Ham to dmb:
Yes, I'm quite aware of the Quality thesis, Dave. I just don't accept it as logical... dmb says: It seems illogical to you because you tenaciously insist upon reasoning from the wrong premise. You simply refuse to think of Quality as anything other than the very thing Pirsig says it is not; subjective. And that is the wrong premise I refer to, your "sensible agent". Your only argument in favor of it seems to be that life has no meaning without it and yet it is never really explained why all meaning evaporates without it. I mean, you seem to think that the rejection of the Cartesian subjective self MEANS that there is no such thing as people, morality, thinking, choice and responsibility. It just ain't so, Ham. The distinction between thoughts and things is perfectly legitimate as a practical, everyday distinction. The problems begin when this conventional notion is raised to a metaphysical level such that all of reality has to be either mind or matter. Then our ideas are true if and when they correspond to reality as it truly is, to objective reality. This reality need n ot be the physical universe as it is for scientific materialism. For Hegelians reality was the Absolute Mind, for Plato it was the eternal forms, the essential reality behind the world we know through the senses. Your "Essentialism" is more like the latte, a kind of Idealism. Since Idealism is opposed to materialism and Pirsig is opposed to materialism, it seems to you that Pirsig is on your side. But I'm afraid that having a common enemy is not the same thing as being friends. (Not trying to make friends or enemies here. It's just an analogy.) It seems that Andre has the same impression. Absolutes and essences and lots of rational principles, a general disregard for empirical facts in favor of rational principles; these are all the marks of the Absolutist Mind and we see this, as Andre put it, in "your need for a soundly reasoned, rational epistemological foundation pointing towards some 'finality', some 'source', some 'Absolute' (claiming of course your 'Essence' to fulfilling such a role)". Andre also said to Ham: Problem is, this is not the MOQ. The MOQ shows how values create these programs, systems, mechanisms out of which a sense of static, conventional reality is created. And it also shows that Dynamic Quality, the driving force, life, consciousness, call it what you like, is heading away from these structured patterns. "Dynamic Quality is not structured and yet it is not chaotic. It is value that cannot be contained by static patterns." (LILA, p146) dmb says: That's a good point. But he also offers this warning in about 20 pages prior to that quote. In my Bantam hardback version Pirsig says this on pages 120-1: "In the past Phaedrus' own radical bias caused him to think of Dynamic Quality alone and neglect static patterns of quality. Until now he had always felt that these static patterns were dead. They have no love. They offer no promise of anything. To succumb to them is to succumb to death, since hat which does not change cannot live. But now he was beginning to see that the radical bias weakened his won case. Life can't exist on Dynamic Quality alone. It has no staying power. To cling to DQ alone apart from any static patterns is to cling to chaos." I'd point out that language and logic, philosophical ideas and categories are among the static patterns Pirsig uses to construct the MOQ and that's his attempt to give DQ some staying power. I like James's analogy here; a giant old tree. The Dynamic is represented by the green living parts, the twigs, leaves, seeds and fruits on the outside and the static patterns are represented by the wood underneath, the hidden core which provides stability as well as vertical and horizontal reach. The interesting thing about this organic analogy, I think, is that all of the core structure was built by the living process one layer at a time. It's all derived from Dynamic Quality. Every word and every idea was invented at some point by some ancestor. Ham said: The adage that "everything gets known by some knower" has a poetic ring to it that makes us feel good, but it's without epistemological foundation. dmb says: I like Andre's reply to this. One of Pirsig's most central points is that likes and dislikes really do matter and not just to human beings in general. He's saying that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way thinkers think and that wrongness has everything to do with "the denigration of the personal and aesthetic factors in the construction of our philosophies", as James puts it. As we all know, Pirsig repeatedly complains about the attitude that says your feelings are "just" subjective and what you like is "just" personal, etc.. As Andre points out, to say "it makes us feel good' is to make a statement about value. To say it is or is not logical is also a value statement, of course. But I also want to point out that empiricism is an epistemological theory, that pragmatism is a kind of empiricism and of course the name "radical empiricism" is also a dead give away. We probably ought not call it a foundation, however. One of the central ideas in pragmatism is that all our metaphysical beliefs be treated as working hypotheses rather than final resting places. Pragmatism is willing to entertain any idea or worldview so long as it is "set to work in the stream of experience". The only thing he could not tolerate were those dogmatic types who "come to a full stop intellectually". But freezing out such thinkers is only consistent with pragmatism's openness. So long as you're willing to treat your ideas as an hypothesis only and willing to test them in experience, pragmatism is willing to consider any and all cases, even if they contradict one another. It's like a big hotel, James said. Everyone has to walk through the same corridor, which is the pragmatic metho d of testing hypotheses in experience, but then each philosopher also has his own room. In one room is a scientist, the other a spiritually inclined thinker, a neat freak architect of a thinker in one room and some artsy fartsy slob in the next. What you can't have is some guy helicoptering in from the roof or otherwise avoiding that long walk down the corridor. Andre quoted from Lila: 'See how this works? A thing doesn't exist because we have never observed it. The reason we have never observed it is because we have never looked for it. And the reason we have never looked for it is that it is unimportant, it has no value and we have better things to do'.(ibid, p 147). dmb says: I think Ham does not recognize this as an epistemological claim - and maybe thinks it is illogical too - because it doesn't fit with the notion of an objective reality. It doesn't fit with the notion that reality already is some certain thing before we get there. This is the premise that will scramble Pirsig's meaning every time. What we notice is in large part determined by our ancestors, by the words and thought categories we inherit by virtue of living embodied, in this culture, at this point in history. James and Pirsig depart from the usual idea of a pre-existing external reality. It is NOT that subjects are sensing an objective reality and that reality is Quality. Instead, the primary empirical reality is neither object nor subject. Those are conceptual additions, created long ago and still working like a charm but that's exactly what the primary empirical reality is not. It is unconceptualized experience, the immediate flux of life and such thought categories aren't pa rt of it quite yet. And it is the part of experience that escapes our thought categories. The idea here is that this immediate experience is far too rich and flowing and dynamic, virtually infinite in variety and detail even in the most austere of situations and there is just no way we can take it all in. And so there is much we just don't see, or notice, or appreciate. We can use the difference between the menu and the food to make this point. Ham said: I agree that Value (Quality) plays a significant noetic role in ontology; but it is derived from Essence rather than the cosmos. And without realization by a "sensible" agent, it is meaningless. dmb says: I'll second what Andre said and add a point or two. I think the MOQ does not really have an ontology, at least not in the usual sense. Reality is not any kind of substance, material or ideal. Instead, reality is experience and whatever we posit as the cause of experience or the essential reality behind appearances is just an idea, an hypothesis. By definition we are then talking about something that is beyond our experience, something that is not knowable in experience. That's why any such notion has to take the walk down that corridor, has to be set to work in experience. We can never know any such thing empirically so the second best thing to do is test the belief, test the idea of it. See what happens when you act as if it's true, whatever the hypothetical belief. How does it work when you try it? James thought it was remarkable, almost astonishing, how easy it was to expose vacuous ideas with this one simple test. Instead of saying quality is "just" whatever you like, adopt the theory that Quality is what you really like. And then go grocery shopping, or to work, or to a party or museum and see how it works out. Mmmm. Mangos. Kind regards. 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
