Andre said to Marsha:
...this position you have adopted is quite ridiculous and very un-Pirsig's MoQ.
You keep on having difficulties with the intellectual level. You keep on
bringing up this reification bit, you keep bringing up this ' object of
knowledge bit' , you keep on bringing up this static is ultimately empty bit.
You keep on holding on to the static as none other than dynamic, the term '
latching' is something you do not accept nor understand. Your definition of
static patterns of quality is still a mess wrought with confusion and
contradiction. Low quality means ' insignificant'. To you intellect is still
SOM (a la Bodvar) and it shows now that you find everything to be
'hypothetical' ... And your defense continues to be that ' in philosophy there
are as many of 'truths', on any given topic, as there are stars in the sky....
dmb says:
Right. Marsha's view is one great big gnarly knot of a mess. It would be a huge
task to untangle it all at once. It would probably be a full-time job for about
a week. But one thing is pretty clear, her conclusions amount to relativism,
nihilism and anti-intellectualism. She and Bodvar have both been presented with
a pile of evidence showing that their equation of SOM and intellect cannot be
right. Despite the fact that many philosophers - including pragmatists like
James, Dewey and Pirsig himself - have explicitly rejected SOM, they still hold
the incoherent belief that the intellect is forever trapped in or identical to
SOM. That's one of their most fatal errors and they stick to it despite
repeated explanations as to the logical impossibility of this view. This view,
in fact, means that it be impossible to adopt or even conceive any other
metaphysical construction, which would mean that James, Dewey and Pirsig have
done the impossible. To equate SOM and the intellect is to
claim that the Metaphysics of Quality is not a metaphysical construct, is not
really an alternative to SOM. And, of course, if intellect is equal to SOM and
we're supposed to reject SOM, then we have also rejected intellect and truth
along with it. Now truth isn't just plural and provisional, it's infinite like
the stars in the sky and as fleeting as the wind. Now truth is just whatever
anyone says it is. Now truth is meaningless and philosophy is a joke.
This view is not just incoherent and incorrect, it's a moral nightmare. It's
vacuous nihilism and relativism of the worst kind. It's not just
anti-intellectual. It's hateful and contemptuous of intellectual values.
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