Hi Mary,
Mary said:
If all is Quality, why can't we see it coming? What do we
lack in order to predict the ultimate outcome or goal of
Quality? At the various levels, why do we not universally
agree on what the highest Quality outcome would be?
Why, for example, has there been recent disagreement
here surrounding the best behavior of government?
Should we not be able to all equally discern this?
Shouldn't recognition of Quality at all levels be as
intuitive as the hot stove?
Matt:
I think those are just the right questions to ponder in
trying to fit together all the different kinds of things Pirsig
says. Quality is a single term--wouldn't that imply it's the
same? Pirsig's answer is consistent between ZMM and
Lila--it's our static patterns, those analogues upon
analogues, that vary the an individual's response.
What's more, Dynamic Quality would seem to be
difference par excellence--it's newness itself. That must
be different for everybody. It is certainly not
homogeneity that Pirsig wants (remember his comments
about how boring aesthetic uniformity would be).
Yet--Pirsig seems to suggest at times that the world
would be better if we just got the cotton out of our ears
and _listened_ better to DQ, to the way the world is
_before_ the static patterns gum everything up and
differentiate us. But isn't the differentiation good?
To bring it to the hot stove, what's so intuitive about the
hot stove? There's disagreement amongst us
interpreters about what the hot stove passage is
intended to demonstrate, let alone its effectiveness. I
think Pirsig intended to demonstrate that the low quality
of the situation preceded our static patterns--that the
low quality was universal. The argumentative riposte is
the example of the masochist--is it clear that they would
universally feel low quality (and Arlo, too, mentioned the
firewalker)? If that's true, then what could cause that
abberation then the fact that the low quality _doesn't_
precede the static patterns, but is just another function
of them--whatever static patterns make up a masochist
lead him to feel different kinds of quality levels.
But some don't think Pirsig intended to demonstrate that
the _low_ quality was universally precedent (either from
argumentative pressure like the above or their own
reading of the passage). Some think that Pirsig simply
intended to show that _value_, whatever the individual
takes it to be, precedes everything else, that the only
universal thing in the example was the causation of
value to valuer. But if that were true, then _any_
example of life could have served just as well, since it
follows as a matter of course that value precedes
everything else once one adopts the Quality thesis. So
why is the hot stove specially deployed?
I think you're aiming at an important ambiguity in Pirsig
writing, Mary. Pirsig describes DQ as a telos (indeed,
saying a moral telos would be redundant), as an
important emendation of the mechanistic, Darwinian
worldview, but much of the apparatus of the MoQ
seems designed to impede any power to be derived
from DQ being so described. If it's a telos, it is an
impotent one because knowing it to be one does
nothing for us in practice. It aids us not a whit in, as you
say, predicting what moral behavior will be in the future,
which in an evolutionary paradigm means _acting morally
now_.
This suggests, as Steve added some passages from
Pirsig giving credence to this, that the MoQ isn't very
useful in making moral decisions. But then
what is it useful for?
Many are driven back to their felt elegance or
completeness in the MoQ as to why it is useful: it's a
good way of arranging reality. Ending things there,
however, is a good explanation as to why Bo grumps
that everyone has their own thing going nowadays (as
Pirsigian a thought as that seems).
Matt
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