djh said to dmb:
... Everyone wants what's good. Everyone wants good things to happen. Good is
the source of all things - right? Reading Lila explains how even folks who we
would consider as evil - such as the Nazi's - thought what they were doing was
good..
"The idea that satisfaction alone is the test of anything is very dangerous,
according to the Metaphysics of Quality. There are different kinds of
satisfaction and some of them are moral nightmares. The Holocaust produced a
satisfaction among Nazis. That was quality for them. They considered it to be
practical. But it was a quality dictated by low-level static social and
biological patterns whose overall purpose was to retard the evolution of truth
and Dynamic Quality. James would probably have been horrified to find that
Nazis could use his pragmatism just as freely as anyone else, but Phaedrus
didn't see anything that would prevent it. But he thought that the Metaphysics
of Quality's classification of static patterns of good prevents this kind of
debasement."
This is the strength of the MOQ. It provides us with a whole new language with
which we can begin to understand folks values and think about and discuss which
values are good - and those which aren't.
dmb says:
I think you are making no sense, David. The quote illustrates my point, I
think, and not yours. The idea that Marsha's satisfaction is the test of
anything is very dangerous. There are different kinds of satisfaction but the
kind we're interested in (we being the members of this discussion group) is
intellectual, not social or biological. The use of Nazis as an example is
unfortunate because it's so extremely, obviously horrifying but, like Marsha,
they were also quite satisfied with their anti-intellectualism. As Pirsig tells
it, and I think he's quite right, fascism is essentially driven by
anti-intellectualism. While I don't expect Marsha to be invading Poland anytime
soon, she does share this anti-intellectual attitude with the fascists,
fundamentalist and others on the far right. I think it's super creepy and
degenerate in every case.
The MOQ's levels are supposed to help prevent this sort of truth relativism,
this degeneracy wherein truth is whatever seems most pleasant for me, and so we
are talking about the importance of intellectual quality in opposition that
kind of regressive, self-serving nonsense. not SOM's value-free science, not
SOM's attitude of objectivity or its correspondence theory of truth, not the
lifeless, hollow, meaningless voice of reason. I'm talking about the MOQ's
expanded rationality, the intellect as the highest form of static quality, not
SOM's value-free science, not SOM's attitude of objectivity, nor its
correspondence theory of truth, not the lifeless voice of disinterested reason.
Marsha sees no difference between the two and she takes the criticism of SOM's
rationality and uses it to bash the MOQ's intellectual values and to bash
philosophy in general. The patient to be cured is rationality and the disease
is SOM. Marsha treats the cured patient (the MOQ's intellectual quali
ty) as if it were the disease. Marsha wants to kill the patient who was cured
and just left the hospital. It's preposterous. It's backwards and upside down.
And she foolishly quotes the surgeon, as if he wanted his patient to be gunned
down in the hospital's parking lot.
dmb said:
...As the title character illustrates, some people have NO sense of
intellectual quality. It's not a matter of difference, but absence. Not an
alternative vision, but mere blindness. ...I think her anti-intellectualism is
a transparent attempt to turn her own inadequacy into a virtue. She foolishly
uses Pirsig's attack on SOM against anything that involves intellect, including
the MOQ's intellectual values ...
djh said:
You seem to be saying - Marsha clearly doesn't value the intellectual level
like I do - she must be wrong - so why should I bother even looking at what she
values or why she values it? It's almost hard to understate the huge chunks of
Lila which would never have been written if Pirsig had the same attitude. What
I'm saying is - what Marsha values - that's the whole thing!
dmb says:
I think you're way off the mark, David. I'm trying to be polite about it but I
think this is not even debatable. Intellectual values ARE values. Marsha's
anti-intellectualism is an expression of her values. Frankly, I think it's just
kind daft to pretend that these are not the most relevant values, if not the
ONLY relevant values. To the extent that any other kind of static values trump
intellectual quality, according to the MOQ, it is immoral and degenerate. As
Ron pointed out, understanding someone's values might explain their motives for
being intellectually dishonest, evasive, or egotistically driven, but that
doesn't really make any difference. Within the context of this kind forum, the
most appropriate, fair, and honest thing to do is examine the validity and
intellectual quality of the posts. I mean, why presume there is a better way to
discern somebody's values without getting weird and invasive? I'm with William
James on this point; he said that a person's vision is
the most important about them. I can see Marsha's vision just fine and it has
no intellectual value. People who care about such things will understand my
complaints, even if Lucy never does.
djh said to dmb:
...I noticed you value something similar (though you've clearly translated it
to mean something completely different) where you write : " Pirsig's
project..is to expand and improve the intellect, to formally incorporate DQ
into the operations of intellect.." . I'm sure Marsha would agree with you on
that goal! How do you see the MOQ 'formally incorporating DQ into the
operations of intellect'?
dmb says:
Marsha value something similar? Oh dude, you are so lost.
This has been my central point for years and years. This is exactly WHY
anti-intellectualism is so wildly inappropriate for a MOQer.
As Marsha misconstrues it, intellectual quality and Dynamic Quality are
mutually exclusive. (This is very much related to my objection to your
separation of values and intellectual validity.) That is true of SOM, with its
value-free science the attitudes of objectivity fostered by SOM - but that's
not what intellect means in the MOQ. Even in ZAMM, the expansion of rationality
was his stated goal. He did nothing for Quality or the Tao, he says, what
benefitted was reason. By the time we get to Lila, Pirsig even spells out what
this means to the scientific method.
At the end of chapter 29 he says:"The MOQ also says that DQ - the value-force
that chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a
brilliant experiment of a confusing, inconclusive one - is another matter
altogether. ...Dynamic value is an integral part of science. It is the cutting
edge of scientific progress itself."
the Buddha said:"Just as the wise accept gold after testing it by heating,
cutting and rubbing it, so are my words to be accepted after examining them,
but not out of respect for me."
Even outside of SOM, in the MOQ or in undiluted Buddhism, we still have
science, testing, examination, empirical standards, and logical inconsistency
is still considered to be taboo!
Pirsig says in chapter 8:"The tests of truth are logical consistency, agreement
with experience, and economy of explanation. The MOQ satisfies these."
And, similarly, the Dali Lama said:"A general stance of Buddhism is that it is
inappropriate to hold a view that is logically inconsistent. This is taboo. But
even more taboo than holding a view that is logically inconsistent is holding a
view that goes against direct experience."
As Ms. Wrong construes it, meditation and thinking carefully are mutually
exclusive. Kill all intellectuals patterns, she says (taking the passage out of
context of its subsequent qualifiers), kill them all. This is also totally not
true.
Traleg Rinpoche says:
"In the Buddha's early discourses on the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold
Path begins with the cultivation of the correct view...Without a conceptual
framework, meditative experiences would be totally incomprehensible. What we
experience in meditation has to be properly interpreted, and its significance
-or lack thereof- has to be understood. This interpretive act requires
appropriate conceptual categories and the correct use of those categories...
.While we are often told that meditation is about emptying the mind, that it is
the discursive, agitated thoughts of our mind that keeps us trapped in false
appearances, meditative experiences are in fact impossible without the use of
conceptual formulations... ."
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