Arlo said to DJH:
Two questions to this point. (1) do you think there is/is not a
contradiction/problem with static patterns of value being both "degenerate" and
"moral" (according to Pirsig)? (2) If all static quality is, by definition,
mystically degenerate, then what would be the point of embracing ANY static
pattern, from food to poetry to painting to language to baseball? How is this
not an argument for something along the lines of asceticism?
dmb says:
The contradiction is both clear and epic.
Where Pirsig says, "the world is primarily a moral order" and "value is the
fundamental ground-stuff of the world," DJH says, "All things are mystically
degenerate".
What assertion could cut against the grain of the MOQ more than DJH's? It's
hard to imagine what could be more hostile to the MOQ. This contradiction is no
small thing.
This is Pirsig quoting himself at the AHP conference. He opens the topic of
morality by saying that morality is the most important part of the MOQ....
I want to get down to the problem which is the essence for me the most
important of… not the essence but the most important part of the MOQ and that
is that it establishes a morality. A scientific morality. Quality is morality.
They are identical.
"The MOQ says that if moral judgments are essentially assertions of value and
if value is the fundamental ground-stuff of the world then moral judgements are
the fundamental ground-stuff of the world." (LILA, Chapter 12)
The world is primarily a moral order.
"It says that even at the most fundamental level of the universe, static
patterns of value and moral judgment are identical. The 'Laws of Nature' are
moral laws. Of course it sounds peculiar at first and awkward and unnecessary
to say that hydrogen and oxygen form water because it is moral to do so. But it
is no less peculiar and awkward and unnecessary than to say chemistry
professors smoke pipes and go to movies because irresistible cause-and-effect
forces of the cosmos force them to do it..."
"So what Phædrus was saying was that not just life, but everything, is an
ethical activity. It is nothing else. When inorganic patterns of reality create
life the Metaphysics of Quality postulates that they've done so because it's
'better' and that this definition of 'betterness' - this beginning response to
Dynamic Quality - is an elementary unit of ethics upon which all right and
wrong can be based." (LILA, Chapter 12)
Now, it says as a subset of this that there, what we see because of these
different levels, that there is not just one moral system, there are many. And
these are named as a morality called the Laws of Nature by which inorganic
patterns triumph over chaos. There is a morality called the 'Law of Jungle"
…where biology triumphs over the inorganic patterns of starvation and death.
There is a morality called social patterns which are called 'The Law', and
which social patterns triumph over biology. And then there is the final
struggle, the final morality which is perhaps the most crucial one we have
today and that's the struggle… well, we have two of them actually: One, there
is the struggle between intellect and society, and this has been coming to me
very much in the last few months since LILA was written, how profoundly deep
this struggle is between popularity-dominated people and truth-dominated people.
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