Greetings Ham, David, John and Marsha
As I said in #105 I think it sounds like it's time to pick up Phaedros
knife again.
I wrote a little outcast for a book as a twig growing out from the line
in ch 19 about quality as an event.
Event is very important because event implies the concept of time as an
event is something with time, a start, a state and an end. Immanuel Kant
is interesting in that matter just because of his work with time and
room as concept. That doesn't mean that all about Kant is interesting
here, his complete works, where he lived, what he preferred to eat or
wear, if he liked dogs, his political orientation or what kind of
temperament he had.
Now I think there are at least three here that are interested in
discussing an ultimate definition of quality as a concept. Or as Ham put it
"What IS the cause of Value?"
I use to put in some small hints from my work here and there.
Today I'll point at this:
As usual there are three sides of it:
A mathematical, a philosophical and a psychological side of it. This is
confusing because most people try to make it clean and then it ends up
as a pure mathematic, a pure philosophic or a pure psychologic work.
When the conclusion are closing to the borders of the other disciplines
then there use to be severe authoring problems because the answer is
then formulated with wrong terms.
What we are looking for could be an answer to the question "What is the
cause of Value", an answer that explains both the mathematical, the
philosophical and the psychological side of it. By rhetoric means to
connect to and honor RMP and ZAMM of course. And the correct answer
should also verify the question itself to be the ultimate answer.
Unfortunately I have just today begun reading ANTHONY MCWATT's "AN
INTRODUCTION TO ROBERT PIRSIG’S METAPHYSICS OF QUALITY" so I must ask
for a short intermission until I've finished the first reading.
sincere
Jan-Anders
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2009 15:10:35 -0500
From: "Ham Priday" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [MD] The percolating SOL
Message-ID: <4a3e29a12cfd42e7bcbb5873ad3e2...@hampc>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=Windows-1252;
reply-type=original
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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