Hi Matt, dmb, On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 7:00 PM, Matt Kundert <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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.
Steve: That's exactly what I am trying to say. I would add that the notion of empathy as the _basis_ for morality though is something mutually exclusive with the MOQ. So can't base an MOQ morality/prudence distinction on that score. That's how I think _I_ would make the pragmatic distinction, but the MOQ does not allow for doing that in Pirsig's system. 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
