Hi All, We seem to have a few closely related threads going but I'll stick with this one.
The quintessential basis of the MoQ is Quality which Pirsig equates with Reality. This Reality can only be experienced pre-intellectually. It cannot be known.It is the moment at which no subjects or objects are experienced...only Quality/Reality/One. Phaedrus' Korean experience told him immediately that to create a metaphysics out of this one single experience/realisation and to make it acceptable to Western ears was virtually impossible. The 26 letters of the alphabet can describe Reality? The Koreans nodded their heads and said 'No'. Even the statement 'Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it' is probably too much already for a large majority of 'Western' ears. The huge problem is that 'we' 'Westerners' want to intellectualise about everything. This is the process of changing DQ into SQ! Firstly we want to make sense of it, then understand it and then create meaning out of it (these are 3 different levels of 'absorbing' the experience, if you like). This, of necessity, involves the use of language. Our 'intellect' must use a representational system called language which goes through a process of discrimination on the 'handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious.(ZMM p75). Pirsig calls this process: 'the knife' but the problem I would suggest is that, not only is the 'process' a 'knife' but also, the very use of our language is a knife.To wit: our language cannot 'contain' / 'represent' Reality. Thus we have 2 difficulties: 1: the process...our reasoning/ discriminating what is of value and what is not (S/O logic to create 'meaning' subservient to 'truth' (SOM) and 2 our language...'we are suspended in language'. How to create a 'path' through which 'East' can meet 'West' and 'West' can meet 'East'? Our traditional notion of 'intellect', by which I mean that 'part' supported by our brains (a huge, dynamic bundle of 'emergent property' ) is where this discrimination process is taking place and this is S/O 'driven': reason and rationality...truth-seeking, the groundwork laid down logically by Aristotle, defines this process leading to SOM...a world of subjects and objects, cause-and-effect relationships etc. In this sense (Bodvar) the manipulation of symbols at the 4th level is not merely a 'definition of language' . It is a manipulation of data leading to a conceptualisation of reality.(maybe I have not quite understood your meaning) But now comes Pirsig! With the introduction of Quality he up-ends the whole SOM framework incuding intellect!. Not truth but Quality i.e.the Good, is Reality and 'truth' is subordinate to Good.'Intellect'( I still have difficulty with this word) and prefer to call it Intellectual level (i.e.intellectual patterns of value and I still have difficulties with the word 'level'...anyway...) Pirsig has, not only injected objects and subjects with a dynamic reality, he has done the same with the intellectual level. By introducing the Quality concept, All has become PATTERNS ...nothing fixed...but interweaving, interplaying, interfering etc etc.Stable, to be sure, but all responsive to Reality. He has, linguistically, redefined (SOM) platypi and through this process forced us to alter our 'reasoning' and the concommittant arrival at 'meaning' ..at making sense of reality and our 'part'/experience in it. As Pirsig says (ZMMp 381): 'The One (of which the MoQ is a representation) can only be described allegorically, through the use of analogy, of figures of imagination and speech'. One cannot escape language. Intellect only understands language but as said, Pirsig has provided us with a frame within which to expand its capabilities. The genius of Pirsig was to realise this and introduce its liberating component: Dynamic force (which drives evolution). It is that part that says that all is provisional. We have our own analogues as individual, cultural/social and intellectual SQ but this is not Reality. DQ/SQ..the mystic force that is the mother of ten thousand things. And because our Western intellects 'desire' we can see its manifestations and when we remain (or return to become) 'desireless' we can see the mystery (Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching). This is what I believe Pirsig has tried to convey by this MoQ Code of Art. I like it here/there. For what it is worth. Andre 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/
