Hi DMB, all
On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 1:25 PM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > Please notice the difference between the following statements. (1) Things do > not exist inherently or independently. (2) Things do not exist. > The first statement makes a negative claim about the nature of things. It > qualifies the existence of things by denying that they are permanent or > essential or that they exist in isolation from each other, that they are > discrete, discontinuous entities in themselves. The second statement simply > denies any kind of existence at all. The first statement pushes back against > Platonism, essentialism, objectivity and other forms of reification. The > second statement far more drastic, maybe even ridiculous. The aspirin I'm > about to take may not have anything like an independent or inherent existence > but I fully expect that it really will relieve my pain. And I stop at red > lights too, despite the fact that it's JUST a conventional reality. We can > reject the metaphysical premise behind scientific materialism and still be > afraid whenever anyone ever points a gun at us. There are concrete realities > and practical consequences that can't just be sweep under the rug, or > shrugged off with asce > tic indifference. The MOQ is not some magic chant that makes the world > dissolve into misty dreams. > Yes, the mysticism and the Zen are very, very important central elements. But > it's also about fixing things and the good cuts of meat. It's also a form of > pragmatism that says our normal, conventional reality cannot function without > quality. Remember that thought experiment in ZAMM wherein Pirsig takes us > through a grocery store with no quality and how drastically that was changed? > The title of ZAMM is just about enough to let you know that it's aimed at a > kind of re-enchantment of the ordinary, finding the Buddha in the gears of > bike or, as James would put it, returning philosophy to the earth of things. > It is decidedly NOT otherworldly. Don't you think? Even its mysticism is NOT > otherworldly. Don't you think? And what other reality do we ever have? I > think it would be best to reject the existence of reality as we understand it > conventionally and conceptually only between meals and never while you're > driving. Steve: The above is a point worth making. Saying something is JUST conventional puts it on the same level as 2+2=4, tigers, and Hiroshima, and lots of things that we can ignore only at our peril. Even after you recognize that it is impossible to disentangle some absolute reality from our descriptions of reality, we still can't reasonably write everything off as merely conventional. There is nothing MERE about it when it is literally everything. Pirsig's view does not postulate an autonomous agent as a fundamental premise that wills this and that, and so free will of the classical sort is denied by the MOQ. I recall some important thoughts Pirsig wrote about on freedom in an introduction or postscript to some edition of something. He talked about how American's hold freedom as an ideal, but that is problematic since freedom only says that something is bad. It is only a negative notion. It doesn't tell us what good we all want. Does anyone have that quote or know where to find it? Best, 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
