Dan, John C and all! Well man... it was a dreadful flight so honey disconnect the phone...
On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 5:04 PM, John Carl <[email protected]> wrote: >> Jc: It has taken me a while, but I think I understand better what >> James meant by immediate experience. One thing for sure, immediate >> experience requires Radical Empiricism, as DQ requires the MOQ. But >> more on that later. >> >> Dan: >> Dynamic Quality and immediate experience are both intellectual terms >> pointing to that which cannot be quantified. The terms themselves may >> require explanations, however. >> > Jc: That's right. All terms only have meaning to the extent that > they've been fully explained. Full explanation is the business of the > meta-physician. Dan replied July 15th: I do not believe there can ever be a full explanation of Dynamic Quality and experience. Ant comments: Well Pirsig says somewhere (in LILA, chapter 9 probably) that the MOQ is actually a contradiction in terms because it claims to be a metaphysics (which as John points out should ideally define all the terms it uses though I doubt any term can be FULLY explained to exhausation) but with a central undefined term. As we know Bob calls this "Dynamic Quality" but "The Tao" or "No-thingness" or even his near final "Unpatterned Quality" (as opposed to "Patterned Quality") are thought to be equivalents by him and such MOQ scholars such as myself. If you read a book such as John Blofeld's fascinating account ("Taoist Mystery & Magic" originally published in 1973) of his time as an English-Chinese translator during the 1930s when he visited all these ancient Chinese Taoist monasteries (before the 1948 "Uncultural Revolution" destroyed most of them and the wisdom contained within, you can begin to understand why Pirsig and myself think this is the case. Pirsig thought the latter book pointed out some great mystic truths but you will have to read it for yourself to see why. This is going to lose some people here (and no doubt elsewhere!) but one of the primary reasons that the MOQ can be so difficult to pin down for a traditional Western intellectual is its basis on the logic of the Tetralemma, the four pronged logic that East Asian philosophies (certainly Buddhist and Taoist traditions) use rather than the syllogistic logic of Aristotle's which is used by nearly every Western philosopher that you can read today. The latter are still largely unaware that East Asian logic can operate in two contradictory contexts while syllogistic logic can operate (or presumes) that there is only one. I guess you call the latter "the world of everyday affairs" and is what all the static quality patterns in the MOQ refer to. As such, the MOQ (unlike a metaphysics based on just on syllogistic logic) can incorporate Dynamic Quality (or at least "point to it") within its system. Paul Turner's paper about the Tetralemma explains this in more detail: "Logic is a set of rules that define valid inference. The validity of inference provided by syllogistic logic and its descendants is based on an assumption that propositions and the relationships between them are made and inferred in one context, whether this is tacit or stated within a premise. Because the rules of inference defined by the syllogism operate within a single context, contradictory propositions cannot be contained within a single structure of thought without being illogical." "The tetralemma (catuskoti) provides alternative rules of valid inference. The tetralemma is a logical formulation of the dual context of the Buddhist principle of “two truths,” or “two worlds.” Because the rules of inference defined by the tetralemma operate across two contexts, contradictory propositions can be contained within a single structure of thought without being illogical." The two truths of Buddhism are typically designated “conventional” and “ultimate” or alternatively they are described as “the world of everyday affairs” and “the world of the Buddhas.” Conventional truth applies to facts about the everyday reality of things, people and events. It is designated conventional in the sense of being the product of human interests and dispositions and does not correspond to anything independently or inherently true. Syllogistic logic works very well for justifying beliefs in the context of conventional truth. Ultimate truth applies to the world of the Buddhas and is inexpressible in the sense that, in the absence of convention, there is no candidate for predication, including the ascription of existence/non-existence itself. Significantly, the conventional and ultimate truths have the same consequence – nothing can be said to exist by virtue of its own essence. Syllogistic logic has no meaning with respect to ultimate truth. The tetralemma comprises the inferred relationship of four propositions and is expressed positively or negatively*. Where p is any proposition and ¬p is its negation, a positive tetralemma takes the form of: p p ¬p Not p p & ¬p Both p & not p ¬(p V ¬p) Neither p nor not p The positive tetralemma is an expression of the conventional validity of the two truths. The positive import of the two truths is that whilst it is stated that nothing is inherently real, i.e., nothing exists by virtue of its own independent essence, the familiar everyday world is, nonetheless, conventionally real and exists in a way which does not contradict experience. With this acceptance of conventional truth we are not left with an absurd conception of reality in which nothing exists in any sense whatsoever. Thus the extreme standpoints of (naïve or philosophical) reification and nihilism are repudiated in favour of a “middle way.” The positive tetralemma operates as follows. The truth of the first proposition can and should be subject to the syllogistic rules of inference, then, from any given proposition which is true of the conventional world, the three remaining propositions are validly inferred. e.g.: The self is real (conventionally real, i.e., it exists in a dependent reality along with everything else we derive from experience) The self is not real (ultimately unreal, i.e., it has no essence) The self is both real and not real (conventionally real but ultimately unreal) The self is neither real nor not real (neither ultimately real nor completely nonexistent) ----CUT---- A negative tetralemma takes the form of: ¬p Not p ¬(¬p) Not not p ¬(p & ¬p) Not (p & not p) ¬(¬(p V ¬p)) Not (neither p nor not p) The negative tetralemma is an expression of the self-negating “logic” of the ultimate truth (the emptiness of emptiness!) which denies the validity and inference of any philosophical assertion of any kind including that of the attribution of existence and non-existence to anything. The import of the negative tetralemma is that, unlike its positive counterpart, it denies the validity of the doctrine of two truths which, by comforming to logic, is itself designated a conventional truth. The negative tetralemma can be seen as a paradoxically logical formulation of the inapplicability of logic to whatever proposition it is applied, insofar as that proposition is related to the world of the Buddhas. An example of the negative tetralemma as applied to nirvāna: It is not the case that nirvāna exists It is not the case that nirvāna does not exist It is not the case that nirvāna both exists and does not exist It is not the case that nirvāna neither exists nor does not exist To put all of this in the context of the MOQ, conventional truth, the world of everyday affairs, applies to static reality and its difference from and relationship to Dynamic Quality. As such, the positive tetralemma would be used to express, in a logical way, the reality of subjects, objects, and so on and their strictly static existence whilst acknowledging their contradictory “unreality”, i.e., their lack of individual essence, that is entailed by their dependence on Dynamic Quality. Ultimate truth, the world of Buddhas, thus applies to the preintellectual “context” of Dynamic Quality. The negative tetralemma would be used to prevent any logical treatment of Dynamic Quality as a putative metaphysical “entity” of which properties and attributes may be predicated. ( robertpirsig.org/Tetralemma.htm ) . Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
