Greetings, David --
The Pirsig quotes that you provided in response to Bodvar on 8/23 are
seminal to the MoQ thesis, and much appreciated.
There has never been any doubt in my mind that Robert Pirsig is an innovator
in the area of Philosophy, and there is certainly a need in our culture for
a new reality perspective.
Dividing the experiential world into a hierarchy of levels is not nearly as
important as an understanding that there is fundamental source underlying
existence. Positing this source as "Quality" may be a useful metaphor, but
it is fraught with the same epistemological problems as theorizing
Consciousness, Energy, Love, or Being as the primary source. These are all
intellectual precepts of subjective human experience, and neither quality
nor experience is a self-generating source.
This is why the following statement, quoted from ZAMM, is problematic:
"Quality is not a thing. It is an event. ...It is the event at which the
subject becomes aware of the object. And because without objects there can
be no subject...
because the objects create the subject's awareness of himself...Quality is
the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible."
Subjects and objects are mutually dependent, but objects do not create
self-awareness. Keeping in mind the primacy of Pirsig's Quality (I prefer
his equivalent term 'Value'), subjects and objects are "secondary"
creations. Subjectivity is proprietary (individuated) value-sensibility,
and it is this cognizant sensibility that is aware of objective experience.
What Pirsig calls the "quality event" is what I call experience. If we
substitute Value for Quality, and "experience" for the quality event, we can
make sense out of this noteworthy paragraph:
"This means Value is not just the result of a collision between subject and
object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from
value-derived experience. The experience is the cause of the subjects and
objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Value!"
With this small but significant adjustment, the epistemological problems are
resolved and we arrive at a logically plausible premise for existential
reality with which I fully concur. There remains, however, the question:
What IS the cause of Value? And that fundamental question has not been
addressed by Pirsig in ZAMM, LILA, SODV, or in subsequent intrerviews with
the author.
Thanks again for the quotes, David. You've selected the cream of the crop.
Essentially yours,
Ham
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