Ham, On my suggestion, thank you for re-examining Chapter 8 of LILA.
The least I can do in return is to examine your replies. I can't see anyone here "de-volving" from the MOQ to the type of SOM saturated metaphysical system that you suggest but maybe someone new to the MOQ (or philosophy even?) might learn something from this discussion. On Sat. May 04, 2013 at 9:23 PM, Ant McWatt wrote: > That's all very good Ham but how's the "homework" going? > Chapter 8 of LILA ring a bell? > > I'd like to see a discussion about that - as far as YOU ARE concerned - first. > > Thanks anyway, > > Ant Hamilton Priday stated May 5th 2013: Dear Dr. McWatt -- Oh yes, "the assignment" you hung on me (on my birthday, actually). Ant McWatt comments: You lucky man! I'm afraid I can't promise you that every year! Hamilton Priday continued May 5th: I have referred several times to LILA Chpt. 8, but you must realize that I don't regard it as my Bible, as most of you folks do. As a consequence, you won't like my critique of this chapter. The very first sentence is an attempt to sell a premise that makes no sense from either a philosophical or an epistemological viewpoint -- "the idea that the world is composed of nothing but moral value." Had Pirsig eliminated the first paragraph and started with the second (Phaedrus recalling an experiment involving glasses that made everything appear upside-down) it would have made more sense, as we might assume he meant that creation (existence?) is a valuistic construct. But "moral value" is man's measure of things, a psycho-emotional response to experience which is definitely not the stuff of physical reality. Ant McWatt comments: You're begging the question here, Ham. However, let's have a look at the whole paragraph so everyone can see exactly what we discussing here: The idea that the world is composed of nothing but moral value sounds impossible at first. Only objects are supposed to be real. "Quality" is supposed to be just a vague fringe word that tells what we think about objects. The whole idea that Quality can create objects seems very wrong. But we see subjects and objects as reality for the same reason we see the world right-side up although the lenses of our eyes actually present it to our brains upside down. We get so used to certain patterns of interpretation we forget the patterns are there. If you have been brought-up in an SOM culture as you and I have, sentence one is indeed true: The idea that the world is composed of nothing but moral value sounds impossible at first. Most people in the Western world are brought up to think the universe is either some spirit-like substance (e.g. mind) or some type of inorganic substance (e.g. physical matter). This Western way of looking at things is usually only changed by visiting non-SOM cultures (as happened to Pirsig when he visited Korea in 1947) or reading a text based on an non-SOM culture (such as the books by D.T. Suzuki that appeared in the West during the mid-20th century). When I first read ZMM, I found it difficult to get it round my head that any other alternative to the universe being composed of mind, matter (or some combination of both), was indeed possible. WE are simply not brought up to think "out-of-the-box" in this way (hence the title of this post). It seems therefore that you when you state: "'moral value' is man's measure of things, a psycho-emotional response to experience which is definitely not the stuff of physical reality." you're still well and truly stuck in a traditional SOM metaphysical prison. You've given us exactly the type of traditional Western way of thinking that is implied in the first sentence in Chapter 8 of LILA! Now, if you look a little deeper into Pirsig's work, he supports the idea that Quality/values create our moral ideas by first observing that any man-made metaphysical framework is not definitive; it can't correspond to any thing "out there" (that is another SOM type of assumption). All we can do is think of helpful ways of thinking about the world and use them until better ways of thinking arise. That's called pragmatism (not relativism!!!) and is why the ideas of modern physics have changed so radically changed over the last 100 years. Before I read Pirsig in the late 1980s, I realised both as a sociologist - and as a fine artist - that there were indeed metaphysical problems with values. In sociology there is a problem called the "fact-value problem". The difficulty with dealing with groups of people/cultures is that observable behaviour is usually regarded as factual while what's going on in peoples' heads is subjective and therefore open to "subjective" interpretation. To give the simplest of example: "Is that guy in the sea over there with the raised arms, waving or drowning?". What I found in the field of sociology (and this is similar with Pirsig's own experience of anthropology) is that while there have been many (unsuccessful) attempts to reduce values into facts (to make the field of sociology "objective" in the sense that physical matter can be "objectively" investigated), no-one had offered - not until Pirsig that is - the "impossible" sounding idea that maybe all facts can be reduced to values. By expanding the traditional notion of values (and don't overlook this expansion, Ham!), this is exactly what Pirsig does with the MOQ. While in fine art, there's been a substantive amount of derivatives of Marcel Duchamp's "ready mades". (These were initially objects of everyday use often presented in a twisted way - the first one of which appeared in 1913, the most famous one being an urinal submitted by Duchamp to the "Society of Independent Artists of New York" in 1917 under the title of "Fountain".) Now as Duchamp would be the first to tell you, these pieces are all junk without artistic merit. (This is probably why the first version of "Fountain" doesn't exist any more - it was thrown out without second thought). Unfortunately, much of the Art world have either missed the joke or, (as I highly suspect as the real reason) chosen not to, as it is far easier to bung a half a sheep in a tank of formaldehyde (or put together a small pile of house bricks - as illustrated in my MSU presentation) than it is to create a "Mona Lisa" or a "Flora Zoologica" (to name a piece by a contemporary fine artist - Alan Aldridge). If you can then find some rich mug to buy your piece of junk/installation art by writing a "manifesto" then it's a far easier way to make money than to actually create an artistic masterpiece (as Aldridge often does). I term this process "Laughing all the way to the bank with Duchamp's ghost!" (I suppose what I object to "Installation Art" above all is that it fills this precious world of ours with junk rather than beautiful things. Maybe one day, an enlightened society will make the public display of such objects a civil offence...). Anyway, when I first read LILA in 1991, I realised that the MOQ (and essentially it's premise of turning the ontological priority of subjects and objects on its head with values) provided a solution to the social scientists fact-value problem and also provided a metaphysical framework where "installation art"is seen (at best), as some type of intellectual value pattern which could be distinguished (at least in theory) from works of Art that reflected the Godhead (or to use more Pirsigian terms the Dynamic beauty of this world). This is why I'd rather have a painting by the average six year old in my house than a Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst! So this is why I accept the first sentence of Chapter 8 as essentially true. Firstly, you have to recognise you have a problem before you can solve it. Secondly, it is seen that the MOQ does indeed solve two problems in the social sciences and the Art World that were previously intractable by just using some sort of SOM metaphysics. That alone would make it worthy of merit and certainly two steps ahead of Essentialism! OK, I think that will do for now, Ham. (Rest assured, I have carefully gone through the whole of your May 5th post and will be posting the remainder of my response to it, in the near future). Best wishes, Anthony ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hamilton Priday continued May 5th: Next he states that "the Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to ...empiricism"! Now how does empiricism -- reliance on knowledge derived from objective experience -- in any way support Quality as the fundamental reality? The author himself admits "it flies outrageously in the face of common experience." Then he goes on to posit a "second principle": "A thing that has no value does not exist," from which he concludes that "value has created the thing", as opposed to the other way around. Mind you, I happen to agree that value sensibility is what creates (i.e., actualizes) our empirical reality. My criticism here lies in the rhetoric by which he argues the case. He talks about "substance" as a "subspecies of value"; yet he offers no epistemology to support this thesis. It's no wonder that the Pirsigians are confused about what SOM means. The reminder of this 10-page chapter is mostly a play on the "platypus" analogy as a means of deriding substance, science, causation, the Big Bang, and cultural evolution. Don't you find it inconsistent that, despite the author's need to denigrate these concepts, he fills 24 additional chapters explaining experiential reality in terms of "static patterns" while romancing us with a cosmology by which Dynamic Quality continually evolves toward moral "betterness"? Good? Bad? Better? --all subjective criteria that do not exist in the absence of conscious awareness, yet are purported to be that ultimate, essential Reality which, the author still insists, is indefinable. Incidentally, I noted that your response to my Apr 14th message was largely a diatribe against my "right wing" views, including the 'Wicked Witch of Westminster' quotes and characterization of Ayn Rand as a "hippie". So, perhaps this assignment was directed toward my conservatism as much as it was a request to provide a position statement of my philosophy viz-à-viz Pirsig's MOQ. If you had a metaphysical purpose, however, I'll be most happy to elaborate on any aspect of Essentialism you don't understand. In either case, thanks for your interest, Ant. Ham ---------------------------------------- . 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