Dave,
This is absolutely beautiful!!!
Marsha
At 02:36 PM 8/22/2008, you wrote:
dmb said to Bo:
It seems to me that you must be suffering from a
very odd definition of "metaphysics" and
"intellect". You seem to think the MOQ is
reality itself rather than words about reality
and so you are altering the MOQ so that it is
construed as essentialism rather than
philosophical mysticism, which is a vigorous form of anti-essentialism.
Bo replied:
Yes if that is essentialism I'm very much so,
but because DQ is part and parcel of the MOQ I
wonder how you avoid being a Quality
essentialist too ... without resorting to the
Quality//DQ/SQ variety that even Pirsig finally had to abandon.
dmb says:
Pirsig's Quality is opposed to Plato's Quality
precisely because it is not an essence. We can
find this anti-essentialist move in what I take
to be the philosophical and dramatic climaxes of ZAMM....
But why? Phædrus wondered. Why destroy areté?
And no sooner had he asked the question than the
answer came to him. Plato hadn't tried to
destroy areté. He had encapsulated it; made a
permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted
it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made
areté the Good, the highest form, the highest
Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth
itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before.
That was why the Quality that Phædrus had
arrived at in the classroom had seemed so close
to Plato's Good. Plato's Good was taken from the
rhetoricians. Phædrus searched, but could find
no previous cosmologists who had talked about
the Good. That was from the Sophists. The
difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and
eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the
rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good
was not a form of reality. It was reality
itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.
.....................
What is good, Phædrus, and what is not
good...need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
It is what he was saying months before in the
classroom in Montana, a message Plato and every
dialectician since him had missed, since they
all sought to define the Good in its
intellectual relation to things. But what he
sees now is how far he has come from that. He is
doing the same bad things himself. His original
goal was to keep Quality undefined, but in the
process of battling against the dialecticians he
has made statements, and each statement has been
a brick in a wall of definition he himself has
been building around Quality. Any attempt to
develop an organized reason around an undefined
quality defeats its own purpose. The
organization of the reason itself defeats the
quality. Everything he has been doing has been a fool's mission to begin with.
On the third day he turns a corner at an
intersection of unknown streets and his vision
blanks out. When it returns he is lying on the
sidewalk, people moving around him as if he were
not there. He gets up wearily and mercilessly
drives his thoughts to remember the way back to
the apartment. They are slowing down. Slowing
down. This is about the time he and Chris try to
find the sellers of bunk beds for the children
to sleep in. After that he does not leave the apartment.
He stares at the wall in a cross-legged position
upon a quilted blanket on the floor of a bedless
bedroom. All bridges have been burned. There is
no way back. And now there is no way forward either.
For three days and three nights, Phædrus stares
at the wall of the bedroom, his thoughts moving
neither forward nor backward, staying only at
the instant. His wife asks if he is sick, and he
does not answer. His wife becomes angry, but
Phædrus listens without responding. He is aware
of what she says but is no longer able to feel
any urgency about it. Not only are his thoughts
slowing down, but his desires too. And they slow
and slow, as if gaining an imponderable mass. So
heavy, so tired, but no sleep comes. He feels
like a giant, a million miles tall. He feels
himself extending into the universe with no limit.
He begins to discard things, encumbrances that
he has carried with him all his life. He tells
his wife to leave with the children, to consider
themselves separated. Fear of loathsomeness and
shame disappear when his urine flows not
deliberately but naturally on the floor of the
room. Fear of pain, the pain of the martyrs is
overcome when cigarettes burn not deliberately
but naturally down into his fingers until they
are extinguished by blisters formed by their own
heat. His wife sees his injured hands and the
urine on the floor and calls for help.
But before help comes, slowly, imperceptibly at
first, the entire consciousness of Phædrus
begins to come apart -- to dissolve and fade
away. Then gradually he no longer wonders what
will happen next. He knows what will happen
next, and tears flow for his family and for
himself and for this world. A fragment comes and
lingers from an old Christian hymn, "You've got
to cross that lonesome valley." It carries him
forward. "You've got to cross it by yourself."
It seems a Western hymn that belongs out in Montana.
"No one else can cross it for you," it says. It
seems to suggest something beyond. "You've got to cross it by yourself."
He crosses a lonesome valley, out of the mythos,
and emerges as if from a dream, seeing that his
whole consciousness, the mythos, has been a
dream and no one's dream but his own, a dream he
must now sustain of his own efforts. Then even
"he" disappears and only the dream of himself remains with himself in it.
And the Quality, the areté he has fought so hard
for, has sacrificed for, has never betrayed, but
in all that time has never once understood, now
makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest.
dmb continues:
We see this same paradox in LILA, where Pirsig
says that philosophical mystics have
historically shared, "a common belief that the
fundamental nature of reality is outside of
language; that language splits things up into
parts while the true nature of reality is
undivided". He says, "Historically mystics have
claimed that for a true understanding of reality
metaphysics is too 'scientific'. Metaphysics is
not reality. Metaphysics is NAMES about
reality." He says, "The central reality of
mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus 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. Quality is a
direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions".
Let me put it this way, old friend. Dynamic
Quality itself is reality but the MOQ is not
reality. It is names about reality, a set of
intellectual static patterns that describe
reality with definitions and concepts. Like its
rival, the MOQ is a product of that analytic
knife. In other words, the deconstructive
anti-essentialist moves against SOM have to be
applied to the MOQ too. Its categories and
concepts are not to be confused with the primary
empirical reality from which they are derived
any more than SOM's categories and concepts. I
mean, Pirsig is consistently anti-essentialist
even with respect to his own metaphysical
system. Otherwise, the MOQ would be exempted
from the art gallery analogy and the whole thing
would otherwise be full of holes.
I think this is what gives rise to your SOLAQI.
You're trying to solve problems that don't
really exist in the MOQ. The problems are a
product of your essentialist misinterpretation
of the MOQ. Get rid of the essentialism and the problems will evaporate.
.
.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.........
.
.
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