Ron wrote:
...The passions are rejected. Pirsig, on the other hand, seems to place more
importance on emotion and feeling as a guiding principle toward intellect.
ngriffis said:
To shift Ron's meaning a bit, I wonder if the forum members would agree that
Pirsig places importance on emotion and feeling as a guiding principle toward
Dynamic Quality? Further, I would like to broach the subject of how one goes
about seeking Dynamic Quality (DQ) in one's life. ...I know I want more DQ in
my life, but how do I go about getting it?
nblodgett said:
...I had always assumed that this blockage of direct quality perception was
social, but in Mexico a few years ago I talked to a neurologist who argued that
it was physiological. She said that recent experiments are showing that the
right side of the brain, the "artistic" side, filters all experience before it
reaches the left "rational" side of the brain. This would concur with the MOQ
assertion that value precedes concepts in human understanding.
dmb says:
The part about cultivating Quality in life is probably best seen in the
motorcycle maintenance lessons. And those lessons can be transferred to
whatever "art" a person wants to practice. But that's only part of the story.
The bigger picture is fairly epic in scope. Pirsig is tackling a problem (and
offering a solution) with the way we think in general, and this problem can be
traced back through the history of philosophy all the way to the beginning.
In
Zen and the Art, Robert Pirsig says:
"In the past
our common universe of reason has been in the process of
escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of
prehistoric
man. It's been necessary since before the time of
Socrates
to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free
the
rational mind for an understanding of nature's order
which
was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an
understanding
of nature's order by re-assimilating those passions which
were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions,
the
affective domain of man's consciousness, are a part of
nature's
order too. The central part."
Similarly, William James complained that philosophers,
particularly the Hegelians' insistence "that feeling has nothing to do
with the question, that it is a pure matter of absolute
reason". "The one fundamental
quarrel" he has with them, James says, "is over this
repudiation
by Absolutism of the personal and aesthetic factor in the
construction of philosophy." He wants them to admit "that
we all of us have feelings" and to "admit that all philosophies are hypotheses,
to
which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical,
help
us".
But we want to be careful NOT to take this as simply becoming a romantic type
or an artist or as an attack on intellectual pursuits. The idea here is to
"re-assimilate" the passions and rationality. The idea is to fuse them, not to
trade off one side for the other. Pirsig wants to effect a root expansion of
rationality, wants to show how Quality is already in operation at the front of
train, already deep in the roots of our thinking.
“...the
crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to
cope with the situation. It can’t be solved by rational means because
the rationality itself is the source of the problem. The only ones
who’re solving it are solving it at a personal level by abandoning
‘square’ rationality altogether and going by feelings alone. ..And that seems
like a
wrong direction too. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that
the solution to the problem isn’t that you abandon rationality but that
you expand the nature of rationality so that it’s capable of coming up
with a solution.”
"[Phaedrus] did nothing for Quality or the Tao. What benefited 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." [ZMM]
"I want to show that that classic pattern of rationality can be tremendously
improved, expanded and made far more effective through the formal recognition
of Quality in its operation." [ZMM]
"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." [ZMM]
"In a sense, the MOQ is an acceptance of this fact, that quality is here, and
that if we can't explain it, you're not going to get rid of the quality. We
have to adjust our system of explanation in such a way that we can incorporate
quality into a rational system of thought." [Pirsig, AHP Lecture, 1993]
But I'm saving the best part for last.
Building on the work of John Dewey and William James, philosophers and
neuroscientists have been re-thinking the nature thought and rationality. This
approach matches Pirsig's work in all kinds of ways and empirical evidence has
been piling up for the last ten years.
"James and Dewey
knew that the radical thesis of embodied thought ultimately requires a
global
explanation of how even our most abstract and apparently universal
cognitive
structures are grounded in aspects of our bodily experience—in perceptual
structures, motor capacities, feelings and emotions. This is the
fundamental
challenge facing any naturalistic, non-reductionist view of mind. ...I will
also suggest that some of the insights they
generated nearly a century ago are today being supported by empirical
research
in various cognitive sciences.
To cut to the chase, the key to the embodiment of thought is the qualitative
dimension of all experience. Dewey understood above all else that thinking
is a matter of the qualitative relations of aspects of experience. Whatever
distinctions we might make in our explicit trains of thought are merely
abstractions
and selections from the complex experiential situations of which those
thoughts
are a part. ...The "quality" is what makes the
situation the situation it is. A particular quality that characterizes a
situation
is never merely a subjective state or feeling; rather, it is in and of the
entire situation, and so
is as much an objective feature as it is a subjective experience."
I would strongly recommend this paper (Mark
Johnson's "Feeling
William James’s But") to all serious students of the MOQ:
http://www.american-philosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion%20papers/Feeling_William_James_But.htm
This paper explains the idea in terms that a Pirsig fan can appreciate and
it's not very long. Readable in an hour or two.
He's the same Mark Johnson that co-wrote "Metaphors We Live By" and "Philosophy
in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought" with
George Lakoff.
I'd also suggest Stanford's article on "Embodied Cognition", which provides the
various strains of thinking within the movement, if it can be called a movement.
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