John McConnell said:
...If you view the relationship of DQ to SQ in this way, and if you view cosmic
evolution as the history of the advance of Dynamic Quality, the levels of MOQ
emerge naturally as sort of the critical points at which phase changes have
occurred. The only place where the levels don't seem completely natural and
obvious to me in this view is the social level and then the intellectual level.
To me the obvious phase change is from the biological level to a "mental"
level which subsumes both the social and the intellectual levels of MOQ.
Social evolution and intellectual evolution both seem to me to be ways in which
DQ continues to push forward and develop stable patterns of SQ, with
intellectual being the more promising and fruitful avenue of advance.
dmb says:
I think it's pretty clear that Pirsig's four levels are all part of an
evolutionary picture and the first two levels are going to map onto physics
(Big Bang) and biology (Darwinism) quite neatly. This part is easier understand
than the social and intellectual levels but the third and fourth levels are far
more interesting and important. That's where all the action is, so to speak.
Pirsig's aim is a root expansion of rationality and his main enemy in this
respect is "value-free science" and the attitudes of objectivity that it
engenders. The whole value system of the culture is effected by this scientific
objectivity, wherein morals and values are JUST subjective, just mental, and
therefore not quite real. And so we see in the subtitles of his books that the
quest is all about morals and values and where our forms of thinking have gone
wrong with respect to morals and values.
As David Granger puts it, in his book about John Dewey and Robert Pirsig,
"their respective metaphysics function as instruments of cultural criticism".
(p.70) Granger says "their metaphysics can do things for us and can be 'put to
work' where values are concerned". (p.70) In both cases, their metaphysics also
function as a direct attack on the fact/value distinction, an attack on
subject-object metaphysics.
"Value-free science has got to go," Pirsig says. Or, in the words of his
eccentric friend Dusenberry,...
"There's this pseudo-science myth that when you're 'objective' you just
disappear from the face of the earth and see everything undistorted, as it
really is, like God from heaven. But that's rubbish. When a person's objective
his attitude is remote. He gets a sort of stony, distant look on his face.
The Indians see that. They see it better than we do. And when they see it they
don't like it." (p.32 of Lila)
"Dewey's main point," Granger says, "is that the common belief in the
separation of the domains of science and value is ultimately parasitic on a
false separation of our cognitive and affective lives, the 'objective' and
'subjective' modes of our relations with the world." (p.77)
The critique of our attitudes and assumptions is one of the main themes in
their attack on objectivity but it also includes a rejection of what Pirsig
calls "the metaphysics of substance" or what we might call ontological realism,
scientific naturalism or simply physicalism. Despite the fact that the first
two static levels of the MOQ fit neatly with the scientific explanations for
the physical and the biological, the MOQ is built upon a radically different
metaphysical premise wherein everything begins with experience, not physical
phenomena. In ZAMM, when Pirsig says that "Quality is the source and substance
of everything", he's talking about Quality as the continuing stimulus which
causes us to create reality as we understand it, as the stimulus which causes
us to create analogy upon analogy. "Man is a participant in the creation of all
things", he says. In Lila, we get the same idea in slightly different terms and
we see how it functions as a direct assault on subject-obj
ect metaphysics. Along with William James, Pirsig says...
"[S]ubjects and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and
objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more
fundamental which he [James] described as 'the immediate flux of life which
furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual
categories'." (p.364-5)
In both books DQ is not anything like the physical ground of reality. All the
various ways of referring to DQ will indicate that we're talking about
experience itself rather than the underlying causes and conditions of
experience. On top of James's terms for it (pure experience, the immediate flux
of life), there is Northrop's "undifferentiated aesthetic experience", Pirsig's
"primary empirical reality", "direct everyday experience", "continuing
stimulus", "cutting edge of experience" and many others. In a nutshell, all
these concepts say the same thing, reality is experience and all concepts are
derived from that, including the idea that physical reality comes first and
concepts have arrived on the evolutionary stage only recently.
This can seem like a very perplexing paradox and it's where the metaphysical
shift from SOM to the MOQ can just end up with a lot of gear-grinding noise.
Pirsig wants to frame the whole thing in terms of evolutionary growth of static
patterns with DQ as the generative force behind that evolution but it's very
important, I think, to make sure we don't simply posit DQ as some kind of
ontological substance or God-like intelligence. DQ is not some mysterious and
invisible stuff behind the scenes; it's only unknowable in the verbal,
conceptual, intellectual sense. DQ is just experience that's so simple,
immediate and direct that it's what you know even before you have a chance to
think about it or reflect on it or otherwise sort it into conceptual
categories. That's what makes it dynamic rather that static; it's pure
experience rather than the conceptualized or verbalized abstractions we add to
experience.
This evolutionary picture is used to paint each of us as "a cohesion of
changing static patterns of this Quality". "The words Lila uses, the thoughts
she things, the values she holds, are the end product of three and a half
billion years of the history of the entire world. She's a kind of jungle of
evolutionary patterns of value. She doesn't know how they all got there any
more than any jungle knows how it came to be". (Lila p.138)
It might be tempting to simply plug this claim into the standard scientific
worldview or otherwise assume Pirisg is only saying that people evolved on
earth over time. But actually he's already challenging the subject/object
distinction in a very big way. As other philosophers have said, Pirsig is
painting a picture wherein the subjective self is NOT ontologically distinct
from objective reality but rather we are always embodied and already culturally
situated by the time we can ever begin to think about "reality".
"In traditional, substance-centered metaphysics, life isn't evolving toward
anything. Life's just an extension of the properties of atoms, nothing more. It
has to be that because atoms and varying forms of energy are all there is. But
in the MOQ what is evolving isn't patterns of atoms. What's evolving is static
patterns of value, and while that doesn't change the data of evolution it
completely up-ends the interpretation that can be given to evolution." (Lila p.
139)
Please notice that Pirsig is not trying to outdo the cosmologists by developing
a better version of the big bang theory and he's not trying to be the biggest,
strongest evolutionary biologist either. He's using these evolutionary
perspectives to frame a moral hierarchy for actual living people in the
present. He uses Lila (the character) as a kind of test case by which we can
examine and explore this moral hierarchy. Through this framework we learn along
the way how and why "she does and does not have quality" at the same time. If
she only had inorganic quality, she'd be dead. Biologically speaking, she's
past her prime but hell yea, baby, she had lots of hot, slippery quality - and
she had it all night long. Especially if you're wearing those beer-goggles. But
socially she's pretty far down the scale, quite contemptible in fact, and
intellectually she is nowhere. Zip, zero, nada.
The rivalry between social level Rigel and the intellectual author helps to
show the difference between social and intellectual values, but the historical
and political examples (especially in chapters 22 and 24 of Lila) are much more
helpful and detailed. And it also helps that this explanation is not just
illustrated by way of fictional characters but rather based on knowable,
checkable and public realities. This is not just a way to explain the levels,
however, because, as I pointed out at the very start, for both Pirsig and
Dewey, "their respective metaphysics function as instruments of cultural
criticism".
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
