidiary. Now a more sober tone, My folly is
to believe that something as enormous as a metaphysical (SOM-
MOQ) shift can happen overnight. Three centuries passed between
the quest for eternal principles and the first outlines of SOM with
Aristotle, and we don't know how many conflicts took place during this
time (except the Plato/Sophists one) and now it's just thirty-some
years since ZAMM's publication. It will certainly be a long haul before
"our" Aristotle arrives.
Joe ctd:
> I agree with that, but from my experience I accept a way of talking
> SOL that would accept that evolution is not completely dormant even
> when MOQ is the focus. Perhaps evolution has continued, and there
> is a MOQ meta-level in consciousness only? How many more levels?
In SOM "evolution" usually means the biological one, but it also covers
the big picture from the formation of stars and planets, the emergence
of biological life on earth that eventually became imbued with mind and
rose above it all and became self-conscious. Hence SOM's impossible
conclusion: The world is either a mind product or mind an
evolutionary fallout. With the advent of the MOQ evolution is the static
levels, their emergence and internal growth, and about that we have
an endless source for investigation.
So long
Bo
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