Marsha said:
Cannot help but wonder about the knower and the known, or the observer and the
observed? Has this dualist perspective vanished into a cloud of pretty
rhetorical terms such as elegance, consistency and coherence, and what of
phrases like "DQ chooses" and "SOM thinks"? Very pretty paraphrasing of few
quotes, but is the intellectual level nothing more than rhetoric?
dmb says:
A cloud of pretty rhetorical terms? Is the intellectual level nothing more than
rhetoric?
Usually, "rhetoric" is a pejorative term referring to manipulative or dishonest
speech. It's used like "spin" or "bullshit". But as Pirsig uses the term,
"rhetoric" refers to excellence in thought and speech. Phaedrus is a
rhetorician and the term is used as very high praise indeed.
"Lightning hits! Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were
teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine "virtue." But areté. Excellence.
Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind
and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first
teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had
chosen was that of rhetoric. He has been doing it right all along."
The comments and quotes simply name SOME of the marks of intellectual quality,
of the art of rationality or the art of rhetoric. It's a partial list of what's
right when you write artfully. That's why the quotes and comments are riddled
with terms like....
...personal, heartfelt, coherently structured, and precise. ...analogies and
metaphors as much as logic and empirical evidence. ...elegance and not
sloppiness, precision and not vagueness, clarity and not confusion, definable
terms and not made up or arbitrary meanings. Truth must have logical
consistency and not incoherence, economy of explanation and not verbose,
rambling drivel, and agreement with experience. Metaphysical ideas "must be
divisible, definable and knowable". "Definitions are the FOUNDATION of reason.
You can't reason without them." ...DQ is "the value-force that chooses an
elegant mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant experiment
over a confusing, inconclusive one" and guides the selection of beautiful ideas
over clumsy and clunky notions.
That's just a fraction of the things Pirsig has said about intellect. One of
his central aims, if not the most important one of all, is a root expansion of
rationality. By equating his conception of intellectual quality with SOM, you
have certainly missed the point of his work in a very big way.
As to the fate of the dualism of knower and known, subject and object, just
look at the end of chapter 29 in Lila. As everyone knows by now, this is
explained in just a few short sentence with help from William James' radical
empiricism. "Subjects and objects are not the starting points of reality," etc..
Does any of this make sense to you? Nah, there's no danger of that ever
happening.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
dmb said:
I think it's quite clear that there are all kinds of ways to describe
intellectual quality WITHOUT getting it mixed up with SOM.
Pirsig shows us what it's like in his books. His philosophy is embedded in a
narrative and even includes autobiographical info. It's personal, heartfelt and
yet it's also coherently structured and precise. This is Pirsig demonstrating
his conception of rhetoric, his conception of excellence in thought and speech,
his conception of an expanded and improved rationality, an artful rationality.
He relies on analogies and metaphors as much as logic and empirical evidence.
> >
> > Anyway, here's the part you did not mention at all, which is all of my post
> > except for that one boring, introductory sentence. It would be nice if you
> > read it, thought about and responded to it with some coherent thoughts of
> > your own.
> >
> >
> > TWO FACETS OF ANY HIGH-QUALITY ENDEAVOR
> >
> >
> > "...In practice, this distinction [static and dynamic] refers to two facets
> > of any high-quality endeavour. Motorcycle maintenance and easel painting
> > both depend on the interaction of Static Patterns and Dynamic Quality.
> > Pirsig made an art out of motorcycle maintenance by first reading the
> > manuals (with some prior understanding of the principles on which they
> > depend), then riding his bike while alert to the unexpected sounds, or
> > changes in engine performance, that DQ might notice and diagnose.
> > Similarly, nobody becomes an accomplished painter, sculptor, writer,
> > musician or architect without having recognized excellence in previous
> > examples of those arts, and taken that excellence as the starting point for
> > new work." -- (Patrick Doorly, The Truth About Art, p.129)
> >
> > dmb says:I think it's quite clear that there are all kinds of ways to
> > describe intellectual quality WITHOUT getting it mixed up with SOM. Even
> > after rejecting SOM for an expanded and improved form of rationality, an
> > artful rationality, Pirsig still lists the basic criteria by which
> > intellectual quality is evaluated. This includes things like elegance and
> > not sloppiness, precision and not vagueness, clarity and not confusion,
> > definable terms and not made up or arbitrary meanings, logical consistency
> > and not incoherence or inconsistency, economy of explanation and not
> > verbose, rambling drivel, and one of my favorites that could be discussed
> > at great length, agreement with experience.
> >
> > "The tests of truth are logical consistency, agreement with experience, and
> > economy of explanation. The Metaphysics of Quality satisfies these." (Lila,
> > chapter 8.)
> >
> > "A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn't
> > any metaphysics." (Lila, page 64.)
> >
> > "Definitions are the FOUNDATION of reason. You can't reason without them."
> > (ZAMM, page 214.)
> >
> > " ...the MOQ also says that DQ - the value-force that chooses an elegant
> > mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant experiment over a
> > confusing, inconclusive one... Dynamic value is an integral part of
> > science. It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself. ..." (Lila,
> > chapter 29.)
> >
> > In other words, DQ is the value-force that chooses coherent ideas over
> > incoherent ideas, that chooses logical consistency over contradiction. It's
> > what guides the selection of beautiful ideas over clumsy and clunky
> > notions. SOM is nothing like this. According to SOM, good and true ideas
> > are the ones that correspond to the one and only objective reality and our
> > values are considered a form of pollution. Science is supposed to
> > value-free. In the MOQ, intellect is not polluted by values but rather
> > intellect IS a certain kind of value, a species of the good. In the MOQ,
> > intellect is centered around DQ and subordinate to DQ but SOM totally fails
> > to acknowledge the value of values in our ways of thinking. That's the
> > defect, the disease. Where Pirsig emphasizes the role of DQ, as the source
> > and substance of everything, as the generator of all static patterns, SOM
> > thinks that truth is only true when it's free of values. That's the
> > problem. Coherence, elegance, consistency and relevant evidence is not the
> > problem. Those are just a few of the names we give, that Pirsig gives, to
> > certain kinds of intellectual excellence.
> >
> > "Value is the predecessor of structure. It’s the preintellectual awareness
> > that gives rise to it. Our structured reality is preselected on the basis
> > of value, and really to understand structured reality requires an
> > understanding of the value source from which it’s derived. One’s rational
> > understanding of a motorcycle is therefore modified from minute to minute
> > as one works on it and sees that a new and different rational understanding
> > has more Quality. One doesn’t cling to old sticky ideas because one has an
> > immediate rational basis for rejecting them. Reality isn’t static anymore.
> > It’s not a set of ideas you have to either fight or resign yourself to.
> > It’s made up, in part, of ideas that are expected to grow as you grow, and
> > as we all grow, century after century. With Quality as a central undefined
> > term, reality is, in its essential nature, not static but dynamic. And when
> > you really understand dynamic reality you never get stuck. It has forms but
> > the forms are capable of change."
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