Hi Matt.
19 Jan. you wrote
> I can sense the weariness in people's sentences. Since I've been gone
> so long, with my fresher legs I'll tag myself in for a moment (though
> with my own axe to grind).
Weariness, yes and also much axe-grinding around this place, but
this your post shows that you have a nose for the essentials
regarding the MOQ
> Bo said:
> James suggested a metaphysics of a dynamic something ahead of static
> subjects and objects, Phaedrus (of ZAMM) did the same but called the
> first part Quality, the second (S & O) part he called "intellectual
> Quality" (the first MOQ's only level).
> Matt:
> This is your own interpolation, Bo. I have no problem in people
> taking a machine and fixing it up to their own specifications, and
> you've up front before about your desire to rectify a shift from ZMM
> to Lila (in favor of ZMM), but as a simple scholastic issue, this is
> wrong as a reading of ZMM, and therefore any perceived authority you
> derive from Pirsig's earlier text is fallacious and any sense in which
> this might serve as an agreeable premise for getting people to follow
> your line of thought suffers until you unpack why you should deviate
> from Pirsig's own sense of what he was doing in the first book, let
> alone the second.
Pirsig compares his ideas with James in an effort to make him an
MOQ pioneer so this interpolation sport we all play. You are right
about my effort to rectify (harmonize) ZAMM and LILA, this here
however concerns some flaws stemming from the very early
reasonings about the Quality Idea in ZAMM. Allow me to repeat.
Phaedrus (and James) postulated an ineffable something ahead of
subjects and objects. I deeply admire their achievement and
agree. Now, this ineffable something must necessarily be MOQ's
"Dynamic Quality". I can't see any objections to that conclusion.
> I might be mistaken--it has been awhile since I've done scholastic
> digging in Pirsig.
Get down to work Matt, the MOQ is the future.
> But the prima facie rebuttal is that, if the
> "first MOQ" had a level it was the classic/romantic one.
Yes, but that was just a first tentative dynamic/static. The crucial
point is the diagram where there's a box called "Quality" is split into
Romantic/Classic Quality. The thing is that the top box should
have been called "Romantic Quality" (Pirsigs says that what he
added to James was calling the pre-everything "Quality") then a
vertical line down to "Classic Quality".
In ZAMM subjects and the objects (called "intellect") was the sole
"classical level". In LILA however the (now "static") range was
increased to four levels whereof "intellect" came last, yet it should
still have been the S/O. Exactly half of LILA indicates it, but there's
enough contradictory to create an handle for those who have no
intention or capacity to grasp the enormity of the MOQ.
A bit more on the Diagram Fallacy. Drawing figures and/or writing
about things is a subjective "hot air" activity in SOM and those who
haven't registered that the SOM rug has been pulled from under
us continue to regard it as lesser than real. Marsha the prime
example, but there are instances when I wonder if Pirsig realized
that his "rug trick" has succeeded. Words, concepts symbols is the
sea we swim in and can neither be used pro or con.
> Matt:
> I will grant you one thing--the sense that there is a reality that
> sits there waiting for us to split it up is something that Hilary
> Putnam made fun of as the "cookie-cutter view" of reality, and what
> Donald Davidson said was the third dogma of empiricism, the
> scheme/content distinction, which we should give up. I agree with
> Putnam and Davidson, so I see a tension between some of Pirsig's
> empiricism rhetoric and the Quality metaphor he wants to birth (if one
> focuses on Quality, one can easily dispense with the empiricism).
IMO there are no philosophers who have come close to Pirsigs
"Copernican Revolution" - except William James, but he did not
develop it beyond the known stage. You may however know better
here, hope you may connect these names to the issue at hand.
> However, that also means that Pirsig was right that SOM makes the first
> split of reality with S/O.
Except for James - and I'm not sure if he coined any - the S/O M
(i.e. a notion running so deep that no one questions it) is Pirsig's
enormous achievement and the necessary first stage of
constructing a counter-metaphysics.
> On my reading, Pirsig unfortunately agrees with the previous tradition
> that there is an unconceptualized reality that is waiting there for us
> to conceptualize it any particular way we want to.
Yes exactly, the Dynamic Reality isn't unconceptualized as
contrasted to conceptualized, everything we say is conveyed by
language, it's SOM's illusion that such a dichotomy exists. Pirsig
fell victim to the dragon he was about to slay with the MOQ
another theory in a QUALITY/Theories super-SOM.
> (This may appear, at first blush, as one more "linguistic philosophy
> fallacy" that DMB shudders at, but I think once one dispenses with this
> reality/conceptualized-reality distinction in favor of the
> panrelationalism that is Quality's true progeny, one will treat
> language/intellect as one facet of reality-interaction, and not as a
> dirty cousin, as the direct/indirect distinction often leads one.)
Hope this is as good as it sounds to me at first blush. At least I
have lost my faith in DMB, he doesn't see any problem with this
from Pirsig's "Summary" (2005)
The Metaphysics of Quality itself is static and should be
separated from the Dynamic Quality it talks about
> If there is any truth to your often weirdly put claim that the MoQ is
> reality (or, at least, that's how people often parody it)
My claim is that, but in the same sense that Newton theory of
Gravity determines how we look upon the data of things falling to
the ground, not that it is in another subjective universe of words
apart from a real world of (falling) objects .... philosophically seen
that is, usually I am most comfortable on the S/O plane
> it is that language isn't something we can just put down to interact
> with reality (Quality) directly. Language doesn't get in the way of
> reality, it is just one way of interacting with it.
I agree. Language can as little be be put down by us as senses
can be put down by animals.
Thanks Matt you made my day.
Bo
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