Matt said: ...Marsha, I did want to answer your original, brief question about knowledge and theism. There has clearly been an extraordinary outpouring on the topic, but I don't like most of them--they are too fast and dirty. Particularly Pirsig's quick identification of the MoQ as anti-theistic. If the MoQ is to retain it's identity as a system and not simply one dude's philosophical beliefs (which almost everyone here wants to distinguish, though at almost all points I do not), then the MoQ most certainly cannot simply _be_ anti-theistic. It is too general for that.
dmb says:Too general? Well, it's certainly true that the MOQ paints the broadest kind of picture. It is a "metaphysical" system in that sense of the word, a picture of how everything hangs together. I guess it would be okay to say the MOQ is "general" in the sense of "broad" but I also think it would be quite wrong to suggest that the MOQ is vague on the topic of religion. Or knowledge. On top of the explicit statement of atheism and even anti-theism, with this latter one being qualified in terms of the conflict between social and intellectual quality, all of the MOQ's central distinctions practically revolve around the issue of religion. It shows up in the details and in the basic structure of the MOQ. If religion were a character in a movie, it wouldn't be in every scene but it would be one of the leading roles with many lines of dialogue and they'd have to hire a fairly serious actor to play it. The whole plot would collapse without this character. Madness, mysticism, and the mythos all touch upon it. Not to mention the peyote, the Zen and the art. It's even built into the author's biography. I'd say the MOQ's stance toward theism is specific, central and far-reaching. Matt responded to Marsha's question ( "What is the relationship between theism and knowledge and how is it determined?"): 1) Theism is a collection of intellectual static patterns. 2) Knowledge is a general kind of subset of collections of intellectual static patterns that displays a high degree of internal valuableness, so much that degradation of that value is reason to think one is excluded from that collection. (In colloquial terms, "No, you are _wrong_" or "No, that's _false_." Such rebuttals to degradation are exclamations that you have evacuated the static area of typical valuing. Of course, brujos are told that, and they are also the ones that--by challenging the typical--help the areas, these collections of static patterns, evolve.) 3) Theistic knowledge is a particular subset of intellectual pattern within the larger collection of intellectual static patterns called "theism." This means that "Christ has risen" is both a statement of fact within that collection _and_, by virtue of that fact (that the statement is taken to be a fact), an announcement of participation in that particular collection of static patterns. This also means the denial of the statement is an announcement that one is _not_ participating in that collection (one does not _value_ those static patterns of value). dmb says: There are two major problems with this analysis and both of them appear in the first premise. You've failed to include two important distinctions, the one between social quality and intellectual quality and the one between intellectual quality and Dynamic Quality. What you say about theism here would only apply to the kind of theism we find at divinity schools and such. As it is practiced by the vast majority, religion is social and in the MOQ's philosophical mysticism it would be Dynamic. By leaving out these structural elements, there is a flattening out wherein all belief systems compete on the same turf as equal rivals. I think the MOQ avoids this kind of relativism, unless you remove or ignore those basic structures. It seems wrong to get rid of these distinctions simply because they resemble Enlightenment ideals. The rivalry between mythos and logos can be seen in Ancient Greece and can be easily discerned in contemporary psychology too. This is another reason why it won't work to compare theism with other bodies of factual knowledge. From the perspective of comparative mythology and Jungian psychology and the history of religion, it is a symbolic, mythological claim to say that "Christ has risen", not an historical or factual claim. Mythos and logos speak different languages and so understanding the former in the terms of the latter breeds a tower of confusion. This distinction is not a product of the Enlightenment and its not even limited to the West. The vast majority in every religion are practicing the exoteric variety, where the symbols are taken concretely and they pray for health, wealth and other creature comforts. And every religion has a esoteric mysticism at its core. Basically, the exoteric is social, divinity school is intellectual and mysticism is Dynamic so that religion is so big that it reaches across the levels and across the distinction between static and Dynamic. These central, structural distinctions in the MOQ can handle all the varieties of religion quite nicely precisely by NOT flattening things out the way you have. Matt said:Yes, this was for everyone who thinks I couldn't speak MoQese if I wanted to. I don't have any proof-texts for the things I've said, but I do think they're fairly reasonable extrapolations of the vocabulary Pirsig developed. dmb says: I detect only an impersonation, a fake MOQ accent. And it's not enough to disguise the substance of your position, which looks a lot like Rorty's position. The idea that science and religion simply use different vocabularies, play different language games and that neither can be privileged above the other is what leads to the flattening and my complaints about it. I suppose temperament has something to do with it. If Rorty and Freud and behaviorism is your style and you don't really care about religion personally, then there's bound to be a disinterested, shoulder-shrugging attitude. By contrast, we can watch Pirsig get angry when he sees theists trying to sneak their goods into idealism through the back door, which is where he makes his position on faith and theism so explicit. We know from the biographical info that his intellectual development and position was hugely effected by two religious experiences, namely the climax scene in zen and the art and the peyote ceremony in Lila. I mean, it's obviously something that he finds important. The long and the short of it is a recovery of Dynamic Quality and that's what distinguishes the actual experience from the _____isms that follow. He hammers away at this and says he has to hammer away at it because there is a cultural blind spot that can traced back to Plato. Phaedrus sides with the Sophists, saying they weren't teaching relativism. They were teaching Quality. They looked like relativists to those who understood the gods exoterically and they looked like relativists to Plato because he conceived of truth as fixed and eternal. But Quality is what prevents both relativism and absolutism. Truth is provisional and tradition is inspectable, if not questionable, but we're still working within the demands of empirical reality. This is probably another important area where Pirsig and Rorty differ. One emphasizes experience and the other sort of subsumes that in his emphasis on language. To the extent that language is static, and all experience is linguistic, the DQ recovery operation is undone. In any case, this flattening is not at all effected by the fake MOQese accent. I mean, it talks like a MOQer but walks like an ISAer (Inter Subjective Agreement-er). _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync. http://windowslive.com/howitworks?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t1_allup_howitworks_022009 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/
