Hi dmb,
> dmb said to Steve: > ...Pirsig says our peculiar habits of thought prevent us from seeing Quality > and your response is simply to say our thought habits don't and can't prevent > us from seeing Quality. That's not an argument. It's just an empty, > unsupported, nonsensical denial of what the author plainly says. > > Steve replied: > ...I am explicitly _disagreeing_ with certain parts of Pirsig's texts on this > point. I think Pirsig's primary/secondary distinction works against some of > the other things he wants to do and doesn't do some of the things he hopes it > will do. > dmb says: > Incredible! Now you're confessing to an explicit disagreement with the MOQ's > central distinction. Steve: That's not what I said. The MOQ's central distinction is between Dynamic Quality and static quality. No one disagrees that that is what Pirsig's philosophy is, and no one, not even Pirsig, says that that distinction is the best possible way of making a first distinction in a system of thought. There is nothing to disagree with on that point. We are all (except for Ham) just seeing where that choice to divide Quality in that way leads us. What I am disagreeing with is the idea that we ought to privilege certain experiences as "primary" while trivializing others as "secondary" along the lines of concepts being distinct from rather than part of reality. The experience of the high quality of a good idea is just as real as the experience of the low value of sitting on a hot stove. I think Pirsig would have to agree that the Buddha resides as comfortably in a concept as he does in the gears of a motorcycle or at the top of a mountain or between your ass and a hot stove. Ideas aren't any more secondary than anything else though he seems to say they are in some places. As Matt said previously and I agreed with him, Pirsig seems to backslide into some Platonic appearance-reality crap at various points, and we would prefer that he hadn't done that (or leave himself so open to being construed that way if he wants to avoid it). dmb: Not only that, you think there is no way to get better at following DQ. Steve: Sort of. I'm saying that if DQ is the primary reality and the leading edge of experience, then there is no way to get any closer to or further from DQ. You and I and everything else are static patterns in the wake of DQ. DQ ends where we begin, so we are as intimately in touch with DQ as we could possible be and there is no way to get out of touch with it. To say that you are in touch with DQ while I am not would be to say that my experience somehow has no leading edge while yours does. Is that what you are saying? Why that is just silly, dmb. Stop saying that. dmb: "The 'squares' of course do see quality," you say, so there's no problem to be solved. Steve: No, it's not that there was no problem to be addressed in ZAMM. There was. The problem was basically this: "To a romantic this classic mode often appears dull, awkward and ugly, like mechanical maintenance itself. Everything is in terms of pieces and parts and components and relationships. Nothing is figured out until it’s run through the computer a dozen times. Everything’s got to be measured and proved. Oppressive. Heavy. Endlessly grey. The death force. Within the classic mode, however, the romantic has some appearances of his own. Frivolous, irrational, erratic, untrustworthy, interested primarily in pleasure-seeking. Shallow. Of no substance. Often a parasite who cannot or will not carry his own weight. A real drag on society. By now these battle lines should sound a little familiar. This is the source of the trouble. Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about. But no one is willing to give up the truth as he sees it, and as far as I know, no one now living has any real reconciliation of these truths or modes. There is no point at which these visions of reality are unified. And so in recent times we have seen a huge split develop between a classic culture and a romantic counterculture...two worlds growingly alienated and hateful toward each other with everyone wondering if it will always be this way, a house divided against itself. No one wants it really...despite what his antagonists in the other dimension might." Steve continues: The solution to this problem cames in the form of Pirsig's root expansion of rationality which makes it possible to see that the Classical mind is not blind to aesthetics. The Classical aesthetic is just a different aesthetic mode. dmb: "DQ is in good shape no matter what happens to our concepts," you say. So Pirsig's attempt to improve rationality by adding DQ is pretty pointless too. Steve: Nope. Pirsig _does_ improve rationality by adding DQ to our concepts. I said that we want to improve our concepts rather than get in touch with reality. I just said he doesn't improve DQ (as primary reality) by adding DQ to our concepts (secondary concepts about reality). Direct experience is direct experience. How could we be out of touch with what is direct? With what precedes "we" and leaves "us" in its wake? dmb: > Do you see what just happened there? > > You have very effectively proven my original charge, which was that you (and > Matt) read the MOQ in a way that makes the central concept seem trivial, > meaningless and inert. Well, there you have it in your own words. The > sqaureness problem isn't really a problem, DQ can't be a solution to that > fake problem and the MOQ's central distinction works against the MOQ, you say. Steve: What I said was that the squareness problem is not a problem of being out of touch with primary reality. (If experience= reality, how could _that_ be the case?) the squareness problem gets dissolved when we recognize that the classical mind does indeed have its aesthetic too. If everything is Quality, then the squares aren't so square when we see them in that light. Likewise, in that light the Romantics aren't so frivolous. 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
