Dave, Steve said: What people usually mean by the word "morality" includes the capacity to empathize, but in the MOQ, morality goes all the way down.
DMB said: Seems like you're bending over backwards to find something wrong with empathy, which is kinda funny given the meaning of term "empathy". Matt: As Steve said explicitly for his own part, I think you are misunderstanding his intentions. Steve seem to be asking for a systematic expansion of the Metaphysics of Quality, Pirsig's systematic philosophy. You alluded later, correctly I think, to "care," which is one of the earliest important terms of Pirsig's philosophy, but it is from ZMM, and the earlier stages of it no less (and the dialectical quality of that book sometimes means the early stages of that book get drowned in the later). What Steve wants are integrations of all the material found in both books into a unified exposition. Not at all at once perhaps (this is, after all, just a discussion forum), but moving in that general direction. How does "care" fit in the MoQ? How does "empathy"? How, given the metaphysical categories of DQ/SQ, does one conceptualize the notion of "empathy"? Steve knows what it is; he just wants to know how Pirsig's MoQ would conceptualize it. He's not _contesting_ empathy, he's requesting a Pirsigian understanding of it. Steve is, it seems to me, essentially asking for a rapprochement between "morality-commonly-understood" and "MoQ-morality." Because as Steve points out, the MoQ understands the whole of existence as a moral order, which means morality goes all the way down. A way of explicating that is to say that physics is a species of the genus morality. What Steve is wondering about is how we cobble together, using Pirsig's tools (and not, for these purposes, our common understandings of things, which defeats the purpose of exploring what Pirsig is able to do in the scope of his writing), a functioning moral philosophy that can do all the kinds of things we want it to do. You don't see the problem with being able to do this. I'm not sure Steve does exactly either, nor am I sure I see a problem on the horizon of doing it. The point, however, is that it has not been done. Steve wants to get back to the text, back to the letter in order to build out a spirit that can do all the things we want it to. It is a way of testing the adequacy of a philosophy, but this isn't the way of attacking: it is the way of exploring. Steve just seems to want to explore Pirsig's philosophy. And this, it seems to me, should be the basic orientation we have to every philosophy. Matt 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
