John and Sylvia, the Sutherlands, were real people but in Pirsig's first book
they also represented millions of people who, like them, felt alienated by
technology and our technological world. We start out with ghost stories and
little repair lessons involving handlebars and beer-can shims. But before you
know it, he has you thinking about the foundations of science and the kind of
metaphysics behind our scientific world. And then, by time we get to the artful
mechanic, we even reach mystical peaks.
The art of motorcycle maintenance is miniature study in the art of rationality
itself, he says. The solution is not to run away from technology or science or
rationality. No, Pirsig wants to show us how the Buddha resides in the gears of
a motorcycle every bit as much as the lotus flower. That's a metaphor for
science and rationality too. That's the aspect of the Buddha that hasn't been
talked to death already.
That's what static intellectual quality, as it's construed in his second, is
supposed to be all about. This is not a contest between gears and lotus
flowers. It's not a contest between intellectuals and mystics. It's about
Pirsig's reformation of rationality, where Quality and value are integrated
into intellectual values. They're are distinctly different but they're not
mutually exclusive. They are supposed to work together. That's the whole point
of the MOQ!
But what does Marsha put on display day after day after day?
A profound alienation from anything and everything intellectual! Kill, kill,
kill the philosophers! Logic is for losers! Definitions are degenerate! And how
many other MOQers echo this upside down, totally backwards nonsense? One is too
many.
Dumping on the motorcycle gears is dumping the lotus is dumping on the Buddha
is dumping yourself is dumping on the world. There is no freaking way that this
counts as a good idea by Pirsig's lights. Not a chance.
I'll reproduce the evidence so it can be ignored once
again.-------------------------
"Thus did he seek to turn the attack. The subject for analysis, the patient on
the table, was no longer Quality, but analysis itself. Quality was healthy and
in good shape. Analysis, however, seemed to have something wrong with it that
prevented it from seeing the obvious."
"A real understanding of Quality doesn't just serve the System, or even beat it
or even escape it. A real understanding of Quality CAPTURES the system, tames
it, and puts it to work for on'w own personal use, while leaving one completely
free to fulfill his inner destiny." (ZAMM, p.223)
"I don't mind the Quality, it's just that all the classical talk about it ISN'T
Quality. Quality is just a focal point around which a lot of intellectual
furniture is getting re-arranged." (ZAMM, p.223)
"I think furthermore, that all his metaphysical mountain climbing did
absolutely nothing to further either our understanding of what Quality is or of
what the Tao is. Not a thing. That sounds like an overwhelming rejection of
what he said and thought, but it isn't. I think it's a statement that he would
have agreed with himself, since any description of Quality is a kind of
definition and must therefore fall short of its mark. ...No, he did nothing
for Quality or the Tao. What benefitted was reason. He showed a way by which
reason may be EXPANDED to include elements that have previously been
unassimilable and thus have been considered irrational. I think it's the
overwhelming presence of these irrational elements crying for assimilation that
creates the present bad quality, the chaotic disconnected spirit of the
twentieth century." (ZAMM, p. 257)
"I think that it will be found that a formal acknowledgment of the role of
Quality in the scientific process doesn't destroy the empirical vision at all.
It expands it, strengthens it and brings it far closer to actual scientific
practice." (ZAMM)
Similarly, in LILA Pirsig wrote:
"The Metaphysics of Quality says that science's empirical rejection of
biological and social values is not only rationally correct, it is also morally
correct because the intellectual patterns of science are of a higher
evolutionary order than the old biological and social patterns. But the
Metaphysics of Quality also says that Dynamic Quality - the value-force that
chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant
experiment over a confusing, inconclusive one-is another matter altogether.
Dynamic Quality is a higher moral order than static scientific truth, and it is
as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress Dynamic Quality as it
is for church authorities to suppress scientific method. Dynamic value is an
integral part of science. It is the cutting edge of scientific progress
itself."
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