[MD] Metaphysics a map or reality itself?.

[MarshaV]

Greetings Bo,

It's a beautifully written post!

 From my heart, or whatever,,, to force the MOQ 
out of the Intellectual Level and into a level of 
its own would be to put the unknown ((DQ 
(Quality) into a system.  Within a system it 
would be at the mercy of every form of butchery.

As it is, many, myself included, have tried to 
kill it. But of course this may just be a symptom 
of my own inadequacy.   I would like to hear how others think.

Marsha







At 03:31 PM 11/29/2007, you wrote:
>Hi Marsha (attention Akshay and Khoo)
>
>28 Nov. you wrote:
>
> > At 01:39 AM 11/28/2007, Bo wrote:
>
> > >Another thing is that P himself went and undermined the MOQ by
> > >turning idealist himself, but that's another story.
>
> > Greetings Bo,
>
> > You've eluded to this many times.  Why don't you tell this part of the
> > story?  You may be wrong, but heroic.
>
>Well, let me have a go at the said issue. Early in LILA Pirsig
>speaks about metaphysics-writing.
>
>     It was fascinating to watch this thing grow.  No one that
>     he knew had ever written a whole metaphysics before and
>     there were no rules for doing it and no way of predicting
>     how it would progress. (Page 16 digital LILA)
>
>And this is just right. No one has ever written a metaphysics in
>the MOQ sense.
>
>     But even then the assertion that metaphysics is
>     meaningless sounded false to him.  As long as you're
>     inside a logical, coherent universe of thought you can't
>     escape metaphysics.
>
>This is also correct, meaning that no human being is/can be
>outside a "metaphysics". The most remote tribes will have
>explanations of reality, we call these mythologies, but are
>metaphysics in this all-embracing sense.
>
>When an anthropologist studies "primitive" metaphysics he is at a
>higher metaphysical ground relative to these, namely the SOM
>(intellect in our book)  that has risen above these (social level in
>our book). Till now Pirsig had been spot on, but then he suddenly
>deviated and turned "mystics".
>
>     To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of
>     intellectual relationships.
>
>Here the notion of metaphysics as "intellect", i.e. that any
>"explanation of experience" is intellect emerges, and the ensuing
>trouble starts.
>
>     And when you do that you destroy real understanding.
>     The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phædrus
>     had called "Quality" in his first book, is not a metaphysical
>     chess piece.  Quality doesn't have to be defined.  You
>     understand it without definition, ahead of definition.
>
>This is not right. Understanding - real or not - requires a context,
>a system.  Even a grand epiphany isn't much until it is made into
>a system and conveyed to other.
>
>     Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to
>     intellectual abstractions. 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.
>
>Regardless how much he wants to keep Quality outside
>everything it is part and parcel of the MOQ, and - heck - Quality
>can be inside the MOQ and still outside definition. Anyway, by
>this he shifted from the initial notion of metaphysics as a totality
>to the Aristotelian type of an ineffable reality that metaphysics are
>more or less correct maps of.
>
>Aristotle is SOM so you see the connection: The ineffable reality
>is the real OBJECTIVE part while a metaphysics is the
>SUBJECTIVE theory. Thus "Quality as Reality" and MOQ as a
>mere theory is SOM in a thin Quality guise.
>
>The true MOQ looks like thisis this:
>
>DYNAMIC QUALITY/STATIC QUALITY.
>
>My guess is that "mysticism" is a SOM (Western) name for the
>Eastern metaphysics  and that the Orientals don't regard
>themselves to be mystics. I hope Akshay Peshwe (the hindu)
>would put in a word here, that goes for Khoo Hock Aun too who I
>believe is a Buddhist.
>
>Bo
>
>
>
>
>
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