To fair-minded readers everywhere, let's see if dmb's construal of Pirsig's rigidly anti-Absolutist stance actually fits the texts available.
On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 8:06 AM, david buchanan <[email protected]>wrote: Pirsig mocks the Absolute and he grows increasingly annoyed as it becomes > clearer and clearer that the Absolutists are just fancy theologians. > Copleston Annotations: (RMP) So It has really been a shock to see how close Bradley is to the MOQ. Both he and the MOQ are expressing what Aldous Huxley called "The Perennial Philosophy," which is perennial, I believe, because it happens to be true. Bradley has given an excellent description of what the MOQ calls Dynamic Quality and an excellent rational justification for its intellectual acceptance. It and the MOQ can be spliced together with no difficulty into a broader explanation of the same thing. A singular difference is that the MOQ says the Absolute is of value, a point Bradley may have thought so obvious it didn't need mentioning. The MOQ says that this value is not a property of the Absolute, it is the Absolute itself, and is a much better name for the Absolute than "Absolute." Rhetorically, the word "absolute" conveys nothing except rigidity and permanence and authoritarianism and remoteness. "Quality," on the other hand conveys flexibility, impermanence, here-and-now-ness and freedom. And it is a word everyone knows and loves and understands even butcher shops that take pride in their product. Beyond that the term, value, paves the way for an explanation of evolution that did not occur to Bradley. He apparently avoided discussing the world of appearances except to emphasize the need to transcend it. The MOQ returns to this world of appearances and shows how to understand these appearances in a more constructive way. John: I claim that Royce was much, much closer to Pirsig than Bradley, because in Royce's argument from the existence of error, Royce's Absolute is explicitly Value. But anyway, it's pretty clear that Pirsig has no problem equating Quality with absolutism, except for certain rhetorical connotations which have shifted over the years. But we philosophers are not bound by mere connotations, dave. We like to get to the fundaments of things. That's what 'metaphysics' is, after all. We also get an explanation of how and why Pirsig glossed over Absolute Idealism in his earlier studies. And we all know how Royce has been ignored by the Academy since the turn of the century, so he's not been available for study until the recent growth of the internet and the search engine. The only question I have, is the MoQ entirely rigid in it's approach to growth and evolution of new insights, or is it just going to proclaim pedantic parrotry as its highest good? 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
