Hi Tim, When I was first trying to wrap my mind about around what Pirsig was getting at in Lila, I wish I had known what Pirsig thought was the biggest improvement that he could make on it. He wrote this in his introduction to Lila's Child:
"...the biggest improvement I could make in the Metaphysics of Quality would be to block the notion that the Metaphysics of Quality claims to be a quick fix for every moral problem in the universe. I have never seen it that way. The image in my mind as I wrote it was of a large football field that gave meaning to the game by telling you who was on the 20-yard line but did not decide which team would win. That was the point of the two opposing arguments over the death penalty described in LILA.That was the point of the equilibrium between static and Dynamic Quality. Both are moral arguments. Both can claim the Metaphysics of Quality for support. Just as two sides can go before the U.S. Supreme Court and both claim constitutionality, so two sides can use the Metaphysics of Quality, but that does not mean that either the Constitution or the Metaphysics of Quality is a meaningless set of ideas. Our whole judicial system rests on the presumption that more than one set of conclusions about individual cases can be drawn within a given set of moral rules. The Metaphysics of Quality makes the same presumption. " Good luck, Steve 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/md/archives.html
