ROGER ZEROES IN ON SOME FUNDAMENTAL
MISCONCEPTIONS OF THE MOQ WITHIN JOHN'S
ORGANISMIC METAPHYSICS
John,
I really did enjoy the work and quality of your recent forum contribution.
You clearly delineate the MOQ and your assumptions and critiques thereof and
you clearly offer some alternatives. Please allow me to state where I differ
in interpretation and prescription.
If anybody else wants to jump in, feel free to offer critiques of my
position. John will probably be gone for another few days.
JOHN:
"Quality is the primary empirical reality of the world" (Lila Ch 5) While
this seems to be essentially an assertion, the word empirical implies that it
is to be supported by my experience. Pirsig's example of the hot stove
demonstrates an organismic reaction to quality, in the case of this example a
low quality experience. What needs to be added to the core statement to
remove any possible ambiguity, then, is something of the nature of "Organisms
experience quality (both positive and negative) as the primary empirical
reality of their world." As an organism, I can then test this statement
against my experience, and hopefully this 'reality' would also be supported
by Poincare's small child. It seems to me that some form of statement of this
type is essential for the MOQ, yet by refining it as I have, it is saying
rather less than the original bold assertion. Yet critically, what it now is
saying is testable, whereas the more abstract statement from Pirsig is not.
ROGER:
Empiricism is basically a system of knowledge that stresses experience.
Quality is direct experience. Therefore "Quality is the primary empirical
reality of the world" is logically consistent within the metaphysics. To
quote W. James: "...there is only one primal stuff or material in our world,
a stuff which everything is composed , and if we call that stuff PURE
EXPERIENCE, then knowing can easily be explained ....."
Pirsig has chosen to call James' stuff VALUE or QUALITY. But they are
talking about the same stuff, and it is the primal or primary empirical
reality.
JOHN:
"Quality is morality" "They're identical" "The world is primarily a moral
order" (Lila Ch 7). The problem here is how to understand the terms morality
and value (another term Pirsig equates with Quality), especially as they are
applied to inorganic substance, or to artistic and intellectual judgements.
With reference to organisms, we could rephrase this to read something like
"Organisms experience quality as having either a positive or negative
valence, insofar as the experience alerts the organism to potential help or
harm in its environment."
To say bluntly that "Quality is morality" seems a nonsense to me, at least in
the generally understood meanings of these terms..
Pirsig is not unaware of this criticism. Indeed in Lila, Ch 12, he says "...
value. The word is too vague... Therefore to say that the world is nothing
but value is just confusing, not clarifying." He then goes on to sort values
according to the level of evolution they represent. "The value that holds a
glass of water together is an inorganic pattern of value..." and so on. In my
view he has not improved the situation. Just what an 'inorganic pattern of
value' might mean eludes me. Cut out the word value altogether in this
context and it reads better. The above could be rephrased as "What holds a
glass of water together is an inorganic pattern." It may be a bit trivial,
but adding in value doesn't improve that. The whole effort seems driven by a
desire to have 'value' as a universal term, while then admitting that the
values of each level "are completely different from each other."
ROGER:
What you see as a weakness, I see as brilliance. Pirsig builds a monism that
explains reality and knowledge from James' pure experience. When you say
"What holds a glass of water together is an inorganic pattern." You have left
out the key term. A rock and a glass are inorganic patterns composed out of
the relationship of value. These values are called the strong force, the
weak, electromagnetism and gravity. None of these have any meaning other
than as terms of relative value. Quantum reality is basically value
interaction.
JOHN:
He concludes this unsatisfactory explanation with the following important
statement "These patterns have nothing in common except the historic
evolutionary process that created all of them. But that process is a process
of value evolution. Therefore the name 'static pattern of values' aplies to
all. That's one puzzle cleared up." (Lila Ch 12)
Not so fast. While evolution is an important component of Pirsig's thought,
he has not justified the core statement that the evolutionary process "is a
process of value evolution". What he has done is examine the 'survival of the
fittest' strand in evolutionary thought and he makes quite a good case for
fitness being a 'value' term. But again, this works at the biological level
of the organism, or the species; possibly even at the cellular level. It
takes a giant leap of faith to apply this with any coherence to inorganic
patterns, and yet this is precisely what is required. What we have is a form
of words which papers over the huge gaps between patterns with nothing in
common by assuming a universal process of 'value evolution'.
ROGER:
I agree that inorganic patterns are not explained well by value evolution.
Value or pattern emergence perhaps, but not value evolution. Evolution can
occur though when chemicals form a feedback loop that allows the chemical
pattern to respond in such a way that its organization is conserved. Current
models of life are built on just such a spontaneous pattern of inorganic
pattern evolution. The universal process of value evolution works fine for me.
JOHN:
"A thing that has no value does not exist" or "The Value has created the
thing" (Lila Ch 8). This is an important insight, but difficult to test in
terms of experience as by definition what is without value will not be
experienced. Again there is a way of understanding such assertions from the
perspective of organisms, but by doing so the sweep of the original
statements is greatly reduced. The organismic statement would run somewhat as
follows "Organisms encounter the world through experiences of positive and
negative value, and what does not have value for them is not experienced,
hence is not encountered."
ROGER:
"A thing that has no value does not exist" is locally consistent within the
basic assumptions of empiricism. On the other hand, your "Organisms encounter
the world through experiences of positive and negative value, and what does
not have value for them is not experienced, hence is not encountered" is pure
SOM. It starts with an objective organism and (seems to me) then references
encounters with other objects. You have followed Robert's path and used
misunderstandings of the MOQ to recreate the world of Aristotle and Descartes.
JOHN:
When Pirsig says "a thing that has no value does not exist", he is
overstating his case.
ROGER:
Again, this is about as good of an assumption I can imagine. It is pure
empiricism. A lack of value means a lack of interaction and relation. And
reality is defined by interaction and relation.
JOHN:
At a fundamental level all language can be seen as carrying static value.
Most words only form from experiences of value. According to his logic, if
there was no value for me in a word, it would not become part of my
vocabulary. However some words seem clearly functional without value - the
word the will do as an example. The fills a grammatical role in language, but
as a word it is empty of content and equally empty of value.
ROGER:
You just agreed its value is grammatical. Why is content the only judge of
value? This is a very materialist argument.
JOHN:
You might argue it has a grammatical or syntactical value, but this is to
apply a different standard. The value Pirsig implies is the primary value
arising out of dynamic experience.
ROGER:
I do so argue! Grammar and language are shared systems of agreements to
coordinate our experiences. No word has inherent content other than what we
have arbitrarily agreed.
JOHN:
To now move in the reverse direction, is it not at least possible that there
may be some 'things' which we do experience as existing, but function like
the word 'the' as a component of our ordering of experience, without value?
If so, it seems a fundamental statement of Pirsig's metaphysics is flawed. To
me it seems the word "the" is itself sufficient refutation. It may well be
that a whole class of mathematical and logical terms, for example, are of
this type. Or can you explain for me how I might distinguish the values of
seventeen and eighteen respectively?
ROGER:
Seventeen only exists in relation to the other numbers that we have agreed
within our culture. In the same sense, physics has found that the basic
forces that compose 'matter' are similarly only interrelationships. What you
see as some kind of flaw is what I see as the strength of the MOQ.
JOHN:
So while most experience for most organisms includes positive or negative
value, and without this value nothing will be experienced, in human beings
with a capacity for language and logic there appear to be words and ideas
which are experiencable but function to facilitate other processes and are
themselves value free.
ROGER:
Huh? Their function shows their value. Pirsig never stated that only one
type of value pattern is real. They are all real.
JOHN:
"Dynamic quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality." "Static
quality ... always contains a component of memory." Pirsig saw this division
into dynamic and static as fundamental to his metaphysics, yet it lacks
clarity. In this polarity he seems to be addressing the question of how
dynamic experiences of quality are preserved or integrated into the ongoing
lives of organisms.
ROGER:
I agree with this last statement.
JOHN:
Both the wording above, with its references to 'pre-intellectual' and
'memory', and the examples used to flesh out this distinction (the tune on
the radio, the heart attack victim) are closely tied to higher organisms. To
explicate this, I would suggest something like "Organisms encounter dynamic
quality in direct experience, both positive and negative, and have the
ability to retain traces of this quality experience through memory, which is
static."
ROGER:
The direct experience is DQ. And the experience creates the organism and the
environment, not the other way around.
JOHN:
But as the example of the tune on the radio makes clear, there is in fact no
sharp division beween dynamic and static, but rather a continuum. The dynamic
element is still present to some extent even as the song is becoming defined
as 'good' in a static sense. It may still be possible to catch a small
element of the dynamic surprise after dozens of playings.
ROGER:
Again, DE is DQ. It is always dynamic. We have learned to filter and veil
experience. To pattern it and use this trick to run on autopilot. This is
basically a very effective and successful process. However, we can tend to
overdo it. We begin to live in our patterns and filter out the greater world
of experience.
The song has already been experienced, so we don't need or want to attend to
it any more. But as you mention, if you really listen, there is much dynamic
experience still to be discovered. Pirsig values sq, but always reminds us
to go back to the source and to constantly seek new, superior experiences and
patterns.
JOHN:
We have already found difficulty with the assumption that the the different
kinds of values associated with each level are part of some "process of value
evolution". However the question of the existence of the four systems or
levels remains an open one. The proposition is at least plausible, and it
seems to me that the test of experience does tend to confirm it. That is, I,
as an organism that functions within all four levels, frequently experience
conflicts which may be seen to arise from the mutual antagonisms of the
different systems, and these conflicts frequently appear intractable (there
appear to be no win/win solutions).
But even if this is so, it does not necessarily follow that the four systems
are rigidly hierarchic. Is it always the case that social values, for
example, over-ride biological values? Or is it rather that biological values
form part of the field in which social values arise, and the biological
values are encountered as constraints, limiting and shaping the options
available to the emerging social value system? In this more subtle statement,
there may be direct conflict between biological and social values, but there
is likely to be quite a bit of mutual adjustment as well. Indeed, this seems
likely, given that the complete overturn of biological values by the social
is likely to result in the elimination of the organism. Jonestown is an
example of such a situation, where the society became self destructive, but
obviously such social systems destroy their own bases for survival. So
although there may be some basis for asserting that since systems arising in
the higher levels manage lower level systems, they therefore dominate the
lower level systems, such domination need not be totally oppositional. Nor
will every emerging social value be equally above the lower level biological
values. It is to be expected that the lower level values will form an
important part of the environment which will select which higher level
emergents will survive. It may well be that the lower level values will at
times appropriately overturn some higher level emergents.
ROGER:
I tend to agree with most of your points on the moral hierarchy. The
hierarchy is an Aristotelian ordering system of value, but harmfull if taken
as literally as RMP suggests in places. I also strongly agree with your
stressing the harmony as well as the conflict between levels.
JOHN:
I have in another article ("Quality and Intelligence", available in the LS
Forum) argued that there are varieties of quality associated with the
biological, social and intellectual levels, and that the mystic puts his
trust in quality at the biological level. This is in organismic terms the
most immediate form of experience, unmediated by intelligence or social
factors, and linked very closely to survival. Recognition of the the quality
of a work of art, in contrast, is heavily dependant upon personal and
cultural training which can be extremely elitist, and generally has much less
survival value. It seems clear to me that Pirsig approaches this issue a
number of times but is so keen to maintain the elemental purity of Quality as
the basis of his metaphysics that he invariably turns off at a tangent and
evades the issue. It is one of the major flaws in his thought; and the purity
of the final metaphysics is phony because he has avoided the range of
meanings of quality that he has tried to subsume in an overly simple formula.
ROGER:
You confuse the pure DQ of an infant with the much broader range of
experience of a mystic. The difference is in depth and breadth of
conciousness.
But then again, I could be wrong.
Roger
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