Krimel said to Andre:
The disservice I am referring to specifically is the claim that the Quality of ZMM is called DQ in Lila. There are two ways to understand this. The first and the one I think Pirsig and dmb use, is that DQ IS Quality. As a result there is no Quality in the Metaphysics of Quality only DQ and SQ. Aside from being awkward; it turns the MoQ into a form of dualism which I believe Pirsig would specifically like to reject. dmb says: The claim that the Quality of ZAMM is called DQ in Lila is only a change in the terms, not the meaning. Which is to say you can compare statements from ZAMM to statements in Lila and see that he talking about the same thing. For example, in Lila he says DQ is "the pre-intellectual cutting-edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new... It contains no pattern of fixed rewards and punishments". (Thanks for that quote, Andre.) In ZAMM he says, "Plato HADN'T tried to destroy ARETE. He had ENCAPSULATED it; made a permanent , fixed Idea out of it; had CONVERTED it to a rigid , immobile Immortal Truth. He made ARETE 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 Phaedrus had arrived at in the classroom had seemed so close to Plato's Good. Plato's Good was TAKEN from the rhetoricians. ...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." (You'll find that near the end of ZAMM's chapter 29, the emphasis is Pirsig's.) I think its fairly obvious that Quality here is dynamic and Plato's fixed ideas are static. In ZAMM he's not using those terms yet, but the difference between "ever changing" reality itself and the "fixed ideas" of Plato is a description the difference between dynamic and static. See? The same difference can be seen in the moving train analogy and in the distinction between classic and romantic, although the latter didn't work very well and had to be dropped. I mean, Lila only clarifies what he was already saying in ZAMM. As I understand these terms, this is all fairly obvious. Like James, he's talking about the "discrepancy between concepts and reality", about the difference between "conceptual categories" and "the immediate flux of life". When all these terms are understood properly, it becomes clear that this distinction runs throughout both books. _________________________________________________________________ Express your personality in color! Preview and select themes for Hotmail®. http://www.windowslive-hotmail.com/LearnMore/personalize.aspx?ocid=TXT_MSGTX_WL_HM_express_032009#colortheme 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/
