Dearest darling Bodvar and the other lost SOLs: Today I'll be drawing from chapter 28 of ZAMM. Maybe it's important to remember how all this got started. And just to set the mood, I give you Sarah...
He had asked Sarah, who long before had come by with her watering pot and put the idea of Quality in his head, where in English literature quality, as a subject, was taught. "Good heavens, I don't know, I'm not an English scholar," she had said. "I'm a classics scholar. My field is Greek." "Is quality a part of Greek thought?" he had asked. "Quality is every part of Greek thought," she had said, and he had thought about this. Sometimes under her old-ladyish way of speaking he thought he detected a secret canniness, as though like a Delphic oracle she said things with hidden meanings, but he could never be sure. Ancient Greece. Strange that for them Quality should be everything while today it sounds odd to even say quality is real. What unseen changes could have taken place? A second path to ancient Greece was indicated by the sudden way the whole question, What is quality?, had been jolted into systematic philosophy. He had thought he was done with that field. But "quality" had opened it all up again. Bo said: ...by and by SOM transformed language into its S/O mold: a subjective shadow of objective reality. And - again - Phaedrus did NOT speak about Quality as pre-concept, but pre-intellect and that intellect = SOM. In LILA however Pirsig agrees with James about Dynamic/Concept and the damage was done. Can't you get this David?. dmb says:If I do get it, then everything you've said here is incorrect. In the first sentence you say SOM transformed language into its S/O mold. That's backwards. As Pirsig puts it, "our rationality is shaped by" the underlying mythos. That's where the subject-object distinction comes from, from the language. And it existed long before anyone turned it into a rational, philosophical distinction. In the second sentence you make a distinction between pre-conceptual and pre-intellectual. I use them interchangeably with Pirsig's DQ and James' "pure experience". It's important to realize that this is epistemology, the area of philosophy that asks "how to we know what we know"? Empiricism is an epistemological stance and so is the radical empiricism of the classical pragmatists. But Phaedrus' thesis is aimed at the cultural transformation that occurred in ancient Greece, which we find summarized nicely in chapters 28 and 29. This doesn't contradict the empiricism we find in Lila, but you've confused the two. I'm talking about the nature of experience and you're talking about historical developments. When talking about radical empiricism, I'm talking about DQ as the pre-intellectual as the cutting edge of experience but then you want to refute this with a discussion about the emergence of the intellectual level out of the social level. Simply put, these are two different topics. I'm happy to talk about either one or even both of them at the same time, but one is not the other. In effect, Pirsig does say that DQ is pre-conceptual even back in ZAMM. As I mentioned recently, the train analogy gets at this. But in terms of historical development, both mythos and logos, both social and intellectual patterns are generated by it. In Lila this notion is expanded into a full-blown evolutionary force behind all four levels. In that sense, in the historical sense, DQ isn't just prior to the intellectual level. It's prior to all levels. Phaedrus was looking at ancient Greece, as we all know, to find the dirty bastards who killed quality. That IS about cultural development and the emerge of rationality out of the mythic way of thinking. This part is important to the MOQ too, which is all the more reason NOT to confuse it with the claims in his radical empiricism. So let's put some relevant text on the table... The term logos, the root word of "logic," refers to the sum total of our rational understanding of the world. Mythos is the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos. The mythos includes not only the Greek myths but the Old Testament, the Vedic Hymns and the early legends of all cultures which have contributed to our present world understanding. The mythos-over-logos argument states that our rationality is shaped by these legends, that our knowledge today is in relation to these legends as a tree is in relation to the little shrub it once was. One can gain great insights into the complex overall structure of the tree by studying the much simpler shape of the shrub. There's no difference in kind or even difference in identity, only a difference in size. Thus, in cultures whose ancestry includes ancient Greece, one invariably finds a strong subject-object differentiation because the grammar of the old Greek mythos presumed a sharp natural division of subjects and predicates. In cultures such as the Chinese, where subject-predicate relationships are not rigidly defined by grammar, one finds a corresponding absence of rigid subject-object philosophy. One finds that in the Judeo-Christian culture in which the Old Testament "Word" had an intrinsic sacredness of its own, men are willing to sacrifice and live by and die for words. In this culture, a court of law can ask a witness to tell "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God," and expect the truth to be told. But one can transport this court to India, as did the British, with no real success on the matter of perjury because the Indian mythos is different and this sacredness of words is not felt in the same way. Similar problems have occurred in this country among minority groups with different cultural backgrounds. There are endless examples of how mythos differences direct behavior differences and they're all fascinating. The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is. There is only one kind of person, Phædrus said, who accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phædrus said, is "insane." To go outside the mythos is to become insane. -- My God, that just came to me now. I never knew that before. He knew! He must have known what was about to happen. It's starting to open up. You have all these fragments, like pieces of a puzzle, and you can place them together into large groups, but the groups don't go together no matter how you try, and then suddenly you get one fragment and it fits two different groups and then suddenly the two great groups are one. The relation of the mythos to insanity. That's a key fragment. I doubt whether anyone ever said that before. Insanity is the terra incognita surrounding the mythos. And he knew! He knew the Quality he talked about lay outside the mythos. Now it comes! Because Quality is the generator of the mythos. That's it. That's what he meant when he said, "Quality is the continuing stimulus which causes us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it." Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side...that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That's why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen. Bodvar said:DMB isn't able to see the rut the pre-concept/concept has landed him into. If language is seen in this arch-somish way nothing escapes it. I challenge DMB to show me one single phenomenon that escapes language. Even Quality must be told about. Unless one postulates a Quality outside of the MOQ, but upon discovering that this also is corrupted by language, postulating one above that again ....ad infinity. dmb says:As we see in the long quote above, the subject-object division was inherited from the mythos and exists in the very structure of the grammar in Western languages. This is another important reason why we can't equate that split with the intellect. It goes further back than that. This might seem to make the escape all the more difficult. You can't escape the mythos without going insane, he says, and subjects and objects are part of the mythos then we're just stuck, right? Wrong. Why? Because the alternative is part of the mythos too. You don't have to go East to find mysticism, he says at the end of Lila, it's a deeply hidden submerged root of the culture. It's been here all along. And more broadly, we find him saying the MOQ is not a new idea, but the oldest idea known to man. More specifically, with respect to this transitional period in ancient Greece, we find that the rhetoricians were teaching Quality. And finally, there is Pirsig's explicit endorsement of the perennial philosophy, which holds that the same mystic reality can be seen in the esoteric core of all the world's great religions and in philosophic mystics throughout history. It wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that the modern Western scientific mythos is just about the only place you don't find it. In that sense, the mythos IS insane. Phædrus went a different path from the idea of individual, personal Quality decisions. I think it was a wrong one, but perhaps if I were in his circumstances I would go his way too. He felt that the solution started with a new philosophy, or he saw it as even broader than that...a new spiritual rationality...in which the ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic technological reason would become illogical. Reason was no longer to be "value free." Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he would find the cause of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of our technology, the tendency to do what is "reasonable" even when it isn't any good. That was the root of the whole thing. Right there. I said a long time ago that he was in pursuit of the ghost of reason. This is what I meant. Reason and Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other and Quality had been forced under and reason made supreme somewhere back then. dmb continues:This gets at the main reason to be opposed to the equation, intellect=Subject-Object Logic. If that were true, poor Phaedrus would have no chance of generating a new philosophy or a new spiritual rationality. He wouldn't be able to show how reason (the level of intellectual static patterns) is logically subordinate to Dynamic Quality. He wouldn't be able to deny that reason is "value free" or explain how truth is a species of the good. But that's exactly what he does and uses uses intellect to do it. He created an alternative set of intellectual static patterns that is subordinate to the Dynamic Quality it talks about and by which it was generated. That's the the MOQ. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ Contacts: Organize your contact list. http://windowslive.com/connect/post/marcusatmicrosoft.spaces.live.com-Blog-cns!503D1D86EBB2B53C!2285.entry?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_UGC_Contacts_032009 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/
