[MD] Julian Baggini Interview with Pirsig

[Matt Kundert]

Kevin,

Kevin said:
What I hear you saying is that subjects and objects come first, 
relationships follow.  What if it were the other way round.  What if the 
interaction was primary?

If Quality is seen as the source of all things, and if Quality is another 
way of talking about value, and if value is just another way of talking 
about meaning, and if meaning is derived from interactions then it would 
seem to me to be logical to say one can interact with the source of all 
things.

Matt:
It may sound like I'm reinverting S/O-Quality relationship, but its 
absolutely fundamental that we say that relationships, interactions are 
primary.  In fact, relationships are all there _is_, and by that I'm 
restating the point that Dynamic Quality is no-thing.

The problem with saying that we have a relationship with no-thing is that 
you can't say what it is.  As soon as you do, you've made into a 
relationship with a thing, not with no-thing.  This may sound like the 
typical "finger pointing at the moon" stuff, but even the moon is a thing in 
the analogy.  It's just amorphous.

The problem I'm trying to avoid is the problem of making a distinction 
between a primary reality and a secondary reality, both of which we have a 
relationship to.  In your formulation, "Quality is the source of all 
things," you're equivocating that distinction slightly by sliding back to 
the ZMM formulation and not the DQ/static formulation of LILA.  If Quality 
is everything, then sure we have a relationship with Quality because we have 
a relationship with everything, there is some sort of interaction between 
each one of us and each other "thing."  But the distinction I'm trying to 
avoid is the idea that we have a relationship with each secondary "thing" 
_in addition_ to a primary relationship to the _source_ of all the "things." 
  I'm not sure what to make of that relationship, that distinction.  What is 
it doing for us?  Why do we need it?  It seems to me that the only thing 
that distinction was built for (aside from the temporal thing I talked about 
in another post) was an appearance/reality situation.  This situation is the 
one where we are able to compare our primary relationship to DQ with our 
secondary relationship to static patterns, and when they don't match, shift 
the static patterns to be more in tune with DQ because DQ is our primary 
relationship to reality.  That seems to me to be textbook Platonism, the 
exact thing that Pirsig pinpoints as the Greeks bequeathal, that which 
turned into SOM.

There are other ways to formulate the central insight of Quality.  I just 
want to warn away people from a few of them.

Matt

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