Dave, I see this Pirsig/James discussion lifting James and doing nothing for the MoQ or RMP. Explain to my why you think this Pirsig/James connection has value?
Marsha -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of David Thomas Sent: Saturday, September 12, 2009 12:21 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Bulk] Re: [MD] Loneliness Bo, On with the Pirsig/James connexion. I left off with comparison of Pirsig's DQ>SQ being similar to James: flux>concepts. As you pointed out else where ZMM Quality turns up as Lila's Dynamic Quality but the "undefined Quality" migrates to be superimposed above it. Here's RMP's dilemma if he leaves DQ-SQ he has a dualism just like the S-0 he is railing against. But uniting the two into a monism means introducing an extra undefined term. But if RMP was to reach his goal of uniting MoQ with the "one" of Zen he seems to have had little choice. As I posted elsewhere James was highly critical of monist philosophies. He thought they led to highly static Absolutist positions and interpretations. As a pluralist James could have helped. In MoQ terms he was not only interested in the patterns of value but the relationships between. His short 1909 version of Radical Empiricism states: "Radical empiricism consists first of a postulate,next of a statement of fact, and finally of a generalized conclusion." "The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience. [Things of an unexperienceable nature may exist ad libitum, but they form no part of the material for philosophical debate]" "The statement of fact is that the relations between things,conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more or less so, than the things themselves." "The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure." Under James way of thinking rather that Q (an undefined given) being split into DQ and SQ (which would make them subsets of Q) the relationship could be described as DQ is the sum off all "conjunctions and disjunctions" of individual DO/SQs hanging together to make up a single "concatenated or continuous" Q. The many, the parts hang together to make up the one; rather than the undefined one subdivided into the parts. This helps in several ways. First my DQ does not equal your DQ. They're similar but different not just because you are in Norway and I'm in Arkansas. I experience my thoughts, ideas, aches and pains but you do not. (Lucky you!) My flux of sensations are not just of the external but also my internal world. And I try to order stable patterns out of both. So do you. Then we come together in groups and try to make a good, agreeable order of all those different experiences into a whole. The stable level called intellect evolved out of the social thus it is both an individual and community endeavor. Second we all have a creative relationship with Quality, the whole, the one. We constantly rearrange it. RMP dynamically rearranged a portion of the physical, biology, social and intellectual patterns of value to created the stable patterns called ZMM and Lila. You do the same every time you pick up a brush. We all do in some way or another. Now that I've screwed off Saturday morning, I need to get the chainsaw working on the huge piles of limbs still left over from the spring ice storm. Chainsawing is not really a Zen thing, The ever present danger focus the attention, but the noise messes with the ONE and the all. Dave 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/ 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/
