Hi Kevin
25 Feb. you cited Pirsig:
> [...] if Quality or excellence is seen as the ultimate reality
> then it becomes possible for more than one set of truths to
> exist. Then one doesn't seek the absolute "Truth." One seeks
> instead the highest quality intellectual explanation of things
> with the knowledge that if the past is any guide to the future
> this explanation must be taken provisionally; as useful until
> something better comes along.
and commented:
> Pirsig said this (Lila, p. 99) and I've heard it repeated here many
> times in one form or another.
> I see in these three sentences the reason for and the foundation of
> the Metaphysics of Quality. The bottom line appears to be the MoQ is
> a practical approach to reality and that seeing excellence as the
> ultimate reality leads to seeking "the highest quality intellectual
> explanation of things [...] until something better comes along." I
> see the MoQ as proceeding from a kind of mystical awareness of reality
> but ending up as the mere intellectualization of reality. So because
> it limits its scope (or seems to) to intellectualizing reality the MoQ
> contradicts itself. (snip)
To see their reality as "absolute" is what the human beings have
done - always. The social level age regarded their respective
mythological world-views as absolute, no one regarded it as
myths or provisional, but then there were no skeptics around,
because such are part of intellect. So is the term "truth"
contrasted to "mere opinion" which was the first variety of SOM.
Later it developed into objectivity contrasted to subjectivity
(mind/matter) as we know it as.
But instead of seeing the obvious, namely that "truth versus
opinion" is the intellectual level of the MOQ Pirsig starts to
undermine the MOQ's own legitimacy, as if there may come
another intellectual truth that rejects the MOQ and still be a
Quality pattern. I believe this is your - Kevin's - complaint. He
speaks as if the MOQ is one intellectual pattern and that SOM is
another "bad" pattern and that its (objectivity) is to be disproved.
But disproving intellect's 'O' invokes its 'S', hence Pirsig's
subjectivity affinity, which is just as wrong.
> I say this because I see that an intellectual
> explantion of reality will never lead to a mystical awareness of
> reality. But I realize that your mileage may vary.
"Mystical" is usually connected with bliss, like the Medieval
mystics unity with God, but a nervous breakdown is also mystical
and I interpret things the way that Phaedrus relentlessly pursued
SOM to the edge of its world and fell off it. So intellectual activity
may cause mystical awareness, but his un-mystical activity in
describing the Quality Reality that surrounds the SOM (has it as a
sub-set of its own) saved him.
IMO
Bo
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