[MD] Does Quality exist?

[Matt Kundert]

Redsky235,

I think you have a haywire interpretive principle when you're reading Pirsig because some of your responses to people, including myself, seem weird.  I'm not sure you're grasping Pirsig by the right handle.

Matt said:
Pirsig's just trying to point out how  commonsensical the existence of what he's talking about is.  It's a beginning point.  His more controversial points require different  arguments.  That argument is a softening up move before the more  interesting stuff about Plato.

Redsky235:
Ok, so he's just saying that humans have the capacity to differentiate  between items?  You can't really assume that in all cases.  Carrying  that idea to its extreme; I present you with two glasses of water that look  equally full, but one is actually very slightly lighter.  You might say  that there's no real difference, while someone equipped with a scale might say  otherwise.

Matt:
And?

Pirsig is saying many things, but your counter-example doesn't show much because if you present two glasses of water they are still _two_ glasses, at the least spatially differentiated.  And even at your extreme, the first person can only distinguish spatially and the second person, aided by the scale, can cut another difference, is only better at distinguishing.  Who said aids were out of line?

Matt said:
I have a lot of difficulty also with Pirsig's  assertion that we already know what Quality is, but I'm not sure if he isn't  saying that we already know how to identify Quality, we already know how to  distinguish higher from lower value because doing so is _the_ basic feature of  living life.

Redsky235 said:
Assuming that humans can indeed accurately distinguish between items  (doing so without bias?), there's still no real justification for thinking that  there is even a "higher" value and a "lower" value.  We might assign  higher priority to action "A," but maybe that's only the result of our society's  influences on us.

Matt:
And?

You're right to be skeptical about distinguishing being without bias because I think Pirsig is exactly saying that bias is what makes reality reality.  The bias of the rock to fall down, instead of up, for instance.  This is an important point of Pirsig's, because the outcome causes us to rethink what the distinction between "descriptive" and "evaluative."

And in my opinion, though perhaps not others, there's no point in saying "only the result of our society's influences on us" because I take Pirsig's point in saying that rationality is the result of "analogues upon analogues upon analogues" is that our responses in life are intimately bound up with our education.

Matt said:
If you are looking for definitive answers to  _any_ question, let alone traditional aesthetic questions, you are looking  in the wrong place if you are looking some place other than what you yourself  think.  That's Pirsig's point.  It is a philosophical  individualism that begins with each person.  Granted, it doesn't end there,  which I don't think Pirsig emphasizes enough in ZMM, but it has to begin  there.

Redsky235 said:
"Trust yourself?"  I'm a great believer in the power of instinct or  intuition (whatever you wish to call it, whatever scientific hangups one might  have about it), but I'm not sure I can trust what I think.  Anyone's  thoughts are going to be impacted by the effect his culture has on him.  No  one is truly "individual."

Matt:
Well, I didn't say trust yourself.  I said it begins with each person's own self.  But what you say is essentially right, no person is so unique that they don't overlap 99% with other people.  I think conversation with others, all other things being equal, is very important to good decisions.  In fact, I think the Humean moral philosopher Annette Baier was right when she said that thinking is a dialogue with yourself, that we learn how to think by internalizing our interactions with others.  But none of this is against, I think, Pirsig's philosophy.  What I call Pirsig's "philosophical individualism," while having something to do with Emerson (i.e., nonconformity), shouldn't be taken as having anything to do with Descartes (i.e., we know the contents of our own minds better than anything else).  Pirsig is intent on debunking the abstract universalism that goes from Plato to Descartes to Kant.  It was Plato's focus on the Forms that Pirsig thinks distracts us from ourselves.

Matt said:
But I also think you're going at it in the wrong direction, which is  in looking for a proof.

Redsky235 said:
First of all, it doesn't make sense that Pirsig can present his theory  and then claim that, because of the nature of his theory, no proof is  required.  It's similar to "You cannot question the Bible, because it  is the word of God."

Matt:
Sure it does.  It only doesn't if what you think "theory" is is something that requires something like geometrical proof.  Your analogy is only sound if Pirsig was saying that there are no grounds for thinking that his orientation towards life is better than others (in fact, no savvy Christian would rest with your pithy formulation, but continue on to incommensurable paradigms).  But Pirsig does think there are grounds: the cultural malaise of the 60s, the impact of the Plato-Kant canon.  It is against those backgrounds that Pirsig thinks he can do better.

But from the way it sounds, it appears that part of what Pirsig is challenging is the background philosophical assumptions that both you and Matt seem to have in play.  My sense is that both of you have a similar understanding of what philosophy is, which in Pirsig's terms would be a Platonic understanding.  Pirsig's opposition of rhetoric to dialectic was meant to undermine the strong sense of "proof" that you seem to be using here.

But I can't be too sure without explicit discussion of some of these background, enabling suppositions.

Matt said:
Right, the objective criteria set  down by the literary world, which is what a community of individuals agree to.

Redsky235 said:
But even there you get into some discrepancies.  The "objective  criteria" of the literary world is always in flux (witness the constantly  changing MLA guidelines, and lest we forget, "Moby Dick" was panned when it was  first published).

Matt:
Right, my statement was ironic because by the Platonic tradition's lights, what I said about the literary world doesn't count as "objective" at all.  But part of Pirsig's philosophy is aimed at replacing the strict dichotomy of subjective/objective.

Matt said:
Pirsig is eliminating the pernicious  subjective/objective distinction in order to undermine the notion of "these  (arbitrary) literary criteria" so that we can instead see any sort of criteria  that might be set forth by a community as set forth by individuals, though none  the worse for it because _anything_ set forth is set forth by _somebody_, every  view the product of the far end of the movement of an individual's brandishment  of the "analytic knife."

Redsky235 said:
Ok, but again, wouldn't that individual's use of the knife still be  affected by his cultural bias?  His actions would still reflect at least  some part of the literary world's judgment.

Matt:
Absolutely.  An individual's own peculiar bias, their own unique viewpoint of the world, develops out of their culture.  The analogy of DNA is very much in point here: we are all unique snowflakes, but only if you look really close.

Matt said:
Pirsig would  certainly object to the notion that a critic's opinion is more "valid," but that  does not destory the notion of authority derived by communal attention, for  instance the authority granted to specialists, like physicists. 

Redsky235 said:
But if there is indeed an absolute Quality, then a well educated (or  experienced) critic would have more knowledge when approaching a text and,  theoretically, should be able to discern its elements that ultimately reveal  Quality.  If there is an absolute Quality, and an absolute way to reveal  that Quality, then there is a definitive way of constructing and reading a  text.

Matt:
Absolute Quality?  I'm not sure where you're getting such an idea, but I doubt it was Pirsig.

But, say there was: there's an absolute conception of Quality.  Why would more education or experience denote better ability at discerning Quality?  What if stipping yourself of everything you've learned is the gate to Quality?  What if your experience is only of appearances and we have to ignore those to get at Quality.

The arguments about how to find absolute conceptions, in addition to their content, have lasted 2500 years without anybody knowing how we'd even know if we knew we knew the absolute conception when we knew it.  The arguments just keep going.  But do get on just fine reading texts and predicting the movements of particles.  Pirsig's suggesting that we don't need a notion of "absolute conception" hiding attached to all of our assertions of truth: the court of argumentative interplay will determine what what works or not.

Matt said:
But doing so will be one more view set forth by an  individual.  For instance, Harold Bloom has done so on occasion to  enunciate why he doesn't enjoy one particular poet but isn't about deny the  poet's place in the Western canon.  All we have to do to get a  distinction like that is to distinguish liking a text for highly idiosyncratic reasons and placing it in high esteem because of its  originality.

Redsky235 said:
Well, then you could ask, why value originality itself?  Isn't that  a "Quality" judgment?

Matt:
Absolutely.  Why would that be a problem?

Matt said:
But what kind of argument is  that?  It's not, but we should instead wonder why Pirsig would make  it.  The pernicious view that he is trying to surmount is that there are  objective criteria or things or whatever that exist outside of what anybody  thinks of them, which then sets as pejorative anything that _does_ have to rest  on what people think of them--things like aesthetic judgments.  Pirsig's  trying to help us reconceive our view by showing how judgments sit at the very  bottom of things.

Redsky235 said:
So he's employing a flawed argument simply to spark discourse and  thought?  Or is he using the argument just to spark a certain theory, which  one then has to take on faith?

Matt:
Is it a flawed argument if it is successful in what it wants to accomplish?

In isolation, the argument seems to exhibit some flaws.  As part of the book Pirsig was writing, I'm not so sure.  Pirsig was writing a different kind of philosophical treatise than say Bertrand Russell or Immanuel Kant.  What Pirsig wrote has more in common with Plato.  Afterall, try reading the Phaedrus without paying attention to the structure and arc of the dialogue.

Matt
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