Arlo said:
...No one, certainly not me, would say that Quality is something the academics
"can smack their lips on like some bon-bon". But the MOQ IS an intellectual
pattern and as such is about "expanding rationality", which is an intellectual
endeavor,.. The MOQ is about an expanded rationality for reinterpreting
experience, an intellectual endeavor.
In response, Platt quoted Pirsig:
"Remember that the central reality of the MOQ is not an object or a subject or
anything else. It is understood by direct experience only and NOT BY REASONING
OF ANY KIND.(LC, Note 132 - emphasis added)
dmb says:
That's just what Pirsig says in chapter 5 of Lila.
"The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had called
'Quality' in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality doesn't
have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition.
Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual
abstractions. Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense
that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these
things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable, and knowable, or there
isn't any metaphysics. Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical
definition and since Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that
a "Metaphysics of Quality" is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical
absurdity." (Lila 64)
He explains the same idea again in the opening of chapter 9 in Lila.
"In his book Phaedrus had tried to save Quality from metaphysics by refusing to
define it, by placing it outside the dialectical chess board. Anything that is
undefined is outside metaphysics, since metaphysics can only function with
defined terms. If you can't define it you can't argue about it. He had
demonstrated that even though you can't define Quality you still must agree
that it exists, since a world from which value is subtracted becomes
unrecognizable. But he realized that sooner or later he was going to have to
stop carping about how bad subject-object metaphysics was and say something
positive for a change. Sooner or later he was going to have to come up with a
way of dividing Quality that was better than subjects and objects. He would
have to do that or get out of metaphysics entirely. It's all right to condemn
somebody else's bad metaphysics but you can't replace it with a metaphysics
that consists of just one word." (Lila 107)
"Anyway, all this certainly answered the question of whether the Metaphysics of
Quality was a foreign, cultish, deviant way of looking at things. The MOQ is a
continuation of the mainstream of twentieth century American philosophy. It is
a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism, which says the test of the true is
the good. It adds that this good is not a social code or some intellectualized
Hegelian Absolute. It is direct everyday experience. Through this
identification of pure value with pure experience, the MOQ paves the way for an
enlarged way of looking at experience which can resolve all sorts of anomalies
that traditional empiricism has not been able to cope with." (Lila 366)
Pirsig's use of the terms "pure experience" and "traditional empiricism" are
references to the radical empiricism of William James, which he's just
explained in the pages leading up to this quote. And please notice how he is
identifying James's "pure experience" with his own "pure value" or "Dynamic
Quality".
_________________________________________________________________
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