Krimel said: What Pirsig says is that Quality is like the Tao and SQ and DQ are opposites that reveal an understanding of that underling unity. It is never one or the other in isolation but always a mixture of both. I think this can be stated more simply as: Order is a subset of Chaos.
dmb says: The open lines of the Tao Te Ching, which Marsh paraphrased for you recently, says that the Tao that can be named is not the real Tao. Pirsig says that you can go through that book replacing the term "Tao" with the term "Quality" and it works every time. The opening lines are no exception. [Krimel] I commented on this early but let me add that Pirsig has this thing about substituting words without altering meaning and frankly his usually either gets it wrong or backwards or both. In this instant to trick he advocates is nothing special. You can go through the Tao te Ching and every time you see the word "Tao", you can substitute "Dog turd" and it will work every time. But it doesn't necessarily work the other way. As I said I think one benefits by going thorough Pirsig's work and substituting "Tao" for "Quality" but I suspect, having not tried it with specific instances, that it won't always work. By using the term Quality for Tao Pirsig imports a whole SUV load of baggage and never really gets it unpacked and sorted. "Quality" has a definition, several in fact and Pirsig uses them interchangeably. [dmb] Or, to put it in terms of philosophical mysticism, Dynamic reality is undivided while static reality is the divisions we impose upon it conceptually and verbally. [Krimel] I agree with most of what you said in this post but I think this a point where I seriously disagree. You maintain as essential, the idea that experience is primarily a unity, undivided. I claim this is just an illusion in Marsha's sense of fantasy. How can someone, who claims to be an empiricist of any stripe, make such a statement? If knowledge is acquired through sense data, where's the unity? Sense data is fragmented. It is vision, sound, touch, taste, smell. These are all different sets of information. We synthesize these fragments into something like a unity and we do it really quickly but that is "perception". Yes, perception is a form of experience but is not and can not take place on "the cutting edge," prior to sensation. 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/
