dmb said:
According to the MOQ, the intellectual level includes all intellectual static
patterns and all intellectual thought styles, such as classical and romantic
for example. These patterns are derived from experience and their veracity
depends on their ability to function in experience. The MOQ's
reconceptualization of the intellect is predicated on a rejection of
subject-object metaphysics, the conceptual framework that reifies subjects and
objects. (The MOQ says subjects and objects are concepts, not entities.) Unlike
SOM, where the paramount demand is for objectivity and disinterested
observation, the MOQ's fourth level gives us an expanded form of rationality
that includes feelings, passions, alternate modes of consciousness and all the
other categories of experience formerly dismissed as "merely" subjective.
Marsha asks:
How are feelings, passions and other modes of consciousness included back into
rationality? How are they included back into science? How are then included
back into mathematics? How?
dmb says:
I'm really not sure what you're asking. There isn't just one way to include the
affective domain and there is not a set of rules or procedures that will tell
you. And that's sort of the point. Pirsig is saying that philosophy and science
are art forms and so is motorcycle maintenance and so is putting your outdoor
grill together. As the title of David Granger's book indicates, the Pirsig's
work (and Dewey's) is about the art of living. Pirsig identifies attitudes of
scientific objectivity as the problem. Millions of people respond to this, he
says, "by abandoning 'square' rationality altogether and going by feelings
alone. Like John and Sylvia here." But Pirsig says that direction is just as
wrong. He's saying, "that the solution to the problem isn't that you abandon
rationality but that you expand the nature of rationality so that it's capable
of coming up with a solution." (ZAMM, p. 169) That's what the MOQ is all about.
In all of the following quotes, the emphasis is Pirsig's in the original:
"But we know from Phaedrus' metaphysics that harmony Poincare talked about is
NOT SUBJECTIVE. It is the SOURCE of subjects and objects and exists in an
anterior relationship to them. It is NOT capricious, it is the force that
OPPOSES capriciousness; the ordering principle of all scientific and
mathematical thought which DESTROYS capriciousness, and without which no
scientific thought can proceed. What brought tears of recognition to my eyes
was the discovery that these unfinished edges match perfectly in a kind of
harmony that both Phaedrus and Poincare talked about, to produce a complete
structure of thought capable of uniting the separate languages of Science and
Art into one." (ZAMM, p. 269-70)
"No, he did nothing for Quality or the Tao. What benefited was reason. He
showed a way by which reason may be expanded to include elements that have
previously been unassimilable and thus have been considered irrational. I think
it's the overwhelming presence of these irrational elements crying for
assimilation that creates the present bad quality,.." (ZAMM, p. 257)
"But now we have with us some concepts that greatly alter the whole
understanding of things. Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality.
Quality is the goal of Art. It remains to work these concepts out into a
practical, down-to-earth context, and for this there is nothing more practical
or down-to-earth than what I have been talking about all along - the repair of
old motorcycle." (ZAMM, p. 276)
"I want to show that that classic pattern of rationality can be tremendously
improved, expanded and made far more effective through the formal recognition
of Quality in its operation." (ZAMM, p. 278)
"The difference between a good mechanic and a bad one, like the difference
between a good mathematician and a bad one, is precisely this ability to SELECT
the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality. He has to CARE! This
is an ability about which formal traditional scientific method has nothing to
says. It's long past time to take a closer look at this qualitative
preselection of facts which has seemed so scrupulously ignored by those who
make so much of these facts after they are "observed." I think that it will be
found that a formal acknowledgment of the role of Quality in the scientific
process doesn't destroy the empirical vision at all. It expands it,
strengthens it and brings it far closer to actual scientific practice." (ZAMM,
p. 281-2)
"This eternally dualistic subject-object way of approaching the motorcycle
sounds right to us because we're used to it. But it's not right. It's always
been an artificial interpretation SUPERIMPOSED on reality. It's never been
reality itself. When this duality is completely accepted a certain nondivided
relationship between the mechanic and the motorcycle, a craftsmanlike feeling
for the work, is destroyed. When traditional rationality divides the world into
subjects and objects it shuts out Quality, and when you're really stuck it's
Quality, not any subjects or objects, that tells you where you ought to go."
(ZAMM, p. 282)
"In the past empiricists have tried to keep science free from values. Values
have been considered a pollution of the rational scientific process. But the
Metaphysics of Quality makes it clear that the pollution is from threats to
science by static lower levels of evolution: static biological values such as
the biological fear that threatened Jenner's smallpox experiment; static social
values such as the religious censorship that threatened Galileo with the rack.
The Metaphysics of Quality says that science's empirical rejection of
biological and social values is not only rationally correct, it is also morally
correct because the intellectual patterns of science are of a higher
evolutionary order than the old biological and social patterns. But the
Metaphysics of Quality also says that Dynamic Quality - the value-force that
chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant
experiment over a confusing, inconclusive one - is another matter altogether.
Dynamic Quality is a higher moral order than static scientific truth, and it is
as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress Dynamic Quality as it
is for church authorities to suppress scientific method. Dynamic value is an
integral part of science. It is the cutting edge of scientific progress
itself." (LILA, p. 365-6)
"In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping,
rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It's been
necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the
emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's
order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of
nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled
from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness,
are a part of nature's order too. The central part." (ZAMM p. 294)
“…The ‘through-and-through’ philosophy [Absolutism] …seems too buttoned-up and
white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing
unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.…Their
persistence in telling me that feeling has nothing to do with the question,
that it is a pure matter of absolute reason, keeps me for ever out of the pale.
…To speak more seriously, the one fundamental quarrel Empiricism has with
Absolutism is over this repudiation by Absolutism of the personal and aesthetic
factor in the construction of philosophy. That we all of us have feelings,
Empiricism feels quite sure. That they may be as prophetic and anticipatory as
anything else we have, and some of them more so than others, can not possibly
be denied. But what hope is there of squaring and settling opinions unless
Absolutism will hold parley on this common ground; and will admit that all
philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties, emotional as well as
logical help us, and the truest of which will at the final integration of
things be found in possession of the men whose faculties on the whole had the
best diving power?" (William James in ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM, p.96)
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