[MD] Reading & Incomprehension

[skutvik at online.no]

Hi Platt,  John (who have shown interest in this topic) Ham doubtfully, 
All!

12 June Platt wrote:

> If by Quality/MOQ being the culprit you mean categorizing the MOQ as
> just another metaphysics, I'm with you. If you put the MOQ in the same
> mental container as materialism, idealism, existentialism,
> essentialism, determinism, naturalism, monism, nihilism and the
> hundred and one other theories of reality, you have the ingredients
> for philosophology, the playground of academics of little
> significance. But if you understand what Pirsig talks about as being
> reality itself and not a filter needed to discuss it, we're on the
> same page.

Great formulation Platt and yes, I certainly do mean MOQ in the 
somish, Aristotelian, sense of a mental theory - "intellectual" in the 
philosophologist's lingo. The fact that what we theorize about is 
supposed to be Quality doesn't really change anything if it is the same 
reality we are irredeemable shut off from inside our subjective prisons, 
it's Plato's cave analogy over and over about ourselves only having 
secondhand access to reality. 

The MOQ was originally meant to be a release from this cave we have 
been in for two thousand plus, plus years and the first crack in the wall 
took place in ZAMM with the inside-out metaphysical turn when SOM 
was made a static fall-out of Quality, meaning that its subject/object 
schism IS A STATIC VALUE (no longer existence's fundament) and in 
ZAMM it was subtitled "intellect". And I can't but harp on intellect = 
SOM this being the crucial issue, when LILA changed intellect into 
something very like MIND the crack closed again.      

Q-Intellect became the very same mental compartment (as SOM's 
mind) where abstract, secondhand theories reside, among them the 
MOQ, it being "better" sounds plausible, but is of zero importance as 
long as it is an abstraction of something else. The QUALITY/MOQ 
meta-metaphysics became necessary but it also was the final nail in 
the MOQ coffin and this we can't allow.    

Ham commented:
> I think there's general agreement here that "reality itself" is what
> we're all seeking.  So let's throw away the "containers",
> "compartments", and "filters" that are one man's scheme for dissecting
> the universe, and get to the point. 

This I take as some strange agreement that making the MOQ the 
"static" part of a greater Quality/MOQ meta-metaphysics, is - again - 
making reality out of reach and is a variant of making the MOQ  
another abstraction of a mind-like "intellect".  

> We can discuss whether a particular pattern belongs to this or that
> level 'til the cows come home, but how is this different than
> speculatng on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?  If we
> don't know what Reality is, what sense does it make to try to diagram
> it? 

But this is Ham off on his own non-understanding tangent.

Scruton:
    "The Cartesian picture tempts us to believe we go through life
    dragging an animal on a lead, forcing it to do our bidding until at
    last it collapses and dies. I am I. It is it. In this way the body
    becomes a thing among other things."

Platt's comments:
> > How much more illuminating, harmonious and "real" to
> > know oneself as a being of unique value.

Yes, definitely, but this is  SOM open and "frank" something we all can 
declare unwanted - like DMB claiming that so many thinkers oppose 
SOM  - but it is first bringing SOM under  control and then allowing it to 
return in the Quality/MOQ disguise I oppose. It was the Pirsig who 
broke SOM's power by making it a static level of the MOQ, so why 
break MOQ's power by making IT a subset of another still greater 
SOM-like system?     

Ham:
> Where, in all of Pirsig's works, is the self referred to as a "being
> of unique value"?

The self is a tricky entity,  I would have said "How much more 
illuminating, harmonious and "real" to know that existence and 
ourselves are united in the same value reality".  

> Indeed, by defining the subject as a POV, the author has made the self
> a valueless "thing among other things."  

Phaedrus defined the subject/object distinction as a fall-out of Quality 
and thereby resolved the two-thousand year paradox the Greeks had 
erected, this grand resolution is what is jeopardized by the 
Quality/MOQ meta-meta....  so the rest of your comment when you 
start on your own hobby-horse is deleted.   


Bodvar