[MD] Pressed Ham

[david buchanan]

Ham and all MOQers:

Ham said to dmb:
It's apparent that some of you regard my views as a thorn in your sides. And 
that's unfortunate because, while I'm not a Pirsigian, I see the MoQ as a 
thesis in development, or at least a philosophy that is not yet ready to 
assume a fundamentalist following.  As perhaps the lone renegade in this
forum, I'm offering a somewhat different perspective that (IMO) is not 
incompatible with the Quality concept, yet is far more explicit in dealing 
with the major issues of contention: namely, individual consciousness and 
man's autonomy, space/time dimensions, teleology or purpose in existence, 
the relativity of physical existence, an epistemology of Value, and the 
(missing) source of it all.

dmb says:
You're the renegade thorn in the sides of fundamentalist MOQers? Is that 
really how you see it? I don't. What I'm trying to tell you is that your 
perspective is not just "somewhat different". I'm saying that your 
perspective is so completely opposed to the MOQ and that you are apparently 
unaware as to how and why. I'm trying to explain that. Nobody is trying to 
get you to accept the MOQ as some kind of dogma, I'm just trying to get you 
to comprehend why Essentialism is at odds with the MOQ.

Ham said:
I'm on record as having read LILA and ZMM -- as novels with a "message", not 
as textbooks to commit to memory and quote from -- and I've studied the 
author's SODV paper as well as Anthony's doctoral thesis.  You must 
understand that I encountered the MoQ after forming certain conclusions of 
my own, with an ontology to support them.  To accept someone else's reality 
concept in his own terms is unfeasible for me, and to pretend otherwise for 
the sake of conformity would be intellectually dishonest.  I'm sorry you 
feel that my disagreements are "drastic"; however, your insinuation that 
I've failed to appreciate Pirsig's enlightened thought strikes me as a 
fundamentalist complaint.

dmb says:
It would be dishonest for you to conform to my fundamentalist complaint? 
Huh? Dude, I simply asking you to examine some of the MOQ's most central 
concepts. Acceptance and conformity and memorization have nothing to do with 
it. That's just a silly strawman. You can discuss these concepts with me or 
you can call me names in order to avoid that discussion. I can't force you 
to make a sincere efffort to understand what I'm trying to tell you, but I 
can ask you to try. And don't you suppose everybody comes to this forum with 
their own conclusions? How could anything else be possible. And if you say 
you've read the material, I'll take your word for it. But my criticism 
remains; there is no sign of that in your writings.

Ham said:
I don't think "imagining" reality as something other than SOM is any more 
impossible than hypothesizing a primary source that transcends it.  What I'm 
saying is that we live and act in a subject/object dichotomy; our knowledge 
is SOM-based; the principles we use to survive and prosper in this world are 
all derived from this existential reality.  Indeed, the assumption that we 
are subjects in an objective world has served mankind well for some 6000 
years.

dmb says:
Yes, our knowledge is SOM-based. That is Pirsig's label for our basic 
assumptions and it has been with us for a long time. That's exactly why its 
so difficult to imagine things any other way. As Pirsig points out, the 
Positivists operated on these assumptions despite their deliberate efforts 
to avoid any such assumptions. And the MOQ doesn't trash SOM or reject it 
entirely, but subjects and objects are put into a larger context and they 
are seen as conventional rather than metaphysical. They are seen as 
interpretations of experience rather than the cause of experience.

Ham said:
Now I'll ask you a question similar to one often addressed to me.  What does 
it avail us to dismiss this reality and retreat into a mystical realm of 
Quality where things are imagined as "better"?  Apart from partitioning the 
SOM world into patterns and levels, Pirsig has laid no guidelines that I am 
aware of for connecting man to DQ or applying this theory to enhance man's 
world in any practical way.  To assert that biological evolution leads to 
more complex organisms says nothing about the individual or his values.

dmb says:
Retreat into a mystical realm? No guidelines for connecting man to DQ? No 
practical applicaton of this theory? See, this is the kind of thing that 
makes it look as if you've never even read the books. This so-called 
mystical realm that you describe as a retreat from reality is described by 
Pirsig in terms that are quite opposite. DQ is described variously as "the 
first thing you know", "direct everyday experience", the "primary empirical 
reality" and the "parent of subjects and objects". And the meaning of the 
saying "Thou art That" doesn't just suggest that man is "connected" to DQ, 
it means that DQ is the Big Self. There isn't just a link, there is 
identity. This is to be contrasted with the subjective self, the static 
self, the small self. And your suggestion that the MOQ offers nothing in 
terms of practical application is just as wrong as these other points. The 
MOQ is a kind of pragmatism and, as Pirsig says, metaphysics is fine if it 
helps people, otherwise forget it. I mean, the whole idea of the MOQ is to 
treat real world problems. And the problems, such as alienation and the 
spiritual emptiness  of scientific objectivity, can be traced to these SOM 
assumptions. These are the assumptions that put the subjective self, the 
little static self at the center of things, as you have done, and that 
dismiss mysticism as imaginary, as you have done. This is what I mean in 
saying your Essentialism is drastically as odds and that you seem to be 
unaware of Pirsig's work. As I said last time, "your Essentialism is 
essentially an SOM view. You are dishing up the very thing that the MOQ 
seeks to overcome."

Ham said:
Again, you see, there is no advantage in "overcoming SOM" unless the 
proposed alternative can enhance our lives by offering some new meaning or 
direction for mankind.  Perhaps I have failed to catch what Pirsig believes 
this may be...

dmb interupts:
Exactly. I'm saying that you have failed to catch what Pirsig believes. You 
can't accept it or reject it until you first understand it. If you think 
there is no advantage to overcoming SOM, then you do not even know what the 
problem is. And the solution to the problem will not make any sense until 
you first understand what it is trying to solve. And as a matter of fact, 
the problem with SOM is that it has drained all the "meaning and direction" 
out of life. As Pirsig puts it, people in our time feel cut off from their 
own lives as if they were drinking life through a straw and never getting 
enough of it, feel like they're chasing a mechanical rabbit, like a dog at 
the race track. And then there are the horrors of war and reaction read as 
an evolutionary struggle. I mean, its all about making things better in all 
kinds of ways. On the web you could find thousand of .edu sites that use 
Pirsig's work with all kinds of applications. Beyond the perfectly ordinary 
business of motorcycle repair, academic types have appliied it to dance, to 
business management, physics, educational practices and many other fields.

Ham continued:
...Simply saying "some things are better than others" does not define 
morality, nor does it tell us what is required of the individual to be moral 
(or better).  What is "better" is a subjective evaluation that will vary 
from one individual to another.  I don't envision it as capable of bringing 
peace and harmony to the world.  That these deficiencies remain in the MoQ 
is evidenced by the discussions going on in this forum.

dmb says:
You know what will bring peace and harmony to the world? Justice. Peace is 
the effect, not the cause. Peace flows from justice. Or so it seems to me. 
Anyway, I don't think the MOQ or anything else can single-handedly improve 
the world. But a re-examination of values and morality might help improve 
our chances. Anyway, the MOQ offers an expanded idea of morality, and that 
sense of betterness is just the most basic and immediate kind. That is the 
Dynamic sense of Quality, from which everything static will follow, as in 
the hot stove example. This is not the definition of morality, just a 
description of our most basic and primary experience. I can't really explain 
the whole thing all at once, but I can try to show you a few ways in which 
your view is approximately the opposite of Pirsig's. The idea that better is 
a subjective evaluation that varies from person to person, for example, is 
one that Pirsig takes head on and deals with for most of ZAMM. That's the 
view he's attacking through most of the book. But as it is explained in the 
hot stove example in Lila, this subjective self is not the perciever of this 
betterness. The subjective self is a product of this sense of betterness. 
Its a good idea, a useful interpretation of experience, not the cause of it. 
In the hot stove example, the sense that it would be better to get off the 
stove occurs even before it can be concieved in terms of  the self or the 
stove. This is the part that's hard to imagine, but the idea that experience 
depends upon a subjective experiencer in an experienced world is secondary 
to the actual experience. In the MOQ this metaphysical starting point, this 
dualistic arrangement is the assumption behind the problems of our time. 
This duality is what creates the epistemic gap, the sense of being cut off 
from reality, from each, which makes our technology seem so ugly, and its 
the very thing you want to re-assert in the face of all that 
condemnation....

Ham said:
I see what you mean, but like many ancient religious "truths", this is a 
paganistic fallacy.  I am NOT That.  I (myself) am not the divine source of 
the world.  I am separated from that source by the nothingness of existence, 
and am sensible of it only through value.  If this were not so, I could not
be a free and self-determining agent capable of choosing my own reality.

dmb says:
Paganistic fallacy? Huh? See, here you've simply dismissed the whole idea 
with a negative characterization, one that makes little sense, and moved on 
to reassert the primacy of the subjective self again. I'm telling you that 
this is wildly opposed to the MOQ...

As Pirsig writes on page 63 of LILA:
"The terms mystic is sometimes confused with 'occult' or 'supernatural' and 
with magic and witchcraft but in philosophy it has a different meaning. Some 
of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: Plotinus, 
Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others. They share a common 
belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that 
language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is 
undivided."

Ham said:
Furthermore, since you have taken a fundamentalist position on the MoQ, 
where does Pirsig make such an assertion?   It seems to me that he has 
steadfastly rejected religious dogma throughout his writings and, despite 
the Zen connection, has been rather vague on Eastern mysticism which 
espouses a similar view.  Monday morning quarterbacking that would inject 
mysticism into a philosophy that Mr. Prisig insists has an empirical 
foundation is inconsistent and unfair to the author. ...Whether the "Thou 
art That" doctrine is one of Pirsig's implied truths, I can't say...

dmb says:
No, its not a Monday morning injection or merely a reasonable implication of 
Pirsig's assertions. Its a straight-up explicit assertion. Lila opens and 
closes with mysticism. On page 36 he says that, "at one time it looked as 
though the whole book would center this long night's meeting of the Native 
American church" and on page 408 he says, "Phaedrus hoped this Quality 
metaphysics was something that would get past the immune system and sow that 
American Indian mysticism is not something alien from American culture. Its 
a deep submerged hidden root of it. Americans don't have to go to the Orient 
to learn what this mysticism stuff is about. Its been right here in America 
all along." And as if that weren't enough, Pirsig explicitly talks about 
subjects and objects in relation to that ancient mystical idea; Thou art 
That. On page 261 of ZAMM, as chapter 25 opens, he writes,..

"Phaedrus felt that at the moment of pure Quality perception, or not even 
perception, at the moment of pure Quality, there is no subject and there is 
no object. There is only a sense of Quality that produces a later awareness 
of subjects and objects. At the moment of pure Quality, subject and object 
are identical. This is the TAT TVAM ASI (Thou art That) truth of the 
Upanishads, but its also reflected in the modern street argot. 'Getting with 
it', 'digging it', 'grooving on it' are all slang reflections of this 
identity."

Its nothing personal Ham. You seem like a perfectly nice guy. I'd fix you up 
with my sister. And its not about conformity to dogma either. But I really 
don't think you have any idea of how opposed your idea are. I wrote a song 
about it. Its called "Ode to a Smoked Ham"...

I think you're as wrong
as a dolphin meat bong
but that doesn't mean I don't love you.

a MOQer you'll be
if ever you see
the Upanishad's meaning's above you.

I think you're as wrong
as a dolphin meat bong
and how many ways is that awful?

Ooooh, baby, baby, yea, yea, yea.

Feel free to add your own music.

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