Hi Matt 8 July you wrote:
DMB had said: > > Even if my radical empiricist reading of DQ (of the MOQ, > > actually) is not accurate, that reading doesn't suffer from the > > problems of inconsistency that seem to come from your reading. And I'd > > like to suggest that if one understands Pirsig's books in such a way > > that any given quote makes sense next to any other quote such that > > everything fits together coherently, then you are probably reading his > > books rightly. Or, to say the same thing from the other direction, if > > Pirsig's claims seen inconsistent or contradictory, then you are > > probably not reading him rightly. I'm not saying his books are > > absolutely perfect, of course, but I really do not remember any case in > > which a perceived inconsistency between claims was not a result of a > > misreading of those claims. Matt commented > Despite your gesture towards assuming "Pirsig's a bright guy who > knows what he's saying," which granting he (or anyone else) is doesn't > get us very far in interpretation (it simply pleads patience with an > antsy audience--which I doubt I'd be a paradigm case of with regards > to Pirsig), I'm taking for granted that your (now) assumption that > Pirsig is internally coherent is something you worked for to achieve, > and not something you simply assume for everyone. Coherence isn't > based on memory (though a good one helps), it's something that's > created and displayed. You two have a knack for these debates. I on the other hand like to point to actual inconsistencies and DMB's (via Pirsig) is the Quality/MOQ (deduced from the Reality/Concept) metaphysics that superimposes itself on top of DQ/SQ. MOQ's fundament starts in ZAMM with the "cutting edge" metaphor, that of a human being becoming aware of an object. (NB I'm away from home and in this portable I have neither ZAMM nor LILA so it will be without quotes) It says something like "You don't know you have seen a tree until after you've seen a tree, there must be a small delay". The delay spells the dynamic instant before perception, but DMB interpretes this as the perception is that of a "tree" as a concept - but we know that animals roams the forests and see trees without conceptualizing them. Pirsig's great mistake (in LILA) was the James' connection of Quality as undifferentiated versus concepts as differentiated, had he followed his own hunch he would have found that the aforementioned example is the intellectual level's perception: An subject perceiving the world as objects (SOM) and in ZAMM he actually does this: SOM is called intellect! He could have developed ZAMM's proto-moq (that onlyhad the intellectual level) into the complete MOQ where the first static quality level - the inorganic - is without senses or language and then the known development ... except that the intellectual would have been as in ZAMM - the subject/object distinction or aggregate. As it is the SOM empire "hit back", it got a grip on the MOQ by way of William James and DMB has developed this travesty to great lengths and the lesser mind of this forum applauds him. Bodvar 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/
