[MD] the MOQ and its environment

[skutvik at online.no]

Marsha 

15 Feb. you said to (I call her Heather)

Who had quoted Lila (Ch. 5):

> >Quality is indivisible, undefinable and
> >unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a
> >known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things.
> >A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and
> >knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics. Since a
> >metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical
> >definition and since Quality is essentially outside
> >definition, this means that a 'Metaphysics of Quality'
> >is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical
> >absurdity."

And you said:

> Don't you think that is perfect?

I'm not able to decipher if this is sarcasm or agreement.  Anyway 
to use Phaedrus against Pirsig (ZMM page 30) 

    So I go on. ``For example, it seems completely natural to 
    presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation 
    existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think 
    that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.'' 
    [.....]  It seems to me that law of gravity has passed every 
    test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single 
    attribute of nonexistence that that law of gravity didn't 
    have.    

Here the point is that Gravity came to be with Newton, meaning 
that the phenomenon of things falling to the ground has always 
existed, but that Newtons explanation of it came with Newton. A 
valid point, but above Pirsig makes it sound as if Quality is 
something outside the Quality metaphysics and that goes against 
the said reasoning. Of course, Quality is the DQ of the MOQ* 
something that makes it the meta-level that contains itself.

To harp some more on it: In Newton's Physics, Gravity has 
always existed and inside the MOQ Quality has always existed, 
but Pirsig disparages metaphysics after first having (correctly) 
stated that nobody can exist outside one.  

*) Somewhere Pirsig (post-LILA) says so, but the 
misunderstanding of a QUALITY outside the DQ/SQ persists.   

 
IMO

Bo