Dearest darling focusers: It seems there are a number of subplots surrounding our elected topic. That's OK with me. For one of my last posts, I've taken some early quotes from Sam and some recent quotes from Matt. It seems both of them have misconstrued Quality, although for different reasons and with different results. Matt thinks its the most trivial thing, the lowest common denominator, obvious, innocuous and only a dunderhead could find it philosophically interesting. Sam has equated with the social level rhetoriticians and takes the following quote as expressing an anti-intellectual stance...
Sam Norton said on Tuesday, May 10: The Narrator then goes on to describe what Plato does with regard to arete (excellence, aka individual worth): "Why destroy arete? And no sooner had he asked the question than the answer came to him. Plato hadn't tried to destroy arete. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made arete the Good, the highest form, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that has gone before." ZAMM p.342 Sam continued on the 10th: This is a rejection of traditional metaphysics, the history of western thought. The Narrator is objecting to the raising of dialectic over rhetoric - and it is THIS which underlies the maxim at the beginning of the book, 'and what is good.', because the point is that you don't need a definition of the good in order to know what the good is. dmb says: As I understand it, the evil that Phaedrus sees here is not in "the raising of dialectic over rhetoric" but rather it was Plato's attempt to make an "ever changing, and ultimately unknowable" reality into a fixed and rigid idea. Plato's evil here is not putting intellect over society, but in converting the dynamic into the static. Plato's Good would have been identical to DQ if he hadn't tried to encapsulate it. The quote Sam used above ends with "...of all that has gone before", and continues in the next paragraph with... ZAMM page 342.. "That was why the Quality that Phaedrus had arrived at in the classroom had seemed so close to Plato's good. Plato's Good was TAKEN from the rhetoriticians. Phaedrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists who had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists. The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving idea, whereas for the rhetorician it was not an idea at all. The Good was not a FORM of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, and ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.". dmb resumes: This is where is all went wrong. This is the move that killed mysticism in the West. This is what sent DQ underground in our culture. And I want Matt to notice that this is also where that your dreaded metaphysical Platonism comes from. This ever changing reality is the flux of life we know directly and intimately like our own breath, not a static intellectual description nor a static rhetorical description. As Anthony puts it on page 52 of his thesis, Heidegger... "..advanced the argument that Plato (and subsequent Western philosophers until Nietzsche) were in error when separating SEIN from SEIENDES. According to Northrop (1946, p.450), this is a critical separation because it is with Plato that Dynamic Quality (given the Platonic term 'the indeterminate dyad') was first deemed to be untrustworthy and, therefore, secondary to the static Forms: 'Thereby, the aesthetic and emotional factors in man's nature, and in the nature of things, were designated as mere appearances and trivial; and the emotional and aesthetic foods which the nature of man needs for its sustenance were deprecated and ignored. The Greek and medieval Roman Catholic cultures had somewhat the same effect, when following Democritus and Plato they branded the sense world as giving spurious knowledge, and when following Plato and Aristotle they identifed the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum [Dynamic Quality] with the principle of evil: restricting trustworthy knowledge and the idea of the good and the divine to the unseen theoretic component. This had the effect also of making the cultures of East and West incompatible'." dmb resumes: Here I think we can see Northrop saying the same thing as Pirsig. Plato's move to encapsulate DQ into a fixed idea was the beginning of the idea that one's experience is "just subjective" while reality is to be found "out there". The metaphysics of substance can be traced to this move. The difference between Eastern and Western religions is part of the same effect. Its huge not only in terms of historical impact, but also in getting at what the MOQ is doing. Notice how the MOQ, as a form of philosophical mysticism, refuses to make that move, is highly critical of that move and refuses to define DQ. Philosophical mysticism is intellectual, to be sure, but it insists that reality is ultimately unknowable in any static intellectual way and asserts that DQ can only be apprehended through non-rational means. When DQ is associated with religious mysticism, says Pirsig, it produces an avalanche of information about Dynamic Quality. "Philosophical mysticism, the idea that truth is indefinable and can be apprehended only by non-rational means, has been with us since the beginning of history." ZAMM p.207 Hang on to that thought because it only SEEMS like we're switching topics... Mark said: The experience of Dynamic Quality is the same for everyone, it is only the experiences and objects which are mentally associated with the experience which are different. There is no difference in the liking when the liking is independent of the things liked. Dynamic Quality is universal. No-one says that his liking for beans is any different to someone else's liking for carrots independently of the beans and carrots involved. Matt said: No one says that their "liking" for beans is any different than someone else's "liking" for carrots, independently of the beans and carrots, because it would be an absurd thing to say. Who cares if "liking" and "valuing" is the same for everyone? That's the most trivial thing you could possibly say. If that's all the "universality of Dynamic Quality" amounts to, then it pretty much amounts to the fact that we all use the words "liking" and "valuing" and their synonyms in the same way. Because the only way we could know if we were all experiencing the same thing, yet independent of the experience itself (boy, that doesn't sound very Pirsigian, does it?), would be to say, "Hey, I like beans!" "Oh my god, I like carrots!" "Really? Hmm. Well, we both seem to enjoy these separate experiences in basically the same way. The lowest common denominator of our experiences must be 'liking.'" dmb says: I think Mark was quoting Pirsig there. In any case, I think you have very much missed the point and that's why you see it as a trival denominator of our experience. I would also point out that Northrop's complaint about Platonism pretty much centers on this very kind of deprecation. (Put that on your irony scale and weigh it, Matt. It'll probably break the springs.) But the idea here is not to enthrone the trivial or find divinity in the lowest common denominator, but rather to take Quality down from heaven, to rescue it from that abstract intellectual encapsulation and otherwise bring it back to earth. "Quality is a word, of course, that every schlock advertiser tries to attach to his products, but it has the advantage that it ubigutiousness, everwhere, makes it not an esoteric, mystic term. It's a common, everyday word and I think one of the messages of the [MOQ] is that the good life is not to be found somewhere else, its to be found in daily life." Pirsig, as quoted on page 59 of Ant's thesis. Matt said: The point is that nothing much (let alone anything philosophically interesting) follows from the fact that we all "value," that we all experience some things as better than others. If we take Pirsig as simply forwarding that thesis, then we've severely hampered Pirsig's philosophical impact. If anything, Pirsig pointing out the obvious, innocuous fact that we all value some things over others is simply a softening up move to shake a few dunder heads out of their sleep. I stress "a few." The really interesting things happen after that in an argument that has to be a lot more subtle and complex than saying, "Hey, don't you like Guinness better than Bud Light? That's just like me liking Cezanne over Warhol!" dmb says: Yea, I'd definately say there's an argument after that. The basic sense of quality, of liking and disliking, is only the beginning. From there, the MOQ is built. In a way that reconciles East and West enlightenment with everyday experience, the MOQ's static/Dynamic split and its evolutionary hierarchy are like a giant spider web that has been spun out around this primary sense.... "Northrop's name for Dynamic Quality is 'the undifferentiated aestheitc continuum'. By 'continuum' he means that it goes on and on forever. By 'undifferentiated' he means that it is without conceptual distinctions. And by 'aesthetic' he means that it has quality." Pirsig, on p.59 of Ant's thesis. "The 'nothingness' of Buddhism has nothing to do with the 'nothingness' of physical space. That's one of the advantages of calling it 'Quality' instead of 'nothingness'. It reduces the confusion." Pirsig, on p.60 of Ant's thesis. "'The Absolute' means the same as 'Dynamic Quality' and the 'nothingness' of Buddhism, but its a poor term because of it connotations. To me it connotes something cold, dead, empty of content and rigid. The term 'Dynamic Quality' has oppostie connotations. It suggests warmth, life, fullness and flexibility." Same Pirsig, same page, same thesis. "This value is more immediate, more directly sensed that any 'self' or any 'object' to which it might be later assigned... It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed." Pirsig in LILA p.69 "To say that the world is nothing but value is just confusing, not claifying. Now this vagueness is removed by sorting our values according to levels of evolution. The value that holds a glass of water together is an inorganic patterns of value. The value that holds a nation together is a social pattern of value. They are completely different from each other because they are at different evolutionary levels. And they are completely different from the biological pattern that can cause the most sceptical of intellectuals to leap from a hot stove. These patterns have nothing in common except the historic process that created all of them. But that process is a process of value evoluton." Pirsig in LILA p157 dmb finally runs out of steam and so moves to a conclusion: Its from the basic experience, the primary empirical reality that we construct the static world. Quality is what holds that world together. Since DQ, the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum, is described as ever changing, infinite, eternal and without conceptual distinctions, it is beyond all boundries and definitions. This is very far away from a fix, rigid idea. This is very far away from social level rhetoric, and this is very far away from Platonic foundationalism. Instead, we're talking about the void behind the forms, the Buddhist no-thing-ness. in ZAMM, Phaedrus comes to realize what Quality is only after reaching the end of his intellectual rope, after his conflict with the Chairman, when he has to "cross that lonesome valley" by himself... "He crosses a lonesome valley, out of the mythos, and emerges as if from a dream, seeing that his whole consciousness, the mythos, has been a dream and no one's dream but his own, a dream he must now sustain of his own efforts. Then even 'he' disappears and only the dream of himself remains with himself in it. And the Quality, the ARETE he has fought so hard for, has sacrificed for, has NEVER betrayed, but in all that time has never one understood, now makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest." For Pirsig the moment of enlightenment came as a crisis, a death of sorts. It came suddenly when the fulitity of intellect became apparent. But this is only one way to put those static patterns to sleep, to see the nothingness directly again, to see the immediate flux of reality without conceptualizations again. Its a way of stripping away all the static interpretations that have been built up over a lifetime so the the primary empirical reality is no longer interpreted in terms of things like subjects and objects, nations, hot stoves and glasses of water. This the the world of distinctions, its the maya, the illusion we all share. And when that melts away, and, in the words of William Blake, "the doors of perception are cleansed, we will see the world as it truely is; infinite." Many thanks to all readers, dmb MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_focus/ MF Queries - [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from moq_focus follow the instructions at: http://www.moq.org/mf/subscribe.html
