Marsha said to dmb:
You seem to want to label som "the disease," but the only problem with som is
that it dismisses value. Within the MoQ, value is seen as primary.
dmb says:
I want to label SOM "the disease"? Okay, but that's not my label but an
allusion to Pirsig's descriptions. He talks about the problem of SOM in medical
metaphors, as a "genetic defect" or as a "patient" on the operating table. And,
yes, he says the defect
As Pirsig puts it, "the thing to be analyzed, is not Quality, but those
peculiar habits of thought called 'squareness' that sometimes prevent us from
seeing it. ..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." (ZAMM 218-9)
>From ZAMM, Chapter 10:"The cause of our current social crises, he would have
>said, is a genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And until this
>genetic defect is cleared, the crises will continue. Our current modes of
>rationality are notmoving society forward into a better world. They are taking
>it further and further from that better world. ...the whole structure of
>reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins
>to be seen for what it really is... emotionally hollow, esthetically
>meaningless and spiritually empty."
Pirsig even sticks with this sort of language in Lila, where he is spelling out
the detail of "the cure" to "the disease". In this case, he's using "defect"
and "paralysis" as metaphors for the problem of SOM.
"Now, it should be stated at this point that the MOQ SUPPORTS this dominance of
intellect over society. ...But having said this, the MOQ goes on to say that
science, the intellectual pattern that has been appointed to take over society,
has a defect in it. The defect is that subject-object science has no provision
for morals. Subject-object science is only concerned with facts. Morals have no
objective reality. ...Now that intellect was in command for the first time in
history, was THIS the intellectual pattern it was going to run society with?"
(ch 22 LILA)
"Phaedrus thought that a MOQ could be a replacement for the paralyzing
intellectual system that is allowing all this destruction to go unchecked. The
paralysis of America is a paralysis of moral patterns. Morals can't function
normally because morals have been declared intelllectually illegal by the
subject-object metaphysics that dominate present social thought. ..It's this
intellectual pattern of amoral 'objectivity' that is to blame for the social
deterioration of America, ..." (ch 24 LILA)
Marsha added:
As far as you reifying the MoQ into "the cure" RMP wrote: "Remember that the
central reality of the MOQ is not an object or a subject or anything else. It
is understood by direct experience only and not by reasoning of any kind."
dmb says:
That makes no sense. The "cure" is an expanded and improved intellect. The
central reality that the MOQ talks about is Dynamic Quality. The cure is
conceptual but the central reality is outside of language. I'm not even talking
about that, much less reifying. This little bit of nonsense is just one more
symptom of the basic confusion I've been complaining about all along. You're
confusing the MOQ (static intellect) with Dynamic Quality itself, which is
outside of language and cannot be defined. That's what these quotes are
saying...
"The Metaphysics of Quality itself is static and should be separated from the
Dynamic Quality it talks about. Like the rest of the printed philosophic
tradition it doesn't change from day to day, although the world it talks about
does."
"Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is
a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A
metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn't any
metaphysics."
I don't know what goes through your mind when you read these passages, but what
they say quite clearly, I think, is that the MOQ is a static and intellectual,
is like the rest of philosophy in that respect, and that static intellectual
systems must be definable and knowable or you have no philosophy. You can't
have the MOQ without being intellectual and intelligible.
Your confused anti-intellectualism leaves you rather empty handed, doesn't it?
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