Marsha said to Mark:
I am quite comfortable with conventional (static) truth being relative. It is
a word comfortably used within Buddhism and I see no reason to reject.
Pirsig gives us lots of reasons to believe that truth is more than merely
relative, Quality is track that guides the formation of both facts and moral
truths:
What guarantees the objectivity of the world in which we live is that this
world is common to us with other thinking beings. Through the communications
that we have with other men we receive from them ready-made harmonious
reasonings. ..And as these reasonings appear to fit the world of our
sensations, we think we may infer that these reasonable beings have seen the
same thing as we; thus it is that we know we haven't been dreaming. It is this
harmony, this quality if you will, that is the sole basis for the only reality
we can ever know.
Poincaré's contemporaries .. presumed that "preselected facts" meant that truth
is "whatever you like" and called his ideas conventionalism. ..What he
neglected to say was that the selection of facts before you "observe" them is
"whatever you like" only in a dualistic, subject-object metaphysical system!
When Quality enters the picture as a third metaphysical entity, the
preselection of facts is no longer arbitrary. The preselection of facts is not
based on subjective, capricious "whatever you like" but on Quality, which is
reality itself. ..To leave the impression in the scientific world that the
source of all scientific reality is merely a subjective, capricious harmony is
to solve problems of epistemology while leaving an unfinished edge at the
border of metaphysics that makes the epistemology unacceptable. ..But we know
from Phædrus' metaphysics that the harmony Poincaré talked about is not
subjective. It is the source of subjects and objects and exists in an anterior
relationship to them. It is not capricious, it is the force that opposes
capriciousness; the ordering principle of all scientific and mathematical
thought which destroys capriciousness, and without which no scientific thought
can proceed.
>From chapter 29 of ZAMM:
Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor
is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and
materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a
relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the
creation of all things. The measure of all things...
How are you going to teach virtue if you teach the relativity of all ethical
ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute. A
person whose idea of what is proper varies from day to day can be admired for
his broadmindedness, but not for his virtue.
Lightning hits!Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were
teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine "virtue." But areté. Excellence.
Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind
and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first
teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had
chosen was that of rhetoric.
...we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many
marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans,
gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science.
We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our
children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw
anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that
which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing
stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we
live. All of it. Every last bit of it.
Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding
of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus
hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all
you've got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what
you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can't be
anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known
before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues.
These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every
last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train.
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